On Heuristic Tradeoffs

[maradydd]

My friend Jenna is quitting smoking, on which I congratulate her unreservedly. Nicotine is a devilishly hard drug to kick; I managed, after countless false starts, to quit smoking, but I will probably leach nicotine into the soil long after I am dead. Note that I said I quit smoking but not nicotine; quitting smoking was, in the end, a matter of

Comments

[songblaze]

idk if I've mentioned it to you, but just so's you know - vaporizers are v. hazardous to my ability to breathe. I doubt you'd be rude about it, as you were always polite in the past with cigarette smoke, but I know some people don't realize that even the vaporizers can cause problems for asthmatics. And I'd probably eventually have issues with the nicotine if I was exposed to too much of that, but I haven't ever been in that situation (only been stuck in clouds of cigarette smoke in clubs and pubs and bars and whatnot, which made me really sick, which I believe you and Len opined was probably due to hypersensitivity to nicotine, but quite understandably none of us thought testing it was a good idea, with how badly it mucked with me! I really hate blacking out.)

On to other stuff. Yeah, the models we use for intersectional issues are decidedly imperfect. I think of them as something like a trend line on a chart - it doesn't show the lie of every data point, but it shows the general trend. (ugh, I think that's the right terminology, but I should have been asleep hours ago. Bad insomnia! Stupid autoimmune crap!)

[maradydd]

You're not the only one, actually! A few other people I know -- one an ex-smoker, one who's never smoked -- get a buzz off secondhand vapor, so if someone has a bad reaction, I go outside.

[songblaze]

Yeah, I have trouble even with the non-nicotine ones. Something in the vapor triggers me. But I do have stupidly sensitive lungs. Fortunately, they seem to have gotten a bit better since I left Philly.

I survived about an hour at Christmas inside the house of my aunt and uncle, who both smoke (though they've laid off smoking inside it seems like except in their bedroom). Thank heavens they've backed off, because I had to leave early a couple years ago due to the smoke coming out of the soft furnishings, and it causes A Thing with that side of the family if someone who is physically in a location where they can come to a thing doesn't. I only went to Christmas because I was told we'd be eating outside...which we eventually did, but the food wasn't actually ready when it was supposed to be, and they only had one heater for outside, which wasn't actually sufficient for the group. We of course sat my grandma and my mother (who both get cold very easily) right under the heaters. I wished I'd brought a heavier jacket, as I hadn't been thinking about eating outside and only had my thin raincoat. If I'd been clever, I could have borrowed something warmer from my mom, but...I didn't think of it until we got to my uncle's.

Anyhow, before we left Philly, that would have had me outside and huffing off my inhaler and coughing, where this time I did need the inhaler but was just...uncomfortable, a bit tight...instead of having a more severe attack.

[maradydd]

Propylene glycol can be very drying to the throat, which I imagine could set off a chain of responses leading to an asthma attack. (OTOH it's also a carrier liquid for nebulizers and some atomizers, which I bet makes finding the right asthma medication a special hell for some people.)

[songblaze]

It's possible. It could be any one of the dozens of ingredients, though. I'm somewhat infamous for how sensitive my lungs can be. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a common flavor/scent agent that I react to, either, as some scents (especially artificial ones) have been a trigger for me since I was in my teens. The worst asthma attacks I had back then were because of a new shampoo.

[maradydd]

And yeah, "statistical models predict trends, for which there will always be outliers" is one of those basic numeracy skills that has somehow managed to escape a lot of people. A few months ago I was reading the blog of a high school math teacher who was pretty horrified to find out that many of his colleagues interpreted "students in certain socioeconomic groups are at risk of worse educational outcomes" to mean "all students in those socioeconomic groups should be put in remedial classes, regardless of their previous outcomes." Literally, people were arguing to take black honors students out of honors classes because the teachers didn't understand what statistics are for.

[songblaze]

oh FFS...that's...that's...AGH.

I don't even have words for it. The level of stupid, it hurts. It hurts.

By that kind of thinking, my mother - who grew up in a poor Irish-Catholic household - should never have gotten into any honors classes. She was a runner up for the National Merit Scholarships.