alt Hacker NewsIf you read the report instead of a blog post with an agenda you will find out that the plain packaging accelerated decline in smoking by about 25% (p<0.01)
https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/study-of-the-i... (page 12)
They also tried quitting more often (p=0.013)
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Was about to comment the same thing, even if they smoked more, the program was meant to reduce the trend of new smokers, period. And it was successful about that
The entire post seems to be along the lines of ‘no laws ever work!’ and then you scratch the surface and they do work.
There was a post here about Mississippi miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_miracle recently which was due to one of the programs mentioned in the original post claiming it produced no improvements.
As in the original post is flat put lying to push an agenda. You can google for like 2mins on many of the points and see counter evidence.
This seems like a super important corrective, but I don't see the agenda you're seeing. The article concludes by arguing we need to do lots more stuff, and suggests that people whose takeaway from the article is "stop doing social science interventions" should take the place of the goats in the sacrifices.
But the paper cited by the blog post also covers the smoking prevalence data and finds it to not be statistically significant. Now you can look at their model and decide if you find that conclusion convincing, but I don't think just pulling a number from a different report (especially one from the Australian government, which has its own agenda in motivating its own policy) is really such a gotcha here.
To be clear, I don't want to play the game of paper vs. paper. I simply think there is more depth of detail here than can be nicely summarised in a comment.