Anatomy of Misleading Science

So I don't get it.

Is Order2Chaos a vaper or not?

It looks as though "cold turkey" is one group, and "taking nicotine in some form" is another, instead of e-cigarettes being it's own group, and then the results for various non-cigarette nicotine delivery are averaged together and labeled as "e-cigarettes" in the conclusion.

It would be like if I put Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and @We Are Borg in a group and then concluded there's a 66% chance that WAB is a serial rapist.

Doh! I fell into the article's trap.

Okay, but now I'm confused. I was assuming they were comparing Vaping to other non-tobacco nicotine replacements, but are they actually comparing vaping to other non-cigarette tobacco products like pipes and cigars??? What's the point of anyone switching to those to get off cigs? They're still smoking tobacco.

10 points! But that’s not all that’s available…

No, nor a smoker; I just don’t like to see people misled by scientific results that don’t actually measure what it reads like they measured. Especially when that bait-and-switch is picked up by the likes of CNN. The switch may be true (though in this case… nah, I’ll let someone else get 5 points here), but it’s limited enough not to matter.

5 points on a 10 point item. Take a look at the figures and tables tab in the paper. They did that, but also separated e-cigarettes.

I believe the reason for switching to other tobacco alternatives (not mentioned in the paper or article) is the assumption that those other tobacco products do not contain the same additives designed specifically to intensify the addictive properties like cigarettes do. I don't know if that's true or not. But, I believe that's why people take that route.

This thing is so bad it kept crashing Acrobat

Batman will use this as an object lesson for his protege.

Okay, I haven't gotten the computer to talk to the new printer yet, but right away we have an inexcusable font choice that fails to distinguish between small ls and big Is. This is how you get statistical samples made up of a 95% chlorine concentration. CAPITAL I'S HAVE CROSSBARS. THIS IS MANDATORY IN ALL BUT THE GOOFIEST OF NON-CURSIVE FONTS.

without my having to bother reading an article and paper I'm not particularly interested in, does it explore the harm reduction angle of vaping vs tobacco vs actual cessation products?

because from what I'm seeing of the conversation, it looks like they've presented vapes as something they're not really intended to be used for.

Discrete puffs at the ren faire?

Warned for gay-bashing. Comments to someone who gives a shit.

I know it's purely anecdotal, but I switched to vaping probably 7 to 9 years ago, and I haven't smoked tobacco since. Still vaping though.

Guilty.

<mezzo-soprano voce>GuIIIIIIIIltYYYYYYYYYYY!</mezzo-soprano voce>.

*raises hand*. Me too.

Did you ever quit cigarettes cold turkey before and succeed for at least 3 months? Yes this is relevant to the paper.

I don't know if you could call it cold turkey, but once before I quit for about six months when my doctor prescribed me Bupropion specifically for that reason. It never worked again after I relapsed.

Some thoughts without digging into the numbers:

- Not enough editorial work to justify printing a hard copy to go to town on, which is disappointing

- "Switching to any tobacco product including e-cigarettes was associated with" -> "Switching to any tobacco product, such as e-cigarettes, was associated with"

- I think they might be using hyphens for ranges of values, but that might be the awful font or the style required by a journal that would use such an awful font

- Ten pages to say that the authors ganged up on someone else's hard work and spent thirty minutes throwing most of it away and then hyperfocusing on a subset of the remnant to come up with a simple assertion

- Like, if they were freshmen it'd be one thing, but they all have grad degrees

- I really doubt nobody else has bothered to do anything like this before now

- The authors acknowledge the presence of several potential 'confounding' factors that might influence results, filter out data to focus on one value of one confounder, then assert that that subset's results hold true for all the population without regard for the possibility of that or any other confounders changing the validity of that assertion

- The study focused on white people, plus the data suggests no evidence that e-cigs were super-effective for women, nor that they're a plot by evil capitalist corporations to victimize disadvantaged women, so if any of the authors expected to get an NPR interview out of this I have bad news for them

- If cigarettes were 95% chlorine that would probably solve the smoking problem

- I would like to learn how to control potential confounders in my life

- Yes, David are strong, and Sara definitely be McMenamin, but Dennis are definitely not Trinidad

1 point.

Maybe dig into this a little more and you'll get 10 points.

5 points.

10 more points.