
The Fireplace Delusion - uvdiv
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion
======
nostromo
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!

~~~
kkowalczyk
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).

~~~
OGinparadise
_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.

~~~
shin_lao
You've obviously never been in a life threatening situation.

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. ;)

~~~
largesse
I have several friends who've defended themselves with guns during a home
invasion. It does happen.

~~~
seestheday
Where the heck do you live? Are you not able to move for some reason? Stories
like this seem so foreign to me.

~~~
sukuriant
The woods, or some of the shadier areas of the city, places where police
aren't immediately accessible

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.

~~~
seestheday
Oh, I have no problem with guns. I own a rifle and enjoy target shooting. I
recently got my hunting license and plan to start hunting this summer.

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.

~~~
sukuriant
As an interesting side-note, I imagine many of the people there may have
actually owned guns and even had them on them. And yet they didn't use them.
If they indeed had them, then they also knew the importance of proper gun
safety, even when drunk and angry :)

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]

------
jacobolus
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.

~~~
roel_v
"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.

~~~
alberich
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.

~~~
AaronBBrown
How go you propose that an individual heat their house if not with gas,
propane, oil, or wood? Electric heat, except in the case of perhaps a space
heater, is extremely inefficient (and in most cases the electricity itself is
made by burning fossil fuels). Unless there have been some dramatic
technological improvements recently, solar and geothermal heating are not
practical in the northern US where temps can drop well below zero Fahrenheit.
Of these options, I'm pretty sure that gas and propane have the lowest
environmental impact.

~~~
uvdiv
Electric heat pumps are more efficient than any of those. Whole system
included. The combination of {heat engine + heat pump} -- i.e., the power
plant generating electricity, followed by the electricity powering a heat pump
in your house -- is more efficient than using the same heat in your house
directly. E.g.: 1 Joule of heat, in a power plant, can bring to you 2 Joules
of heat in your house (through an intermediate of 0.5 Joules of electricity).

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.

~~~
maxerickson
The capital costs of retrofitting a ground source are prohibitive though, so
'just use a heat pump' isn't useful advice for millions of people that live in
regions where the air gets cold enough to limit the effectiveness of a heat
pump.

------
hzay
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.

~~~
gnufied
State governments in North India _distribute_ wood during winter. See
[http://urbanemissions.blogspot.com/2012/11/pollution-in-
delh...](http://urbanemissions.blogspot.com/2012/11/pollution-in-delhi-winter-
time-highs.html)

>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.

~~~
test001only
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.

~~~
gnufied
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda#Scientific_appraisal>

See the safety section.

~~~
test001only
That is scary... the website for the medicine I use seems to stress that it
uses herbs over metal or minerals. Hope they are safe. But the fact that there
is no central body which can check and authorise these medicines is a cause
for concern.

------
lukifer
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.)

~~~
kijin
> _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.

------
uvdiv
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...](http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/publications/2006%20pubs/JIT%20Woodsmoke2.pdf)

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

[http://www.epa.gov/burnwise/pdfs/woodsmoke_health_effects_ja...](http://www.epa.gov/burnwise/pdfs/woodsmoke_health_effects_jan07.pdf)

~~~
anemic
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...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1026893/pdf/westjmed00121-0093.pdf)

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"?

------
maggit
> 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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-
burning_stove#Catalytic_and_non-catalytic_stoves)

~~~
yen223
Is natural gas not available in Norway?

~~~
maggit
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.

------
kijin
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
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.

~~~
MartinCron
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.

~~~
tunesmith
Reminds me of what a therapist friend says about counseling, how you have to
give a client a safe environment before you do any work.

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.

------
Adaptive
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.

------
nnq
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._

~~~
Tichy
"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.

~~~
BudVVeezer
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.

~~~
Tichy
I can only hope that this trend will go hand in hand with development of
better wood burning stoves that pollute less.

~~~
BudVVeezer
I'm a bit amazed by how efficient my wood boiler is -- I can run it for
several hours off a few logs, while maintaining about 175 degrees in the
boiler. On a good day, I end up burning less than a log an hour to heat my
entire house, including the water heater.

------
eitland
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
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.

------
Xcelerate
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.

~~~
sold
> 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>

~~~
wolfhumble
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...](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11238-006-9004-4#page-1)

------
tzaman
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.

~~~
jlgreco
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.

------
47uF
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.

~~~
DanBC
> 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.

~~~
Nursie
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.

~~~
47uF
I'm not saying programmers are always right or rational. I'm saying they care
more about truth and logical consistency. Or at least they care more about
being the kind of person that cares about truth and logical consistency.

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.

~~~
Nursie
_"Or at least they care more about being the kind of person that cares about
truth and logical consistency."_

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.

------
tolmasky
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.

~~~
robertskmiles
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.

See also:

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

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

~~~
pja
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/>

------
sawyer
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.

~~~
rimantas
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.

------
mhax
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.

------
Jach
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
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.

------
kkowalczyk
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
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>

------
cmdli
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.

~~~
Nursie
_"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.

------
ScottWhigham
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.

------
killermonkeys
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.

~~~
ygra
Google Scholar to the rescue:

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

Cute last page in Comic Sans, too ;-)

~~~
eloisant
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.

~~~
ygra
That's one thing I miss from most, if not all, journalism: Cited sources for
the claims in the article. Mind you, academia produces a lot of crap, but at
least you can usually _verify_ whether it's crap or not by following the
sources. Articles in newspapers and magazines usually don't tell where they
got the data and in online publications they often don't even put up useful
links.

------
Nursie
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.

------
JulianMorrison
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.

------
clhodapp
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).

------
nraynaud
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
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.

------
farinasa
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.

------
dylangs1030
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
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.

------
manmal
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
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://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/cooked-meats)

[http://sciencenordic.com/renewed-worries-over-carcinogens-
fo...](http://sciencenordic.com/renewed-worries-over-carcinogens-foods)

------
oelmekki
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.

~~~
kbenson
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.

~~~
oelmekki
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" :)

------
stephen_g
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...

------
jtheory
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.

------
mattangriffel
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
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.

------
ishener
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.

------
ghshephard
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.

------
ableal
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
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
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.

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

------
gizzlon
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)

------
nsxwolf
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.

~~~
baudehlo
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.

~~~
nsxwolf
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.

~~~
DanBC
The article is not about woodsmoke.

The article is about how people react when you attack something. The article
uses woodsmoke as an example, presenting many scientific reasons why woodsmoke
is bad, and allowing some of the audience to experience the feelings that
people have when something they like is attacked.

The comments in this thread show that it's a poorly written article and that
most people didn't get that point. (Or were not interested in addressing that
point.)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
But the verity of the argument WRT woodsmoke speaks to the strength of the
analogy.

Many here appear to agree that burning of woodsmoke is not _always_ bad
[appeal to majority!] and that the article appears# to go far beyond what
there is evidence for in claiming wood burning is wrong, period. [of course
that doesn't mean it isn't wrong]

Following the analogy to a conclusion on this basis says that those who appeal
to scientific arguments for atheism are using poor data and over-reaching
often attacking practices which don't match well with real life.

If the woodsmoke argument is poor but the analogy is sound then the conclusion
is that those who light wood-fires like those who are religious are justified
in rejecting this sort of "scientific position".

He's done for the anti-woodsmoke position what proving the pope is fallible
does for atheism.

\- - -

# I only read the snippets of the conclusions of the papers in the comments
and not the actual papers.

------
JDGM
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.

------
Millennium
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
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.

------
raverbashing
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
Well, guess I'm not burning wood anymore.

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

------
tomjen3
Seems well argued.

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

~~~
VLM
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..

~~~
eloisant
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.

------
lifeisstillgood
This. Paeleo this.

Hey look something humans have always done.

It kills people?

But it's comforting?

------
juice13
Please stop making sane arguments. They cause me to think, and that's not good
now is it?

------
OGinparadise
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.

~~~
yen223
I believe coal burns more cleanly than wood. I could be wrong though.

~~~
eloisant
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.

------
danbmil99
Fucking buzzkill

------
ypeterholmes
This is at the top of hacker news? Yikes.

