Government sponsored study on alcohol doesn't stand up to scrutiny

Setting aside my bias about whether my large glass of wine last night was one drink or two, I find the claims in this post odd. None of the issues noted seem inherently problematic, and indeed several are as I would expect. Disclaimer: not an epidemiologist, although I do fit models to data and have seen more than a few epidemiology talks.

1: Asymmetric CIs aren't mysterious. Any parameter fit to anything beyond the simplest model and data will have asymmetric CIs. We often neglect this and assume a symmetric (normal) approximation, but in complex data you really should calculate the proper CIs.

2: The data in the age groups wouldn't be expected to be either fully dependent or independent. Looking at the data and assumptions that goes in, some affects all age groups, some only one, and there's model effects between groups (if you die due to alcohol at 30, you can't also die due to alcohol at 50). The CI size lying somewhere between independent and fully correlated is exactly what you'd expect there.

3. The last complaint is a more fair, but also common: most people who die are old, and most causes of death go up when you get old, so CIs get big when you have to subtract large numbers. More data is always welcome there, but also famously hard to get.

So, none of these seem like show stoppers to me, and the way some of them are presented in the post ("mysterious asymmetric CIs") seems to speak to a motivation to knock this study down.

I agree the stats methods in the paper are a bit thin, but I'm not sure how much of that is standard practice in the field. But I think that's a case for asking more detail, rather than denying the results out of hand.

<drug> consumers every time: it's actually not bad in moderate consumption/I can quit any time/medication is always a question of dosage

Looks to me like even taking meds for a prolonged amount of time shows you that to any problem you try to fix with externally administered chemistry always has a downside to deal with, too.

Please stop trying to frame your drug habit as a good thing, be it caffeine, weed or worse things like alcohol and beyond. Another one of those things where your mental health depends on you not understanding the problems you cause yourself.

Even the best people seem to go out of their way to rationalise (their own?) alcohol consumption. As a nowadays leading cause of cancer in many regions, and associated with dependency and other secondary negative outcomes, perhaps it is time to stop rationalising it?

And maybe also let off the rhetoric of "government sponsored" science, which is actually most science in many places. Written for views/clicks obviously. So tiering.

// Master of Science in Public Health

If there's no explanation of why the 70+ bucket has so much larger CI band, having that dominate the totals seems like very fair critique. At the very least, they should have presented another totals with the outlier removed to show the impact.

I am inclined to take Nassim's position as true, since it agrees with my desired beliefs: that moderate drinking is quite harmless, or if there are harms, they are outweighed by the benefits.

Modern medicine often gives us access to amazing drugs which have, in small print, a long list of associated, known, proven harms to our organs and health. The logic, as I understand it, is that the benefits of the drugs outweigh the harms.

The logic is not "that these drugs are harmless and possess only benefits".

I'll drink to that! Cheers!

Alcohol is a carcinogen, famous for causing various upper gastrointestinal cancers. It also isn't great for brain cells. Why are these reasons not enough to quit it?

If you want something to drink in the evenings, how about a cup of mild bancha green tea andor rooibos tea andor hibiscus tea? If you do, please get the loose leaf product only, never the bagged product, as the latter infuses microplastics.

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