I discount that for several reasons - first, I'm not guaranteed to survive to that point. Second, lung cancer survival rates continue to improve (it's still a minority that survive, mind, but over my lifetime I expect that figure to improve still further). Third, lung cancer is a pretty predictable mode of death - in terms of cryogenics, my really long-term survival could be considerably improved over other, less predictable forms of death, such as heart attack or stroke.
Additionally, two cigarettes a day for 10 years produces only a marginal increase in health risk. In fact, you have to consume 5 pack-years (1 cigarettes a day for 20 years is a pack-year; the relationship is strictly linear with both respects, so 1 cigarette a day for 40 years is 2 pack-years, and 2 cigarettes a day for 10 years is 1 pack-year) before you start to see substantial health risks from smoking.
At present, I consume 1-3 cigarettes a day, and skip many days, and frequently skip weeks. (I am currently using them to try to train good behavior into myself.)
I will also add that smoking reduces my sinus response to allergens quite considerably, which has reduced the number of sinus and chest infections I get, as well as the severity when I get them. (This is apparently at odds with what most people experience, but it's been consistent my whole life - when my parents stopped smoking is approximately when I started having severe allergy problems.)
Nicotine does seem to activate a lot of the neurologically-controlled anti-inflammatory reflexes (while also indiscriminately poking at all the other autonomic reflexes that use the same neurotransmitters connected up to different fibers, thus the vasoconstriction and the like). Hence smokers not getting inflammitory bowel disease. I do think there are probably better methods of getting it in you than inhaling burned leaves, though perhaps not cheaper.
This is an extension of a comment I made that I can't find and also a request for examples. It seems plausible that, when giving advice, many people optimize for deepness or punchiness of the advice rather than for actual practical value. There may be good reasons to do this - e.g. advice that sounds deep or punchy might be more likely to be listened to - but as a corollary, there could be valuable advice that people generally don't give because it doesn't sound deep or punchy. Let's call this boring advice.
An example that's been discussed on LW several times is "make checklists." Checklists are great. We should totally make checklists. But "make checklists" is not a deep or punchy thing to say. Other examples include "google things" and "exercise."
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of boring advice. If you can, provide evidence and/or a plausible argument that your boring advice actually is useful, but I would prefer that you err on the side of boring but not necessarily useful in the name of more thoroughly searching a plausibly under-searched part of advicespace.
Upvotes on advice posted in this thread should be based on your estimate of the usefulness of the advice; in particular, please do not vote up advice just because it sounds deep or punchy.