What's the backstory to the "In defense of merit" paper? How did these 29 authors come together? It didn't just happen spontaneously....
It was Thursday night and we were chilling on the intellectual dark web. Jordan was torrenting the James Watson bootleg that just dropped. Pinker was like “You know what doesn’t matter in science anymore?” Cowen guessed “GRE scores?” but no and Lindsay said “the art of the blade?” and everyone was all wait how the fuck did he get back in here and by the time that got sorted it was bedtime but when Pinker dropped a truth bomb “merit” we knew there would be no sleep to be has for us that night.
@ct_bergstrom @pieist
It could be worse, as per this ad for Kents, with the famous Micronite FIlter:
https://tobacco-img.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/cigarettes/filter-safety-myths/kent-classic/kent_13.jpg
Hint: for some years, Micronite filters were asbetos, made in Lorillard factories with very high asbestosis rates.
Source: Robert Proctor, Golden Holocaust(2012)
Hell and damnation, I never knew. My mother smoked Kents for my whole childhood and presumably before. Sounds like they stopped years before she would have started smoking but I'm amazed I hadn't heard this.
It's beyond belief: even as far back as the 1910s there was reason to believe asbestos particle inhalation was dangerous. It's like leaded gas -- they continued to do it for years after the harms were known, because profit.
@pieist @ct_bergstrom
Golden Holocaust is one of the very best books on Big tobacco.
Kents with asbestos were sold 1952-56, p.344.
My review:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RUYZDLW23UHM7/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0520270169
@pieist @ct_bergstrom
My mother smoked Kents, and died of lung cancer (~63).
My father never smoked, died of mesothelioma (~74, generally asbestos-caused), but he'd run vehicle maintenance on a base in North Africa during WWII, and we lived on a farm, both possible asbestos exposures ... but after reading about this in Golden Holocaust, I've always wondered if it was a contributing factor.
@ct_bergstrom @pieist As a yacht racer[1], I can tell you that anyone who got a cigarette near a $5000 sail would quickly be keelhauled.
[1] OPB. Other people's boats.
@ct_bergstrom
(There's a bunch of these, amusingly at Stanford given one of their recent pratfalls. Several of them would served just about as well.) https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/reassuring-brand-names/merit/