91–100 of 116 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counterpoint, here's a relevant part of an interview with the lawyer who won 2 billion dollars in damages from Monsanto addressing skeptics of the trial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw5H36B1tJE&t=2842s
Since we all know a jury is the best way to arbitrate scientific fact
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Since we all know a jury is the best way to arbitrate scientific fact
Guessing you didn't watch to where he said "We tried to get scientists on the jury. That's how we won".
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Yes, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, under the right evidence-gathering circumstances. Would you say that perhaps there are pigs which can fly, because absence of the evidence of the existence of flying pigs isn't evidence of their absence?
People used to think there were no black swans until they found them. Re. flying pigs, we have total and complete observation of pigs for thousands of years, as well as a physical and biological understanding of why they can’t fly. If you have that, then it’s pretty safe to draw conclusions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence...
Here is an online calculator:
https://www.statskingdom.com/proportion-confidence-interval-...
If we plug in 10,000 white swans out of 10,000 observations, and a confidence of 0.99 (we want to be 99% sure that the probability we calculate is within the range we calculate) the Clopper-Pearson exact result gives us a range [0.9995. 1]. Based on a observing a properly randomized, unbiased sample of 10,000 swans and finding them all to be white, we can be 99% confident that the probability of a swan being white could be as low as 99.95%, or as high as 100% (all swans are white).
If we want to be 99.99% certain of our range, it drops down to [0.999, 1]: 99.9% to 100% of swans are white, with a confidence of 99.99%.
There are lots of substances that can cause cancer, including ones that occur in nature, including in foods. The relevant question is whether the substance under consideration causes cancer above the noise floor, not in some mathematically pure sense like "No molecule of the substance could ever interact with something in a cell in order to trigger cancerous behavior."
E.g. roughly speaking, if you give megadoses of the stuff to a large number of rats and they don't have any more tumors than a control group, that's might be good evidence of absence, especially if repeated with large numbers of rats by different researchers in different countries and organizations.
This story is a broken record that just repeats over and over again in different forms and industries. It follows the general form of: 1. Develop some profitable product 2. years later people report horrible effects 3. Big co denies and stalls for years/decades 4. Hundreds of thousands /millions of people are negatively effected 5. Science eventually overwhelms any counter argument and product in taken off market 6.…
Add to that: 6. Sugar (all forms, but especially high fructose corn syrup) 7. Processed Meat (nitrites) [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in... https://ceh.org/high-fructose-corn-syrup/ [7] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/politics... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX1KUPZC3Ck (0:00 / 52:26 The Meat Lobby: How the Meat Industry Hides the Truth)
This story is a broken record that just repeats over and over again in different forms and industries. It follows the general form of: 1. Develop some profitable product 2. years later people report horrible effects 3. Big co denies and stalls for years/decades 4. Hundreds of thousands /millions of people are negatively effected 5. Science eventually overwhelms any counter argument and product in taken off market 6.…
That’s how science is supposed to work, unfortunately: the answer being right takes priority over it being prompt or cheap, in order to allow for unexpected possibilities or unforeseen sources of confusion to be exposed. That’s not a bad thing, but suggests science even in its ideal form may be the wrong tool here. (What’s the right one? I don’t know.)
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People used to think there were no black swans until they found them. Re. flying pigs, we have total and complete observation of pigs for thousands of years, as well as a physical and biological understanding of why they can’t fly. If you have that, then it’s pretty safe to draw conclusions.
If we randomly sample, say, 10,000 swans and find all of them to be white, then we can state that a certain percentage of swans are white, with a confidence interval around it. That percentage won't be 100% and the interval won't be +/- zero. There are multiple techniques for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence... Here is an online calculator: https://www.statskingdom.com/proportion-con…
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As always it comes down to scale not labels. Glyphosate in normal use is vastly more dangerous than anything you mentioned.
What's the current consensus? It's dangerous to the workers who work on the fields, not to the consumers at the end of the chain, or both?
The comments on HN are usually very informative, and this article is no exception. Here we have this comment:
> The IARC is the odd one out here and their results are based mainly on discredited experiments on rats that are known to be prone to getting cancer (meaning they aren't a good model for humans in this case).
It depends on how you define consensus, I guess. But the data is clear: one organisation out of many, and they drew their conclusions not from humans but from rats prone to cancer.
> It's dangerous to the workers who work on the fields, not to the consumers at the end of the chain, or both?
I don't know. But one of Glyphosate charms is it breaks down very rapidly. It means it doesn't do damage to surrounding plants that weren't directly exposed (unlike say 75-D). So my wild guess is you would have to be a field worker exposed to it directly. IIRC the people who won law suits against Monsanto were field workers who got regularly drenched in the stuff.
The damage is still being done. I am a non-producing farmer in EEU. I know for a fact many local farmers still use Roundup on crops, even though its illegal. There are no checks done when they sell the grain. All the bees in the area have already died.
Why is this comment being downvoted?
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/nicotinebased-pesticides...
"Organizations such as the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues and the European Commission, Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency, and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment[30] have concluded that there is no evidence that glyphosate poses a carcinogenic or genotoxic risk to humans. The final assessment of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority in 2017 was that "glyphosat…
check: glyphosate gut-brain axis https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=glyphosate+gut-brain+ax...
"Abstract There are currently various concerns regarding certain environmental toxins and the possible impact they can have on developmental diseases. Glyphosate (Gly) is the most utilised herbicide in agriculture, although its widespread use is generating controversy in the scientific world because of its probable carcinogenic effect on human cells. Gly performs as an inhibitor of 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phospate synthase (EPSP synthase), not only in plants, but also in bacteria. An inhibiting effect on EPSP synthase from intestinal microbiota has been reported, affecting mainly beneficial bacteria. To the contrary, Clostridium spp. and Salmonella strains are shown to be resistant to Gly. Consequently, researchers have suggested that Gly can cause dysbiosis, a phenomenon which is characterised by an imbalance between beneficial and pathogenic microorganisms. The overgrowth of bacteria such as clostridia generates high levels of noxious metabolites in the brain, which can contribute to the development of neurological deviations. This work reviews the impact of Gly-induced intestinal dysbiosis on the central nervous system, focusing on emotional, neurological and neurodegenerative disorders. A wide variety of factors were investigated in relation to brain-related changes, including highlighting genetic abnormalities, pregnancy-associated problems, diet, infections, vaccines and heavy metals. However, more studies are required to determine the implication of the most internationally used herbicide, Gly, in behavioural disorders."
read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01618...
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Excellent summary. Like they say history repeats. And teaching history does not help.
"And teaching history does not help." It does to some extent, but only those who truly learn it. In the current conversation, there are people who have seen this patern of recurring failure and are increasingly skeptical of new stuff. You'd be surprised how many doctors choose the older tried and true treatments for themselves rather than the newest stuff. They have personal experience that says "new" is more synonym…