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What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
71–80 of 124 posts
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. That's wrong. Yes, we should. Each and every study that doesn't find evidence for what they are looking for is evidence for its absence.
Absence in the results of whatever we measured for. Just take the sheer hybris of "junk DNA": We don't understand this, so it's probably junk.
Note that we didn't call it junk DNA until we learned a whole lot about how DNA works and formulated a theory in which junk DNA doesn't do anything for good reasons. In a way, lack of understanding prevented us from calling it junk DNA earlier.
Of course it's still possible for the theory to be wrong and the so-called junk DNA being actually important. It's only junk according to our classical, non-quantum and non-relativistic theory of junkiness.
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah, but we shouldn't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. That's wrong. Yes, we should. Each and every study that doesn't find evidence for what they are looking for is evidence for its absence.
That’s wrong. Only if the studies are powerful enough and are looking at the right stuff can you make any reasonable conclusions. If the studies are powerful enough then that absolutely isn’t evidence of absence at all.
Evidence can be strong or weak. Every positive study result is evidence of presence, usually strong evidence. Every negative study result is evidence of absence, usually very weak evidence.
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I think that the Microplastics Moral Panic is a textbook study of F.U.D. There is practically nothing that ordinary people can do for prevention, mitigation, diagnosis or treatment of microplastics in our bodies, so I therefore conclude that it is futile and wasteful to worry or argue about it, unless you have abundant free time and resources to get paranoid strangers all in a frenzy, for no good reason.
Did this apply to people freaking out about lead a couple decades ago? What about those advocating for smoking bans in shared spaces? Cholera outbreaks near the city water wells? Or are microplastics special in some way?
We didn't ban water or metals because of the things in your examples.
Discover what plastic is harmful and we can't start to talk.
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#75I think hate of plastics is an emergent form of elitism. Upwardly mobile middle/upper class people who've sort of "maxed out" the amount of personal identity they can buy with regular plastic things can unlock a new level of identity by deciding that plastics are bad for them and eliminating plastics from their life, a process which conveniently requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from the…
Health in general has always worked like this, from supplements, to organic food, to avoiding ultra-processed foods, to gluten-free diets, pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health. Most of human behavior is irrational. If we were all perfectly rational, we would have healthy diet and exercise habits from the get go, and we'd have plenty of time to prepare food and exercise, beca…
>pretty much every popular health fad has no provable causative effect on health.
Isn't this almost true by definition? If it actually works, it's not a "fad", just "science" or whatever. Advice like "eat more vegetables" and "don't drink alcohol" probably do work, but they're ingrained enough that nobody thinks they're "fads".
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#76I think hate of plastics is an emergent form of elitism. Upwardly mobile middle/upper class people who've sort of "maxed out" the amount of personal identity they can buy with regular plastic things can unlock a new level of identity by deciding that plastics are bad for them and eliminating plastics from their life, a process which conveniently requires buying a whole new set of things that distinguish them from the…
Why was that we used to be able to ban environmental toxins such as leaded gasoline without this weird psycho-social-political analysis that has become the fashion in some circles?
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things like glass food storage containers are really expensive compared to plastic. And they still have plastic lids; like, I don't know what you'd even do without at least the seal-part being some kind of plastic, I guess you'd need to use natural-sourced wax to make it seal, or something? And on the topic of cost, I'm certain my kids have broken between 50 and 100 glass and ceramic drinking cups, storage containers…
Just chiming in because you might be interested - > That's just true. Plastic spoons for cooking suck, wood and (where it makes sense and won't damage other things) metal are way better. If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dish…
> If you have ever used nice commercial high-temp silicone spatula, it's an incredibly versatile and easy to clean spoon for cooking. A bit expensive at like $20 though. Pair with nice nonstick pan and polycarbonate cutting board (dishwashable) for the easiest and most out of fashion cooking and cleaning experience.
Those, I do use! My wife insists on keeping one non-stick pan, mostly for eggs (I just cook them in stainless, whatever) so we've got a couple around for that specific use case, but I grab them sometimes for other things, too. They're great for scraping little bits of sauce out of the edge of a pan, things like that.
> My cheapest in the store oyster blender is glass, I think they mostly still are.
Ha! Really? I killed one blender before upgrading (the old "buy a cheap one, and if you wear out out, buy the expensive one" approach) and that was also plastic, but it probably wasn't Oyster. Hm.
All of those were glass when I was a kid, it seems really weird to me that the pricey ones are usually plastic now. I'm not even (that) worried about the health effects of it, I mostly just like the way the contents move & pour in glass better, the plastic's too "sticky" (though I do cringe a little when we blend a near-boiling sauce in the plastic jar)
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science. It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.
Having lived this reality, people respond to incentives. Your have to very fundamentally re-architect the incentives and career progression in academia to make publication of null results more common. The other side of this is reducing the time and hassle of publication. Right now I’m unlikely to battle for 1.5-3 years to get something through peer review for a result that nobody will find interesting.
I think this is exactly what the person you are replying to is saying; everyone knows it, but the people in charge of setting up the incentives still don’t seem interested in changing the incentives.
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
also, asbestos is too small to interact with T-cells, so it must be safe.
It's not really analogous. One of the hypothesized ways that microplastics are harmful is that they disrupt the immune system; there has been evidence found of this in bivalves. Another is that they cause inflammation, which is also mediated by T-cells. A null result on the impact of microplastics on human T-cells is directly relevant to these hypotheses. The mechanism of harm for asbestos is known to be that the fib…
>>>> ... too large to interact with T cells.
>>> Also, unfortunately, a result that industry and the anti-regulation crowd will use to say microplastics are harmless.
>> also, asbestos is too small to interact with T-cells, so it must be safe.
> It's not really analogous.
Ironically, this is missing the point. They were commenting on flawed reasoning. This shouldn't need to be spelled out, as it's part of the conversation context.
Sometimes "dunking" comments are a variation on https://www.instagram.com/p/DY2DRKDhqaa - where everyone is arguing about who is wrong, because they aren't treating it like a conversation.
Re: What Do We Know About the Microplastics Inside Us?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absence in the results of whatever we measured for. Just take the sheer hybris of "junk DNA": We don't understand this, so it's probably junk.
Note that we didn't call it junk DNA until we learned a whole lot about how DNA works and formulated a theory in which junk DNA doesn't do anything for good reasons. In a way, lack of understanding prevented us from calling it junk DNA earlier. Of course it's still possible for the theory to be wrong and the so-called junk DNA being actually important. It's only junk according to our classical, non-quantum and non-re…
> Note that we didn't call it junk DNA until we learned a whole lot about how DNA works and formulated a theory in which junk DNA doesn't do anything for good reasons. In a way, lack of understanding prevented us from calling it junk DNA earlier.
Thanks for noting that, you totally caught me since I actually don't even really remember the stuff I read about that, which was probably false to begin with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA#Junk_DNA_and_non-codi...
So upon further consideration, since I don't really know anything about the research of the impact of microplastics, I'll apologize for speaking of scientific hybris so flimsily, that was really the hybris of the layman (me).
I'm still skeptical, not of science but of the harmlessness of microplastics. Not because of any evidence I have, but because it's just so us... this cycle of putting something everywhere before we even know it exists, finding out it exists, going "nahhh it's probably fine" for years, decades or centuries, and then "oh shit". Which I'll admit is not scientific and not really a useful contribution to this conversation, either :P