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!

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).

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.

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.

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.

It's simple math.

And yes, the Maths is simple. But gathering the right figures to plug into the Maths is hard.

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?

For instance, if in 2008 376 children died by gun at home and as much as 376000 families had a gun at home, then the risk would be 0.1%. But if the number of families with a gun at home were 752, then this would mean a risk of 50%!

Zero people in my town were attacked by lions last year, but I'm sure a few were attacked by dogs. Cool! Lions are way safer than dogs!

UnoriginalGuy, I'd suggest taking a step back from your argument for a minute. Every single response here has explained the flaw in your original claim. It might be worth taking a minute to understand where you could have gone wrong in your reasoning.

Here's the quote from Freakonomics:

"In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million-plus guns"

And then the author draws conclusions based on that. It says nothing about "drowning in a pool" - only drowning. It says nothing about death by a gun at the gun owner's house. It says nothing about households with multiple guns (nor households with multiple pools, I guess).

The point UnoriginalGuy was trying to make is that this is absolutely shoddy statistics at work. Now his statistics may be equally as shoddy, but he's not selling books about this stuff.

So what you're saying is [deaths of children by gun]/[number of children]. That's not an absolute number, 1 in 100000 is just a percentage disguised (0.01%).

My only remark on your comment is that only children living in houses that have a gun should be taken into account when calculating the risk of "having your child killed by a gun that you keep in your house".

> 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.

I heard from a person that had to go through helicopter rescue training that they're, in their course of training, required to drown at one point; and then, after drowning, are brought back up and revived.

Drowning may kill a large percentage of the people that drown, but it's not a guaranteed death-sentence.

Being shot to death kills 100% of people who are shot to death. I don't think you have a valid point.

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.

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).

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).

The problem is that the 'gun lobby' doesn't stop there. They insist that guns make you safer, when the actual evidence couldn't be clearer that they don't. They perpetuate myths such as that an armed society is a polite society, when in fact access to firearms dramatically increases the risk that a confrontation will escalate to lethal violence.

American society is saturated with guns. Those weapons aren't going to go away any time soon. So the IMHO the rational response is to look at what is achievable. Educating gun owners as to the real risks, promoting gun safety, encouraging and legislating for safe practices around gun ownership, storage and use. These are all achievable goals.

It's almost as if the mere act of owning a firearm has little bearing on one's overall safety.

The point is that cities don't have monitored borders, and so they have a hard time regulating the influx of guns. A country-wide ban would actually stand a chance of working.

Edit: here's the article I mentioned: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/us/strict-chicago-gun-laws...

I haven't heard this but it certainly sounds plausible.

To me, it says one of a few things are happening: (A) The people buying the guns are not criminals at the time of purchase, and shouldn't be prohibited from buying them in the first. Whether they go on to commit a crime with the gun or the gun is stolen and then used in a crime is mostly irrelevant; (B) The people buying the guns are criminals at the time of purchase, and the NICS check didn't alert the owner properly. This would be more a failure of the FBI than anyone else; (C) Least likely, the people buying the guns are criminals at the time of purchase and the owner of the shop knew this and either did not perform the NICS check or performed it with fraudulent data.

I do believe a large majority of Americans would be fine with high gun ownership levels, if only there was a safe, healthy, well informed and responsible gun ownership culture to go with it. Many gun owners do meet that description, but far too many don't and any attempts to rectify that or even provide evidence based advice are blocked at every turn.

Are you replying to an earlier version of the comment above?

Children like to swim in pools. Children like to ride bicycles. I sure hope even the most enthusiastic gun owner doesn't give guns to children to play with.

I don't have to justify the usefulness of pools or bicycles. The kids like them, it's a fact.

As a society we tolerate the risk of those things. Is it rational? Should we? I don't care - we just do and that's a fact.

You can take away a risk associated with a pool or bicycle but only by taking away the fun that children have swimming in pools or riding a bicycle.

It's true that some parents enjoy the things you can do with a gun. It's also true that having a gun in the house is additional, sometimes tragic, risk with no benefit to children.

First, as a parent you're supposed to put the benefit of your child over the little joys in your life, like squeezing a trigger of a 44 Magnum or getting enough sleep.

Second, you can enjoy most of the benefits of having a gun without actually having one in the house.

I'm pretty sure you cannot hunt or discharge firearms within city limits anyway.

You can still indulge yourself in hunting or go to a shooting range without endangering the life of your child by having a gun in your house.

OK, now you've lost me because:

People like to shoot guns, it's a fact.

As a society, currently, we tolerate the risk of those things. Is it rational? Should we? I don't care - we just do and that's a fact.

Did I just win the argument? Because that's the case right now. It is quite legal to have a gun in your home. Done. Or are we both perhaps arguing about the way things should be and not simply reciting to each other the way things are as a matter of fact?

> Second, you can enjoy most of the benefits of having a gun without actually having one in the house.

Sure, and I agree that is probably a wise decision. Having pools outside the house (where there is always an active life guard on duty) is also a wise decision. I will personally choose to not live in a house with a pool if I have kids AND not have guns in my home, because I think they are both wise decisions. In particular if my kid ever drowns I won't think to myself "but since it is a fact that kids like swimming this was definitely worth it".

I seem to agree with most of what you've said: both the context of children and not needing something unsafe in your house all the time. I guess I just don't see the need to (strangely) shrug off one set of real dangers when discussing another. Now I think the real reason you are disagreeing with this is that you don't want me telling you not to have a pool if you have a kid. It's not really that society decided anything, you have made the personal decision for you and your family (which you agree may not even be rational) that it is a risk you are willing to take. I disagree with that risk but accept it is your risk to take. I believe having a gun in my home is similarly my decision, despite me using that ability to decide not to have one.

And children like to hunt. What's your point?

> I don't have to justify the usefulness of pools or bicycles.

Actually, when you're claiming that they have more usefulness than some other arbitrary object (in this case, guns), yes you do.

> You can take away a risk associated with a pool or bicycle but only by taking away the fun that children have swimming in pools or riding a bicycle.

That's exactly right, because helmets make bicycles less fun.

> It's true that some parents enjoy the things you can do with a gun. It's also true that having a gun in the house is additional, sometimes tragic, risk with no benefit to children.

Except for the cases in which a gun in the home is used for self defense.

> First, as a parent you're supposed to put the benefit of your child over the little joys in your life, like squeezing a trigger of a 44 Magnum or getting enough sleep.

And swimming, because apparently they're more likely to die doing that.

> Second, you can enjoy most of the benefits of having a gun without actually having one in the house.

Except for self defense, which if we read the Constitution is the primary reason for the second amendment (discussion about self defense from whom aside for the moment).

> I'm pretty sure you cannot hunt or discharge firearms within city limits anyway.

I don't know what city limits have to do with anything, so I don't think this is germane. I'm willing to bet you're more likely to find a pool in the suburbs than downtown, anyway.

But living in a city does not mean you waive your right to self defense.

> You can still indulge yourself in hunting or go to a shooting range without endangering the life of your child by having a gun in your house.

You can still indulge yourself in swimming or go to a public pool without endangering the life of your child by having a pool in your yard.

In some families, a father will put a loaded gun in the hands of his 12-year-old son and have him shoot at targets. You are right. It's never okay to give a kid a gun to "play with". However, giving a kid a gun to teach him respect for firearms is a little different.

vs

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57562397-504083/georg...

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.

Not that I partake in hunting personally (suburban lifestyle), but my home state (of Pennsylvania) has a significant rural population that takes advantage of the large deer population to supplement its caloric budget.

America isn't homogeneous with regard to its distribution of jobs, supermarkets and population.

Here in Scotland large parts of the country are privately owned sporting estates and shooting is not a cheap sport!

Hunting is licensed by the states, and is usually relatively inexpensive for in-state residents. People from other states usually pay considerably more for a license. Big game or rarer animals may require special "tags" which come at larger fees and may be limited and awarded by lottery.

There are private game reserves. Georgia and other southern states have massive hunting preserves that can be a mark of old money, for instance. There are similar ranches in the west. And hunting clubs that anyone can just buy their way into.

And, to be honest, there's a lot of what is technically poaching- hunting on the private land of others without permission. That sort of thing isn't all that well policed, though state fish and game authorities are generally pretty tough on completely unlicensed hunting.

Here's a symptom of the cultural prevalence of hunting in the U.S.:

http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/sta...

Most states will have such a listing.

There is also plenty of private land kept for hunting, which as you might mean to imply, is not cheap.

Interestingly enough, in Scotland although most wild areas are privately owned everyone has a right of access - you can wander about pretty much anywhere that isn't explicitly private or where you would cause harm.

This is not true. Where I went to college, there were people in the surrounding area who ate squirrels. Yes, squirrels are edible, and a handful of squirrels can make a meal.

.22lr ammunition is more than sufficient to kill a squirrel, rabbit, or small bird, and you can buy it at 4 cents per cartridge. That means you can get all the meat needed for dinner for 20-30 cents. Excluding food stamps, where else can you get meat so cheaply?

There is another issue with hunting, which I mentioned elsewhere: overpopulation. In many places in America, there are so many deer that they are considered a nuisance species. I live in an area where there are more deer today than there were when Europeans first arrived on this continent. Hunting deer is a form of population control and the limits on how many deer can be taken are set to meet those goals.

Yes, controlling the deer population is important. Deer cause a lot of property damage, and that problem is worsened as the deer population increases.

When my poorer friends here in rural USA ask me what the hell that "privilege" concept is, I'm going to point them at this comment.

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.

OK, lets looks at the facts. At least, the facts available despite the NRA's diligent shutting down of as much research into the role of guns in American society as possible.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/pro-gun-myths-fa... • A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

Although Myth I also refer to you to: #7: Guns make women safer.

Same with the "fact" that guns in the home are linked to suicides and assaults and not legitimate home defense. OK? Yeah, that's obvious. But that doesn't control for the fact that many people who purchase guns use them completely responsibly.

I understand you think it's a bad idea that on average, gun crime happens. But none of the "evidence" you posted presents a slam-dunk case for repealing the 2nd Amendment and probably many others (unreasonable search and seizure and the like).

None of this even factors into the whole intent of allowing citizens to own weapons, which is worth a fair amount.

http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=16613...

The safest defense is to not have this turn into an arms race. Both for you and your children.

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.

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.

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.

It's very unlikely owning a weapon (gun, knife, spray, whatever) will be of any use. "Killers" or "Rapists" (whatever that means) take you by surprise and pulling a gun is not an option (even if you had the mental discipline and self control to do it).

If you care about self defense, learn Krav Maga or another martial art that will condition you to actually increase your odds of survival... After years of rigorous training.

Just for the record, if you live in the 1st world, the probability of dying because of murder is so low that mentioning is a waste of time. Turn off the TV. ;)

Is it okay for me to own a gun now that I've jumped through your arbitrary hoops?

I would rather like to live in the woods if I had the chance. I find it a wonderful location, quiet, peaceful.

Guns still have a place in this world, it just might not be a place that you, personally, see.

I have also lived in very rural areas and some very shady parts of town. I'm in Canada though, so handguns just aren't as prevalent up here (although I do have friends with restricted licenses and handguns they can shoot at the range).

I had an "interesting" youth. Growing up in rural area means I'm no stranger to seeing people at parties getting beer bottles smashed over their heads during fights or hit with ash trays at bars. Looking back at that, there was not a single situation where a person having a handgun would have made things better. It almost definitely would have made things much worse. People would have died as opposed to just need stitches at the hospital. Even in this rural area, it wasn't that difficult to talk my way out of bad situations. I was blasted out of the blue once, but it was a case of mistaken identity.

I think that if home invasions were a real threat to my family then I would really start to think about moving. There are just so many nicer places to live.

And yes, probably.. as long as you weren't hundreds of thousands of dollars upside down on your mortgage with 5 kids (requiring a large house) [and so on, insert rough situation here]

Yes, it is a generalization, but it is very real. For instance, look at the disparity between violent crime rates in Seattle and Vancouver.

On your second point, I feel that you are speculating. Neither you or I know what a handgun would bring in those situations. People who do concealed carry in the US are statistically very unlikely to commit violent crime, far far less than the general population. The mere presence of gun isn't as big of a deal as many people fear.

The thing that troubles me in the US is that gun control advocates continuously attempt to paint a future where there are no handguns. We can't even keep cellphones out of prisons in the US, or eradicate drugs (which have been illegal for decades). With that in mind, essentially telling criminals in a society of extremes that they have nothing to worry about, that law-abiding citizens will be disarmed, seems incredibly foolish.

If we had it to do all over again, I'd be for strict gun control in the US, but we have to deal with the way things are now, not some imaginary reset. Maybe the issue for today is an early ban on armed drones.

So a thief or a potential rapist /murderer is in my living room at 4am. I should approach him without knowing his ultimate intention or what weapons he has, and try to some martial arts moves against him? Should I ask if he likes a cup of coffee first?

How about unmistakeable shotgun click from a safer distance?

Martial arts teach you confidence and self control, this is what will be useful. One of the first thing you learn when you're taught self-defense is that if someone asks for your wallet with a blade, you give the wallet. You use self defense only as a last resort.

If someone is inside your house just lock yourself in the bathroom, head low in the bathtub, and call the police. Maybe do some noise to scare the thief, or say out lout "get out, I'm calling the police". In this situation, if you have any sort of weapon, yes, take that with you as a last resort.

Shotgun negotiation? Who are you kidding? If you take out a weapon, you must be ready to use it. Are you ready to shoot? Can you live the rest of your life with the death of someone? Are you even trained for that kind of situations? Probable outcomes: injury, prison or death. For you.

Most home robberies occur when the occupant is not home. People who just want some cash or stuff do not want to risk a confrontation. If a person breaks in with you home you MUST assume they are out to do physical harm to you.

Great idea! My kids can fend for themselves!

But that's not realistic so you have to figure out who he is and what he wants from his actions starting with the 2am kicking down of your door. Guess wrong and he might be a drugged out rapist instead.

Really, if he's not yelling 'Fireman!' (And didn't arrive in a special truck) he's not kicking down your door to help. Some of the things that may be done to you may only (mostly) involve your things, or only hurt you not kill you, and people can give you a big song and dance about laws and morality - but don't YOU want to choose prison over death for yourself, if those really are your only two options?

I'm with you, partly. No need to fight this guy to be a hero. For your additional safety, hide in bathtub, sound a siren, and get help - while holding the shotgun you will use to kill him and his accomplices if they try to open your hiding spot before help arrives.

The claim was that "guns have no useful purpose". To refute this assertion, we don't need to prove that gun ownership results in fewer rapes or deaths (on, for example, a nation-wide basis), only that when someone attempts to harm you, a gun can be useful in defending yourself.

I mean, when you buy a bag of chips you don't ask yourself whether there is proof that chips actually results in a more satisfied society. You buy them because you feel it benefits you, and that's an entirely acceptable justification, in my opinion.

And before bringing up the number of gun deaths that would be considered justified versus suicides or murders, we do have pretty good evidence that in those cases where a gun prevents a crime it's mostly by the threat of its use, not its use itself.

All I need to know: A gun will help me defend myself and family. A gun can be kept safe by adhering to certain known gun safety principles. Accidents happen but then a brick from a building's facade can smack you in the head in the morning. Cops are great, if you have one right there, right when you need him/her. So, I think to myself, why not have one? Leaving all fun aside, it's a piece of mind.

In reality, if someone is armed and has broken into my house, I want it to be absolutely clear to them that I am unarmed. I want them to know that they have no need to attack me, and that they should just take some of my stuff and get out (by far the most likely reason they're there), leaving me unharmed. The alternative possibilities sound much worse to me.

This is true in almost every situation where people talk about guns being useful against crime. I think I am more likely to harm myself, to incite the other party to harm me, to harm a bystander (maybe someone in my household), or to harm someone that I perceive as a much more serious and dangerous criminal than they actually are, than I am to successfully be a "good guy with a gun who stops a bad guy with a gun".

[1]: http://www.kgw.com/news/Clackamas-man-armed-confronts-mall-s...

I have had it happen twice. Once right after we moved into a brand new house (3-4 days after move in). Some local kids had figured out that the front door could be opened because the lock was installed wrong and were using the house to party while it was empty. They hadn't realized that people moved in.

Our golden retriever scared the crap out of them and they never made it 5 feet into the house - even though the dog was on the second floor. Now there is a solid defense system. I'll note that at the time, we had 5 guns locked up in the closest safely stored. The dog was down the stairs and dealing with the situation before I was even conscious enough to think. The whole thing would have been over before the guns were out if it was worse than some dumb kids.

Second time it happened was only 18 months ago. This was a little different because I was on a boat at night, but again I was certain that two big adult men were robbing boats in the vincity. I called the cops. The cops sent the coast guard. We hunkered down and hid (probably not the right call, should have turned on the lights). I wish I had a gun in that moment, they were 15 feet from our stern and definitely coming onboard. There is no where to go on a boat like that. I had a mag light and a radio, and when the guys started heading for my boat I hit them with the light. Meanwhile the cops went from sneaking over at 5mph to screaming over at 45mph. That defused the situation, but if there weren't cops and/or I had a gun I would have definitely shot a round or two into the water to scare them off. Possibly more.

When the cops actually picked them up, it turned out they were 2 14 year olds sneaking onto boats at night stealing booze. The cops made them apologize for scaring the crap out of us, so I met them. They couldn't have been 115 pounds each. If I hadn't saw them, I honestly could have sworn under oath they were 300 pound linebackers based on their silhouettes on other boats. Thank god I didn't have a gun that day, I'm almost certain I would have shot one of them. This is how kids get shot while holding skittles and even trained police officers confuse wallets for guns. Your mind plays tricks on you.

My lessons learned: keep the lights on. Own a dog. If there are intruders, make them totally aware you are there because most of the time, they want nothing to do with people. I'm not against owning guns, but if you store them safely they won't be as much help as you think.

I have very little regard for the life of a robber. I don't feel that I should take valuable time out of my life to learn skills for applying measured non-lethal force to dissuade a person who intends to take my personal property by force. The only reason why I would be very hesitant to just shoot someone who broke into my house, would be my inability to identify them -- I don't want to shoot my mother-in-law.

Not having a gun when someone armed threatens me will most likely increase my chances of survival/getting out of the conflict unharmed. Maybe with a gun I have a better chance of retaliation but I'm also more likely to die.

The bottom line is: any weapon you /add/ to a conflict rises the stakes for /all/ parties involved. And vice versa.

And this is known as the fallacy of making things up and asserting that they are most likely true.

> (Maybe with a gun I have a better chance of retaliation) but (I'm also more likely to die).

'end of story', 'All I need to know' are expressions that begin to end a discussion, they certainly don't make way for a healthy and productive exchange of ideas.

(I don't mean to knock on you here, just thought I would point it out so you can think about this on your own. Cheers).

No exchange of ideas on this topic, I've considered them all and I have decided to be armed while in my home. Whether I use it, how and when I use are a different story, but at least I may have that option. Others may choose not to have a gun, it's their choice.

So you are commenting just to offer your hard-won life wisdom to the rest of us?

Thank you?

  > And you can't kill your potential killer or rapist

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

Anyway, it seems a middle of the road number from the studies is . . . about a million defensive gun uses per year? Lower bound is 55,000 - 80,000.

Wikipedia also gives a homicide with guns rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Stat..., looks like about 8,000 in 2012. It should be borne in mind that a lot of those homicides are from things like gang violence, and would be conducted with illegal guns or other weapons even if gun laws were super-tight.

So I'd say the numbers show a clear win for guns.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airsoft_gun)

Oh, and my bath mat. I'm very worried about my bath mat.

I used to shoot at targets with a bb gun as a kid. I sure as hell wasn't practicing to be a bb gun killer....

It depends on what the intruder /attacker has in mind.

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...

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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...

You can't get very injured in a pool (I guess you can slip outside the pool - but you can slip anywhere playing so does that count?). But there are probably more firearms injuries than deaths.

Again, why are you only talking about children deaths, one group that's not even supposed to have access to guns? That's cherry picking.

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.

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.

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.”

  * * * * * * * 

"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.

  * * * * *

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.

This doesn't violate the 1st law of thermodynamics. You are not converting 1 Joule of heat into 2 Joules of heat. You are using 1 Joule of heat to move 2 Joules of heat out of a large heat sink (the outside atmosphere, or maybe the ground).

It doesn't violate the 2nd law either. A power plant runs on very high temperature differences -- Carnot ratio Th/Tc as high as 5.0 (1,500 K / 300 K). A heat pump runs on very small temperature differences, maybe 1.1 (e.g. 300 K / 280 K). Together, you can translate a small movement of heat, at a high temperature difference, into a large movement of heat, at a low temperature difference.

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.

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.

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.

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

Having felt the effect of "fireplace smoke" without a chimney I find it strange that people live like that. OTOH, African houses are probably much more open than the house I'm used to..

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.

>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.

See the safety section.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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

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.)

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.

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).

"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...

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"?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

Also seems related to the point linked from HN recently - ask someone a moral question, let them answer, and then somehow convince them they gave an opposite answer (they did this by secretly altering the paper questionnaire they filled out, and showing the forged answer to the subject) - the person will then often defend the answer they apparently gave, rather than the answer they really gave.

I think it's a good question. My best theory so far is to just lay out the reasoning to the person in a very accessible way, so they can accept it on their own timetable.

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.

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

I actually think he might be on to something here.

I rejected the arguments of atheism because they are unsound and/or invalid and so I gave up atheism and became agnostic.

Then through first-hand experience of God I became a Christian.

In the same way this guy tells me "when you light a fire, you needlessly poison the air" I can tell you that I'm poor, there's wood outside I can gather for free, that wood could stop me from suffering in the cold. People need heat to survive colder climatic regions. Yes, his magic "just use gas" is great - presumably he will pay the bill?

Also, if I'm using a rocket burner (uses primary burning to heat a secondary chamber for re-burn) then it seems much of the objection is invalid?

It seems the author has assumed a homogeneity of situation and a self-omniscience which are neither present. That perhaps speaks to his point in an manner he wasn't intending.

That said it does seem quite likely the public at large isn't aware of the health problems inherent in casual [ie unconsidered] use of open wood burning.

Belief in provably true: science Belief in provably false: willful ignorance Belief in things not provably true or false: religion

Atheism - or at least the evangelical sort - seems to be the belief that others should not believe in something if it isn't provably true.

Sometimes it is useful to believe in conjectures, for pragmatic reasons. Sometimes it is useful to believe in religion, for emotional reasons.

It's true that some of what is ascribed to "religion" is actually willful ignorance. That is appropriate to combat, in my view. However, I don't believe it's appropriate to combat the belief in things not provably true or false. And that is a common reason that religious people reject the arguments of atheism.

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.

Sam needs new friends.

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.

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.

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

New Study Suggests Religion May Help Criminals Justify Their Crimes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Let's say there was a box containing a piece of paper that has the answer to the question, "Does God exist?" or "Is my view on nutrition or pharmaceuticals correct?". The atheist and the programmer would almost certainly look inside that box even at considerable cost. Many religious people would not. Some people could save a lot of time if they realized that.

I think this is the more true statement :)

I don't disagree with your premise, by the way, and maybe weird irrational opinions are rarer in engineering/sciency/computery people, but they're definitely there.

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.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952

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

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/

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

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.))

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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."

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.

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.

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

Cute last page in Comic Sans, too ;-)

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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