201–210 of 261 posts
If you really are concerned about this : buy organic. If organic food gets more interest, more and more people will start growing it, and more and more people will have access to good healthy food. These poisons wouldn't be abused if they wouldn't be profitable...
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Ockham's razor reasoning is that a gigantic profit driven structure with a huge lobbying activity, and high financial stakes should probably not be trusted with making the right choice between their business and our health. History tells it didn't work very well for us when the big guys said tobacco, asbestos, the Chernobyl cloud and PCBs were all safe and good. Given Monsanto's pretty poor moral track record (improp…
> terminator seeds Monsanto has a legitimate tricky choice here. One lobby group was very concerned about cross contamination, about GM seed escaping from GM farms and getting to other places. Terminator genes help fix that. And sterile crop isn't new thing from GM, it's common for hybrid crops to do this too.
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>You fail to account for the possibility of unknown unknowns This sounds reasonable. /s Do you have an example of anything that accounts for the possibility of unknown unknowns? My guess is if you do, then all it will take to "debunk" it is someone with a bigger imagination. EDIT: bad comma
The way you take in consideration unknown unknowns is not by trying to think of every single possible thing. It's actually quite the opposite. You start from what you know and what you control. From that you can assess what you can mess up. The scale, the consequences and likelihood of it. E.G: if you are using a very potent instable new explosive, you have much more unknown unknowns that if you are manipulating a we…
Perhaps this is just semantics but I have always thought of "unknown unknowns" as being in that mirky realm of "every single possible thing".
Perhaps I should have been more charitable and less pedantic, which is honestly hard for me to do when I see someone passionately argue against something I thought was a scientific consensus.
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In France we had this wonderful scandal about donated blood that was provided by aids infected patients... but declared safe. It's been used to make transfusion to other people that were already plagued with hemophilia, so that they could really enjoy the benefit of having both diseases at the same time. I'm wondering what will be the next stuff like that. Will we learn in 30 years that milk is actually unhealthy and…
> Will we learn in 30 years that milk is actually unhealthy I do not know if you are joking, but we know for some time now that regular consumption of dairy as an adult human increases risk for many health complications. (similarly evidence builds up against meat and eggs for some time now) http://nutritionstudies.org/12-frightening-facts-milk/ http://www.peta.org/living/food/reasons-stop-drinking-milk/ http://www.pc…
I had head aches all my life, and my hippie family doctor told me I should stop milk. I never listened to her.
Then in the last recent years I made experiments, and I noticed a correlation between raw milk intake and my head aches.
Now my veggie no gluten no milk doctor has died. Of cancer. Oh the irony.
But I don't have to take pain killers that much often anymore, only when I screw up my diet.
Life is funny that way.
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It's a recent trend in many niche (but maybe somehow influential ?) social networks like HN or some subreddits. Controversial big players are having more and more supportive comments, despite previously being famous for dubious proven activities. It wasn't like that at the beginning. I tend to put my tinfoil hat on when I think about what could have caused it.
No tinfoil required, there are now companies you can pay that will "manage" social network comment sections in your favor.
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Ockham's razor reasoning is that a gigantic profit driven structure with a huge lobbying activity, and high financial stakes should probably not be trusted with making the right choice between their business and our health. History tells it didn't work very well for us when the big guys said tobacco, asbestos, the Chernobyl cloud and PCBs were all safe and good. Given Monsanto's pretty poor moral track record (improp…
I'm not asking you to believe anything from Monsanto. There is a vast field of researchers that care deeply about what causes cancer and what can be done to prevent and treat it. Most of us aren't for sale. There are sensitive, objective and simple tests for determining whether or not a compound causes genetic mutations in cells (Ames test). There are tests for whether or not a compound induces chromosome abnormaliti…
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> stuff that is natural is time-tested This also applies to tobacco.
It does, but not really to smoking. Tobacco is far safer chewed or insufflated than smoked, and cigarettes have a bunch of additional terrible chemicals in them.
I'd be curious to find out if there's any place with a history of consumption of fresh tobacco leaves as a food item.
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I'm not asking you to believe anything from Monsanto. There is a vast field of researchers that care deeply about what causes cancer and what can be done to prevent and treat it. Most of us aren't for sale. There are sensitive, objective and simple tests for determining whether or not a compound causes genetic mutations in cells (Ames test). There are tests for whether or not a compound induces chromosome abnormaliti…
You fail to account for the possibility of unknown unknowns, and again you're displaying biased cognitive dissonance. You can't determine generational toxicity from LD50 profiles. You are simplifying everything way too much. Glyphosate is an analog to glycine. You know, the building blocks for proteins. DuPont did a study in 2007 that shows glyphosate is integrating in protein structures. Does that not worry you? Gly…
I will discuss unknown unknowns later on. Firstly, in terms of cognitive dissonance, I believe that the charge is premature. You seem to have missed the fact that he was referring to himself as one of those researchers, and he most certainly did not mention LD50 profiles. A quick check of his profile:
> I'm a synthetic biologist. I did some of the early work in optogenetics as a student. Now I work on industrializing the genetic engineering of cells.
It seems unlikely to me, given that context, that he routinely simplifies the topic too much.
Your questions about glycine, protein structures, chelating, and shikimate might be really good ones. I wouldn't know. However, your preamble provides a strong disincentive to answering them.
In terms of errors in reasoning, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance, I wonder if this is a common reinforcing structure; that is, if people generally prefix questions with a preamble hinting at the permissible responses in order to ward off the experience of cognitive dissonance. I might do it myself. That's just a passing thought. Concretely, regardless of motive, you've signalled to him quite strongly that any answer he makes will be futile, for persuasive purposes, and probably pissed him off a bit.
> You are running with the base assumption that Monsanto is benevolent and honest. This is where your cognitive dissonance stems from.
Your conclusion returns to the theme of rejecting what he has to say. His very first sentence was literally "I'm not asking you to believe anything from Monsanto." Having demonstrated that you will not pay attention to what he says, you then reaffirm that anything he says contradicting your opinions is the result of cognitive dissonance. I do not think that anyone who was paying attention to your words would, at that point, bother to reply.
With regards to "unknown unknowns," you should appreciate that you are speaking to a domain expert. By contrast, you are reasoning through a trust calculus on first principles. That's fine, but he has education and experience that represent a multi-generational attempt to address those "unknown unknowns". Detecting unknown unknowns and turning them into known unknowns is one of its primary occupations. It is manifestly erroneous to equally weight the "unknown unknowns" with "everything else" at all points and times, especially if that means privileging them over known unknowns.
You appealed to Occam's Razor in your previous comment. Here we have a dispute about material fact between a genetic scientist and a (known unknown) random person on the internet, regarding the risks of a substance as a carcinogen. I want to stress again that that's fine. However, I think it would benefit you to be self-aware enough to realize exactly which resolution of the dispute Occam's Razor suggests to your audience. If you demonstrated such awareness, you might be taken more seriously.
We are such a short sighted species.
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The way you take in consideration unknown unknowns is not by trying to think of every single possible thing. It's actually quite the opposite. You start from what you know and what you control. From that you can assess what you can mess up. The scale, the consequences and likelihood of it. E.G: if you are using a very potent instable new explosive, you have much more unknown unknowns that if you are manipulating a we…
In that case, I think they meant to say: "known unknowns" Perhaps this is just semantics but I have always thought of "unknown unknowns" as being in that mirky realm of "every single possible thing". Perhaps I should have been more charitable and less pedantic, which is honestly hard for me to do when I see someone passionately argue against something I thought was a scientific consensus.
But known unknowns and unknown unknowns are not the same things though. known unknowns are a space you can account for. It's easy to put a number of it. unknown unknowns not so much, and dealing with it is more a matter of morality than science. You can't scientifically deal with something you can hardly define or quantify.