This is an excellent diatribe of popular reasoning about alcohol use and abuse. I came to Medium to gather real world examples of lies, whether they are intentional, non-intentional, pernicious or not. This article is a cornucopia of truth and lies. Rich diggings so to speak.
Having lived through the lies around cigarettes, they also had such a rich tapestry of truth and lies about nicotine.
In both cases, the relevant science is hampered by the mix of truth and lie. There is little said that is nothing but the truth. Systematic scientific investigation is lacking.
I once both smoked and drank. I don't anymore.
For the case of cigarettes it was a day when one of my electrical engineers came into my office at CMU (in 1983) and told me that my cigarette smoke would kill the computer hard drives (smoke particles...true). That was the last cigarette I ever had.
Similarly for drinking. Just stopped. To set a better example. Both addictive habits took more than a year to put behind me after I stopped.
The science of lies says basically predications (what some people nowadays call 'framing') are the minimum true-false units in the brain, and that any object you can conceptualize can predicate another, and the predication itself can be made to change it's truth or falsity by additional predication (framing). The brain computes that way, and that is why it is impossible to really tell the truth which will be understood as truth to everybody. Or, tell a lie which will be guaranteed to be viewed as a truth or a lie to somebody.
Popular dialogue about alcohol (and cigarettes) really brings this fundamental property of human natural language and neocortical computation in clear view without political poisoning.
This article is a great study in hundreds of ways different people view the same statements or predications conceptualized by someone else.
We are a LONG way from understanding what alcohol (or cigarettes) do to the computations in the human cognitive brain, but one demand we can make of any theory we get is how alcohol or other mind drugs affect that computation. That would tell us whether, for instance, a little alcohol (or a smoke) makes you more creative, or whether some social computation occurs only with a little alcohol, or not. And when computations are disabled by intoxication or withdrawal, exactly what can you no longer readily compute and why.
We have near zero knowledge about such questions but by the way the mind works, such knowledge, if certain by the science, would likely give us predictability and control over alcohol use that we currently, as individuals, lack.
We did largely succeed with cigarettes, I think. Today's discussion of cigarettes is much different from the tapestry of lies similar to alcohol that we had in the 1950s-1980s. Self-imposed abstinence has largely worked, but what we don't know is, with better knowledge about alcohol, will we choose abstinence on that as well, or not.
Sorry for the diatribe on your nice diatribe, but yours was so cool I just couldn't stop my unmedicated self.
