The Fireplace Delusion

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion

by uvdiv • 13 years ago

322 288 13 years ago

samharris.org

uvdiv3• 13 years ago

Here's a free PDF of the toxicology paper he cites:

"Woodsmoke Health Effects: A Review"

http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/publications/2006%20pubs...

(update): More supporting references here (he should have linked this one):

http://www.epa.gov/burnwise/pdfs/woodsmoke_health_effects_ja...

anemic• 13 years ago

I tried to look where the claim "Research shows that nearly 70 percent of chimney smoke reenters nearby buildings." comes from as I find it interesting. In the "woodsmoke health effects" paper it references this:

Pierson, W. E., Koenig, J. Q., and Bardana, E. J., 1989. Potential adverse health effects of wood smoke. West J. Med. 151: 339-342.

which is found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1026893/pdf/west...

And it says:

> Also, about 70% of the outdoor wood smoke reenters the house (T. V. Larson, PhD, University of Washington, Department of Civil Engineering, unpublished data).

First, the article is from 1989 and it's not known when the T.V. Larsons data is collected. Also wouldn't for example the density of the houses or the type of the houses and their ventilation and filtering affect this result? How much?

Secondly somehow the original article mentions that the smoke reenters the house, which I understand is the same house with the stove/fireplace, but in the "woodsmoke health effects" paper it has transformed to "can actually reenter the home and neighborhood dwellings"?

tomjen3• 13 years ago

Seems well argued.

But we will never be able to ban stoves, fireplaces, etc.

Adaptive3• 13 years ago

Maybe not ban, nor would we want to, but carbon credits could come into play and impact selection of home heating options, for example.

ars2• 13 years ago

I assume you mean carbon dioxide credits, not carbon credits. Because for fireplaces it would have to be actual carbon credits - fireplaces release lots of carbon into the air as pollution.

Incidentally people should stop being lazy and say carbon dioxide when they mean carbon dioxide - otherwise it gets confusing in situations like this where fireplaces release both carbon dioxide, and carbon, into the air.

MarkSweep• 13 years ago

Actually one city in silicon valley has already banned building new wood-burning fireplaces:

http://www.losaltosonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&#...

myelin• 13 years ago

My hometown in New Zealand has been working to ban open fires for over a decade, due to their contribution to the city's terrible winter-time air quality. (Not helped by a temperature inversion that causes the smoke to stay near the ground rather than rise and blow away.)

VLM• 13 years ago

Where I live insurance is hyper-regulated and required if you have a mortgage, and I'm not sure exactly how much or how little social engineering input the EPA had, but you're looking at your home insurance bill going up by about $2000 annually if you have a wood burner of any type in your house. Note this isn't silicon valley, and the national median household income is almost exactly $50K, so for more than half the homes in america, you're talking about a "tax" in excess of 4% of gross income merely for the privilege of owning a woodburner.

A tax by any other name... Add to that the cost of obtaining wood, and the substantial mostly product liability costs of a decent wood stove (more than a grand or two) and you've changed owning a woodburner from something any joe 6 pack can have in his house to pretty much elites only.

Sure, technically there's no official ban, but spending 5% of my annual income is kinda extreme as a hobby..

eloisant5• 13 years ago

In France there is no premium on insurance if you have a fireplace or stove, but you have to declare it, keep it to the norms and do the mandatory yearly check by a professional.

sawyer• 13 years ago

Great example of how to make seculars feel like religious people when confronted with science; and actually quite educational! I had no idea wood smoke was harmful, but am now glad the fireplace in my living room is gas, heh.

rimantas2• 13 years ago

This is very very bad example. We do know thas some things are bad for us but still are willing to risk anyway. Alcohol, tobacco? I did not think much about how dangerous smoke is but it is no surprise that it is no good (smoke is particles, it cannot be good anyway). That won't stop me from enjoying a few evenings by bonfire each year.

Author chose really bad analogy there and had to stretch it beyond of the breaking point.

Adaptive3• 13 years ago

Refusing to "believe" that fireplaces is bad is simply indulgent and intellectually lazy. I grew up felling trees, cutting wood and burning it all winter long. Yet my fellow bleeding heart environmentalist friends and I have no trouble identifying what a horror wood burning is now.

Sam needs new friends.

lukifer• 13 years ago

Anecdotally, this seems right to me; anytime I use the fireplace, I wake up with a cough the next morning.

The framing device of belief systems is interesting. My reaction was to immediately accept his statements as highly probable, but also accept that for now, I'll keep using the fireplace anyway, although maybe less often. But I've no doubt that many self-proclaimed rationalists would jump backflips to maintain what they want to be true.

The more I observe human behavior, the more it seems that religious belief is the norm, not the exception. Believers and non-believers alike cement ideas in their head which are indifferent to reality and hard to dislodge. Sometimes this is due to social bonds, or low-level emotional associations, or a support structure for identity/ego; often, it's just plain habit. Nobody likes to feel the rug pulled out from under them. (Okay: I like it just a little.)

kbenson2• 13 years ago

> Nobody likes to feel the rug pulled out from under them. (Okay: I like it just a little.)

Me too. Although I find it dependent on what rug I'm standing on. I have a feeling it depends on how core that belief is to how I base my personality and life decisions. In short, it probably breaks down to the amount of time I have invested into it. (If I've recently adopted some belief, I imagine it's easier to accept change or even invalidation than if I spent 20 years with it).

kijin3• 13 years ago

> Believers and non-believers alike cement ideas in their head which are indifferent to reality and hard to dislodge.

When such ideas acquire a (more or less) self-consistent philosophical theory to back them up, and social institutions to promote them, that's what most people call religion. Sometimes we also call them ideologies or traditions. Some have supernatural elements and some don't, but their cognitive and social functions seem to be mostly the same.

svantana• 13 years ago

I am one of those few people who enjoy having my beliefs being disproven - and I guess there are plenty of us here on HN. Most likely people with this predisposition are drawn to science; after all, refuting hypotheses is what science is all about.

nraynaud• 13 years ago

There is something to be careful of with this new piece of information, this is about accumulation, so don't freak about going to your firend's who as a chimey. It's about everyday smoke.

On another level, it reminds us that human are creatures of psychology, this feeling of warms and wood smoke is important, we have to find some other ritual to replace it. Rituals are important to the society.

fmkamchatka• 13 years ago

I get the point but was is the impact of recreationally burning wood a few evenings in the winter or at a campfire. It seems, even from the article, that the repeated practice is bad but I don't think that at this point it would still be called recreational.

It's similar to eating fast food. Every day, the consequences would be disastrous, but once in a blue moon that's a different story.

juice13• 13 years ago

Please stop making sane arguments. They cause me to think, and that's not good now is it?

Jach2• 13 years ago

So I accept they're bad for me and my neighbors--how bad, roughly? I like wood fires, and intend to keep lighting them with about the same frequency as now (every 6-18 months or so), but is this going to take a year off my/my neighbors' life expectancy? Just like driving has a pretty high chance of death, I suspect it's "worth it" when the utilities come out. (Edit: Or as fmkamchatka mentioned in a better example, eating fast food every now and again.)

meric• 13 years ago

If burning a fire once is equal to taking 30 cigarettes, then I suppose taking 30 cigarettes every 6-18 months isn't that bad, in the big scheme of things.

clhodapp• 13 years ago

Honestly, I find myself easily convinced that burning wood is hazardous, though I do note that it is not something most people do all the time (nor is it addictive).

cmdli• 13 years ago

The overall point seems to be true, but that may just be because of previously held beliefs which I would like to confirm (much like the author suggests with fireplaces).

I think people have a hard time accepting scientific fact because the reality of the situation is much more convincing. Many people live with fireplaces, so their reality is that they are not harmful, regardless of the science behind the hazard they pose. It's much like American football: so many people have either played it or know people that play it that the possibility of damage due to injuries seems unreal or at least acceptable to them, because they haven't seen the harm in their experience.

Speaking from a personal viewpoint, I find that many rationalists put little value in peoples' opinions because they are "unsupported", ignoring the mountain of personal, anecdoctal evidence that the person has gained over their life, which is much more likely to be believed than the foreign research of far-off scientists.

Nursie4• 13 years ago

"Many people live with fireplaces, so their reality is that they are not harmful"

That's not reality though is it? And it could be compared to smoking - the reality is that it's very harmful, but for a very long time nobody really believed that.

"I find that many rationalists put little value in peoples' opinions because they are "unsupported", ignoring the mountain of personal, anecdoctal evidence that the person has gained over their life, which is much more likely to be believed than the foreign research of far-off scientists."

That's because in the modern world we know that there is actually little value to these things compared to a dispassionate analysis. I understand that this is why many people are slow to 'believe' research when it confronts their ideas though.

ishener• 13 years ago

Excellent example of how something that is natural and have been around for tens of thousands of years is worse than other artificial things that are manufactured in factories.

kijin3• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if this is meant to be an attack on fireplaces that uses an analogy with religion, or an attack on religion that uses an analogy with fireplaces. Maybe it's both. In any case, I find the analogy rather distracting. All those paragraphs could have been better spent on comparing the energy efficiency and polluting effect of fireplaces with those of other methods of heating, and similar information.

The danger of air pollution from fireplaces (in addition to the obvious implications on CO2 production) is an interesting and important topic on its own. There is no need to give the article an extra "edge" by dragging in the issue of religion vs. science -- which we already know Sam Harris is obsessed with. And he's really beginning to sound like an Emeritus professor who talks on and on about his pet theory in the Q&A session of everyone else's colloquium, whether it's related or not.

Harris, Dawkins, etc. are very smart people, and they could do a lot of good in the world by doing their best to purge biases, politics and superstition of all kinds from undeniable facts. But I often feel that their pursuit of controversy for the sake of controversy actually does a disservice to human rationality. Burning wood is bad for the environment, and here are the numbers that say so, so let's stop doing it. Is it really so difficult to get that message across without adding any unnecessary politics to it?

Disclaimer: I came from a country where real fireplaces are rare items that you only occasionally see in upscale coffee shops, which is probably why I find it easy to believe that they are indeed nasty things.

fishtoaster• 13 years ago

I think you missed the point a bit: the article was about scientific/religious discussion. The author was trying to make the reader (presumably an atheist and/or skeptic) feel the same emotional response that the religious feel when their beliefs are challenged. The whole woodsmoke thing was just an illustrative discussion: most people reading it will feel an instinctive negative reaction against having something they cherish so attacked, even with solid evidence.

So, it's neither an attack on fireplaces or religion: it's an attempt to make skeptics empathize a bit with those they're trying to convince.

kijin3• 13 years ago

Thanks, I was probably approaching the article with the wrong expectations, leading to disappointment.

Joeboy• 13 years ago

> most people reading it will feel an instinctive negative reaction against having something they cherish so attacked, even with solid evidence

All I got was "Damn, do I tell my open-fire loving unscientific friends they're harming their children, or should I just keep quiet for the sake of an easy life?"

MartinCron2• 13 years ago

And in that sense, I thought it was brilliant.

People in the skeptic community tend to diminish the fact that fellow humans tend to have involuntary emotional reactions in response to arguments, no matter how good the arguments are. If someone is heavily invested in believing in something like homeopathic medicine, they will experience a strong visceral feeling when you try to discuss homeopathy in a scientific setting. Even if they don't want to, the feeling may be there.

I'm not sure what the immediate practical or ethical implications of this are. I don't believe it's right to entertain any irrational or harmful belief just because it brings someone else comfort, but I tend to be less confrontational than Sam Harris.

stiff• 13 years ago

I don't like the aggressive rhetoric of the likes of Harris either, but on the other hand "here are the numbers" has unfortunately a rather poor conversion rate.

tunesmith4• 13 years ago

Harris problem is that he represents himself as appealing to logos, but then at the crucial moments he switches to ethos and pathos. I find it annoying. It's fine to give a rip-roaring speech that tugs on the heartstrings, etc, but don't represent it as logic and reason.

invisible• 13 years ago

It was pretty obvious he was saying that humans, instinctually, are afraid of change. Changing beliefs is a hard thing to do (internally or externally). When someone "chooses" a way of thinking they have a lot of trouble accepting anything but.

Hypothetically, if coffee were directly linked to heart disease after 10 years, would you still drink it? If someone casually mentioned it to you in a cafe would you believe them? Would you want to know the truth? Does it matter how bad it is for you?

Religion has, in some ways, been a plague on society. Not so much for the belief but rather for the resistance to anything but a person's belief. That is what religious persecution is and it's not far off from wood smoke.

FaddiCat• 13 years ago

>>> I'm not sure if this is meant to be an attack on fireplaces that uses an analogy with religion, or an attack on religion that uses an analogy with fireplaces. Maybe it's both.

Nah, it wasn't intended to be either.

He assumes religious people reject atheism because of an emotional response to atheists' arguments, so he's trying to provoke the same emotional response in atheists to give them insight into the minds of religious people.

curiousdannii• 13 years ago

Of course, it's an assumption which isn't universal, and probably not even valid for a majority of religious people.

jneen• 13 years ago

> He assumes religious people reject atheism because of an emotional response to atheists' arguments, so he's trying to provoke the same emotional response in atheists to give them insight into the minds of religious people.

This, it should be mentioned, is a very wrong assumption.

Jach2• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure it's meant to be what it says at the start: it's a reminder to atheists of the feeing of a cherished belief ("fireplaces are good") being destroyed. Some atheists have a hard problem with rejecting false beliefs even if they've gotten over the big one. I agree it's not that great of an analogy, though I'm not really offended at Harris doing what Harris does and bringing religion into everything. And if you just care about the message about fireplaces getting out, rhetoric (i.e. marketing) such as "creating controversy" is useful for that purpose...

eitland• 13 years ago

Anyone wants to make a thread here on the long and the short carbon cycle? (The small being trees, animals etc growing old, rot, release the carbon, the long being trees, animals etc growing old, getting sealed under layers of soil and finally converted to coal or oil/gas?)

Not meaning to take anything away from the toxicologi part but in a whole lot of places wood is still an energy source and would need to be replaced. Where I live we use (hydroelectric mostly) electricity for heating mostly which seems liek a genuine waste of high value electricity.

tadfisher• 13 years ago

You're right in that wood-burning is carbon-neutral over human lifespans, making it far better than, say, coal-burning power plants in terms of emissions.

However, in the short term, wood-burning is problematic much like smog from driving is problematic. If cars burned nothing but renewable vegetable oil, and drive in places like Los Angeles the same amount that people drive today, smog would still be a problem for human health.

I think the article overstates the risk a bit; high-efficiency wood stoves burn off much of the harmful gas and particulates and don't have visible emissions when they are working properly, for example. But that's not the point of the article.

hzay• 13 years ago

Firstly, none of my wood-burning-loving-friends would refuse to accept the truthiness of the wood-burning-is-bad theory after they look into the sources. They'd do the same of any other argument that interests them. I guess I'm luckier than the author is with respect to the openness of our friends.

Secondly, when he says that the resistance you feel to new ideas is itself bad, I detect a suggestion that you ought to be less questioning than usual when someone claims something as "science", especially if it goes against your taste/interests. This is a dangerous suggestion because being an unquestioning science-fanboy is no better than being unquestioningly religious or being an unquestioning brand-fanboy or brand-hateboy.

Among a lot of my facebook-friends, it is sacrilegious to suggest that global warming is perhaps not happening. I'm not drawing your attention to the truthiness of that idea but the fact that it is considered unacceptable to be ignorant or misinformed about that topic - you are instantly understood to be "unscientific" if you question it. OTOH, it is completely okay to be ignorant or misinformed about say, the runtime complexity of dijkstra's - you just "didn't know" and it can be explained to you.

Thirdly, I didn't get the wood-burning thing at all because we don't have fireplaces in south india. At least I've never seen one here. Obviously I don't mean that you shouldn't talk about fireplaces but I wish more people and magazines realized that their readership is no longer purely american. I distinctly remember a statement by NASA a few years ago that said that nobody needs to worry about this upcoming meteor because there won't be any harm caused to anyone, everything is fine, there's an insignificantly tiny chance that it would hit north america. I know NASA is funded by the US govt. and all that but by now a lot of people in a lot of countries look to them as the forerunner in space research and I wish they'd realize that.

uvdiv3• 13 years ago

Thirdly, I didn't get the wood-burning thing at all because we don't have fireplaces in south india.

Aren't wood-burning stoves pretty common? Like these,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_India#Fuel_wo...

test001only3• 13 years ago

Exactly what I was going to say. Wood burning stoves are very common especially in villages and also among poor people as wood is more widely available and is cheaper than LPG. We ourself have wood burning stove as an alternate to the LPG stove because cooking in slow fire on a stone or iron vessel is considered to produce tastier and healthier food. I understood that wood smoke was harmful but that it contains carcinogens is new for me.

XorNot• 13 years ago

I would suggest it's the medium in which you choose to question it. People "questioning" global warming on Facebook are making a statement and appending the ?.

There is any number of outlets or resources where they could've sought to become informed on the science, the consensus and the weakness or blindspots of current research. Instead they decided to "just ask questions" in a forum which cannot possibly support complex explanations.

http://www.realclimate.org/ is a good place to start if you actually have questions about what is, inherently, a very complicated topic (that is also very interesting when people don't have an agenda with it).

gnufied2• 13 years ago

State governments in North India distribute wood during winter. See http://urbanemissions.blogspot.com/2012/11/pollution-in-delh...

>I guess I'm luckier than the author is with respect to the openness of our friends.

I am sure many running state governments up North(India) are aware of wood smoke being a bad thing. But I think the argument author is going for is - people are willing to set aside their scientific training/knowledge when confronted with something they have been traditionally considered okay. My Dad for example has Bachelors in physics and almsot finished masters - But I can see his argument going on the lines of, "Our body can tolerate some amount of these chemicals, it has been doing that since 10 thousand years and so it is okay".

Let me give you another example. Ayurveda . There are government run colleges in India, training people to practice Ayurveda as alternative medicine. Winter may not be same in India everywhere, but Ayurveda is. Now it has been scientifically proven that, many Ayurvedic medicines contain arsenic, lead in dangerous proportions. Beyond Yoga, their usefulness as medicine is also questionable. Try having argument with someone who believes in this (I used to be one). So, I think I understand authors POV of traditional beliefs sometimes overriding our scientific training.

test001only3• 13 years ago

A quick Google search throws up instance of people buying medicine on-line which contains arsenics. Is this not similar to how we get fake English medicines. I do not see any source which says that ayurveda advocates adding this. Can you link me to some relevant source? I have been using medicines from arya vaidya sala one of the trusted ayurveda centres in India and never heard or had any issues.

sharan• 13 years ago

I agree with you on the first two points.

With regards to the third, I've seen this gripe before, but I feel its misplaced.

This author has personally noticed a parallel between the reaction of his friends to wood-burning and religion. Something he though was interesting and decided to write about. Expecting him to fit that realization in to an analogy that would cater to the entire world, will water down the effectiveness of his point.

Additionally, he may not have any inkling about what will cater to the world audience. When I write something, I write from my own experiences, I have no idea if a reader in the U.K. will relate to my problem or my thoughts.

I am from South India too.

scarmig• 13 years ago

What about, say, questioning evolution though? Or vaccines?

Most people questioning those topics aren't questioning them because of genuine curiosity--at least if they're college educated or equivalent. Instead it's as part, conscious or not, of a planned campaign of misinformation.

Saying someone is unscientific is, in that context, more of a statement of being actively anti-scientific, not science-resistant.

disgruntledphd22• 13 years ago

On vaccines, there haven't been that many RCT's (with the notable exception of polio) so one could make the argument that causality hasn't been proven.

I probably wouldn't make the argument, but I know some well educated professionals who would.

nostromo• 13 years ago

Discussing gun policy with a friend, I mentioned the Freakonomics statistic that having a pool on your property is 100 times more dangerous for your child's welfare than having a gun in the house.

If you really want to see a certain subset of your friends squirm with cognitive dissonance, mention this.

(I hope this doesn't start a flame war. The reason I bring up this particular example is because guns seem so ridiculously evil, while having a pool seems like every child's dream, yet the numbers tell a very different story in terms of perceived vs. actual danger.)

Edit: I regret posting this; but I won't delete it so people know the context of the replies. Sorry HN!

twiceaday• 13 years ago

Define dangerous.

arbus2• 13 years ago

dangerous as in death by drowning vs death by shooting http://www.freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excer...

kkowalczyk3• 13 years ago

The flaw in this argument is that guns and pools have very different uses.

You can't swim in a gun.

Guns have no useful purpose. The fact that pools are more dangerous doesn't justify owning a gun, so there is no "cognitive dissonance" here.

You don't want a gun in your house regardless of any other dangers that exists, just like you want to child proof the house.

You want a pool for the same reason you want a bicycle: it provides lots of benefit. Ultimately we make a choice that the benefit of the pool or the benefit of a bicycle for the child is greater than the risk.

We can't eliminate all the risk.

We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns).

icelancer2• 13 years ago

> Guns have no useful purpose

Home defense, hunting, on-person defense for women in unsafe areas, etc.

But yeah, continue on your screed. Let's not let facts get in the way of a good diatribe.

GHFigs• 13 years ago

What's the useful purpose of a private pool?

arbus2• 13 years ago

Child proofing your house does not include throwing away everything that is dangerous in the house, the same way you lock your liquor and medicine cabinet instead of getting rid of them.

derefr2• 13 years ago

> Guns have no useful purpose.

If I recall, in some countries, the only legal guns are rifles--because they can be used to hunt game. Or, to put a finer point on it: some people use a gun to feed their family.

tolmasky4• 13 years ago

> Guns have no useful purpose. The fact that pools are more dangerous doesn't justify owning a gun, so there is no "cognitive dissonance" here.

What is the useful purpose of a swimming pool exactly? Are you proposing that they are a meaningful part of our society? Is this "use" so valuable that it clearly outweighs the deaths it causes? You seem to in your own comment think the bicycle provides the same benefit, so why keep pools if we have such a great alternative? No one swims a gun, but no one swims to work either. At least there are people actually dependent on bikes because they can't afford cars.

> We can't eliminate all the risk. > We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns).

So you think pools qualify as a necessary risk then?

Is it at all possible that you may just personally see no use in guns while appreciating the recreational value of a pool despite its risks, while at the exact same time a gun owner may see no use in pools while appreciating the recreational value of guns? You can't swim (useless activity) in a gun. You also can't fire a pool.

I can actually perfectly understand the argument "well, both guns and pools should be outlawed then". I really have a hard time shrugging off pool deaths because they are such a clearly useful thing that is a necessary risk for society though (however that argument works much better for car deaths vs. gun deaths).

Edit: Below I was just commenting on understanding your audience and thus not making arguments that won't resonate with them. There is an entire culture around gun ownership. There are some people that go shooting every day, and it really hurts your position to tell them that that part of their life is not a valid "use". It is actually quite similar to football in some respects. At some point in this country we may have to discuss the very real health issues associated with it, and a part of the framing of that argument should probably not belittle the attachment people have to something that is in fact quite useless (as any and all recreations are to the people that don't practice them).

OGinparadise6• 13 years ago

You can't swim in a gun. Guns have no useful purpose. The fact that pools are more dangerous doesn't justify owning a gun, so there is no "cognitive dissonance" here...We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns).

And you can't kill your potential killer or rapist, unless you invite him in the pool and hope he drowns, with pools being dangerous and all. I hope you never have to wish you had a gun near you. Personally I have no pool, but...

Pools, unless they are Olympic size ones used to do laps for most people are useless, "just [extremely dangerous] fun." Fun, like shooting a gun which also can save your life, or the life or your neighbor. Mighty useful if you ask me and much safer than pools.

cabalamat• 13 years ago

> Guns have no useful purpose

Yes they do. Some people enjoy firing them, therefore their useful purpose is to make people happy (which at the end of the day the same end purpose for everything people do). Ditto with pools -- some people like swimming, so they also fulfil the useful purpose of making people happy.

notdrunkatall2• 13 years ago

The flaw in your argument is that guns do have a useful purpose.

I'm sorry that you're so obtuse that you can't understand what that purpose is.

betterunix3• 13 years ago

"Guns have no useful purpose"

Correction: guns have no useful purpose that you can personally imagine (or that you are personally willing to accept).

Yes, I am a gun owner. I own three rifles, and at least two have a clear utility argument:

1. .22lr is for basic practice (aiming, breathing control, etc.) at low expense.

2. .270 is for hunting deer. Where I live, there are more whitetail deer than there were when Europeans first arrived on this continent, and the only way to keep that population under control is by hunting. Deer are the cause of numerous automobile accidents and cause quite a bit of property damage. In some suburban areas where deer hunting is not allowed, towns occasionally hire people to exterminate deer because they have become pests.

Right there, you have useful purposes for a large class of firearms. Killing pests on farms is another common use of rifles.

"We can eliminate unnecessary risk (like guns)."

So what you are saying is that anyone with children should not be a hunter or farmer, or that they should store their guns somewhere other than their home (and hope they are not stolen)?

The problem with your argument is that it is a blanket statement -- you are talking about guns as a general thing, which covers little BB guns all the way up to naval canons. Some guns have immediate and obvious civil uses, but you leave no room for that.

nsxwolf4• 13 years ago

If guns have no useful purpose, police shouldn't carry them.

bluthru• 13 years ago

Pools are for swimming. Food is for eating. Cars are for transporting. All of those things can be hazardous.

Guns are for "safety", but they actually decrease safety:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lots...

http://www.iansa.org/system/files/Risks%20and%20Benefits%20o...

nawitus• 13 years ago

>Guns are for "safety", but they actually decrease safety:

Well, that's just like, your opinion man. Other people have other uses for guns, like recreational shooting. Kinda like motorcycles increase traffic deaths but are hobbies for some people, and useless to others.

rorrr2• 13 years ago

A lot more people die from gunshots than people drown, even if you count all drownings, not just pool-related (in the US, of course).

You cherry-picked one child-dangerous item in the house. Yay for "logic".

NoPiece• 13 years ago

If you look at children 14 and under, 390 drowned, and 376 died by firearms, including accidents, murders and suicides. And if you only look at accidental firearm deaths, there were 62 for children 14 and under, and 123 for 20 and under. Pools really are dangerous, even compared to guns.

Using Consumer Product Safety Commission 2008 numbers for drowning, and the anti-gun group Children's Defense fund numbers for firearm deaths.

http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroom/News-Releases/2012/New-CPSC-...

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publicat...

UnoriginalGuy3• 13 years ago

> Discussing gun policy with a friend, I mentioned the Freakonomics statistic that having a pool on your property is 100 times more dangerous for your child's welfare than having a gun in the house.

That is nonsense, the way Freakonomics got that 100x more dangerous figure makes absolutely no sense.

Don't get me wrong - pools likely are more dangerous than guns. I'm just arguing that they aren't 100x more dangerous than guns.

In 2008 there were 376 deaths of "children" (aged 14 and below) by gun. In the same year there was 791 deaths by drowning (all sources).

So drowning is is roughly 2x as dangerous as guns but that is drowning from ALL sources, so that doesn't imply that pools are 2x more dangerous as guns since that ignores other sources of potential drownings (e.g. boats, bathtub, etc).

This data is all from the CDC's own web-site (http://wonder.cdc.gov).

What the Freakonomics guys did was take the above numbers and then use the total number of guns and total number of pools, and then abuse those statistics in order to try and get this 100x more dangerous figure.

In interviews he has essentially said he is a pro-gun advocate so that is something to keep in mind too...

As I said at the start, drowning is MORE dangerous than guns (2x). It is just not 100x more dangerous unless you're trying to measure the danger level of each individual gun rather than by measuring the risk to a fixed population (i.e. the danger from the average US child's perspective).

pervycreeper• 13 years ago

>In 2008 there were 376 deaths of "children" (aged 14 and below) by gun. In the same year there was 791 deaths by drowning (all sources).

You should really be using the number who were killed by a gun kept in their home for this comparison. Also, there are other ways to die in a pool aside from drowning.

calpaterson• 13 years ago

You're not taking into account the difference in risks between children who live in a home that has a pool and those that don't.

runeks3• 13 years ago

> What the Freakonomics guys did was take the above numbers and then use the total number of guns and total number of pools, and then abuse those statistics in order to try and get this 100x more dangerous figure.

I don't understand. This seems sensible to me. Why wouldn't we include this figure to calculate risk? Isn't risk a matter of incidences/exposures?

davidkatz• 13 years ago

This makes little sense. Say only 7 people died from inhaling cyanide last year, does that make cyanide 100 less dangerous than guns? Nope, because 100% of the people who inhaled it died.

The real questions is, of the people who are within harms way of home swimming pools, how many suffer injuries, and of the people who are within harms way of fire arms, how many suffer injuries.

Both are not that easy to measure, especially firearms, but looking at absolute causes of death is clearly nonsense.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

The number of deaths is a poor measure of harm. One reason is that trauma care keeps improving. So there are now a large number of amputees and brain-injured soldiers that would have previously died.

Cars are getting more survivable, and almost certainly safer, too, but do numerical comparisons with numbers from the past remain valid in light of external influences on these outcomes?

In this case, improvements in trauma care may mask both brain injury from lack of oxygen and serious disability from gun accidents in this comparison. Or we don't know the methodology and they could be counting ER visits, which might provide a better comparison.

jtheory3• 13 years ago

I don't know the Freakonomics methodology, but I'm pretty sure the analysis you're making isn't useful.

We're talking about choices an individual homeowner can make.

Those choices are "install a pool" or "keep a gun in the house".

To understand the risks for those two choices, total drownings and total gun deaths of children in the country aren't relevant to an individual's choice.

To get a useful statistic, you need to know how many children died in their home pool in the sample group of homeowners w/ pools, and how many children died from a gun in the home in the sample group of homeowners w/ guns in the house.

Because that's the choice -- do I put myself in this sample group or not?

Think about powered trampolines -- suppose there are only five installed in the country, and on two of them a child has died this past year. That's a HORRIBLE risk, but with your method of assessment, it doesn't even show up.

If you're thinking of installing this kind of trampoline, I'd highly recommend my method of analysis over yours.

aneth4• 13 years ago

Perhaps a valid point that Freakonomics had bad methodology in this instance, though this is similariy bad:

> So drowning is is roughly 2x as dangerous as guns

Drowning kills 100% of people who drown, so it's certainly more dangerous than guns.

Replace drowning with "pools" and there might be something more reasonable to compare, though hard to know what should be compared.

Tloewald2• 13 years ago

I think the stat that got me was staircases (we had a particularly nasty one in our house at the time). That said, it doesn't mean that gun control isn't a good thing, just that there are other things to consider. And I'll never look at a domestic staircase the same way again.

alvarosm• 13 years ago

Dude, risk/reward. The reward for having a pool is tons of fun, exercise, comfort... Besides you can't go to statistics for gun safety: either you handle them safely or not: you are not a xx% safe statistic.

bjhoops1• 13 years ago

But does this take into consideration the children that are saved from drowning in an intruder's pool by the presence of their own pool?

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a pool is a good guy with a pool.

iliis• 13 years ago

Thanks for a rather nice example :)

Actually, it's somewhat meta for me: While I didn't squirm that much in the fireplace example, I'm a bit surprised by the amount of 'squirming'/'flaming' shown in this thread. I don't want to believe it. I want HNers to be able to discuss the topic at hand (confronting your own dilusions) instead of falling into the trap warned twice of (by OP and you).

MartinCron2• 13 years ago

I regret posting this; but I won't delete it so people know the context of the replies. Sorry HN!

Even if the statistic isn't bulletproof, and even if some of the discussion this sparked hasn't been of the caliber we've come to expect from HN, I don't regret that you posted it. It's an interesting thought experiment.

oelmekki2• 13 years ago

I understand author is concerned about religious people hurted feelings, but just to be clear: is the point, here, that we shouldn't rectify obviously wrong people because we are sometime obviously wrong ourselves ? Sounds like a chewbacca defense to me.

kbenson2• 13 years ago

I think he's trying to provide a reference point. "Here's a way that you may behave that is similar to the way you bemoan others behaving." It's my believe that reference points help further useful discussion, so I think this is a good thing.

oelmekki2• 13 years ago

I totally subscribe to this vision. I just would have read it more clearly in the article, that's kind of ambiguous, like : "1°) religious people are hurted when you argue with them, 2°) here is what you would feel in their place".

Conclusion could be as well "stop arguing with religious people, you're wrong too" as "don't push their feeling too hard and have some compassion when explaining your arguments" :)

nnq• 13 years ago

The comparison is very bad: something like burning wood gives you small psychological comfort but no benefit, while something like religion brings quite a lot of benefits for a large segment of scientifically illiterate or psychologically "unstable" people (and besides basic school knowledge of science, most people are quite "illiterate" unfortunately, they lack the most important parts of experiment based reasoning, the skills to build clear and falsifiable hypotheses, a "true" understanding of evolution and why it works and so on...).

Also, to make wood burning unnecessary, you only have to give people access to electric or gas heating, and after this only a few nostalgics will occasionally burn wood for "recreation". To make religion unnecessary, you'd need to educate people to quite a high level (scientific knowledge and reason can only replace religion once somebody gains quite a deep and intuitive understanding of both) and you'd also need to have a "socially healthy" society that promotes "healthy" relations among people (a completely unsolved problem imho, although we like to think otherwise!), replacing part of the socio-moral function of religion (basing morality on religion, you get an ugly but working system of "no-think ethics" that has a lot of bugs but works on "all platforms", not matter how irrational they may be). It's much harder to bring people to a high enough level of education, psychological health and "social health" than to just give them central heating. Religion is quite an ugly hack, but it solves quite a bunch of problems for quite a lot of people, although these are mostly "hard to measure" problems.

Tichy3• 13 years ago

"after this only a few nostalgics will occasionally burn wood for "recreation""

Not true unfortunately - here in Germany wood burning has been trending in recent years, even though alternative means of heating are readily available. In fact most house owners probably equip both - gas/oil heating for the baseline comfort and wood for the coziness.

BudVVeezer2• 13 years ago

Same is true in parts of the US as well. Here in Maine, it costs 3.80$/gal for heating oil, but you can get wood for 100$/cord. This means I can heat my house with oil to the tune of about 3k/year, or wood for 400/year.

acqq• 13 years ago

re your "religion brings quite a lot of benefits for a large segment of scientifically illiterate or psychologically "unstable" people":

http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/03/08/faith_based_pris...

New Study Suggests Religion May Help Criminals Justify Their Crimes

duck3• 13 years ago

Also, to make wood burning unnecessary, you only have to give people access to electric or gas heating

You missed a key word, cheaper alternatives. I live in Maine and put in a pellet stove (which is way more efficient than a fireplace) and it saves me about $2500 each year over oil heating.

kkowalczyk3• 13 years ago

Looks like very flawed analogy to me.

It's one thing to believe in something when there is no rational reason for the belief (religion).

It's completely different to not believe something just because someone says so.

I don't know if burning wood is as harmful as the article says.

Prior to reading it I had no data and if I were asked, I would indeed think that it's safe given that people were doing it since the dawn of human race and no one drops dead because they sat near fire.

If a random smart aleck accosted me at a party and started telling me how it's sooo bad (which seems to be the article's author MO), I would brush him off, and that would have been a rational reaction.

After reading this article I'm inclined to accept that burning wood is dangerous but I'm far from convinced - it's a single data point.

The author is clearly so in love with his "clever" analogy that he can't help equating apples to oranges (a skepticism about a claim due to lack of expertise to evaluate whether it's true or false and an active, irrational belief that is internally inconsistent and whose many aspects have been refuted by science and at a level that is comprehensible to regular humans (like finding carbon-dated human remains older than the age of universe according to bible).

rosser• 13 years ago

I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but you've just made Harris' argument for him.

Also, some science for your perusal can be found in uvdiv's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5355300

jaggederest• 13 years ago

> no one drops dead because they sat near fire.

Joan of Arc would have a word with you, I'm sure.

The old Pratchett quote: "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

tolmasky4• 13 years ago

I feel like I had a slightly different takeaway than the author intended to make: namely, that this is a great example of exactly the wrong way to make an argument. Maybe this was actually what he intended, but I don't think it was.

But let me back track a bit. There is a lot to say here about choosing an antagonistic way of presenting an idea, but one tiny nitpick affected me in particular. I was actually following fine and agreeing perfectly well up until his proposed solution of solving everything by simply making a law. Now, the problem isn't necessarily that I don't think this is the best solution, but the fact that he clearly does not actually understand the libertarian position, and thus completely fails to convince me by using the wrong counter arguments to hypothetical objections he imagines I have. His assumption is that libertarians value ridiculous personal freedoms more than the environment, and thus spends his time explaining how much the externalities of wood burning outweigh whatever silly freedom I may be concerned with this week. This is equivalent to patronizing someone who is for drug legalization by explaining to them that, actually, drugs are bad, and that's why they need to be illegal silly.

I think he can't fathom that I may actually be 100% in agreement with his goal (to reduce wood burning), and yet reach a completely different conclusion as to the method to achieve it. A big part of the libertarian argument is actually quite consequentialist: make this illegal and you may very well find the the amount of wood burning go up, or at least not decreasing at all. If its obvious to you that that's not the case, then it should be easy to prove. To convince me (and it is totally possible), I'd actually be curious to know things such as: is wood burning already decreasing on its own and thus not require a law and all sorts of strange enforcement practices? Are we sure that enforcing such a law wouldn't unexpectedly require another form of pollution (wouldn't be the first time an environmental law had that result). Have we really exhausted all other approaches including education on the subject? Etc. Etc.

I get the sense that what he wants us to walk away with is "look how hard the truth can be to accept if you don't know it", but I think the real takeaway is seeing how little we understand our audience sometimes. Whether the argument is political or religious, the favored method of argumentation seems to be "shock and awe". Showing people that as it turns out, they're actually assholes and didn't even know it! Then following up by belittling their values and explaining why your values are more important. This rarely works. I think people's goals are actually way more aligned than we think they are, but understandably we have reached different conclusions on how to reach those goals (again, the drug legalization issue is a great example). To finally bring it full circle, I think this is certainly true of religious arguments. I'm certain there is a much better path than trying to beat into people's heads how stupid they've actually been their whole lives and how they're partially responsible for so much suffering in the world by perpetuating this "terrible" thing.

danbmil992• 13 years ago

Sam Harris is no libertarian -- quite the opposite. His prescriptions for almost everything come down to laws and regulations, developed and enforced by an educated, knows-better-than-you elite.

He should work for Michael Bloomberg. CNO: Chief Nanny Officer?

tolmasky4• 13 years ago

Right, I wasn't saying that he is doing a bad job of representing the libertarian position. I was just saying that he does a bad job of arguing against it (and in general does a bad job of presenting this entire idea). If that's not what you meant then my apologies for misunderstanding your comment.

pja2• 13 years ago

Sometimes regulations are simply the right answer.

The tragedy of the commons is a thing & communal regulation is the response that works. I can't think of anything that fits the definition of 'a commons' better than the air that you and I breathe.

robertskmiles• 13 years ago

For reference, there are places where this kind of MEDC recreational wood-burning is illegal, and it is easily enforceable without causing other problems. For example (I'm not sure of the specifics), but wood-burning is illegal in built-up areas of the UK. It's pretty trivially enforceable actually - if a police officer happens to see smoke coming out of a chimney, they'll knock on the door and ask you to put it out. There's not a lot of potential for 'underground' wood-burning, and the law has pretty good public support, since in London smogs killed literally thousands of people at a time, in living memory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_control_area

pja2• 13 years ago

Yup. My Dad will tell of the great smog in '52 if you ask him.

Note that it's still possible to burn 'smokeless' fuels, including some forms of treated wood IIRC, very high quality coal & it's perfectly ok to burn wood in a high-temperature wood burning stove, which are much cleaner than an open fire.

The gory details are here: http://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/

mherdeg• 13 years ago

Wow, thanks for sharing this. I knew about the Great Smog of 1952 from, uh, science fiction (Neil Gaiman's novelization of _Neverwhere_) but it had not occurred to me to wonder why my recently built flat does not have a fireplace.

Apparently my colleagues all know this — everyone just knows that it's OK to burn smokeless coal (anthracite) but not wood.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

> I get the sense that what he wants us to walk away with is "look how hard the truth can be to accept if you don't know it",

I felt his point was that people have a position, and when they listen to you they accept things that support their position and automatically question things that undermine their position.

(Although I agree the article is unclear and not particularly well written.)

This is problematic because smart people tend to know they're smart; tend to believe they're rational; and tend to feel that they cannot fall victim to the same irrationality that allows people to believe in astrology; and that when they explore ideas they're not going to come up with weak, unscientific, flawed, explanations.

Some things are clearly nonsense, and we tend to reject those quickly. (Homeopathy; ghosts; astrology; fan death.)

But other things have a veneer of respectability. They're presented by real doctors in real hospitals and they have a sensible plausible mechanism behind them. Knee arthroscopy is a great example of this. Many people went through operations (with the risks involved of infection and anaesthesia) when there wasn't any good science showing any benefit. When controlled trials were done, with one group getting the real surgery and the control group getting a sham surgery, we saw that knee arthroscopy had little benefit above placebo.

I strongly agree with your post; especially the parts about persuading people that they might be wrong. "Huh, you're a scientologist, and thus you're an idiot!" is satisfying but futile. (If the desired result is to weaken scientology by reducing their numbers and converting people back from scientology. (And where scientology can be replaced by creationism or anything.))

wnight2• 13 years ago

He really doesn't seem to get libertarians, I agree.

But you're acting like the pain of the truth is his fault.

And it's not like he, let alone the world, isn't full of softer messages, but those work on the (few) people who they work for and for everyone else there are other things. That people are claiming his messages are so maddening just shows they're blind to anything not pointed or they'd have encountered these thoughts already in a way they would have found more palatable.

In fact, they're not even outraged, it's just the next step in the courtroom joke.

"When you have the law on your side, but not the facts, pound the law. When you have the facts on your side, but not the law, pound the facts. And, when you have neither law nor facts on your side, pound the table."

Nobody is kicking down your grandmother's door and making her defend christmas. Just don't read something you consider harsh if all you are going to do is whine if it is.

jacobolus2• 13 years ago

This is absurdly hyperbolic. Few people are going to die because they made a wood fire in a fireplace 10-20 times a year. The reason wood fires cause serious health problems in the developing world is that they’re put in the center of a one-room house, with no chimney, and used for heating/cooking/etc. The whole room fills with smoke, to the point that eyes sting and it’s hard to breathe, and the smoke noticeably impacts visibility. The density of smoke in such a room is probably at least an order of magnitude greater than in a room with a fireplace and in the corner. Additionally, such houses are filled with wood smoke all day every day of the year. The hearth fire is an essential part of the home. [Source: my parents are anthropologists and I spent a substantial chunk of my childhood hanging out in this kind of home.]

That said, I’ll absolutely agree that spending time in such an environment is dramatically more unpleasant than spending time in a room with several heavy smokers, and almost certainly more damaging. Which is why it seems ridiculous that a certain sort of person will both make a big stink about someone smoking nearby outdoors, and also romanticize rural peasant life and wax poetic about how much less toxic life used to be in the past.

gizzlon3• 13 years ago

No chimney? Wtf? :) Where is this?

coolj• 13 years ago

> in the developing world

cf. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05...

roel_v• 13 years ago

"This is absurdly hyperbolic. Few people are going to die because they made a wood fire in a fireplace 10-20 times a year."

Did you even read the linked papers? There is direct and plausible evidence that recreational wood burning in the West is a significant contributor to pollution in residential areas, with the pollution itself clearly linked to public health. So basically, you're flat out wrong (or arguing a straw man, if I take your comment literally) - yes, dozens of people are going to die each year because of recreational wood burning.

jacobolus2• 13 years ago

Did you read the linked paper? It’s a literature review which includes an assessment of a huge assortment of papers, mostly about stuff like forest fires and fires used for clearing agricultural land. The studies which were related to the health effects of indoor recreational wood fires were mostly small sample sizes, pretty minor effects.

Here are some bits from the paper:

“To date, only a single controlled exposure study of human exposure to woodsmoke itself seems to have been published (Barregard et al., 2006; Sallsten et al., 2006). Thirteen subjects were exposed to realistic concentrations of woodsmoke (200–300 μg/m3 PM2.5) generated under controlled conditions for two 4-h sessions, spaced 1 wk apart. In this study, exposure to woodsmoke resulted in small exposure-related changes in levels of inflammatory mediators and coagulation factors.”

“A questionnaire study of respiratory symptoms compared residents of 600 homes in a high woodsmoke area of Seattle, WA, with 600 homes of a low woodsmoke area. [...] When all age groups were combined, no significant differences were observed between the high- and low-exposure areas.”

“In Seattle, WA, 326 elementary school children were stud- ied during the heating seasons of 1988–1989 and 1989–1990. [...] The 26 children with asthma showed a significant decrement (18 ml/μg/m3 PM2.5) for both measures of lung function. Children without asthma showed no significant changes in lung function associ- ated with PM values.”

“In contrast, in a larger, prospective study of 904 infants in Connecticut and Virginia, Pettigrew et al. found no relation- ship between either woodstove or fireplace use and either single episodes of otitis media or recurrent otitis media, which was defined as 4 or more episodes during 1 yr (Pettigrew et al., 2004). Data on infant respiratory symptoms (in this case, a physician’s diagnosis of an ear infection) and hours of use of secondary heating sources were collected in telephone interviews with the mothers every 2 wk for 1 yr. Although both woodstove and fireplace use were significantly associated with the outcomes in bivariate models, these associations were absent in multivariate models that adjusted for gender, race, day care, number of chil- dren in the household, duration of breast-feeding, winter heating season, use of gas appliances, season of birth, maternal education, maternal history of asthma and allergy, and pets.”

And here, the most “damning” bits of summary. They’re awfully circumspect.

“Surprisingly relatively few studies examining the health impacts of woodsmoke have been conducted in developed countries, partly due to the difficulty of disentangling risks due to woodsmoke from those associated with other pollutants also present. In addition, most available studies are ecologic in design, limiting the ability to infer causality. Those that have been done, however, indicate that exposure to the smoke from residential woodburning is associated with a variety of adverse respiratory health effects, which are no different in kind and, with present knowledge, show no consistent difference in magnitude of effect from other combustion-derived ambient particles.”

“Since source apportionment studies show that woodsmoke is a major contributor to PM in many communities, it is likely that woodsmoke exposure plays a role in the spectrum of adverse effects linked to PM exposure. The large effects seen at higher exposures in the developing world provide additional evidence of the toxicity of woodsmoke.”

The paper’s conclusion includes:

“Finally, returning to the questions posed at the start, we conclude that although there is a large and growing body of evidence linking exposure to wood/biomass smoke itself with both acute and chronic illness, there is insufficient evidence at present to support regulating it separately from its individual components, especially fine particulate matter. In addition, there is insufficient evidence at present to conclude that woodsmoke particles are significantly less or more damaging to health than general ambient fine particles.”

  * * * * * * *

But if you read the main story under discussion, we instead get:

"The unhappy truth about burning wood has been scientifically established to a moral certainty: That nice, cozy fire in your fireplace is bad for you. It is bad for your children. It is bad for your neighbors and their children. [...] In fact, wood smoke often contributes more harmful particulates to urban air than any other source.

"In the developing world, the burning of solid fuel in the home is a genuine scourge, second only to poor sanitation as an environmental health risk. In 2000, the World Health Organization estimated that it caused nearly 2 million premature deaths each year—considerably more than were caused by traffic accidents."

The first paragraph is hyperbolic (there are a few places in industrial countries where woodsmoke is the biggest source of pollution, but this is still pretty low by world and historical standards, and typically those areas don’t have much other air pollution to speak of, so this is unsurprising). The stuff about “moral certainty” is just crap. Maybe if you live in a place with relatively high population density and every house is mainly heated by wood, you’ll get noticeable amounts of air pollution, but this is also a different case than the author is trying to make us feel guilty about, which is having a fireplace in your living room every-once-in-a-while.

The second paragraph is much worse though, because, while accurate, is grossly misleading when included in an argument about industrialized countries without providing additional context and explanation.

  * * * * *

In summary, if the conclusion was “don’t heat your house all the time using only a woodstove, especially if you have infants or asthmatics in the house” then I would agree 100%. Or if the summary was “we really should work on improving access to gas and electricity to the developing world, so they can stop using dangerous wood fires for heating and cooking”, I would also agree 100%. I would even agree if he said “we should convince people in those US/European ski towns that they should use gas for heating, and limit their wood burning to the occasional fire in the fireplace”. But unfortunately, the author didn’t limit himself to supportable conclusions.

alberich• 13 years ago

One gripe I have about this article is that it tells people to burn gas. Okay... it won't harm your lungs (so much) but will help increase global warming (nice). The contents are fine, though the annalogies are bad (a diesel engine indling in the room? common).

Anyway, people will keep burning wood in their homes, just because they like it. Most everybody knows the hazards of smoking and keep smoking anyway (including health professionals)...

I guess people banned public smoking because the smell is so ofensive to others, not because they were really worried about their health.

Tichy3• 13 years ago

My dad with asthma has severe problems in the winter because everybody in his village heats with wood - in the middle of western Germany (they do have other heaters, but like the wood, is what I mean). So definitely not just a third world problem.

In Germany the heating with wood was extremely on the rise in recent years, even in big cities you smell it on the street in winter. And in the countryside it is much worse, which is a shame given that people move there for the clean air, among other things.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

let me chip in one bit of anecdotal information.

We have a neighbor who burns wood in their fireplace during winter. At times outside in my yard, I am a few homes away, the smell is very acrid. Worse, my dogs are affected. It took me awhile to connect their tail down behavior with my neighbor's wood burning fetish.

Without wind the smell just hangs there. I have to set my system to recirculate to keep it out of my house. I figure it this way, if it smell so bad and causes my nose to wrinkle at the acrid aspects of it it cannot be good for anyone.

JPKab• 13 years ago

My brother lives in a fairly dense, turn of the century American neighborhood, with lots of old homes with fireplaces. I went running on Christmas Eve, and at first relished the smell of woodsmoke from all of the burning fires. Within a mile I realized that it felt like I was running with a cigar in my mouth. This article is no joke.

Having grown up in a rural home heated by a wood stove, one thing this article says hits home: respiratory problems in small children. My father stopped using the wood stove after installing electric heat, only using the wood stove for the coldest nights.There was an immediate benefit for all 5 of his children.

stephen_g• 13 years ago

Interesting article, but it's a shame that like usual he launches straight off with a fallacious (and extremely boring) strawman argument that what science explains about how the world works is incompatible with any non-naturalist world view...

danbmil992• 13 years ago

Fucking buzzkill

47uF2• 13 years ago

I don't think this example helps much, because it's not that we don't know what an unpleasant truth feels like. Everyone knows what that feels like. The difference is in what comes next. Do we accept a painful truth or accept a happy lie? To me, rationalists like Sam Harris, and probably most programmers, truth wins over feelings by quite a long shot. A better way to understand the other side, is to realize that for a lot of people this isn't the case.

Here's a better example. If you were being cheated on, but this had no affect on your otherwise perfect relationship, would you want to know? What if it was a one time thing that your partner was extremely regretful about and would never happen again. What if you're in your tenth year of the relationship, the cheating occurred nine years ago, you currently share a mortgage and two children.

I would still answer yes, and you probably did too. But many people don't care about truth that much. And I don't necessarily think they should.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

> and probably most programmers, truth wins over feelings by quite a long shot.

You only have to read any HN thread about nutrition to see that idiotic woo is entrenched in a sizeable portion of HN commenters.

Nursie4• 13 years ago

Yup, or pharmaceuticals or a variety of other topics.

Programmers and engineers are not a bastion of rationality, no matter how much we like to think we are.

floody-berry• 13 years ago

The pro-religion / anti-religious criticism crowd here seems much more vocal than the opposition as well. Both sides seem to have lost out to the Guns vs Pools debate in any case.

gizzlon3• 13 years ago

I'm fighting my instinct to refute the fireplace argument in order to get to the more important question.

Feel the author is missing the last, important piece: To what degree is this affecting himself? How many beliefs does he hold, against seemingly rational arguments? (None? I wouldn't believe that for a second)

farinasa• 13 years ago

I understand the metaphor, but my problem with it is that there are many fireplace designs that reburn the smoke. Rocket mass heaters, gasifiers, even catalytic converters combust the smoke which quadruples the heat yield from wood and produces only CO2 and H2O.

The lesson I end up taking away is that intelligence can be applied rationally to fix whatever the problem is.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Well, good thing they found that out

Humanity couldn't possibly live hundreds of years with that harmful heating method. Oh my god, it even produces greenhouse gases.

Also, I always laugh at the "equivalent to X cigarettes", always blurted out as a scientific comparison.

First of all, even cigarettes are different amongst themselves it's pointless to compare

Second, comparable to what? Nicotine? Wood doesn't have any. Carbon monoxide? Tar? Sulphur emissions?

Not to mention different substances spread differently.

kgc• 13 years ago

Well, guess I'm not burning wood anymore.

ypeterholmes• 13 years ago

This is at the top of hacker news? Yikes.

manmal• 13 years ago

Related: I recently found out that coffee contains cancerogenic substances. Still, people advertise it as healthy because of its antioxidants. And, the stats seem to suggest that it's actually good for brain health etc. (too lazy to search for references now)

antiterra• 13 years ago

Roasting, grilling and baking regularly creates carcinogens and substances that are likely carcinogens in the food we eat. Currently the link between something like eating bread and actual cancer risk is tenuous, but research is ongoing:

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cooked-mea...

http://sciencenordic.com/renewed-worries-over-carcinogens-fo...

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

This. Paeleo this.

Hey look something humans have always done.

It kills people?

But it's comforting?

tzaman• 13 years ago

His facts are right, but his view on this is way too narrow;

First there is the social factor. I live in the countryside and every season we build fires for different purposes, like celebration and preparing different vegetables (in Slovenia, corn and potato being the most popular ones). It's fun for everyone, regardless of being dangerous. A lof of people gather around the fire and chat, prepare the food and connect. If I die younger because I wanted to meet with people and have fun,... well so be it.

Second reason: nature. The author explains that we have evolved, that we're no longer running from lions and bears. That's true but what about volcanoes (and other natural sources of fire)? The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted 250 million cubic meters of ash (According to Wikipeda), and there are more active volcanoes, releasing loads of toxins into the air on a daily basis. I'm not a scientist but I think it would take A LOT of wood burning to produce a similar amount of toxins.

As I said, his facts are right, but there is more to it. Much more.

jlgreco4• 13 years ago

Indeed, I feel like Sam has failed to take into account the full range of tolerance to clear danger.

For example, despite growing up in a public school with a DARE program that stressed the risks, I still drink alcohol at levels that will ultimately be detrimental to my health. I fully understand this risk and, with no cognative dissonance, accept it.

mhax• 13 years ago

I wonder if these stats hold up when looking at modern stoves (which have burning efficiencies upwards of 70%). Bundling open fires, which are highly inefficient along with these stoves seems a little unreasonable. Lots of modern stoves, in the UK at least, come with defra ( http://smokecontrol.defra.gov.uk/) exemption, meaning they can be used in smoke controlled (i.e. built up urban) areas. These controls are more to do with air pollution, rather than direct human harm, but the two measures must be somewhat correlated.

killermonkeys• 13 years ago

I have a friend who uses a wood burning stove to heat his home. This article is so long on claims and insults and so short on facts and references that I would never show it to him if I wanted him to change his behavior. The only reference is behind a paywall. If you want to insult two populations (religious people and fire burners) under the assertion that science tells them they are stupid, at least have the sense to include good public references. At least then you can show the facts are indeed on your side.

ygra2• 13 years ago

Google Scholar to the rescue:

http://www.uvm.edu/~susagctr/Documents/Woodsmoke.pdf

Cute last page in Comic Sans, too ;-)

eloisant5• 13 years ago

It's funny that the article is hidden behind a paywall, but when you get to it and read it you realize it doesn't support the author views at all:

"we conclude that although there is a large and growing body of evidence linking exposure to wood/biomass smoke itself with both acute and chronic illness, there is insufﬁcient evidence at present to support regulating it separately from its individual components, especially ﬁne particulate matter.

In addition, there is insufﬁcient evidence at present to conclude that woodsmoke particles are signiﬁcantly less or more damaging to health than general ambient ﬁne particles."

That's a good lesson about science: just because an article has serious references doesn't mean it's not bullshit. Don't take the facts for granted if you don't actually read the references.

jlgreco4• 13 years ago

In no way was the purpose of this article to insult the religious...

ghshephard• 13 years ago

I'm listening to an NPR podcast on thus exact topic. Wood burning stoves are particularly dangerous where there are inversions, but not so much in areas that have good air supply. The air quality impact of the particulates from fireplaces and wood burning stoves is measured by the EPS, and is unhealthy in places like Fairbanks, alaska.

With all that said, in some places (Fairbanks) wood stoves are the most effective way of keeping warm, even for people who have oil furnaces.

Xcelerate• 13 years ago

Curiously, as someone who is religious, I read his article and thought after a couple of arguments "Huh, I guess burning wood is dangerous. Won't be using a fireplace anytime soon".

Now, I didn't bother to check any of his facts myself, but I'm confident he probably got them correct.

I guess my point is that, despite what he seems to assume, not all religious people debate on the basis of "feelings" or "emotions". My belief is the product of many years of debating with myself what the most reasonable explanation for existence is, and my conclusion was God. I'm not going to list my reasons or get into a debate on HN about it, because my point is simply this: it is possible for two rational people to come to different conclusions without the influence of emotions or personal bias.

Udo• 13 years ago

The point is, it's possible for the same person to be rational about one thing, and irrational about another. In your case, the willingness to accept the health dangers of fireplaces cannot be used to meaningfully demonstrate that your belief in the supernatural must be rational.

I think you're right though that irrationality is not necessarily rooted in emotion. There are probably multiple reasons why sometimes malicious memes thrive in brains and no single brain is immune to all of them. That's the price we pay for being cultural and communicative beings.

Personally, I think fireplaces are nice, not as a heat source but recreationally. But I know it's irrational ;-)

sold• 13 years ago

> it is possible for two rational people to come to different conclusions without the influence of emotions or personal bias.

Aumann's agreement theorem [1] states this is not the case.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann_agreement_theorem

fnayr• 13 years ago

Except that that theory requires common knowledge, which certainly is not a correct assumption. What exactly is common knowledge is almost entirely the debate between religion and science.

wolfhumble2• 13 years ago

I haven't studied Aumann's agreement theorem, but according to the Wikipedia article it assumes "Bayesian rationalists with common priors".

The article goes on to say that "the assumption of common priors is a rather strong one and may not hold in practice", but according to Robin Hansen this is the case when Bayesians adhere to a certain pre-rationality condition: ". . . Bayesians who agree enough about the origins of their priors must have the same priors" [1].

Will Bayesians ALWAYS agree enough about the origins of their priors?

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11238-006-9004-4...

tunesmith4• 13 years ago

I can't think of this theorem as anything other than silly.

Let's look at what two people might disagree over. It is quite likely a "should" statement, rather than something simply factual. If it were cleanly factual and measurable, they could just devise a test and observe it. So it's probably a "should" statement.

A conclusion is derived from premises that logically lead to the conclusion. Those premises are in turn derived from deeper premises, and so on.

It's known that there are only three possible outcomes to such an exercise. You either delve to infinity, which is not reasonably acceptable, or you engage in circular reasoning, which is not rational, or you eventually arrive at axioms.

The axiomatic approach is the one commonly accepted. The problem is that it is pretty well-accepted that you cannot derive an "ought" statement (a "should" statement) from "is" statements alone. Any "ought" statement is going to partially rely on "ought" premises. And this means that you're eventually going to drill down to "ought" axioms.

Blowhards like Sam Harris like to argue otherwise, but really all they are doing about with their "moral science" talk is strenuously arguing that we should accept certain "ought" axioms. They couch it in language such that we should consider these axioms so basic and obvious that they somehow don't become axioms anymore, but that's silly - they are still "ought" axioms.

Anyway, the point is that we do not all have the same "ought" axioms. That's what the entire field of philosophy is all about - the different collections of "ought" axioms we accept for ourselves.

And since two people can have different "ought" axioms, it is then possible for them to have entire world views that conflict with others, and yet are still internally consistent.

In other words, it's possible for two people to come to two different conclusions while still both being perfectly and completely logical, rational, and internally consistent.

This thing about different "ought" axioms might be what the theorem means about "different priors", but if so, that would basically make the theorem meaningless - and it seems to be a different meaning than what "common knowledge" implies.

wolfhumble2• 13 years ago

Being Christian and reading the article, I didn't find anything that reflects how I react to questions about my faith. I didn't choose to believe in God because I needed a crutch, a cozy fireplace or imaginary friend on tough days. I choose to believe in Him because He made sense of it all.

Dove2• 13 years ago

That was my reaction, too.

It has seemed to me historically that Sam Harris' grasp on what "religious" people are like is . . . tenuous. I guess that isn't really surprising, given that he isn't one, but people seem to inexplicably consider him a credible source anyway.

Nursie4• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how this maps to religion.

Why would I refuse to believe wood smoke is harmful? I might refuse to stop burning the stuff, but present me with facts and I'll take them on board. I might even switch to a smokeless fuel or cut down how often I burn things.

And none of this changes the base enjoyment of a wood fire, or addresses that one might acknowledge how harmful it is but indulge once in a while anyway.

Unlike religions, where very, very few would ever acknowledging that the central premise is wrong but then carry on with the charade.

ableal• 13 years ago

The wood smoke impact was news to me, and I love fireplaces. (Fortunately, so it seems, I rarely get to enjoy them ...)

But this last bit got me thinking: "And that should give you some sense of what we are up against whenever we confront religion."

Which reminded me of a previous diatribe by the same writer. Just as a gedankenexperiment, I'd like to know what would he do if a scientific study proved that religion was better for public health ...

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

Proving a religion has an effect on health would not change the fact that religion makes unfalsifiable claims. It would not change the fact that religion wants people to believe things without evidence (faith).

1123581321• 13 years ago

I thought the meta experiment in this article was interesting as I am religious and resented being compared to those who think wood fuel is clean. I would like to find a way to explain to the author that he is the analogous romantic defender of wood burning, but as he says, getting through the incredulity and irrationality is difficult.

maggit2• 13 years ago

> Burning wood is also completely unnecessary, because in the developed world we invariably have better and cleaner alternatives for heating our homes.

This assumption seems to be at the center of his argument (about the fireplace, not the analogy-part). However, in my modern apartment here in Norway it is regularly so cold that I am unable to heat it properly without using my wood-burning stove. So it is not recreational.

With regards to environmental impact, Norway is no stranger to legislation and have mandated that all new stoves are catalytic [1] since 1998. I am not sure how this impacts the findings referenced in the article, but I am sure that this is one of the possible things to consider other than "ban everything" or "legislate nothing".

In conclusion: Of course smoke is bad for you. Bad air quality is a big problem in winter in my town. But I need the heat!

[1]: Or "clean burn". Unsure about the English nomenclature here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-burning_stove#Catalytic_an...

yen2232• 13 years ago

Is natural gas not available in Norway?

maggit2• 13 years ago

In general, no, natural gas is not part of our infrastructure and people don't use it for heating. This has to do with our easy access to hydroelectric power.

eloisant5• 13 years ago

I don't know about US, but in Europe we have modern woodstoves like this maker: http://www.hase.eu/

Well installed, they burn almost everything, leaving only mineral parts of the wood. That means more energy-efficient burning, and less smoke. In addition since they're completely close all the smoke goes through the chimney, nothing gets in the house.

Correctly used, you get almost no smoke (because everything burns). The only reason a recent woodstove would produce a visible amount of smoke is if you burn stuff you're not supposed to burn (some people use their chimney/woodstove as a garbage bin) or if you burn wet wood.

So even when other energies are available, it's a pretty good way to heat your house: cheap, efficient, nice warm feeling, limited pollution.

OGinparadise6• 13 years ago

Now on topic :)

So wood burning is bad, and it makes sense. But I have to heat myself with something and that thing is probably coming from coal, gas or nuclear. Is coal any better for the average person or maybe some hit the jackpot and the plant is far away from you? On nuclear it's OK, until it happens, ala Fukushima.

yen2232• 13 years ago

I believe coal burns more cleanly than wood. I could be wrong though.

eloisant5• 13 years ago

It depends how you burn your wood. If you burn it in a fireplace you'll reject a lot of smoke (aka unburned particles) but if you burn it in a modern woodstove, wood can burn pretty cleanly.

fduran• 13 years ago

Also the traditional fireplace cools down the rest of the house.

Millennium• 13 years ago

While I appreciate that Hacker News and Reddit have a historical relationship, they're still different sites. This really isn't an appropriate forum for this sort of thing.

edtechdev• 13 years ago

I don't mind it being posted, but I am surprised there haven't been any other comments that try to tie it back to hackernews related topics.

Every professional field seems to have its share of delusions and resists data to the contrary - programming, academia, technology, entrepreneurship, etc. Some delusions cause more damage than others. Some are harder to refute with data. Baseball scouts had their own beliefs about evaluating players, and the sabermetrics stuff (along with the results of teams like the A's that used it) at least showed them how they could improve things with more data.

I'd give examples of delusions vs. data related to hackernews topics, but ah, no thanks, because hackernews is more like reddit and every other large scale public forum than you think.

JulianMorrison• 13 years ago

It made me sad, but it also immediately made me change my behaviour - I'll regard wood smoke as a harmful indulgence if I enjoy it myself, and not to be foisted upon neighbors or kids.

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

I must be a serial contrarian, because I actually can't get enough of facts like these. I have no internal resistance whatsoever - I've already decided not to get a house with a wood burning fireplace in my next move.

I'm sure most people on Hacker News are capable of accepting things like this without having a "religious" reaction.

dwiel• 13 years ago

That, or you hold a different set of beliefs dear than the typical person. I'm not saying this is true about you, just that it is another possibility.

mattangriffel• 13 years ago

As a philosophy major you realize that not enough people are trained in logic for you to have a reasonable, well-thought out and coherent debate about a topic.

Arguments with people who believe something dogmatically end up going in circles and being frustrating for both sides, with neither one ending up making clear progress.

At the same time, it's made me question whether "logic" is really something so natural and part of the world itself, if you have to be trained for years in order to understand and argue by its rules..

rokhayakebe• 13 years ago

I feel one could have a great discussion about every single line of your comment.

Apparently up to around 200 years ago, or possibly less than that, you learned grammar, rhetoric, and logic in secondary school. Blame the school system for that, Mortimer Adler has a great book on that: "How to read."

Debate is the wrong word, Dialectic is the correct one. I think, the usage of the former instead of the second has shaped western thinking for the past few hundred years, and unfortunately the world is never going to recover from that. Imagine if every discussion started with "let us attempt to discover the truth," as opposed to "let us each try to convince the other of our individual truths."

The funny thing about dogmatic belief, is that even scientist are dogmatic, even philosophers themselves are, in a sense dogmatic because, well, many believe it all comes down to reasoning. For example you sound convinced in order to have a a coherent debate, one must be trained in logic. Is that a fact? Not to say I disagree, I am just pointing we may all be suffering from the same illness.

Is logic natural and part of the world itself, if you must be trained...? That's tough and interesting one. I'll think about this in my free time. It must depend on what you believe. Are only the things that consist of matter natural? Is logic something that hails from matter? I don't know, Lucretius would probably say yes. But you cannot deny its existence since we are speaking of it, so it must be part of this world. Then again, are there things which are part of this world but not natural? I have no freaking clue man. But interesting anyways.

However note that logic has existed for years and possibly started before humans with the very first deduction a living entity made. If you ever reasoned then it must be logic, even if faulty reasoning. I think the difference is that some think logic started with Plato because he was the first (at least according to Western History) to record it. But obviously logic was there before, otherwise how would he have noticed it in Socrates.

jtheory3• 13 years ago

This was interesting to read, though I wonder why the author gets so many negative reactions when talking about wood fires... do so many people actually have fireplaces nowadays?

Personally, I want more details... most of all because I switched from heating my home with oil to heating it with a wood-pellet stove several years ago, and while I was convinced at the time, I've had my doubts about how it really stacks up as an ecological/renewable/etc. solution.

Note this isn't the same as a regular woodstove (it's far more efficient) but I'm sure much of the problems in the OP apply to it... I just need to find out more, and how to balance it against other ways to heat the house.

JDGM• 13 years ago

I was so sure the final paragraph would be a "gotcha", revealing that everything he had said about wood burning was fabricated specifically to make people experience the sense of resistance he wanted them to.

ScottWhigham• 13 years ago

The comments here show why we need to be able to collapse/expand comments. Top comment - gun policy explosion. I don't want to even bother with it. However, for me to skip it, I have to scroll sixteen times to see the next-most-voted top-level comment.

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

Implying every facet of life has to be rooted in some scientific fact or some 98% confidence interval is just as delusional.

nsxwolf4• 13 years ago

There's another view: Who cares? I like fireplaces and I'm fine with the supposed risks, so go F yourself Sam. Some people don't want their lives calibrated and micromanaged by statisticians and scientists and asshats like Sam Harris.

baudehlo4• 13 years ago

Whoosh. Perhaps you should re-read the start of the article.

It's about how atheists don't understand how the religious feel when you attack their religion with logic. Clearly you just felt attacked - well that's what he was trying to make you feel.

nsxwolf4• 13 years ago

I said I acknowledge that woodsmoke is harmful and that I don't care. I don't hold a cherished belief that woodsmoke is harmless.

I do feel that my personal liberty is under attack when people like Sam Harris are out there, advocating that my life be regulated into a sterile, one size fits all dystopian nightmare of his own design.

The Fireplace Delusion

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