Excellent post. I would add that SMA’s approach to reducing smoking-related harm has another defect that doesn’t require one to have a position on the question of how to model the benefits of smoking, which is their position on much safer, noncombustible forms of tobacco and nicotine use like vaping, nicotine pouches, and snus.
There’s plentiful evidence that all of these products hugely diminish risks to longevity, are the most effective known way to stop smoking, and have a major measurable impact on population-level disease incidence when widely available. An Our World in Data post from a few weeks ago summarizes the bulk of it, and I’ve also written a sequence on this for the EA forum. SMA describes vaping as a “way the tobacco industry is dodging the rules,” puts scare quotes around “safer” when discussing (and dismissing) its health benefits to people who smoke, and their incubatees appear to be lobbying against regulation that would make it more available while ignoring the countervailing evidence when confronted with it publicly.
I don’t have any reason to think SMA has anything but good intentions in helping people achieve better outcomes (health-related or otherwise) for their lives, but from the tone of their communications it appears that they are conflating hurting the tobacco industry with helping people that suffer because of the defects of their products. The idea that an industry that created a problem that causes so much death and suffering may, if properly regulated and incentivized, also be part of the solution to that problem appears to be beyond their moral imagination (or ambition, one might say) even though this approach seems to me pretty standard in other causes EA is interested in, like working with farmers and the meat industry towards progress in animal welfare or with fossil fuel companies to mitigate climate change.
Excellent post. I would add that SMA’s approach to reducing smoking-related harm has another defect that doesn’t require one to have a position on the question of how to model the benefits of smoking, which is their position on much safer, noncombustible forms of tobacco and nicotine use like vaping, nicotine pouches, and snus.
There’s plentiful evidence that all of these products hugely diminish risks to longevity, are the most effective known way to stop smoking, and have a major measurable impact on population-level disease incidence when widely available. An Our World in Data post from a few weeks ago summarizes the bulk of it, and I’ve also written a sequence on this for the EA forum. SMA describes vaping as a “way the tobacco industry is dodging the rules,” puts scare quotes around “safer” when discussing (and dismissing) its health benefits to people who smoke, and their incubatees appear to be lobbying against regulation that would make it more available while ignoring the countervailing evidence when confronted with it publicly.
I don’t have any reason to think SMA has anything but good intentions in helping people achieve better outcomes (health-related or otherwise) for their lives, but from the tone of their communications it appears that they are conflating hurting the tobacco industry with helping people that suffer because of the defects of their products. The idea that an industry that created a problem that causes so much death and suffering may, if properly regulated and incentivized, also be part of the solution to that problem appears to be beyond their moral imagination (or ambition, one might say) even though this approach seems to me pretty standard in other causes EA is interested in, like working with farmers and the meat industry towards progress in animal welfare or with fossil fuel companies to mitigate climate change.