Fireplace Delusions [LINK]

The most interesting thing I took away was the apparent disparity between the reaction of LW'ers and the reaction Sam reports from his friends. Almost everyone here seems open to the possibility, and even consider it plausible, while by my reading of Sam's reports about his friends, they are completely dismissive of the possibility.

Does this make you skeptical that Sam is correctly reporting the reactions he's getting from his friends? I would have guessed that he had smarter friends than his report indicates.

I can attest to the main point of the article: the irrational ire that this issue invokes in people. This letter to the editor is in no way unique in my neck of the woods. Though that can also come from it being a highly religious, republican/libertarian sort of place. Amongst my friends, there is much less of this rage Harris speaks of. We readily admit the down sides, but up here, a blackout of sufficient duration (a couple hours, maybe?) could be lethal, and would certainly cost thousands of dollars in damage if water pipes freeze up.

Harris did seem to commit one of the gravest wikipedian sins: citation needed. Here's a little more info, for your edification.

A copy of Harris' cited source that isn't paywalled.

The EPA talks about health effects stemming from Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, structural damage resulting from particles abrading soft tissues, and cancer from deposited carcinogens that hitchhike on the small particles. One of the sources cited in that list is Zelikoff's The Toxicology Of Inhaled Woodsmoke in the Journal of Toxicology, which I think is a good place to start. There's also some downloadable articles on this site which might be of use as gateways to more info.

Edit: It occurs to me that since I'm enjoying reading the Zelikoff article that I should summarize some interesting points. -The WHO estimates that indoor air pollution (no clue if there were other major sources beyond wood and dung burning) accounts for 2.2 to 2.5 million annual deaths around the world. -Biomass fuel is not terribly good in terms of combustion efficiency, which is why they produce so much crap. -Emissions include -aldehydes, hydrocarbons, CO, NO_x and SO_x, volatile organics, chlorinated dioxins, and free radicals. -Cooking smoke increases risk of chronic obstructive lung disease, respiratory infections, and in children pulmonary tuberculosis. -Most woodburning in the United States is done by middle to upper-middle income, and use has risen dramatically since the 1980s. -Temperature inversions trap these particles, which is bad for places like British Columbia (and incidentally my town) -Upwards of 70% of outdoor woodsmoke reenters the house and neighboring houses (that is sourced to Pierson et al. 1989). -Fireplaces are about as bad as non-airtight stoves, but worse than airtight ones. Except that airtight ones have less oxygen, which apparently facilitates making more exotic organic chemicals.

-Now it starts talking specifics. CO levels in woodstove homes have been shown to make carboxyhemoglobin and increases angina in people with cardiac disease. Nitrogen oxides bind to hemoglobin to produce methemoglobin and hematologic aberrations, which messes up enzyme systems, injure vascular membranes, which leads to edema and bronchoconstriction in asthmatics. The hydrocarbons are immunosuppresants and obviously carcinogenic (both are known in animals and suspected in humans). Formaldehyde and acrolein are the primary aldehydes, and they are associated with upper airway irritation, headaches, exacerbating bronchial asthma, and cancer. -One of the most interesting thing about scientists is they can talk about horrible things like this, and start a paragraph with "One of the most interesting components of woodsmoke pollution is PM" (Particulate matter). -Short-term exposure to particles is linked with a lot of bad shit. Including death and reduced recovery rates from infectious diseases. -They've done animal studies and found direct links between woodsmoke and scary sounding names like necrotizing tracheobronchial epithelial cell injury, lung cancer, decreased ventilatory frequency and response to CO2. -Adults with prolonged exposure get: chronic bronchitis, chronic interstitial pneumonitis and fibrosis, cor pulmodale, interstitial lung disease, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and altered pulmonary immune defense mechanisms. -Children have it worse: decreased pulmonary lung function in asthmatics, increased rates of acute bronchitis (increased severity and frequency of wheezing and coughing), increased incidence, duration and severity of acute respiratory infections.

• Then there's immune system issues, which are of a persistent and progressive nature. They talk about some rat studies and how particles <2.5 microns made pneumonia worse. Most of this section went right over my head. -"While the mechanisms by which woodsmoke may have acted to persistently suppress bacterial clearance are not yet clear, results from this part of the study demonstrated that short-term repeated inhalation of woodsmoke [...] compromised pulmonary host resistance against an infection, pneumonia-producing lung pathogen well after exposure ceased." -This study displayed that recovery rates were lessened in woodsmoke-exposed rodents in a time-dependent manner. A different study showed that decreased immune system starts about 4 days from exposure (not sure the exposure regimen) and lasted up to 25 days with repeated exposure. That study also showed that it was because particles release formaldehyde slowly over the course of being in the body, which is how it is a continuous progressive effect.

I always hate reading abstracts before reading an interesting paper. It should say Spoiler Alert, not Abstract... Also, I really like how a paper with good citations is several pages shorter than the size of the document. Hitting Summary before expected always gives me a slight endorphin rush.

While I was reading it, I found myself thinking

"Come on, give me some citations! Just show me some trustworthy studies so I can show my rationalist virtue by gracefully accepting it!"

I'm not sure this was quite the right way to respond.

From conversations with less rational people, I get the feeling that having a sense of discomfort from holding conflicting beliefs is in itself rare.

Before.

I would guess that it's more the case of people here having more flexible priors. I find that I'm generally less certain of the truth of my beliefs than most people. By my estimation, most people are damn sure of things that they have no way of knowing anything about. I'm probably a defense attorney's wet dream, because I always have doubt.

I worry about this all the time, but honestly, we know rationality is hard, and we know you're never quite sure you're doing it right. Because humans tend to try to validate their own beliefs way harder than than conflicting ones, applying the virtue of evenness probably means closer to rejecting your own beliefs if possible than "searching equally hard for flaws in your own arguments as well as others". If you state the latter goal, you are likely to fall into one of the many, many traps that let you think you were right all along.

But I do worry about it all the time. What if, instead of being a leaf on the wind, I'm a rocket-propelled leaf trying to figure out the direction of the wind prematurely and flying off into space, never to be seen again? Then I'd be in space, and there's no oxygen there, and leaves can't survive without oxygen.

A better measure would be evidence that video games are harmful.

I have a very strong feeling that, if the presence of a fireplace were shown to reduce John's life expectancy by 10 minutes he would indeed make no adjustments in his behavior, if the reduction in life expectancy were 10 years he would never go near a wood fire again, and intermediate values would result in monotonically decreasing levels of use.

Your feeling sounds needlessly insulting; perhaps that was triggered because it was poor form John to insist on exactitude? Exact numbers being impossible to come by, we do still all already reduce our life expectancies regularly when driving, flying, eating ice cream, spending time in higher-crime areas... Yet if you were to point out that "OMG, driving to the library can kill you!" it would be a technical truth drowning in connotational falsehood. When trying to balance rare dangers against common benefits, asking for the danger to be at least approximately quantified is the only rational thing to do.

Do you still make that prediction about my behavior if the numbers I received suggested that 1 minute of fireplace use would decrease my expected lifespan by an hour? What if the numbers suggested that 1 min. of fireplace use would decrease my expected lifespan by a year?

I'm not asking for a precise number, just a rough order of magnitude. All I want to know is how much additional lifespan I am buying if I avoid fireplaces, the same way one might want to know roughly how much money one would save on gas by buying a hybrid car. I'm not upset with Sam Harris for not including this, but it would be a public service if he did, so his readers could weigh their utility for fireplaces against their decreased years of life, and individually decide whether they wanted to avoid them or not. If I were to guess, I'd say that most fireplace users end up dying from something other than fireplaces before fireplaces can kill them, so maybe Sam could say how many hours of fireplace use per week one can engage in before the probability of dying from fireplace use goes over .1%.

My behavior did not remain completely unchanged by the article. I don't sit in front of fireplaces on a regular basis, but after reading the article, I will attempt to estimate health hazards from fireplaces if I notice that this changes.

Lol I mentally completed "She could convert... to Judaism"... cached thoughts die hard.

She's hoping to sell the house. I'm not sure if that's the sort of renovation that would increase its sale price or the odds of its sale.

And I don't think a gas fireplace would be as pretty and crackly, anyway. It might be warm, but I rarely just want warm.

If I liked sacrificing things I like in order to spend longer not doing them, I would be a rare bird.

Ah. So I want to avoid rooms with drafts, when fires are aglow. Noted.

Reading between the lines, I suspect Harris self-identifies as the "guns and dope" breed of small-L libertarian (possibly modulo guns). His stated motivations aren't necessarily inconsistent with that label, although they are inconsistent with libertarian theory.

Which is not to say that he doesn't have some badly confused views about that general ideological space. Describing Objectivism as "autism rebranded", for example, is seriously unfair to both Objectivists and autistic folks.

"All laws are coercive and take the following form: do this, and don’t do that, or else. Or else what? Or else men with guns will arrive at your door and take you away to prison. Yes, it would be wonderful if we did not need to be corralled and threatened in this way. And many uses of State power are both silly and harmful (the “war on drugs” being, perhaps, the ultimate instance). But the moment certain strictures are relaxed, people reliably go berserk. "

While the rest of the quote does make it pretty clear that Harris isn't a libertarian, the first part -- where in he acknowledges that laws ultimately derive their authority from men with guns say they do, and only from "the consent of the governed" (as in Lockean social contract theory) to the extent that "the will of the people" is capable of influencing the guys with guns -- wouldn't sound too out of place in a libertarian argument. Of course, most libertarians go on to add that this state of affairs is suboptimal, and could be improved upon, which Harris explicitly doesn't believe. Still, he probably has more in common with libertarians than your average politically interested person does.