Study finds that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant

Horse hockey.

Which means, obviously, that a causal link hasn't been proven.

Really? The presence of other risk factors prevents some smokers from getting lung cancer?

Really??

Which might be interesting were anyone proposing a causal link between collisions and breaking traffic rules, when everyone who drives knows that's baloney.

Talk about a revealing choice of words.

 

Although the causal link isn't deterministic on an individual basis it is deterministic on a group basis. That's why when scientists repeat the experiment on groups of people they overwhelmingly come to the same conclusion. Smoking causes cancer.

I think beginning to see a pattern here. I think there is a cognitive bias going on here that prevents you guys from thinking in terms of probabilities. You can't see the big forest because you're too focused on figuring out all the different ways the individual trees are different.

The presence of other risk factors results in some people getting lung cancer for reasons other than smoking. The presence of other risk factors prevents some smokers from getting lung cancer because they simply die from something else first. And people don't always get lung cancer even though they've smoked all of their life for reasons that we still don't know today. None of this in any way refutes the fact that smoking causes cancer.

You're argument here is as ridiculous as saying bullets fired from a gun don't kill people because they don't always kill people. News flash...bullets kill people; bullets cause death. Bullets fired from a gun are a risk factor for death.

Then present an abundance of evidence that suggests there is no link between breaking traffic rules and traffic accidents.

 

Yeah that pretty much says it all. Case closed.

 

Sweet. So you should be able to take your model, and never lose in vegas. Right? Because you can demonstrate that your proficiency in probability management if effective enough to make you money, right? Tell me, what's the probability of a roulette table hitting red 10 times in a row? (.49 to the 10th, right?) Which makes the probability that you can bet on red 10 times in a row virtually zero. And yet, it happens. Not all the time but far more times than the probability would indicate it should. Studies of the gaming table behaviors will bare this out. Which, again, is why the house always wins. Always.

So, no. I'm not focused on the trees themselves. I am looking at the big picture. And the big picture depends on folks being under educated enough to not understand the insignificance of deterministic statistics. So why be dishonest about it? You continue to use strawman arguments no one has asserted as evidence that your characterization of other folks here's opinion then is discountable . You've used the "smokers die from something else before they die from lung cancer" example twice now. And it's just as disingenuous now as the last time you used it, and yet, here you are, using it again. And frankly, why do you feel so entitled to abuse other's using this technique? If someone dies of natural causes at 90 and have smoked their entire lives, but didn't get cancer, your assertion assumes that given enough time, and age, they would. As in you seem to believe that everyone who ever smokes doesn't die of lung cancer simply because they didn't live long enough to exhibit it. That's F'in laughable bro...

Yes, bullets are used to kill people. Just like folks abusing drugs, right? So staying away from the bullets, or not abusing drugs might be a lifestyle choice we should encourage, right? But, again, I can show you legions of folks who have been around bullets and guns who have never died because of them. And, I can show you legions of folks who exist in a society full of drugs who haven't overdosed. So even though I can show you that if I take my time and aim carefully, and shoot someone precisely, I will kill them, that doesn't indicate that a) I will, or b) that you could predict the target. In fact, all you can do is suggest that as a probability given the number of total deaths from bullets in this country, that an indicated risk might be 1:100K. right?

10s if not 100s of millions of folks in this country smoke. Of those, how many die from lung cancer? 1:1K? Using 10 year old data here, so not sure if those have changed, but this seems about right. Say 150M smokers, ~150K smoking related deaths per year... And yet, eventually all 150M smokers will die. Even if not from lung cancer right? Their risk of death is still 100%, right? not .01%, but dead on 100%. And all you have is your assertion that if only they lived longer, they would all get lung cancer, right? Laughable.

 

Is this your way of saying you also deny the link between smoking and cancer too?

 

Cased cased ?
https://www3.nd.edu/~pmtrc/Handouts/Secondhand_Smoke_AMA.htm

 

Correct. If we went to Vegas and played the admittedly disturbing game of who was going to die of lung cancer at some point in their life and I used the scientifically established fact that smokers get lung cancer more often than non-smokers and you didn't use that information...ya know...because you don't believe it then yes, I will absolutely make money while you lose money. That is a fact. By the way, insurance companies play this "game" everyday and profit from it.

Also, it is my understanding that Vegas wheels have 38 slots of which 18 are red. That means the probability of landing on red if the wheel is purely random is actually 0.4737. The odds of hitting red 10 times in a row is thus 0.4737 ^ 10 or about 5.69 in 10000 or 1 in 1757. But, note that the 1757 figure is a block of 10 consecutive attempts. So what is the average number of attempts necessary that yield a positive result Well, that's actually kind of tricky to work out for several reasons. I'll dispense with the math and just give you the answer. On average you'd need to play the wheel 3320 times. For 1 sigma confidence you'd need to play about 3800 times. For 2 sigma confidence you'd need to play about 10,000 times. And for 3 sigma confidence you need to play about 20,000 times. If after observing all of the plays in Vegas you come to the conclusion that it's happening more often than you expected then the conclusion is that the wheel isn't purely random. I highly doubt any of them actually are. The odds of landing on red isn't likely to be precisely 0.4737. By the way, people have actually exploited the non-randomness of the wheel to their advantage.

The house always wins because they use mathematics. Just like science always trumps psuedoscience because it too uses mathematics.

 

Given that the House always wins, somehow, the Russian spy named Trump managed to bankrupt a Casino and needed his daddy to bail him out.

 

That's definitely happening here.

I'm not getting it. What am I being dishonest about? What strawman am I building?

That's not disingenuous. It's a fact. People die from other causes. When you die from cause A you simply do not have the...ehmm..."opportunity" to die from cause B because you can't die twice.

I've never made that assertion though. My assertion is that when considering two population of people the group in which the age of death is less than 40 will exhibit lower incidences of smoking related lung cancer than a population in which the age of death is less than 100. I've never claim that if you're 90 and you've smoked all your life then the only way you can die is by lung cancer. Scientists haven't said that either.

I never said that either. What I assert is that the quantity and duration of your smoking habit is statistically linked with your probability of dying of lung cancer. I have never claimed that given enough cigarettes and time you will die of lung cancer if something else doesn't get you first.

It's laughable to YOU because you don't understand probabilities.

You missed my point. My point wasn't about intention. My point was about exposure to bullets. And by exposure I mean that one actually entered your body for whatever reason. Maybe it was intentional and maybe it was an accident. Either way exposure to bullets is a risk factor for death. No, it doesn't always cause death. But, yes, you are significantly more likely to die if you are exposed to a bullet. And ironically, if you are exposed to a bullet then you are less likely to die from lung cancer as a smoker. Why? Because you died from something else and because you can't die twice.

Again, I never said that; or least that was never my attention to convey that meaning. Can you show me which post in which you believe I made this assertion?

 

Touche!

 

See, we agree on stuff. Agree also that 100% of all people will die, right? This is the difference though. I haven't created an entirely artificial expectation. Your assertion was, because folks died prior to developing lung cancer, they still would have, given enough time. Insurance companies don't play that game, do they?

 

I'm not sure that we do. I believe that smoking causes cancer.

Again, and for at least the 3rd time, I've never made that assertion. Reread post #1009.

And by the way, don't think it slipped past me that you use accuse me of building strawmen and yet here we are with you claiming I made an argument that I didn't so that you can have the satisfaction of tearing down.

Are you seriously trying to argue that insurance companies don't charge extra for known risk factors? Seriously?

 

You said, not once, but twice that " If you smoke, but die of something else before you got lung cancer then that proves that smoking cannot cause cancer." You did so as an indictment of the Singer guy. Your assumption then being that clearly, living long enough will produce a cancer, because not living long enough isn't an indication that cancer won't eventually occur. This is what you've said, and continue to defend. It's disingenuous of you now to suggest that you haven't suggested and defended this standard.

I suggest that you make many leaps of faith, mostly to drive the conversation, like this latest foray into what insurance does, or doesn't do...

So, tell us again. All else being equal, what makes the difference between those that smoke and get lung cancer, and those that don't. You feel that you know this yet? I don't believe you do, or could provide any answer other than "statistically, you're inclined to get lung cancer". That's all you ever have. And from that, you then infer (again without having ever actually shown the causal link) that smoking causes cancer. So, it always causes cancer? And if not, then why is your statement smoking causes cancer still accurate?

 

First, we're not even talking about the same thing here. The logical statement "if P1 and P2 then not Q" is not the same thing as "if P1 and not P2 then Q".

Second, the statement above isn't even my assertion. It is one type of logical fallacy that deniers use. It is an example of a tactic that Singer and Seitz use. Here is my exact quote from post #977. "That line of reasoning is taken right out of Singer's playbook. This is the tack Singer used. If you smoke, but die of something else before you got lung cancer then that proves that smoking cannot cause cancer. There are other logical fallacies as well." By the way, this particular fallacy I called out in post #977 is called denying the antecedent.

I never defended that statement nor have I defended the statement that you will necessarily get cancer if you are a smoker and live long enough. In fact, I've made every effort to show you how Singer and Sietz use of these tactics are, in fact, logical fallacies.

Insurance companies absolutely charge more for certain risk factors. That is a fact.

Showing that you are 25x more likely to develop lung cancer if you smoke vs if you don't is demonstrating a casual link between smoking and cancer.
Showing that 90% of the people who died from lung cancer are smokers is demonstrating a casual link between smoking and cancer.

Smoking does not always cause cancer. There are many reasons for this. Some we know and some we don't. We don't need perfect knowledge of the null cases to know that there is a casual link between smoking and cancer.

By the way, this is another tactic science deniers use. They frame the problem in terms of impossible expectations. They claim, erroneously I might add, that there is no such thing as a conclusion until all issues both known and unknown and which may or may not be related to the hypothesis are researched exhaustively. That's the fallacy of impossible expectations. Deniers use this anti-science tactic of requiring infinite truthification to delay decisions regarding behaviors that are deemed harmful to the environment. There's always more research that needs to be done they say. And, in the meantime you simply can't warn the public about certain environmental risks until you've reached a point of perfect knowledge which by their standard is an impossibility. That's why science is built around the idea of falsification instead of truthification. Falsification is possible. Truthification is not.

 

So, this is the only part that is effectively being responsive to the conversation. In it you say: "smoking does not always cause cancer. there are many reasons for this. Some we know, and some we don't" Ok, like what? The question wasn't, do you feel like you can make a prediction, or can you come up with a statistical number that represents, to you, what you feel the risk is. The question was, what causes folks who smoke to not get cancer. And the flip side of is it, for those who smoke who do get cancer, why? So, you assert that there are reasons, and then fail to articulate or list them. And yet you assert you know them. Ok, what are they? And more, what number of times? 1, 2, 10, 10K, 100K? What is the spark.

I think it's interesting that you bring us expectations as a fallacy. I mean, if I were advocating your side, I'd do it. Why? Because it's lazy. It somehow crafts a narrative that suggests that because you currently don't know a thing, you can ignore that fact because you are certain of your assumptions. I think that's super shoddy, lazy, and otherwise entirely unprofessional.

We have science so we don't have to endure your type of bullying. That's why it's so necessary for science to actually learn the actual answers, and not rely on BS mathematical models that attempt to explain their fantasies to us. That's why I do support the use of science to actually investigate and experiment to find the actual triggers. Wouldn't your case be infinitely more successful if you could simply say, you have this marker, when exposed to this chemical, it flips said switch and begins the metastisization process in your body? So, you could implicitly be able to warm folks not to do the thing that exposes them? Wouldn't that ultimately be the case you'd want to advocate?

So, yes, it's lazy. We have expectations, that doesn't make it a fallacy then to want better science because of them. It means folks who do the work shouldn't guess instead of actually identifying the things that actually cause the harms. What happens, for example, if it simply turns out that cancer is a manifestation of one variant of immune deficient, or immune suppressive behavior in the individual, and those folks are just predisposed to developing a cancer of any kind irrespective of the inputs? Where does that leave you smoking case? (perhaps outside of the ability to present the chemical ingestion as a trigger?) Pretty much blows it away, right?

 

I have never asserted that I know all of the reasons for the null events. In fact, I even said some of them are unknown. And for me personally, I know very little about them. And that's okay with me. I'm not an expert afterall. However, I can tell you one reason why people who smoke don't get lung cancer. It's obvious...they die of other causes before they've had the "opportunity" to even get lung cancer. There are certainly many others though. I just don't know what they are.

The lack of knowledge in science is rarely a result of laziness. It's usually the result of technological and resource limitations. There are infinitely many paths to explore in the pursuit of knowledge. They all should be explored, but that's not possible. Scientists are then forced into choosing which branch to explore further. They usually choose the branches that they deem most likely to produce useful results. For example, when studying the risk of bullet exposure a scientist might choose to explore caliber of the bullet or the type of gun that fired it as being mostly likely to yield useful statistics regarding it's lethality. He may forego studying whether a bullet made of copper vs lead has an impact simply because it doesn't seem like a variable that is as important as say the caliber. That doesn't mean there isn't casual link bullet material and it doesn't mean the scientist was lazy. It does mean that there is the possibility she goes down unfruitful paths. But remember, she's just doing the best job she can given the constraints of the problem.

Sure, it could be that lung cancer is primarily caused by something intrinsic to that person (like an immune deficiency) and that people who have this deficiency also happen to have a disproportionate drive to smoke. That would yield the rather strange scenario of the only people who have this deficiency are the only people who happen to smoke. That would be an example of correlation without causation. Is it possible that people who are disproportionately predisposed to getting lung cancer also disproportionately predisposed to take up smoking? Yeah, sure. Is it likely? No. By the way, as a fun exercise what kind of test can you construct to eliminate that possibility?

Yes. Absolutely. Although it's not a requirement it is definitely far more convincing if you can explain the mechanism by which a hypothesized agent leads to an effect. I'll be sure to look this up in the context of smoking and cancer.

It's a challenge I'm going to give you as well. If your hypothesis is that lung cancer is the result of an intrinsic predisposition to it then 1) present evidence that shows the link and 2) demonstrate the mechanism by which that intrinsic mechanism produces lung cancer.

What it is specifically that you think scientists do? Are you envisioning them sitting at a big conference table brainstorming causes to match to effects and the person that comes up with the coolest idea wins? That's not how it works. They run experiments specifically so that they don't have to guess at it.

 

It's like arguing with 10 different people with you. I recall, just a few posts ago, where you whined that you'd never assert this, that you were not arguing this, that other folks had, and that you, specifically thought this wasn't a valid argument. And yet, here you are, again, suggesting that the only reason folks who smoke haven't developed cancer is that they died before it could exhibit.

So, because it's fun, the reason that individual genome therapy has been so successful in treating cancers, is that a whole bunch of eager, highly motivated doctors stopped being lazy and started actually experimenting. How many new therapies for cancer treatment last year? As in, they actually produced something. An actual targeted genomic agent introduced in those with a cancer that directly fought the specific cancer that person exhibited. I advance that as a good example of not being lazy, or relying entirely on correlative statistics that frankly produce nothing useful..

I'm sure this won't change your mind. You seem entirely too invested in your current set of multiple narratives, but one hopes that regardless of them, perhaps, collectively, your group can evolve and learn.

 

By doctors, if you mean treatment doctors, you’re wrong. Medical doctors are not the primary source of new cancer treatments. They are the last step in trials and treatment but are not the evidence gatherers and theorists who set the stage. It’s the scientific community at large working together and not MDs alone that develope cancer cures. A nuclear physicist has as much to contribute to a cancer cure as a medical doctor....so doesn’t a biologist and a mathematician. It’s an institutional approach. It’s the entire scientific community, many of whom have their work used in many other fields other then medicine.

 

The statement...

1. "One reason why people who smoke avoid getting cancer is because they die of something else first."

...is different than...

2. "Because not all people who smoke get cancer then smoking does not cause cancer."

...and is also different than...

3. "Given enough time and assuming they do not die of something else first someone who smokes will always get cancer."

Statement #1 is what I and pretty much every scientist claim. It is a fact.

Statement #2 is the logic Singer uses. It is a logical fallacy. It is not true.

Statement #3 is the strawman you made up and tried to pin on me. It is also not true.

 

There is no debate.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/tobacco-and-cancer/secondhand-smoke.html

Second hand smoke has the same ingredients as primary smoke. The more you inhale, the greater the risk of respiratory desease, including lung cancer.

 

Same question, demonstrate the trigger. Not the statistical correlation, but the actual trigger. Lots of things lead to a greater risk of a lot of other things. If I drive late at night on a Friday or Saturday night in my city, my chances of getter killed by a drunk illegal alien exponentially rise. And yet, I still drive and I've never been killed so far. But you know what actually kills me? The cars, colliding at speed, and the trauma caused because of it. Clearly, not the "risk" you referred to. Of course you don't see the difference.

 

Here is what I dug up with a quick google search.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53010/
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/ab.../smoking-and-cancer/how-smoking-causes-cancer
http://magic.club.kmu.edu.tw/sdamyun/ent/fulltext.pdf
https://monographs.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/mono100F-14.pdf
https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/iris/iris_documents/documents/subst/0136_summary.pdf
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/roc/content/profiles/polycyclicaromatichydrocarbons.pdf
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/41132869.pdf

In a nutshell there are dozens of chemical compounds in cigarette smoke that breakdown DNA. These are then given an assist by other chemicals which irritate the tissues in the lungs which provides a better a vector for the carcinogens to attack the cells. Then on top of that there are chemicals that catalyze the binding of the carcinogen molecules to the DNA strands.

This explains why second hand smoking also causes cancer. It's not the act of smoking that causes cancer, but it's the inhalation of cigarette smoke which contains the dangerous chemicals. Exposure to cigarette smoke is the problem regardless of the vector in which it was inhaled. The more you inhale the more it accumulates in the lungs which increases the cross sectional area and thus the probability of a genetic mutation.

 

Here is their "research."
April 3, 2007
RUSH: Mark my brilliant words on this. ... The vast majority of CO2 that's in the atmosphere comes from water vapor.

 

That is pseudoscientific gibberish.

I'm reminded of the derivatives that got so much attention in '08, which financial instruments were made of notes that were bundled together, sliced and diced, and bundled back together so the buyer had no way of directly assessing the quality of the notes; and just as those derivatives served the purpose of generating profits, even for some of the buyers, the methodology you describe serves the purpose of making a proposition credible to a great many people. One purpose it cannot possibly serve, however, is as justification for the proposition that smoking causes cancer.

Actually what you're seeing from this quarter is cognizance of the fact that in the present context, probability is an intellectual fig leaf to cover ignorance.

So does old age count as a risk factor?

Which is why your claim about the cause of lung cancer is utterly bogus.

Actually, taken at face value, the statement is perfectly correct.

To be sure; but using the same methodology as for smoking, I suspect we'd have to conclude that firing bullets out of a gun increases the risk of accidental death by something less than .01%.

What the hell for?

I'd be surprised if they didn't; but then they're not looking for causes. They're looking for the same thing casinos are looking for: profit.

 

The “ trigger? “
There are no magic conditions where by you don’t put your life at risk by avoiding them in ANY SITUATION. Only ways that decrease probability.

Medical science has saved millions of lives over the decades through preventative medicine. One of those measures is discouraging exposure second hand smoke for the same reasons, we discourage primary smoking. Given that limitation, get this. There is no accredited university, no medical support organization and no govt. health agency ( in the free world) that doesn’t support idea that second hand smoke increases your chances of respiratory problems INCLUDING LUNG CANCER.
Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Look it at any reputable healthcare site.