Thank you for doing something ambiguously between smoking and not smoking

An early (2013) harm-reduction case for e-cigarettes, built around the rationalist concept of 'funging' (what an option trades off against). E-cigs' desirability depends entirely on whether they funge against smoking tobacco (strictly safer — no tar/cancer/secondhand smoke) or against not smoking at all; the evidence (≈70%+ of e-cig users are former/current smokers, RCTs showing big cuts in cigarettes/day) says mostly the former. Scott argues banning/taxing/restricting them is a 'fallacy of fungibility' — holding e-cigs to a high medical-device safety bar while convenience stores sell cigarettes freely — and that public health is ~100x more important than typical political issues (a 2% drop in switching ≈ 9,000 extra deaths/year).

Quality 70 · Strong. Strong, mid. A clear, correct, ahead-of-its-time harm-reduction argument that also popularizes a genuinely useful portable concept ('what does it funge against?'). Held mid-Strong because it's a fairly standard (if early and right) policy take on one question, and the funging frame is borrowed from CFAR rather than original.

Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. Moderate (50). The harm-reduction-for-e-cigs position was somewhat ahead of the 2013 mainstream panic, and the funging framing was fresh to readers, but neither harm reduction nor the funging concept is novel-to-Scott.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor (2). Influential-within-discourse (the funging frame + an early correct vaping-harm-reduction call), but the material-world vaping-policy debate wasn't moved by this post specifically.