Hyperbole has its place, but one should be careful not to sound factual when trying to engage in hyperbole, because it can leave you making statements you don’t want to make.
If you say that X is just as bad as Z, then you are in essence saying that Z is no worse than X. This sounds relatively simple and straightforward, but people seem not to remember it.
I could use drunk driving as an example, or various legal terms, but since it relates to something else I am working on, I will focus on tobacco and smoking. It’s here I see this a lot.
Due to a recent study, a bunch of articles have come out pointing out the alleged dangers of “thirdhand smoke” which is the residue left over on clothes and surfaces due to smoking. Whether this actually represents a significant danger to health is still up for debate. We enter an entirely different ballpark with headlines like “Third-Hand Smoke Just as Deadly as First-Hand Smoke” or “Third-Hand Smoke Just as Lethal as First-Hand Smoke.”
Are we really prepared to say “Smoking is no more dangerous than contact with clothes with smoke residue”? Because if you’re not, saying “Third-hand smoke is just as deadly as first-hand smoke” is at best grossly misleading.
This was an issue when I was younger. The dangers of second-hand smoke were just coming out. It just didn’t seem to be enough to say “Second-hand smoke is dangerous” but it had to be a level of danger comparable to first-hand smoke, which it just isn’t. This was obvious to my fifth grade self. It doesn’t pass the laugh test. The difference between breathing something in directly compared to breathing something that is in a room? That’s just not comparable. And having been a smoker, and having lived with a smoker while not being one myself, I can tell you with absolute certainty that is true.
And the people making the claims know it. Nobody would ever tell someone “If your husband smokes, you might as well smoke to” which is the obvious implication of equivalent danger. Nor would anybody say “Hey, Father of Two, you might as well smoke inside because they’re getting poisoned anyway.”
About the closest the statement comes to being true is saying “If you’re a smoker, you’re still putting yourself at greater risk because you’re compounding first-hand and second-hand and third-hand smoke. And if you’re willing to argue that the actual act of smoking is only 1/3 of the danger, have at it. But nobody really believes that.
This sort of hyperbole matters a great deal. Yes, it can be useful when it comes to trying to pass smoking bans. The more dangerous second-hand smoke is presented as being, the more justified such rules are. But they also come at a cost, if you think to follow them to their logical conclusion. If third-hand smoke really is that dangerous, it’s a justification to revoke child custody. Because if a five year old living with a smoker is the equivalent of a five year old smoking, why not?
Absolutism has served the anti-smoking movement well for the most part. The argument, over and over again that “There is no smoking that is okay” has had an effect. It also has the benefit of being true, insofar as you’re not saying “All smoking is equally dangerous” as the argument has sometimes turned on. Smoking lights is just as dangerous as smoking reds. Or it’s just as dangerous because you’ll smoke more of the lights. But smoking less isn’t actually any safer than smoking more. We’re just not prepared to say anything is less likely to kill you, even if we might say that something is more likely to kill you.
All of this turns to ecigarettes, which I will be posting about again next week. Suffice it to say, arguments are being made that vaping is “just as dangerous as smoking.” Unfortunately I think “zero social tolerance” has extended a bridge too far in this case, but a quick gut-check to anyone making that statement is “How would you respond to a tobacco company saying that as far as we know, smoking is no more hazardous to your health than vaping.”?
I have more to say about hyperbole than I do about smoking.
One of the most striking linguistic trends in viral media (and the one most likely to annoy people like me) is that everything and anything becomes hyperbole. Everything is awesome, best thing ever, mind-blowing, etc.
I know this is meant to be playful and harmless but for some reason it really bothers me and has the opposite effect on me. Same with gifs. I dislike gifs extremely.Report
I believe that ten years from now, animated gif will be viewed like blinking text came to be viewed after a few year.Report
One hopes!
I am just curious about what the sociological-linguistic-cultural origins of social media hyperbole are.
I am more of a downworthy kind of guy.Report
I am just curious about what the sociological-linguistic-cultural origins of social media hyperbole are.
It’s a form of advertising.Report
Fish you, Chris
🙂Report
Hyperbole! I do it literally all the time, constantly, and it’s totally the best.Report
No, it’s worse than Hitler!Report
UghReport
Sometime on the last year, it became standard for every story advertisement on the Internet to include the word “shocking.” It took about three clicks to become totally desensitized to the word, and begin automatically ignoring every such headline. I wonder how it will escalate from there?Report
i see it a lot more in headlines than display ads, unless we’re talking about those outbrain story nests that are seemingly at the bottom of every suggested content feed on the internet these days. but it seems to be more like “the shocking secret that blah blah blah doesn’t want you to know!” where blah blah blah is whatever the readership’s version of the illuminati is.Report
If instead of shocking it has shocked, shocked, it’s a George Will column. I think it’s the only movie he’s ever seen.Report
Personally I’m hoping for an arms race of counter-signalling which leads to headlines totally downplaying the contents of their articles.
This post on the FDA approving a cure for ageing may be worth reading if you really have nothing better to doReport
My husband has the same issue about resumes. He refuses to pad his, and when people realize, he really did/knows the stuff on his resume,” it’s never fails to impress.Report
Well, some things are, but not everything.Report
Without actually knowing anything about the danger of third-hand smoke, etc., your argument is measuring risk on the wrong scale.
No one actually cares about th relative danger of various forms of smoking. They care about the absolute health risk. If (numbers obv made up) direct smoking gives you 99 cancer points and 3rd hand smoking gives you 33 cancer points, but it only takes 10 cancer points to actually get cancer, then the two really are equally dangerous. The fact that direct smoking is extra bad on some arbitrary scale doesn’t really concern me as much as the fact that, in my made-up example, I’ve still got cancer.Report
More or less, but…
No one actually cares about the relative danger of various forms of smoking. They care about the absolute health risk
Most people don’t know what absolute risk *is*, and they talk an awful lot about relative dangers… so I quibble with that part.Report
The cancer risk for all smoking is relative, though, and not absolute. People smoke and live to 90. It’s about the various odds that a bad thing will happen to you, which bad thing, and how bad the thing is.Report
Or, if you want to look at it as the “maximum health risk” or “the worst that can happen” and say that first-through-third hand smoking has the same MHR and therefore are “equally dangerous”… and that relative risk is unimportant… well I consider that view blinkered because it really does mean that if you live with a smoker, you might as well smoke yourself.
I’m not saying that the MHR isn’t important. But the worst that can happen is quite secondary to the odds of it happening.
Otherwise, being born comes with a risk of cancer. Lung cancer. Being a soldier and being a solar panel installer are both equally bad because you can die or be injured on both jobs. Driving with and without a seatbelt are equally bad because you can die in a car accident either way. Hell, driving drunk and driving sober are both equally bad. That’s just not a helpful prism through which to evaluate the issue, in my opinion.Report
To the extent that you’re talking about smoking in particular, I suspect you’re right–direct smoking and third-hand smoking are probably on opposite sides of whatever risk thresholds exist (since if they were actually equally risky everyone would be dead) (note: not intended as a factual statement).
However, to the extent that you’re trying to establish a general principle, I think my caveat is important. “Getting hit in the head with a 1 ton weight is just as dangerous as getting hit in the head with a 2 ton weight.” Is this accurate? In some sense, the 2 ton weight is twice as bad (kinetic energy, ease of identification of remains, etc). Can I reverse it and say “getting hit with a 2 ton weight is no worse than getting hit with a 1 ton weight?” Well, sure. The relevant threshold is death, not degree of kinetic energy transfer, so they’re both equally bad in that sense.
I guess my basic point is that there is no general principle to be established here, and it sounds like you’re trying to make a more general point than just about tobacco.Report
EB, my general principle is that if you’re not willing to say that Z is no more dangerous than X, then you shouldn’t say X is just as dangerous as Z.
I am perfectly willing to say that a 2-ton weight falling on you isn’t generally more dangerous than a 1-ton weight falling on you.Report
BTW, EB, I loved your comment. My first response was too short because I wanted to respond to it while I was waiting in line at Sheetz.Report
They care about the absolute health risk.
Indeed, and exposure makes an impact as well. To piggy-back on your example, if a typical non-smoker gets exposed to three instances of third-hand-smoke each day, then it becomes just as dangerous as direct smoking from a public-health perspective. There was a lot of hyperbole with second-hand-smoke, to be sure, but one of the sane arguments was that a smoker dining with a few of his friends and smoking could be doing more damage to others (in aggregate) than to himself.Report
Exposure matters mostly on the basis of relative danger. The more exposure you have, the greater the danger. Which is why the difference between first, second, and third-hand is significant.
I will grant that the dynamics would change if it could be demonstrated that second hand smoke is actually doing as much damage in the overall as smoking, but the numbers we have do not suggest that to be the case. The most obvious metrics I can find are lung cancer and heart disease, where it’s about 10:1.
Which absolutely sucks if you’re one of the non-smokers who got cancer from smokers, but suggests that the primary public health danger is to the smokers themselves.Report
The most obvious metrics I can find are lung cancer and heart disease, where it’s about 10:1.
Fair point, it’s probably unlikely that a person is habitually smoking with 10 non-smokers. That said, back when smoking was allowed in bars or even at work, that second-hand risk could really add up.Report
It’s the end of the world as we know it,
and I feel fine.Report
Smoking is the perfect pleasure. It must be destroyed.Report
That’s the thing about secondhand smoke. The risk to reward ratio is infinite, because no one enjoys breathing other people’s smoke.Report
I should also mention that I am turned off by inflammed rhetoric and distrust it.Report
I had a roommate who insisted that one whiff of cigarette smoke, by itself, could cause lung cancer. I don’t think she was being hyperbolous, either. I think she really believed it, based on some theory that the cancer mutation can be effected by one introduction of the poison. For all I know, she might have been technically correct, although left out of her claim is any assessment of the likelihood of that happening.
Since neither she, nor I, nor our other roommate actually smoked, it was just something to argue about and not an imposition on any of us.
I don’t really have a point here, other than to relate an anecdote.Report
Sounds plausible to me, though tracing the cancer back to that one whiff of smoke would be impossible.Report
It’s certainly possible. The pertinent measure, though, is how much e-cigarette smoke raises a person’s risk of having cancer.Report
Will,
I remember that there were people who argued that secondhand smoking was *worse* than smoking because the person smoking benefitted from the filter while the secondhand smoke person just breathed in everything indiscriminately.Report
First they came for my cigs, then they came for my e-cigs!
Bastards.Report
@will-truman ,
Semi-relatedly, “Animal protein-rich diets could be as harmful to health as smoking”.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/04/animal-protein-diets-smoking-meat-eggs-dairy
The subheading in this case suggests actually that they are underselling the comparison though: “People under 65 who eat a lot of meat, eggs and dairy are four times as likely to die from cancer or diabetes, study suggests”.Report