Sam Harris' "The Fireplace Delusion"

[asydhouse]

Sam Harris makes an interesting point in this article on his website, demonstrating that we resist the scientific facts when they threaten a cherished practice. The reason I am posting this is the underlying point of his article that resistance to science is not the preserve of the religious alone. (And I put it in this section because I couldn't figure out where else might be more appropriate.)

We skeptics can fall too easily into dismissing the resistance of the religious with a garnish of mild contempt for the workings of their minds, but this article demonstrates to the reader that such mind sets are possible in us also.

It's a sort of thought experiment for the reader, as he asks you to pay attention to your reactions as you read the piece. Possibly quite enlightening to some of us, and humbling too.

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

 

[Craig B]

Humbling my bum. Harris is an outrageous reactionary. It is very true that wood smoke mainly from cooking fires is the cause of an estimated 2 million deaths per year in the developing world, where fires are used in chimneyless kitchens. But the idea that wood burning is to be equated with cigarette smoking is nonsense. The ban on smoking is in enclosed public spaces, at least here in Scotland where it was introduced very early. A similar ban should most certainly be applied to open fires in enclosed spaces. I spend much time in the mountains of Italy where wood is a major fuel used both for space heating and cooking, usually burned in enclosed iron stoves, or increasingly in the form of combustible pellets in stoves equipped with electric fans which produce little if any smoke. The air in that part of italy is exceptionally clean. Harris's piece reads as if it was written by a propagandist for a tobacco company: look at these ecofascists stopping honest people smoking in bars while they do even more damage with their wood fires.

 

[asydhouse]

Humbling my bum. Harris is an outrageous reactionary. It is very true that wood smoke mainly from cooking fires is the cause of an estimated 2 million deaths per year in the developing world, where fires are used in chimneyless kitchens. But the idea that wood burning is to be equated with cigarette smoking is nonsense. The ban on smoking is in enclosed public spaces, at least here in Scotland where it was introduced very early. A similar ban should most certainly be applied to open fires in enclosed spaces. I spend much time in the mountains of Italy where wood is a major fuel used both for space heating and cooking, usually burned in enclosed iron stoves, or increasingly in the form of combustible pellets in stoves equipped with electric fans which produce little if any smoke. The air in that part of italy is exceptionally clean. Harris's piece reads as if it was written by a propagandist for a tobacco company: look at these ecofascists stopping honest people smoking in bars while they do even more damage with their wood fires.

QED

 

[lionking]

Good, thought provoking article. I will contemplate it more deeply in front of my fireplace tonight.

Seriously, he makes good points about irrational beliefs. He could probably have made the same point about driving as against public transport.

 

[Craig B]

... He could probably have made the same point about driving as against public transport.

Don't give him ideas! Goddam bus lanes and streetcar tracks make honest car drivers go bananas with frustration and run over kids and senior citizens. It's the fault of these pesky econuts.

ETA For a really thought provoking article by Harris, read http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-torture_b_8993.html. The question of irrational beliefs and their effect on the ethics of decision making is prominent in this disquisition too.

 

[Sophronius]

I fully agree with Harris in essence, though the fireplace example did not work for me. I would like to think that this is because I am rational enough to not be averse to facts that oppose things I cherish, but the fact of the matter is probably that I did not cherish fireplaces enough in the first place.

He is fully right that non-religious people are just as irrational about anything that they cherish, however. Just try discussing politics with people who are interested in politics. Convincing them of anything is a losing battle most of the time. Or heck, just ask any group of people whether there is an iq difference between races or sex: Just asking the question is likely to get people to yell at you.

 

[eight bits]

First disclsoure: I personally rarely if ever burn wood, so I don't have a dog in the fight.

I don't sense any disbelief of "science." I would like to see some of the underlying research, but I trust Harris to have summarized it fairly. I have also known since grade school that burned wood and associated products reliably contain carcinogens. Closely related fires (autumn leaf burning) have been regulated near where I live for decades.

I certainly don't see any parallel to religious thinking. I have never met anybody who thinks that there is a Wood Fairy who makes the smoke go away. Nor I have met any mono-Wood-Fairyists who mount suicide bombing missions to eradicate triune-Wood-Fairyists.

There also seems to be some resistance to economic thinking on Haris' own part. If there is a neighborhood effect, then why are chimney "scrubbers" not discussed? Why only banning? That's also relevant to the supposed effects on children - part of the point of a chimeny is to keep the smoke out of the heated space. Why is this not happening, in Harris' view?

That last question assumes that what appears to be correlational evidence does reflect causation. I do not simply trust Harris on that, without seeing his work. Too often, correlation is not causation.

Perhaps the resistance Harris notices from other people is reluctance to hand over "oughts" authority to experts on "is." Last disclosure: I have never been impressed with Harris' recycled utilitarian ethics.

Harris reports that he took his quasi-survey among people at social functions that Harris attends. It's a safe bet that such people know the rudiments of American legal and political argumentation. The term "burden of proof" is used in such circles in its proper sense: the party seeking a behavioral change must establish the facts that motivate the attempt to change. The other party need not speak until the moving party has met this burden.

In this case, the moving party is Harris, as an objective matter of fact, having nothing to do with a fantasy "disposition to disbelieve" him. It is plainly and simply the rules of the game as it is played in his neighbohood. Which, BTW, is another difference between those who want to vet his science, and those who wish to redefine biology as Genesis 1-3.

 

[asydhouse]

First disclsoure: I personally rarely if ever burn wood, so I don't have a dog in the fight.

I don't sense any disbelief of "science." I would like to see some of the underlying research, but I trust Harris to have summarized it fairly. I have also known since grade school that burned wood and associated products reliably contain carcinogens. Closely related fires (autumn leaf burning) have been regulated near where I live for decades.

I certainly don't see any parallel to religious thinking. I have never met anybody who thinks that there is a Wood Fairy who makes the smoke go away. Nor I have met any mono-Wood-Fairyists who mount suicide bombing missions to eradicate triune-Wood-Fairyists. There also seems to be some resistance to economic thinking on Haris' own part. If there is a neighborhood effect, then why are chimney "scrubbers" not discussed? Why only banning? That's also relevant to the supposed effects on children - part of the point of a chimeny is to keep the smoke out of the heated space. Why is this not happening, in Harris' view?

That last question assumes that what appears to be correlational evidence does reflect causation. I do not simply trust Harris on that, without seeing his work. Too often, correlation is not causation.

Perhaps the resistance Harris notices from other people is reluctance to hand over "oughts" authority to experts on "is." Last disclosure: I have never been impressed with Harris' recycled utilitarian ethics.

Harris reports that he took his quasi-survey among people at social functions that Harris attends. It's a safe bet that such people know the rudiments of American legal and political argumentation. The term "burden of proof" is used in such circles in its proper sense: the party seeking a behavioral change must establish the facts that motivate the attempt to change. The other party need not speak until the moving party has met this burden.

In this case, the moving party is Harris, as an objective matter of fact, having nothing to do with a fantasy "disposition to disbelieve" him. It is plainly and simply the rules of the game as it is played in his neighbohood. Which, BTW, is another difference between those who want to vet his science, and those who wish to redefine biology as Genesis 1-3.

That's obviously not what he was claiming. Not to accuse you of strawmanery, but that's a misdirect. He's talking about resistance to facts that contradict favoured behaviour, and simply drawing the analogy with the resistance put up by the religious. Skeptics pity the poor superstitious resistors, but might not see their own resistance. The article is just a chance for us to observe our own resistance in practice, if one happens to have that cosy association with wood fires.

That said, I think the rest of your post is cogent and worthwhile provisos on accepting the details in the article. Thanks.

 

[marplots]

This reminds me of telling people about the soup of bacteria we live in (and that live in us).

I didn't get any reaction to the info at all. Sounds good to me. But I'm not health conscious and I smoke, so I didn't have a dog in the hunt to start out with - the piece assumes a kind of mindset his dinner guests apparently share about wood fires as a kind of "good" instead of just a kind of chemistry.

 

[Mister Agenda]

It took me some time to accept global warming. My experience had been that 'science scares' usually have some substance but often turned out to err on the side of doom. It's the kind of thing my father used to go on about (no point in saving for college, there won't be any colleges when you're grown, just a polluted wasteland), although he's moved on to being more worried about me not being prepared for the Rapture. I realized the scope of the problem if true and the massive nature of any attempt to prevent it. I really wanted climatologists to be wrong about this.

It didn't help that journalists almost always went with the most dire predictions, which often failed to materialize. 'Email-gate' was handled appallingly. We had some cooler-than-expected years which I now hear weren't anticipated because climate models didn't take the increased particulate output of India and China into account...how did they miss THAT? What else are they missing?

But it's 2013, sea levels have risen faster than predicted, the northern polar cap has shrunk dramatically (although Antarctic sea ice has expanded, possibly due to melting in the interior); so while I may still be resistant to confidence in the details of climatological predictions, overall the preponderance of evidence is not only on the side of the world getting warmer (which I accepted years ago) but that it will continue to do so. It won't be the end of civilization, but it will be a rough ride, whether we cripple our economies stopping it or adapting to it.

Of course, I don't have God fixing it to fall back on if all other objections fail. I do have some hope for technological solutions that won't cost 10 trillion dollars to implement.

 

[asydhouse]

It took me some time to accept global warming. My experience had been that 'science scares' usually have some substance but often turned out to err on the side of doom. It's the kind of thing my father used to go on about (no point in saving for college, there won't be any colleges when you're grown, just a polluted wasteland), although he's moved on to being more worried about me not being prepared for the Rapture. I realized the scope of the problem if true and the massive nature of any attempt to prevent it. I really wanted climatologists to be wrong about this.

It didn't help that journalists almost always went with the most dire predictions, which often failed to materialize. 'Email-gate' was handled appallingly. We had some cooler-than-expected years which I now hear weren't anticipated because climate models didn't take the increased particulate output of India and China into account...how did they miss THAT? What else are they missing?

But it's 2013, sea levels have risen faster than predicted, the northern polar cap has shrunk dramatically (although Antarctic sea ice has expanded, possibly due to melting in the interior); so while I may still be resistant to confidence in the details of climatological predictions, overall the preponderance of evidence is not only on the side of the world getting warmer (which I accepted years ago) but that it will continue to do so. It won't be the end of civilization, but it will be a rough ride, whether we cripple our economies stopping it or adapting to it.

Of course, I don't have God fixing it to fall back on if all other objections fail. I do have some hope for technological solutions that won't cost 10 trillion dollars to implement.

Not to get into the politics of it all, but it seems logical to me that vested interests and dull-minded politicians have caused such a delay in responding to the problem that it's going to cost a lot more to rectify the damage than it would have cost to implement some reasonable adjustments in practice, and the development of cleaner technologies, if the science had been taken seriously 20 years ago. Their propaganda was what delayed your realisation of the actuality.

I find it hard to believe that the same amount of money that's been spent on nuclear power would not have borne far more fruit if invested in research in tidal and wave power systems etc.

An example of a cultural instance of the same phenomenon as Harris is talking about in the article linked to in the OP.

 

[Humes fork]

Interesting article, and certainly new information. But I don't feel any resistence to accepting this information. I am not emotionally invested in the viewpoint that burning wood is a non-dangerous thing.

 

[marplots]

Interesting article, and certainly new information. But I don't feel any resistence to accepting this information. I am not emotionally invested in the viewpoint that burning wood is a non-dangerous thing.

Me too, but I still accept his point and do not think myself immune to emotional attachments to mistaken beliefs. Interestingly, I can even flip between belief and unbelief in matters such as, "I am attractive, and witty" - at times thinking this so and when pressed, knowing it isn't.

Perhaps the difference comes in how deeply we spread the manure around. I don't think I'm so emotionally attached to a false belief that I would blow myself up over it. At least I hope not.

 

[Humes fork]

Me too, but I still accept his point and do not think myself immune to emotional attachments to mistaken beliefs. Interestingly, I can even flip between belief and unbelief in matters such as, "I am attractive, and witty" - at times thinking this so and when pressed, knowing it isn't.

Perhaps the difference comes in how deeply we spread the manure around. I don't think I'm so emotionally attached to a false belief that I would blow myself up over it. At least I hope not.

Of course we all get emotionally attached to beliefs and viewpoints. It's part of being (a non-psychopathic) human. However, I've always thought that part of the point of science and skepticism is to focus on the process, not the conclusion. Steven Novella puts it down well:

Part of the point of science and skepticism is to transcend this basic human psychology by investing in a process, not a conclusion – the process of science. It is better to listen to whatever logic and evidence says is most likely to be true, rather than what we wish to be true or whichever “side” we have already invested in. We also recognize that many scientific topics are very complex, and require a large body of specialized knowledge in order to know and understand the relevant evidence. This is why we look to expert opinion to help us make sense of complex questions, and why a consensus of expert opinion should not be casually tossed aside.

Do you think that makes sense?

 

[Pup]

Interesting article, and certainly new information. But I don't feel any resistence to accepting this information. I am not emotionally invested in the viewpoint that burning wood is a non-dangerous thing.

It didn't even seem new to me. I guess it depends on the individual, but I was already familiar with such regulations in Colorado for fireplaces and wood stoves, and in other US western states: http://www.bouldercounty.org/family/healthyhome/pages/cowoodburnregs.aspx

Those new outdoor wood-burning boiler furnaces are controversial too. Some neighbors (not anywhere close, fortunately) have them, and they smoke like crazy. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see increasingly strict laws about them.

So this is a problem that regulators are already wrestling with, as the population becomes more crowded and wood-burning becomes less a mainstream heating method that everyone is willing to put up with the side effects of, and more of a luxury.

It would be hard to pick a topic that someone, somewhere, isn't already suffering from and therefore regulating, without descending into silly-sounding topics that no one is suffering from and may never suffer from, like, I dunno, the bio-hazards of too many people discarding toenail clippings in the gutter, or something. But once one picks a real topic, then it's not hypothetical any more, and one can look at real regulators struggling with real issues, based on research.

 

[marplots]

(some snipped)

Do you think that makes sense?

Yes, I think it does.

 

[Apathia]

Reminds me of the unhygienic and filthy practice of kissing.
Science isn't going to stop anyone I know from wallowing in disgusting oral activities!

 

[Frozenwolf150]

I don't have emotional investment in wood-burning. I've known for a long time that it's inefficient, dangerous, and unnecessary for heating one's home. Growing up, we used the fireplace only a couple of times and found it was more trouble than it was worth.

I do however have faith in completely irrational things, such as:

* Faith in the good of humanity.
* Faith that we will one day find a way to coexist peacefully.
* Faith that our best days are yet to come.
* Trust in the maturity and understanding of others.
* Faith that my personal endeavors will amount to something.

Whenever I encounter something that proves any of these untrue, I can't help but be conscious of what's going through my head. I feel sick enough that I want to give up completely, though I'm never able to do this. I want to keep believing them, and there will always be part of me that does, despite the fact that they've been challenged in so many ways.

 

[asydhouse]

I don't have emotional investment in wood-burning. I've known for a long time that it's inefficient, dangerous, and unnecessary for heating one's home. Growing up, we used the fireplace only a couple of times and found it was more trouble than it was worth.

I do however have faith in completely irrational things, such as:

* Faith in the good of humanity.
* Faith that we will one day find a way to coexist peacefully.
* Faith that our best days are yet to come.
* Trust in the maturity and understanding of others.
* Faith that my personal endeavors will amount to something.

Whenever I encounter something that proves any of these untrue, I can't help but be conscious of what's going through my head. I feel sick enough that I want to give up completely, though I'm never able to do this. I want to keep believing them, and there will always be part of me that does, despite the fact that they've been challenged in so many ways.

I know how you feel! But this is not a simple either or condition we're in. For what it's worth, despite many times being the victim of selfish/opportunistic people, I have far more experience of people being kind and caring and helpful. When you think about it, if most people were not decent and kind, we'd have no functioning civilisation!

THANKS HUMES FORK for the Steven Novella quote: very nicely put, and precisely what we need to remember. It's the process that's going to be everlasting; any results of the process could alter as time goes on.

And, APATHIA, I think kissing is a great way of inoculating ourselves!

Isn't it?

 

[TimCallahan]

We use our fireplace about four times a year. I also barbecue a few times every summer. I suspect, if I only smoked cigarettes a few days every year, I would be unlikely to get lung cancer. Of course, given the addictive nature of nicotine, such a rare use of cigarettes is unlikely. I am quite fortunate never to have had the slightest desire to smoke. However, I suspect that were someone only to smoke a pipe, and that only occasionally, their lung cancer risks would drop greatly. So, I will continue to occasionally barbecue in the summer and use our fireplace on a few occasions in the winter with a reasonably clear conscience that I'm not giving either myself or my neighbor's children cancer.

Still I do see Sam Harris' point about the romantic attachment to fireplaces getting in the way of clear thinking and that we all have such attachments. Thus, while we should try to correct irrational thinking, we shouldn't look down our noses at those enmeshed in it.