I wrote a comment at econlog. The blog
author, Bryan Caplan, seems to meas a sympathetic person (with some less
sympathetic political ideas). Not least because he is a teetotaler! I came into
a discussion with a poster called Z, about the relative dangers of alcohol and sugar.
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The calorie counts are interesting, I think they make my point rather well - I hadn't thought they were that close.
I knew there are fewer calories in beer than in soda, but I meant that the damaging effects of alcohol more than makes up for it. In "moderation", the health effects are small anyway.
However, the cost of alcohol damage in a society is propotional to total use, not number of heavy users. Moderate drinking is harmful in practice, because alcohol-related accidents ("trauma" in the literature) are common in moderate drinkers as well. Also, it seems that when median consumption is low, high consumption is rarer as well. That's reasonable, when you think about it: The more the people around you drink, the easier it is for you to drink to excess as well. And conversely, if everyone you know is like me and Caplan, you will feel a little weird if you drink a lot.
That's one of the reasons I don't drink at all. I figure it's the best way to reduce harms related to heavy drinking (and moderate, too), especially in those closest to me.
But it would be hard to apply the same thinking to sugar. Alcohol is not really very useful, and easy to do completely without (ask me!), but sugar isn't. Also, part of the preventive effect of alcohol abstention comes from the moral challenge it poses. I believe that most people who use intoxicants feel at some level that they ought not to (whether that feeling is reasonable or not).
There is no similar idea about sugar, at least not very wide-spread. While people might feel that the sugar they eat is bad for them, only a few dieters feel genuinely guilty about it. Why should they? In one form or another your body needs sugar.
If people can be convinced that alcohol is beneficial for their health, it will come in the same category. They can more easily convince themselves that they're not just using it as an intoxicant. Consumption will then rise, and damages and overuse as well, for the reasons I've talked about.
So even though sugar is undoubtedly harmful in some similar ways, telling people to switch to beer is a bad idea, in my opinion.
I posted this comment on slashdot, I thought I'd copy it here, just as documentation for all the weird ideas I've had over the years. By the way, it's years since I visited the Technical Museum, my comment may make it look like I just visited. In case someone wondered.
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I though of an idea for a hearing aid the other day, and I wonder if something like this exists.
I was in the technical museum in Oslo when I came across an exhibit which was simply a table with a small vibrating metal dot in the middle, plus a plastic bowl beside it. As my hands touched that dot, I had an odd feeling of recognition. I found out why when I put the bowl on the dot (that was the intent of the exhibit). The bowl functioned as a loudspeaker, and I heard radio, a weather broadcast as I recall.
That set me thinking. When I just felt the vibrations, it was almost as if I could hear words. Fingertips are really sensitive, I wonder if it's possible to learn to "hear" that way with practice. Perhaps if the device is tuned to amplify the frequencies associated with speech, and to map it in such a way as to make best use of fingertip sensitivity.
And think of GSM compression. It builds a pretty sophisticated model of the resonance chambers in your head and throat. Surely there must be a way of representing that voice data as shapes and colours in such a way that deaf people could learn to understand it. After all, we have impressive knowledge about the sounds of human speech and how they are made. We have built computer programs to pick up the sounds of human speech and transcribe it into something like phonetic writing. Speech-to-text systems then make guesses about which words the sounds represents, but we can skip that last step, because deaf people's brains can certainly learn to make better guesses, even if they have been deaf from birth. We just need a real-time, visual way of efficiently transmitting the phonetic data.
Someone must have thought of it before.