He has a good, larger point but this article is plagued with those little, annoying inaccuracies and misprepresentations which, for me at least, completely ruin it.
> Here is what we know from a scientific point of view: There is no amount of wood smoke that is good to breathe.
There is no way to make a value judgement "from a scientific point of view." This is just the first from a collection of his moral convictions (we should live as long as possible, affecting our neighbours as little as possible). Nothing particularly wrong with having those but why dress them up in science?
> many other things are just as natural—such as dying at the ripe old age of thirty.
People may have on average had life expectancies in the 30 years range but that was because of child and infant mortality. Adults weren't dropping dead at 30.
And then some silly js sticks this to every paste:
> There is no way to make a value judgement "from a scientific point of view."
It seems obvious from context that he is using "not good to breathe" as a colloquial synonym for "causes damage to your lungs / other body systems" (which is not remotely a value judgement), rather than "morally wrong to breathe".
> And then some silly js sticks this to every paste
That though, I agree is utter bullshit (and malware, for that matter).
> There is no way to make a value judgement "from a scientific point of view."
I'm not sure if your familiar with Sam Harris' other writing, but one of his shticks is applying a scientific approach to morality.[1] Not that I necessarily agree with him, but wanted to point out that there's a bit more substance there than some off-the-cuff remark.
I haven't read a lot of his stuff (although what I have read/heard I mostly respect), but I'm not super comfortable with how he just waltzes over the is/ought divide.
But this brings up a larger issue: where do we draw the line between this kind of health-centric utilitarianism and the ability for humans to indulge in pleasurable but potentially self-destructive behaviors?
When I was younger, I basically cheered whenever laws were passed to further restrict the sale / usage of cigarettes, because I knew they were harmful and that was all that mattered. But as I grew older, and I realized that the depth of the human experience goes beyond mere self-preservation, I became less sure of this monolithic approach to public policy.
I guess my point is that I find that Mr. Harris's essay, while aimed at allowing us to see why religious beliefs are so hard to dislodge, kind of illuminates an opposite idea: that perhaps in our crusade to rid the world of "irrational" behavior, we risk compromising something fundamental to the human experience. The problem is agreeing on where we draw the line.
I personally draw the line that cuts out as much utilitarianism as possible.
> I became less sure of this monolithic approach to public policy.
I've been a voluntaryist for several years now, so I'm quite on the same page as you. :-) I really was just trying to be fair to Sam Harris. (I both strongly agree and disagree with many of the things he claims.)
> I guess my point is that I find that Mr. Harris's essay, while aimed at allowing us to see why religious beliefs are so hard to dislodge, kind of illuminates an opposite idea: that perhaps in our crusade to rid the world of "irrational" behavior, we risk compromising something fundamental to the human experience. The problem is agreeing on where we draw the line.
Absolutely. Although, I do view recreational wood burning as a different kind of "irrational" than claiming things based on revealed knowledge. The former can be a reasoned judgment about one's preferences, while the latter is necessarily logically flawed.
I believe both types of "irrational" are impossible to eradicate. I share your hesitation with the notion that we might even want to eliminate "irrationality" in the first place.
To the contrary, adults died in young adulthood in early prehistory. That is, surviving infancy and childhood still led to a harsh life with high mortality, with most human beings dying before age fifty. The last time this came up in a Hacker News thread, I forgot to refer to the better source[1] I know about Pleistocene human mortality. Looking up just now, I see that there is an even more current and specific source[2] that reports "An assessment of younger (20–40 y) versus older (>40 y) adult mortality distributions for late archaic humans (principally Neandertals) and two samples of early modern humans (Middle Paleolithic and earlier Upper Paleolithic) provides little difference across the samples. All three Late Pleistocene samples have a dearth of older individuals compared with Holocene ethnographic/historical samples. They also lack older adults compared with Holocene paleodemographic profiles that have been critiqued for having too few older individuals for subsistence, social, and demographic viability. Although biased, probably through a combination of preservation, age assessment, and especially Pleistocene mobility requirements, these adult mortality distributions suggest low life expectancy and demographic instability across these Late Pleistocene human groups. They indicate only subtle and paleontologically invisible changes in human paleodemographics with the establishment of modern humans; they provide no support for a life history advantage among early modern humans."
[1] The Nature of Paleolithic Art, by R. Dale Guthrie, a biologist who specializes in Pleistocene megafauna (including Homo sapiens), a fascinating book studded with references to the research literature.
Drinking a warm cup of coffee or hot chocolate next to a wood fire during a cold night is possibly one of the most enjoyable and stress reducing activities I can think of. Life isn't about evaluating every risk.
Here's a small list of that has a high probability of harming my body:
* Snowboard when I'm not at my prime
* Use MSG in my cooking once in awhile
* Smoke seldomly
* Eat fatty meats such as lamb / duck
* No sleep consistently
* Have too much stress
No one is going to refute these scientifically, but at the same time, just because we ignore the warnings, do not mean that we do not accept the warning as truthful. There is simply a more complex heuristic function we use to evaluate our decisions than a purely risk adverse one.
It's not about the harm you're doing to your own body, it's about the harm you're doing to other people and their property without their consent. Snowboarding or missing sleep doesn't harm anyone else. Burning wood does, and that's why it's different.
However, missing sleep and then driving (a rather common occurrence) is incredibly dangerous to the person doing it and others. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-deprived_driving) In fact, I think it's fair to argue that sleep deprivation plus daily activities (work or otherwise) likely puts more people at risk than burning wood, many of them without their consent (as they are not the sleep deprived ones).
I disagree that it is different. Not every theoretical harm to property is a violation of consent. In practice, one has to demonstrate harm and be able to assign blame to an entity. In most cases, short term exposure to burning wood won't cause any demonstrable harm. (Just ask the residents of Providence, RI on Saturday nights during the summer.)
Therefore, it's not just that "burning wood" causes harm, but that a certain level of exposure to burning wood causes harm.
You may think me a pedant, but consider the top post in this sub-thread:
> Drinking a warm cup of coffee or hot chocolate next to a wood fire during
> a cold night is possibly one of the most enjoyable and stress reducing
> activities I can think of. Life isn't about evaluating every risk.
Which is clearly talking about recreational wood burning. I would argue that one cannot (typically) demonstrate harm from such an activity, either because the exposure is too short or the blame cannot be laid on any one particular entity.
Therefore, I would say that they are indeed not different at all, at least with regard to a practical implementation of property law. Otherwise, nearly anything could be misconstrued as harm. (e.g., I have dependents and snowboarding could cause me to break my leg and put me out of work, which would cause harm to those relying on me.)
What about your loved ones? Run into a tree and break your neck and life is not too rosy for them is it? Also your argument can be stretched to eating: if I eat some bread, it is harming you... because you can't eat it, so you starve, also their excreta might suddenly overwhelm and drown you (as you sleep).
This is the trouble with silly polemical arguments - they run out of control really easily!
There was an excellent bit of trivia regarding the "dangers" of MSG on one of the "The mind of a chef" episodes. Apparently it was made into the issue largely by the ignorance of the press.
Power to thee if you actually acknowledge the risks and consciously choose to indulge yourself. Most people don't quite understand the risks involved, and with the specific example of fireplaces: how damaging it can be on the kids around. It is well-known that humans are poor judges in evaluating the chance of occurrence of black swan events.
This doesn't seem to be what the article is about at all though. It sounds like you accept evidence whereas he's trying to draw a parallel between the difficulty of arguing with people who reject evidence.
But you're also framing this in terms of personal experiences with limited spheres of effect. Operating wood burning stoves in a neighborhood would appear (I'm not 100% sure on his evidence here, but going with it) to lead to the harm of others. As he opens: "There is no amount of wood smoke that is good to breathe."
There's also a third category, in which I seem to fall- not rejecting evidence, but ignoring it on purpose. As in, "Yes, you are pretty much right, but I don't want to change my ways so I am going to stop thinking about this".
I have a feeling that most people on either side of the debates Harris are involved in are more in your category than logic-driven or emotion-driven. People are inertia-driven; we're comfortable with what we carve out, and accept change if we are sufficiently comfortable with the process and/or the results. Many religious people are likely religious because of choosing to follow tradition. Many irreligious people are likely just apathetic and not inclined to believe in an organized belief in the supernatural.
At the end of the day, I don't think it's about getting people to overcome their emotional attachments, or convincing them with logic. It's about stirring them out of their apathy. Both believes and nonbelievers will have to confront the third category.
I don't choose to sit by a fire (or smoke a cigar, for another example) because of apathy. I choose to value the purported benefits of an activity over the risk I take by partaking in said activity.
I'm not sure how to apply that analysis to a religious belief, which leads me to conclude that the analogy drawn by Sam Harris is flawed in at least some cases.
For that matter, doing everything right and avoiding absolutely anything that could harm you still has a 100% mortality rate. Not holding my breath waiting for Calico to fix that...
I don't know if is that I am a very skeptical person, that I am a Sam Harris fan, or that I grew up without a fireplace (I suspect it is this one), but I didn't find myself at all opposed to the information about fireplaces. Consider me an anti-fireplace convert!
This is interesting to me - I had precisely the same reaction.
In fact, I've noticed that throughout my life my initial reaction on reading something that contradicts my previous beliefs is not rejection but extreme interest at the possibility I may have been wrong.
I don't know if that makes me very skeptical or very gullible. I think it's the former.
I think that's an excellent quality (if used with care), and it's probably related to whether you're the type that is happy to accept critique of your code, or get offended and upset when someone points out your mistakes.
I'm happy if someone finds a way to make my code better, because I can now easily improve it and hopefully learn from my mistake. I don't place much self-worth in the code I write; I care more about the end result of what I'm trying to create.
I did grow up with a fireplace, but still did not feel the slightest inclination to clench my fists at this new information.
Based on it, I wouldn't install a fireplace in a new home, but I think I'd still like to sit by one once or twice a year. I think my lungs can take it.
It continues to amaze me how Sam Harris has managed to change my mind about nearly everything he talks about, be it gun control, scientific morality, or how we should talk about "faith".
Did he actually manage to change your mind about scientific morality though? That seems to be the one area where he's met with a lot of resistance from the secular types.
Read it carefully, think about extrapolations and polemic. "no safe level" (as in oxygen?) Think about the assertion that this is a Moral issue.... Sure, if you are going to live forever, or if you can identify the childhood cancer as being caused by the fire, rather than f*ing bad luck or simply "things we don't understand".
This is not the work of somebody trying to find the truth, or help others come to it.
"Burning wood smoke has more carcinogens and mutagens than cigarette smoke".
"Oh but if we can't directly link this specific cancer with a specific fire, then burning wood isn't harmful, it's all luck, and we can carry on with it without guilt".
Once they realize (or you teach them) that they can use computers to create simple video games or similar things, they'll never look at computers the same way. Or maybe that's just me. :P
It seems that Mr. Harris is not aware of the various improved techniques to burn wood like rocket mass heater or heat-accumulating fireplaces (e.g. Tulikivi). By the way, I'm in Europe, burning woods to heat my house and not for a "recreational" objective using a heat-accumulating fireplace.
None of these are new or improved and they all have the same consequences because we are talking about chemistry (what happens to wood when it is burned).
This pseudo argument is akin to those who, after some initial evidence came to light about the harmful effects of smoking 50-60 years ago, argued that with a filter, smoking was safe (because the filter would 'catch' the bad stuff).
No matter what kind of technique or equipment you use, nothing will 100% prevent the escape of the carcinogenic compounds produced by the chemical reaction of burning wood.
So the question becomes, do you want a little bit of carcinogens in your air? a lot of them? or none (produced by you in your enclosed space/home)?
There are various techniques in order to approach a "Stoichiometric combustion" while burning woods. It's indeed very difficult to reach due to various factor (e.g. partially wet woods or mixed woods). The major risk when you have incomplete combustion is the generation of formaldehyde. That's indeed a critical risk but the combustion for "mass heating" is targeting a fast and quick combustion (the opposite of the common "recreational" fire place") where you can limit the risk. Regarding the "carcinogens" and especially the short particles, this is a shared issue among all combustion and the gasoline/fuel burning is also a major source of particles.
So my point regarding this article, you cannot draw risk conclusion without comparing the various combustion techniques.
Now, I am not familiar with temperature's effects on the reactions found in burning wood. However, your invocation of chemistry is misguided at best. Chemical reactions CAN and DO vary based on energy input into the system. Reactions can happen one way at normal wood fireplace temperature, but another way in an efficient burner at higher temperature. Not to mention that higher temperatures can also simply burn away compounds that lower temperatures cannot. They can also vary based on outside inputs; for instance, wood burned without oxygen becomes charcoal.
I'm sure hydrofracking, coal power plants, cars, switching power supplies, paint etc.. all have absolutely no carcinogenic or other disease causing potential in your home.
I have burned wood in a highly inefficient, toxic way to heat my home, as I only had an inappropriate furnace. To put things into perspective, in our town, the junkyard is essentially perpetually smoldering, giving off quite potent fumes.
When burned properly, both wood and many types of garbage should not create carcinogens, I think. Burning typical coal releases uranium, which will be radioactive, unless you scrub it, put it in a nuclear reactor or so.
> hey all have the same consequences because we are talking about chemistry (what happens to wood when it is burned).
Inefficient fires don't get as hot and cause more smoke. efficient fires get much hotter, and have better airflow. These burn more "stuff", and it burns cleaner.
Plants are well known to contain elements other than carbon and hydrogen. So sure, if you stick to cartoon chemistry you just have those, if you try to actually characterize the reaction, not so much.
The hazardous chemical byproducts of incomplete wood combustion are primarily CHO compounds. With sufficient combustion wood burning can produce very little to none of those compounds. Not that such conditions are typical of wood burning, but the idea that burning wood must produce carcinogenic and hazardous products due to the fundamental chemistry involved is simply erroneous.
I would ask you to look at that list again and re-evaluate whether those products are inevitably the consequence of wood burning in every situation due to the fundamental chemistry involved or whether instead they are due primarily to the conditions involved in that burning and will be produced in different amounts under different conditions.
So the question becomes, do you want a little bit of carcinogens in your air? a lot of them? or none (produced by you in your enclosed space/home)?
An identical argument can be made about wireless radiation. Literally, do a search/replace of a lot of the quackery throughout this whole discussion and you've got a standard discussion about banning wifi.
e.g. I have heard that standing close to a high power transmitter is dangerous. Therefore, I am in danger because of my neighbour's wifi transmitter.
Now someone is going to argue about ionizing potential energy, but the same principals apply for carcinogenic compounds, which are literally all around us. The process of cooking almost invariably even creates new carcinogenic compounds -- do you eschew cooking?
Reductionism is almost always garbage science if taken holistically (it has value within a context, however). Are there actual demonstrated correlative studies of recreational burn "advocates"? Of neighbours? Do wildfires lead to mass outbreaks of cancer (or even a statistically discernable incident rates)? No? Then it sounds like an enormous reach of extraterritorial offense.
strawman argument - wireless signals are not dangerous or harmful, no study has shown this, whereas VOCs and other compounds which are a byproduct of wood smoke are carcinogenic.
Would you stand in front of an operational radar array? Would you give a good hug to a high power transmitter? In both cases you would quickly find yourself dead, despite it being just "wireless signals".
They are high power variants of their low power cousins. The latter isn't dangerous simply as a factor of magnitude. But the same arguments apply. Further it's an interesting note that the classification of something as a carcinogen usually is arrived at via very large levels of exposure, and there are endless tables of "acceptable" exposure to such carcinogenic materials.
This fireplace issue would seem to be something that would be studied to death, and strong correlative findings demonstrating a sound case (given how utterly dire and extreme the submission is). Instead you get things like this-
I'll skip to the fun part -- wood burning homes did have more incidents of cancer, because they had a higher correlation with smokers (similar to how, for instance, blue jeans probably have a higher incidence of cancer than khakis). Among non-smokers the incident rates of cancer are absolutely identical with non wood burning homes. Isn't that incredible, and doesn't that simply destroy the submission? And this is for frequent users who use it as a primary source of fuel, so a level of exposure dramatically higher than such a recreational user.
Predominant solid-fuel users had an increased risk of lung cancer compared with nonsolid-fuel users (Figure 1). We saw this increased risk among both men and women, in ever- and never-smokers, among whites and Asians, and among studies carried out in Asian and in North American and European countries.
Skip the narrative and look at the data -- never-smokers who predominately used solid-fuel (which in North America means wood) had a cancer rate of 1.01 (where 1 is the non-solid-fuel incidence of cancer). For their sample size that is a statistically irrelevant difference. And remember these are people who are exposed to burning wood for dozens if not hundreds of days a year, and compare that with the narrative of the article that does the oldest trick of proclaiming that something has an association with carcinogens, therefore it is an unhealthy dangerous.
We have a fireplace. It's our primary source of heat. It's efficient, however - an EPA approved catalytic model. The smoke from the chimney is very light, and once it's burning dissipates very quickly. Plenty of stoves/fireplaces produce a blue pall of smoke that hangs over the entire area for days, and it's not one of those.
I'd be curious to know if studies included modern and correctly-installed stoves as well.
This is the 21th century, but I'm afraid the message hasn't quite arrived yet: no, your generation of (heat|power|motion) through combustion or burning of things is not ever going to be healthy, efficient or sane.
I think I disagree. For energy density, gasoline is hard to beat. And I'm not convinced that catalytic wood stoves are that bad, without doing more research.
Nahh - they can't, because there is no body of exposure, lack of study power and no control (due to the shortness of time of the technology use and the vast set of confounding factors). It's rubbish.
This argument seems to have 'recreational' as its cornerstone - as soon as it's not recreational, it falls apart, since death from potential cancer in the future is not as bad as poor health or death now from being cold or having poor-quality food.
But even when it's not recreational, the author calls it a scourge in the developing world - apparently 'warmth' is just a nice-to-have, and food cooked for both taste (better subjective experience of life) and to ease digestion (better physical health) are significant issues that the author ignores.
I would say that the 'intelligent' people that the author presents this argument to are not intelligent enough to see the gaping flaws in the argument as presented. There are problems with burning wood, and these can be quite significant in some areas. But balancing this against the argument "all a wood fire gives us is a sense of comfort" should be easily countered by any intelligent audience. What is described in the article is not 'scientific reality', but a very selective subset of it.
It's a reasonable analogy for the some of the issues of discussing religion as an atheist, but I don't think it's anywhere near as clever as the author does, because it relies on intentionally withholding or glossing over a host of very pertinent information. A well-read atheist should be able to counter any point without withholding information.
As an aside, the best thing I've seen on the problems of atheism versus (christian) religion was one guy who became an atheist over the course of years. He mentioned that the way many atheists go about arguing their case undermines themselves - screaming facts at people, then being abusive to some degree when they "can't understand reason". He points out that it doesn't matter what it is you think, if someone is demanding you think differently, and abusing you for not changing instantly, you're instinctively going to create barriers to what they're saying. Whether it's religion, sporting teams, personal politics, diet, anything that's not a trivial investment for the individual. Of course, the fly in the ointment is that politics at the national level can't really be run this way...
You might have missed the point that wood is not the only way to get 'warmth' e.g., you could use gas that is less harmful. It discards most of your comment. Though your last paragraph suggests that you might have some difficulty accepting that if you are not considering it a trivial investment.
(I've tried to make the comment to sound less snarky without sacrificing accuracy).
Personal data point: Maybe I'm too gullible but I love to find out something new that changes my mind (not too often), especially non-trivial stuff e.g., about weight/fitness as it relates to health. Not all people resist change all of the time.
I didn't miss the 'use gas instead' argument - and it doesn't discard most of my comment at all. Read the comment again - I'm talking about the times when wood is not used 'recreationally'. This is usually in rural areas in developed countries, where wood is very cheap, if not free, or in some developing countries where it's often the only fuel source available en masse.
The article is framing 'a wood fire' as something that is merely to provide some sort of cosy sense of solace, which is really a very selective way to look at it. Not to mention that saying "just use gas instead" isn't so trivial - if you're not hooked up to a gas pipe, then managing the gas supply has its own transport issues, extra costs and so forth. For a lot of subsistence farmers with access to both, free wood is likely to be favourable over gas bottles. Gas has wonderful convenience, but if you don't have the money? Frequently the answer is gas for cooking and wood for heating.
Similarly, he begs the question a bit when he says that wood fires are natural. They're not natural the way humans use them, not even remotely. That whole argument over the 'naturalness' of fires is a total sideshow, simply because they're not natural - they are traditional. I get that it's supposed to be an illustrative analogy, which is why I say I think it's okay, but not as clever as the author seems to think.
The city I live in ran a campaign a number of years ago handing out $1000 vouchers to upgrade inefficient wood stoves. It can be a air quality issue, but the major issue is one of efficiency. Modern wood stoves are very efficient - where a fireplace may run at 15%, some of the new hearthstones exceed 80%. In any case, as someone from New Hampshire, I find it insulting that anyone would frame burning wood as "recreational."
Why so obviously wrong? Seems reasonable to me that chimney smoke – defined as air with heavy particulates created from burning wood – might fall back down to the ground (and thus into surrounding buildings) once it has cooled.
I'm not saying it's right, but it doesn't seem obviously wrong to me. Regardless, I'm sure whatever "research" there is must be based on something! A citation would have been appreciated so we could judge for ourselves...
If 70% of chimney smoke re-entered nearby buildings, then those times when most buildings were burning, the air inside them would be nearly as smoky as what come out of the chimney. It's also very hard to believe outside of a tenement arrangement. In a village where there's lots of space between houses, and assuming all particulate matter fell back within the bounds of the village (itself a big stretch), it's hard to see how two-thirds of smoke would find its way back into buildings.
It doesn't mention over what sort of volume/area it re-enters... 70% of smoke from one chimney distributed over the whole neighborhood/town would be more subtle.
Fall back down to the ground and blow back into sealed houses, though? I think obviously wrong applies to the scenario he wants you to have in mind. Maybe the research has some specific conditions.
Yeah, that is the bit that stuck out as wrong to me as well. For most wind directions, there aren't any nearby buildings downwind of my chimney. Wood burning isn't so common in the city, where I suppose it could be true that most of the smoke finds its way into someone's house.
For an article that uses the word "scientific" so often it's remarkably imprecise. We're told that "there is no amount of wood smoke that is good to breathe", but there's no effort at all to quantify how bad it is. Children who live with wood stoves have higher incidence of asthma... okay, I can believe that. It doesn't mean anything until you give at least a little indication of approximately how much higher.
This is the umpteenth time I've seen this on HN. Is there a flaw in the HN algorithm that allows the exact same article of be recycled several times thru or is that a feature. Is it a way to get lots of Upvotes? Just resubmit an article that did well before?
While his essay is thought provoking and makes some valid points, he has oversimplified the moral equation in at least two ways. It is not clear that in many areas burning wood (especially using modern catalytic converter efficient wood stoves) would raise air pollutants above background levels due to car/ truck/ airplane exhaust, coal fired power plants, forest fires/ controlled burns, and the burning of sugar cane and other crops (not to mention indoor dust and other non combustion air pollutants). Also heating and cooking with wood using a modern wood stove can significantly lower one's carbon footprint compared to alternatives.
Isn't there something else we can burn that also gives off that nice wooden smell? I smell a market opportunity here - bio natural imitation fireplace wood - 100% carcinogen free smoke, asbestos free, cholesterol free, contains no hydrogenated fats.
Well, I assume that burning pretty much anything that is solid will produce some sort of micro-particles... which even if they are not cancerogenic are probably not good to inhale...
Mounted police are surprisingly effective. They're highly visible (you noticed them on your way home, for example). They're useful for crowd control, as the officer is above the crowds. And being chased by an officer on horseback is a memorable experience, which may have a deterrent effect.
"I am sorry to say that if you feel this way about a wood fire, you are not only wrong but dangerously misguided"
This does not follow the preceding paragraph at all, making it painful to read the rest. If my opposition just demonstrates that I'm a romantic that loves my wood fires, then I suppose...
> Here is what we know from a scientific point of view: There is no amount of wood smoke that is good to breathe.
There is no way to make a value judgement "from a scientific point of view." This is just the first from a collection of his moral convictions (we should live as long as possible, affecting our neighbours as little as possible). Nothing particularly wrong with having those but why dress them up in science?
> many other things are just as natural—such as dying at the ripe old age of thirty.
People may have on average had life expectancies in the 30 years range but that was because of child and infant mortality. Adults weren't dropping dead at 30.
And then some silly js sticks this to every paste:
> - See more at: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion#st...
So sloppy.