Jenneral HQ

On Incredibly Botched Cost-Benefit Calculations

So one morbid hobby that I have is using QALY measures to calculate roughly how many people any single policy decision would kill. Thankfully I don’t get to indulge it much since most policies that I encounter aren’t completely terrible, but today, my friends, we have truly been blessed.

So the FDA recently imposed a bunch of e-cigarette regulations, including forbidding them from advertising true claims about how they are safer than cigarettes, stopping vape shops from helping their customers assemble and fix vapes, forbidding companies from making them safer or more pleasant to use, and having such a stringent and expensive review process that it’s pretty much the equivalent of banning them completely after a 2 year grace period.

Because when doing the cost-benefit calculations, they assigned no value to smokers who will die because they reverted back from vaping to smoking cigarettes.

Alright, lets do the math. Let’s do this very, very conservatively.

So we know that

smoking is associated with 1.9 fewer years of QALE for U.S. adults.

A reuters/ipsos poll tells us that 10% of US adults vape (

(i.e. 24.5 million of 245 million), and also provides us with this helpful graphic to work with:

(source)

From this we know that 30% of that 24.5 million has used it to successfully quit using conventional tobacco. That is 7.35 million people who used to smoke cigarettes, and then quit because of e-cigarettes.

Is vaping harmful? According to this post by the Scientific American,

Given the long and sorry list of harmful and toxic chemicals in cigarettes, vaping is almost certainly less dangerous to your health.

But also (from the same article):

There is evidence that e-cigs deliver some toxic stuff of their own such as formaldehyde (a known carcinogen), nitrosamines (linked to cancer) and lead (a neurotoxin). Though the toxicant levels of e-cigs may be “9–450 times lower than in cigarette smoke,” [emphasis mine] as this study suggests, levels of formaldehyde and metals have been found to be comparable to or higher than those found in conventional cigarettes. Silicate particles, which are a cause of lung disease, have also been found in e-cigarette vapors.

Hmm, so definitely less harmful than smoking, but by how much? Let’s lowball, like, a lot, and say that there’s only a 50% difference in harm levels between vapes and cigarettes (so that 1 vape session is as toxic as half of a cigarette). Realistically, the difference in safety between vapes and traditional cigarettes is likely much larger.

And let’s lowball a lot again, and say that only half of the 7.35 million people who used vapes to quit their smoking habit revert back to smoking cigarettes. So 3,675,000 people. And again, realistically, the number is likely larger than that.

(I’m sure that there are probably actual numbers for these, but I’m just too lazy to look them up. I may edit this later on to reflect research findings.)

Alright, it’s time for the math.

Our parameters:

1.9 fewer QALYs for American adult smokers
3,675,000 people reverting to smoking
50% risk difference between vaping and smoking

it’s fairly simple to calculate the damage in terms of QALY:

Plugging in our numbers gives us a total loss of 13,965,000 QALYs.

Assuming an average lifespan of 80 years, that’s a loss of 174,562.5 lives.

Remember that we’ve been pretty conservative in estimating our variables, so the actual cost in lives is likely much more. And also, this equation only accounts for people who started smoking e-cigarettes. So future Americans who start smoking because e-cigarettes stopped being commercially available are also not represented here.

So, yeah. The sheer stupidity of this is frankly rage-inducing. Please don’t do this if you do cost-benefit analyses professionally.

I’m reminded of this pretty good quote from the Discworld series:

“I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!”

“No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”

― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

The Turing Test

[Epistemic status: assume that I know absolutely nothing about computers.]

So I know that if a machine passes the Turing test, it means that it fools humans 50% of the time, right? At that point it emulates a human perfectly, and whether the interrogator chooses “correctly” is left to chance.

But imagine a machine that passes the test more than 50% of the time. Wouldn’t that be an interesting tool to realise and analyse inherent biases that humanity has about itself?

Maybe the machine will portray itself as having been shaped by childhood experiences more than most of us really are. Maybe the machine must exaggerate different traits in different cultures. Maybe we’ll realise that we’re all pretty boring when it comes down to it. The same way that characters in Serious Broody Literature™ are incredibly realised but my personality can pretty much be boiled down to “really, really likes naps”, maybe we’ll find that the archetype of the renaissance man or the “fully realized human” or whatever has only ever been an abstract ideal.

This is something that’s interesting to me, because humanity has always defined itself as being superior in all the ways that “count”, right? We’re the most intelligent species, the ones that are capable of abstract thought and symbolic language. We have that divine spark. It’s hard to find that upper bound on humanity when we are the definition of the upper bound, although one can argue that having something we made be the upper bound isn’t that much better.

And then, well, if we aren’t the best at being “human”, what then? How will we define ourselves, when programs can not only automate all our jobs, but can come up with more sublime poetry, more moving choreography, wittier social commentary? Will we let ourselves be defined by our sudden mediocrity?

Will we start put emphasis on the importance of that one thing that the system haven’t figured out perfectly yet? Imagine if, due to some inexplicable bug, the machine cannot answer convincingly the question “Why do you like the movie Mean Girls?” Imagine if, because of that, suddenly everyone is thinking Very Seriously about the movie Mean Girls and writing think-pieces about how the movie Mean Girls is the single most thorough interrogation about what being human entails.

Imagine if cults start up worshipping the holiness that is being able to be allergic to things, being able to get sick, having breakable skin and fragile bones and dying. A return to worshipping death would be kind of poetic.

And then the methods we’ll develop to get that percentage back down to 50% is also pretty fun to think about:

Interrogator: “So what do you do in your spare time?”

Player A: “I’m super into making origami models, because it’s soothing to me and I like making stuff with my hands, although making anything more substantial has always seemed daunting to me.”

Player B: “lol i smoke doobies and play overwatch”

Interrogator:

On Ethnoburbia

I’m writing my term paper on (so, reading a lot about) the Canadian ethnoburb – a relatively new subtype of suburb populated by newer, wealthier Asian immigrants.

I spent most of my life living in Don Mills and Scarborough, two very prominent Torontonian examples.

I’m reading about the ethnic shift in areas near Chinatown that my parents used to rent a basement in. When I still wrote my journals in Chinese as a very small girl.

I remember that even once we moved out from Chinatown, my parents would bus in on the weekends to buy groceries, since they were much cheaper there and it had selections of Chinese vegetables that weren’t available outside it.

I remember the first time a Chinese supermarket opened near where we lived, how much more convenient our lives got.

I’m reading about a place that our family used to go to for takeout a lot before it shut down. It’s located in the first Chinese shopping centre outside of Chinatown, and it’s a block away from where my parents still live. One that sparked massive protest by the then-mostly-white residents of Scarborough. It’s now mostly empty. (We still go to the dim-sum place next door though, pretty much every time I head back to Toronto. It’s really good.)

My parents tell me stories about the struggles they first faced here, and now I see them reflected in my textbooks. And suddenly it’s like I realize another facet to this whole personal-being-political thing.