The problem with gwern posts is that there are so rarely anything to nitpick, to spark conversation in the comments.

One of the more amusing things about the vape panic is that it's now easier to purchase fentanyl adulterated meth in San Francisco than it is to get a Juul pod. And it's riskier to be a seller of the latter than the former.

Public health officials are throwing their credibility into a bonfire when they land on a fixation and use heavy handed strategies to pursue their goals, without a sense of proportionality or efficacy.

nearly all the value in a news article comes from the collation of facts needed to formulate it.

i would much rather read this collation directly, give me bullet points. in such a structured format it would also be easier to analyze if a given statement is too specific or has too many qualifiers. it would also be easier to notice what's missing.

Glad they wrote this, but then some people have been reading the "news" like this for decades.

This doesn't surprise me.

I grew up reading NYTimes on the weekend with my parents. I held them in extreme high regard when it came to their news and journalistic integrity. Over the years, I've shifted to think of them as another data point. For the industries that I'm most familiar with (Tech, Finance, and Pharma), I find their reporting often shallow, lacking in nuance, or intentional/unintentional misreporting. And I often wonder if their reporting of other areas is similarly lacking.

Now, they are just another data point, which is sad.

I vaped for a couple months but stopped when I started to have my heart race when I would stand up suddenly. Ears started to crackle as well. Not saying the article is wrong, but I think there are probably good reasons to chose alternatives...

I sure am glad such deception is limited to that one vaping article.

• YZF

  today at 3:18 AM

  Some people might not realize there's a /s in there.

• zrezzed

  today at 4:12 AM

  I’m disappointed this is the first comment on this post.

  gwern’s writing (including on nicotine) was formative for me; it showed me how and why the internet the was important: it let me read good, well written thinking I had never seen from the NYTs or my parents.

  I first saw a link to gwern.net on HN. And I trusted the NYTs as an institution then, and do to this day… and I’m sure I clicked through, and took the gwern post seriously in part because comments weren’t universally negative.

  You can point to bounded trust problems, or talk more about how “The Media Very Rarely Lies”…

  But please don’t take up the first comment on a gwern post to cheap shot the NYTs