Perhaps this is silly of me, but the single word in the article that made me indignantly exclaim “What!?” was when he called CFAR “overhygienic.”
I mean… you can call us nerdy, weird in some ways, obsessed with productivity, with some justification! But how can you take issue with our insistence [Edit: more like strong encouragement!] that people use hand sanitizer at a 4-day retreat with 40 people sharing food and close quarters?
[Edit: The author has clarified above that “overhygienic” was meant to refer to epistemic hygiene, not literal hygiene.]
But how can you take issue with our insistence [Edit: more like strong encouragement!] that people use hand sanitizer at a 4-day retreat with 40 people sharing food and close quarters?
I would guess >95% of 4-day retreats where 40 people are sharing food and close quarters don’t include recommendations about the usage of hand sanitizer.
Edited to reflect the fact that, no, we certainly don’t insist. We just warn people that it’s common to get sick during the workshop because you’re probably getting less sleep and in close contact with so many other people (many of whom have recently been in airports, etc.). And that it’s good practice to use hand sanitizers regularly, not just for your own sake but for others’.
Sure, here’s a CDC overview: http://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-hand-sanitizer.html
They seem to be imperfect but better than nothing, and since people are surely not going to be washing their hands every time they cough, sneeze, or touch communal surfaces, supplementing normal handwashing practices with hand sanitizer seems like a probably-helpful precaution.
But note that this has turned out to be an accidental tangent since the “overhygienic” criticism was actually meant to refer to epistemic hygiene! (I am potentially also indignant about the newly clarified criticism, but would need more detail from Sam to find out what, exactly, about our epistemic hygiene he objects to.)
But how can you take issue with our insistence [Edit: more like strong encouragement!] that people use hand sanitizer at a 4-day retreat with 40 people sharing food and close quarters?
So, I have noticed that I am overhygienic relative to the general population (when it comes to health; not necessarily when it comes to appearance), and I think that’s standard for LWers. I think this is related to taking numbers and risk seriously; to use dubious leftovers as an example, my father’s approach to food poisoning is “eh, you can eat that, it’s probably okay” and my approach to food poisoning is “that’s only 99.999% likely to be okay, no way is eating that worth 10 micromorts!”
Isn’t food poisoning non-fatal a vast majority of the time? Or were you using a broad definition of “okay?”
Yeah; obviously missing a day or two to just getting ill is a significant cost worth avoiding, but if you expect to live a long while the chance of death typically ends up being more important in terms of total cost (because it’s worse than it is rarer, I believe).
Interestingly, I think that when I’m not at work, I’m probably less hygienic than the average population–the implicit thought process is kind of like “oh my god, I have washed my hands every 5 minutes for 12 hours straight, I can’t stand the thought of washing my hands again until I next have to go to work.” I do make some effort at CFAR workshops but it’s ughy.
I think rating eating a dubious leftover as 10 micromorts comes from not taking numbers seriously.
If you really think it’s in that order of magnitude I would like to see the reasoning behind it.
I think rating eating a dubious leftover as 10 micromorts comes from not taking numbers seriously. If you really think it’s in that order of magnitude I would like to see the reasoning behind it.
The base rate of death due to food-borne illness in the US is 10 micromorts a year; there’s a conversion from ‘per year’ numbers to ‘per act’ numbers, the issue of how much comes from food starting off bad and how much comes from food going bad, and the issue of how good you are at detecting a pathogen risk by smell/sight, and I fudged all three as coming out to 1 when combined. (You could also add in the risk of days lost to sickness in terms of micromorts, instead of separate units, but that would probably be unnecessarily confusing.)
The real point, though, was to demonstrate how you can agree on facts but disagree on values; even if we both put the same probability on the risk of death, one of us is moved by it and the other isn’t. (As well, I have a specialized vocabulary specifically targeted at dealing with these tiny risks of death that he doesn’t use as much.) That’s what ‘overhygienic’ means to me: “look at how far they’re willing to go to avoid death!”
The AIDS risk of unprotected sex at a one-night stand is also a risk on the order of 10 micromorts and quite many people do care about it. (For values such as infection risk at 0.1% if the person has AIDS and 1% of the population having AIDS)
The real point, though, was to demonstrate how you can agree on facts but disagree on values;
But there no good reason to believe that there’s agreement on facts.
Plenty of people do believe that being overhygienic leads to an increase in allergies and isn’t healthy.
there’s a conversion from ‘per year’ numbers to ‘per act’ numbers, the issue of how much comes from food starting off bad and how much comes from food going bad, and the issue of how good you are at detecting a pathogen risk by smell/sight, and I fudged all three as coming out to 1 when combined. (
I don’t think that’s reasonable. It seems to me like all those factors are under 1.
The highest of the factors in the US seem to be Salmonella, Toxoplasma gondii and Listeria. All bacteria that you can kill if you cook your food.
The forth factor is Norovirus and there I’m not even sure that food going back is an usual way of food getting poisoned. It’s rather about uncleanness.
That’s what ‘overhygienic’ means to me: “look at how far they’re willing to go to avoid death!”
I don’t think that most people who are overhygineic are that way because they follow a rational strategy but because of emotional driven fear of uncleanness.
How large is your sample size? (I would consider myself around average as far as hygiene goes, but my sense of the average level of hygiene of the general population may be somewhat skewed by hanging around someone who regularly picks food up off of the ground and eats it, so...)
I’ve met probably ~100 LWers in person, but I notice that I was falling prey to confirmation / availability bias when writing the grandparent post. When I met up with Fluttershy for lunch in a restaurant, he took out the bottle of hand sanitizer he kept in his backpack, and that counted more heavily in my memory than the Seattle LW game night / group meal hosted at jsalvatier’s place, where if I recall correctly people washed their hands in the sink if they wanted to, rather than there being some sort of explicit cleanliness norm, despite there being two LWers at the first event and ~twelve at the second. I can’t recall a time when I thought a LWer was behaving in an obviously unclean manner, though, but that’s rare enough anyway among people I’m around that I don’t know how much evidence that is. (Thinking of the group I’m close to with the least overall healthiness, as evidenced by the prevalence of drinking, smoking, and (I’m pretty sure) promiscuity, even they throw out unrefrigerated leftovers with meat in it because of the influence of one of the members with a food service job (and thus the associated food safety training).)
Meeting you for lunch was fun! Normally, I would have just gone to the restroom to wash my hands; the reason I had left a bottle of hand sanitizer on the table for was that I had wanted to be able to clean my hands without getting up from the table immediately after sitting down, given that some people think that getting up from the table is slightly rude. Using hand sanitizer just happened to be a more visible method of cleaning my hands than washing my hands in the restroom would have been.
On a related note, at the LW meetup after lunch, I remember that Frances passed a bottle of hand sanitizer around the table while we were in the middle of a conversation about how being hygienic was a good thing. I appreciated that.
Can you try to summarize your rules of thumb on consumption of leftovers, and describe to what extent you think they’ve got a rational basis?
(I discovered last year that I’m actually more lax about it than some people I know, so I’m interested in what you and others think is risky versus safe behavior in this regard, and what that’s based on. I guess when I was growing up we tended not to have a lot of leftovers, so it never came up, and I think I may lack an adequate fear of food poisoning as a result.)
I am far more lax than most people I know also—when I was growing up there were leftovers, but we couldn’t afford to waste them unless they were really not good; I was still broke in college and would not turn my nose up at things other people were wary of. I have never been completely stupid about it, but I am not terribly afraid of food poisoning either, mostly because it barely registers on the list of risky activities I should worry about. (For comparison, I am convinced that my lack of driving skill would seriously injure myself or others, and so I don’t drive, which apparently makes me weird.)
I have had food poisoning a handful of times—but mostly under conditions that even conscientiously hygienic people would consider fine… and once from dubious food while traveling, because really if you do not eat the street food you are wasting your airfare.
(gwillen, I swear I am not deliberately following you around!)
Can you try to summarize your rules of thumb on consumption of leftovers, and describe to what extent you think they’ve got a rational basis?
The primary things that come to mind are “if you notice anything off, dispose of it” and “store things in sealed containers with dates on post-it notes or written with dry erase markers,” but most of the stuff I pay attention to these days are food prep rules (since I very rarely have leftovers, and most of the things I consume take a long time to go bad).
But how can you take issue with our insistence that people use hand sanitizer at a 4-day retreat with 40 people sharing food and close quarters?
This is not something that would cross my mind if I was organizing such a retreat. Making sure people who handled food washed their hands with soap, yes, but not hand sanitizer. Perhaps this is a cultural difference between (parts of) US and Europe.
I think hand sanitizer is more feasible for practical reasons? Generally in the sorts of spaces where people gather for things like this, there is not a sink near the food. So I’m used to there being hand sanitizer at the beginning of the food line, not because hand sanitizer is great, but because it’s inconvenient and time consuming (and overbearing) to ask everyone to shuffle through the restroom to wash their hands before touching the food.
Not to mention that if people touch the bathroom door handle, sink handle, etc. after they washed their hands, they’ll get many of the germs they just washed off back onto their hands, whereas with hand sanitizer, all you need do is touch the pump and you’re good to go.
Perhaps this is silly of me, but the single word in the article that made me indignantly exclaim “What!?” was when he called CFAR “overhygienic.”
I mean… you can call us nerdy, weird in some ways, obsessed with productivity, with some justification! But how can you take issue with our insistence [Edit: more like strong encouragement!] that people use hand sanitizer at a 4-day retreat with 40 people sharing food and close quarters?
[Edit: The author has clarified above that “overhygienic” was meant to refer to epistemic hygiene, not literal hygiene.]
I would guess >95% of 4-day retreats where 40 people are sharing food and close quarters don’t include recommendations about the usage of hand sanitizer.
You insisted (instead of just offering)? I would have found it weird. And told you “No, thank you”, too.
Edited to reflect the fact that, no, we certainly don’t insist. We just warn people that it’s common to get sick during the workshop because you’re probably getting less sleep and in close contact with so many other people (many of whom have recently been in airports, etc.). And that it’s good practice to use hand sanitizers regularly, not just for your own sake but for others’.
So, people who commute by public transportation in a big city are just screwed, aren’t they? :-)
I don’t think so—not for people with a healthy immune system.
Is that recommendation based on concret evidence, if so, could you link sources?
Sure, here’s a CDC overview: http://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-hand-sanitizer.html They seem to be imperfect but better than nothing, and since people are surely not going to be washing their hands every time they cough, sneeze, or touch communal surfaces, supplementing normal handwashing practices with hand sanitizer seems like a probably-helpful precaution.
But note that this has turned out to be an accidental tangent since the “overhygienic” criticism was actually meant to refer to epistemic hygiene! (I am potentially also indignant about the newly clarified criticism, but would need more detail from Sam to find out what, exactly, about our epistemic hygiene he objects to.)
So, I have noticed that I am overhygienic relative to the general population (when it comes to health; not necessarily when it comes to appearance), and I think that’s standard for LWers. I think this is related to taking numbers and risk seriously; to use dubious leftovers as an example, my father’s approach to food poisoning is “eh, you can eat that, it’s probably okay” and my approach to food poisoning is “that’s only 99.999% likely to be okay, no way is eating that worth 10 micromorts!”
Nitpick: Isn’t food poisoning non-fatal a vast majority of the time? Or were you using a broad definition of “okay?”
Yeah; obviously missing a day or two to just getting ill is a significant cost worth avoiding, but if you expect to live a long while the chance of death typically ends up being more important in terms of total cost (because it’s worse than it is rarer, I believe).
Interestingly, I think that when I’m not at work, I’m probably less hygienic than the average population–the implicit thought process is kind of like “oh my god, I have washed my hands every 5 minutes for 12 hours straight, I can’t stand the thought of washing my hands again until I next have to go to work.” I do make some effort at CFAR workshops but it’s ughy.
I think rating eating a dubious leftover as 10 micromorts comes from not taking numbers seriously. If you really think it’s in that order of magnitude I would like to see the reasoning behind it.
The base rate of death due to food-borne illness in the US is 10 micromorts a year; there’s a conversion from ‘per year’ numbers to ‘per act’ numbers, the issue of how much comes from food starting off bad and how much comes from food going bad, and the issue of how good you are at detecting a pathogen risk by smell/sight, and I fudged all three as coming out to 1 when combined. (You could also add in the risk of days lost to sickness in terms of micromorts, instead of separate units, but that would probably be unnecessarily confusing.)
The real point, though, was to demonstrate how you can agree on facts but disagree on values; even if we both put the same probability on the risk of death, one of us is moved by it and the other isn’t. (As well, I have a specialized vocabulary specifically targeted at dealing with these tiny risks of death that he doesn’t use as much.) That’s what ‘overhygienic’ means to me: “look at how far they’re willing to go to avoid death!”
The AIDS risk of unprotected sex at a one-night stand is also a risk on the order of 10 micromorts and quite many people do care about it. (For values such as infection risk at 0.1% if the person has AIDS and 1% of the population having AIDS)
But there no good reason to believe that there’s agreement on facts. Plenty of people do believe that being overhygienic leads to an increase in allergies and isn’t healthy.
I don’t think that’s reasonable. It seems to me like all those factors are under 1.
The highest of the factors in the US seem to be Salmonella, Toxoplasma gondii and Listeria. All bacteria that you can kill if you cook your food. The forth factor is Norovirus and there I’m not even sure that food going back is an usual way of food getting poisoned. It’s rather about uncleanness.
I don’t think that most people who are overhygineic are that way because they follow a rational strategy but because of emotional driven fear of uncleanness.
How large is your sample size? (I would consider myself around average as far as hygiene goes, but my sense of the average level of hygiene of the general population may be somewhat skewed by hanging around someone who regularly picks food up off of the ground and eats it, so...)
I’ve met probably ~100 LWers in person, but I notice that I was falling prey to confirmation / availability bias when writing the grandparent post. When I met up with Fluttershy for lunch in a restaurant, he took out the bottle of hand sanitizer he kept in his backpack, and that counted more heavily in my memory than the Seattle LW game night / group meal hosted at jsalvatier’s place, where if I recall correctly people washed their hands in the sink if they wanted to, rather than there being some sort of explicit cleanliness norm, despite there being two LWers at the first event and ~twelve at the second. I can’t recall a time when I thought a LWer was behaving in an obviously unclean manner, though, but that’s rare enough anyway among people I’m around that I don’t know how much evidence that is. (Thinking of the group I’m close to with the least overall healthiness, as evidenced by the prevalence of drinking, smoking, and (I’m pretty sure) promiscuity, even they throw out unrefrigerated leftovers with meat in it because of the influence of one of the members with a food service job (and thus the associated food safety training).)
Meeting you for lunch was fun! Normally, I would have just gone to the restroom to wash my hands; the reason I had left a bottle of hand sanitizer on the table for was that I had wanted to be able to clean my hands without getting up from the table immediately after sitting down, given that some people think that getting up from the table is slightly rude. Using hand sanitizer just happened to be a more visible method of cleaning my hands than washing my hands in the restroom would have been.
On a related note, at the LW meetup after lunch, I remember that Frances passed a bottle of hand sanitizer around the table while we were in the middle of a conversation about how being hygienic was a good thing. I appreciated that.
Same! Let us know if you get another chance to come up to Austin; it’d be great to see you at the meetup again.
Can you try to summarize your rules of thumb on consumption of leftovers, and describe to what extent you think they’ve got a rational basis?
(I discovered last year that I’m actually more lax about it than some people I know, so I’m interested in what you and others think is risky versus safe behavior in this regard, and what that’s based on. I guess when I was growing up we tended not to have a lot of leftovers, so it never came up, and I think I may lack an adequate fear of food poisoning as a result.)
I am far more lax than most people I know also—when I was growing up there were leftovers, but we couldn’t afford to waste them unless they were really not good; I was still broke in college and would not turn my nose up at things other people were wary of. I have never been completely stupid about it, but I am not terribly afraid of food poisoning either, mostly because it barely registers on the list of risky activities I should worry about. (For comparison, I am convinced that my lack of driving skill would seriously injure myself or others, and so I don’t drive, which apparently makes me weird.)
I have had food poisoning a handful of times—but mostly under conditions that even conscientiously hygienic people would consider fine… and once from dubious food while traveling, because really if you do not eat the street food you are wasting your airfare.
(gwillen, I swear I am not deliberately following you around!)
The primary things that come to mind are “if you notice anything off, dispose of it” and “store things in sealed containers with dates on post-it notes or written with dry erase markers,” but most of the stuff I pay attention to these days are food prep rules (since I very rarely have leftovers, and most of the things I consume take a long time to go bad).
This is not something that would cross my mind if I was organizing such a retreat. Making sure people who handled food washed their hands with soap, yes, but not hand sanitizer. Perhaps this is a cultural difference between (parts of) US and Europe.
US Americans are overly obsessed with hygiene from the point of view of the average European.
I think hand sanitizer is more feasible for practical reasons? Generally in the sorts of spaces where people gather for things like this, there is not a sink near the food. So I’m used to there being hand sanitizer at the beginning of the food line, not because hand sanitizer is great, but because it’s inconvenient and time consuming (and overbearing) to ask everyone to shuffle through the restroom to wash their hands before touching the food.
Not to mention that if people touch the bathroom door handle, sink handle, etc. after they washed their hands, they’ll get many of the germs they just washed off back onto their hands, whereas with hand sanitizer, all you need do is touch the pump and you’re good to go.
You can add “literal” to that :-p