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Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

> finding that while 49% were willing to try recycled wastewater, 13% refused, and the rest weren't sure.

This is the end result of an education system that has not prepared people for the modern world, if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity greater than water from a reservoir and and half of people are still not sure it is safe to drink then we have a massive problem.

For the record: I've no issue with grey water recovery systems, every drop of water I've ever drank has been through at least a few fish in it's time.

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"This is the end result of an education system that has not prepared people for the modern world, if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity greater than water from a reservoir and and half of people are still not sure it is safe to drink then we have a massive problem."

It has nothing to do with the education system and everything to do with human social evolution and evolutionarily stable strategies.

You're looking at the problem "like a nerd"[1] wherein you have a fixed set of definitions and guidelines and the end product (the water) fits or exceeds all of them and therefore, presto! Anyone who disagrees with your framework is therefore an idiot.

But these people aren't disagreeing with the stats - they don't care about the stats. They have a built-in, knee-jerk revulsion to drinking anything that came from sewage. That might not be rational or useful in 2016, but it has been tremendously useful over the past hundred thousand years of human social evolution. In fact, so useful, that people without that revulsion have been heavily selected against.

If your response to this is to show them more and more data and "proof" you're missing the point.

[1] ... to use Nassim Taleb's technical term.

> They have a built-in, knee-jerk revulsion to drinking anything that came from sewage. That might not be rational or useful in 2016, but it has been tremendously useful over the past hundred thousand years of human social evolution.

That's not necessarily true. First-world capitalist society focused on intellectual labor does a great job of mentally dividing the world into 'clean' and 'unclean', where everything unclean moves invisibly through a series of subterranean pipes.

If you go to any farm, this division is much more vague. Farmers dump horse manure onto soil, from which your vegetables grow. Bruised and almost-rotting apples are picked, crushed, and pressed to create apple cider. Milk comes from the teats of a cow into a tin pail that might have some bits of hay that are later strained out.

The notion that humans have "built-in, knee-jerk revulsion" to sewage is a trained behavior arising from an ignorance or a visceral distance from production processes.

Many humans also probably have "built-in, knee-jerk revulsion" to the sight of animals being slaughtered, with their blood draining into a pool, yet will happily devour a plate of barbecue. Why would we consider that recycled water from sewage would be any different?

"If you go to any farm, this division is much more vague."

I live on a farm and we have fairly stark divisions here.

The same effect is noticed with GMO foods. They're better in all regards, yet there are people who are afraid of them because "not natural".

I don't think this has to do with the education system. My friend's father has a terminal illness, and in his attempt to understand and rationalize it, he thought that he did it to himself by leading an "unnatural" lifestyle. The man has a masters in mathematics and owned a software company, he's quite intelligent.

I think people just try to rationalize their situation, sometimes they rest on the idea that natural is better.

"The same effect is noticed with GMO foods. They're better in all regards, yet there are people who are afraid of them because "not natural"."

No. People are afraid about GMO because they expect private companies incentives not being healthy food but economic benefits (for them).

That means for example, that if they could flood our food plants with "Roundup" because the plants are resistant to it, and the pesticide ends in our food, and we start getting cancers 10 years from now they don't care at all if they can profit now from it.

"sometimes they rest on the idea that natural is better."

Well, natural is usually better because nature had millions of years of adaptation to the environment. You can protect yourself against natural sunlight or natural nuclear radiation because nature created mechanisms against their bad effects, but you can't protect against manmade Pultonium or xrays or cosmic radiation not protected by Ozone.

Day after pill for example contaminates water with estrogens that are not easy(cheap) to filter.

Thinking about it, this is probably a side effect of the later, dirtier portions of the industrial revolution (early-1800s-) vs the early conservation movement (mid 1800s+).

I think it's ultimately to the detriment of the environment that the preservationist/Muir/Sierra Club strain of environmentalism won out over the sustainability/Roosevelt/management view in the public consciousness.

Of course, I generally stop listening when an "environmentalist" starts railing against nuclear power without a cogent argument (of which I'll admit there are a few). Love alone doesn't save nature, sadly.

One of the issues with GMO foods is that we don't actually know for a fact exactly how the changes we make in them work, or what effect they may have in the human body over long periods of time. We just don't know.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to paint with such a broad brush the level of knowledge there is about the long-term effects of GMO foods. Numerous studies have been released[0] and more published every year seem to lean towards minimal to no perceivable negative effects.

EDIT: I will grant that all of these studies deal with animals rather than directly at effects on humans, but it doesn't seem there is compelling evidence thus far for one to assume there would be a significant difference.

[0] http://www.fass.org/page.asp?pageID=52&autotry=true&ULnotkn=...

Every single new modification is it's own risks independent from all others. So, no set of studies can say that this new GMO product is safe until you test that GMO product.

In 100 years people may reasonably feel that pre 2060's GMO food is fine, but that new stuff is risky. And they would be reasonable to feel that way. After all, we have recalled a lot of great new products from the market due to long term issues.

PS: This might be unreasonable, however the pro GMO argument is lower food costs which is a non issue for many people.

As opposed to "naturally" cross-breeding strains and selecting for traits without genetic sequencing?

Changes are changes, whether random or induced mutation. I feel better if there's at least one brain inspecting the changes vs throwing dice.

Cross breeding does not induce mutations. Cross breeding mixes genetic code that already exist on the original plants.

Random or induced mutation like they do in GMO has lots of unintended consequences(for example radiating it). It is like a program that has not been debugged, only that a crash could be people dying or getting ill in the thousands or millions.

Also mixing genes from species that have nothing to do with each other like creatures that live in deep ocean that emit light with those that live on the surface will also have unintended consequences.

Human beings could be cocky and arrogant. I have a river near my house. Someone had the brilliant idea of introducing an alien small fish to help native fish as food. The unintended consequence was that the new small fish ate the eggs of native fish and made them disappear completely from the river.

> Cross breeding does not induce mutations. Cross breeding mixes genetic code that already exist on the original plants.

And why do you think that genetic code within the same species is different in the first place...?

There are a lot of things we don't know. How do we know that non-GMO foods are good? Just because that's what we've done for thousands of years doesn't mean it's "right". Should we let people starve and die because "we don't know"? It's just intellectually dishonest to not use GMO foods because "we don't know". How will we ever know if we don't try them?

It's just intellectually dishonest to not use GMO foods because "we don't know". How will we ever know if we don't try them?

Is it really intellectually dishonest, or did someone else just come up with a different risk and cost/benefit analysis from yours? I'm not saying they're right, but it's entirely possible they're making an honest mistake. (Also, the ethics of science get tricky when your subjects are human beings.)

We know it is safe to eat because we have tested it for thousands of years. Call me up when we have tested GMOs for that long.

Exceptions can of course be made for places that are experiencing acute malnutrition, but even so it probably makes much more sense using the same money to make sure the African farmers have access to fertilizer so they can get better yields.

Well, all "unnatural" GMO food DNA are going to be broken to pieces inside my intestine anyway: I think I can trust modern science (and common sense) enough to say a different jumble of nucleic acids in my bowel won't do anything "natural" nucleic acids can't do.

I mean, if you come across a dish of quinoa, macadamia nuts, and beef, would you object to eating it because it contains DNAs that never made contact with each other for a hundred million years, and there's just no guarantee what their combined power could do once ingested?

The only credible potential danger of GMO food is what they might do to the ecosystem while they're still alive (that is, before you eat them), but somehow most GMO opponents just gloss over this important distinction.

There are other complexities. For many municipalities, regulation regarding artificial chemicals and dissolved pharmaceuticals is lacking or nonexistent. When you aren't sure of what's safe or not, it's better to be safe than sorry. And if the problem is information, is it the voter's fault for being uninformed or the establishment for insufficient propagation?

Agreed but that a replacement isn't perfect is not sufficient reason not to do it if the replace is better.

If the concern is that municipal water standards are too low to do this then the solution is to push for higher standards.

The pressure on water supply in many regions is only going to get worse and more efficiently recycling waste water can make a significant difference.

Additionally if the standards are so low as to make grey water a risky proposition then they are simply too low generally, water from reservoirs can also be very polluted with things like agricultural run off.

Precisely. I worked for a water utility, in Australia, and this was the issue.

"What's in waste water?" People would answer, "E coli, food scraps, garbage".

Okay, so here's tap water. Show them lab samples.

Do the same with our 'grey water' (after processing). Lower impurities.

People still wouldn't touch it. We could use it for things like golf courses, etc, which lessened the load, to be sure. But still.

The US government just announced that for the last dozen decades it has been wrong and that cholesterol is not a nutrient of importance; so eat all the eggs you want.

People aren't sure because they aren't equipped to do the science themselves and have a well reasoned distrust of being told things are safe, that then turn out not be (or vice versa).

It would only be more pure based on what we can currently measure. Supposed we had tried this back when we just had to filter it for things we could see - the water would be clear and also likely still filled with cholera.

We know more about bacteria today, but can we filter for e.g prions?

Anyway the current system works, the new system might be better, but on the off chance that something goes wrong, why risk it?

> This is the end result of an education system that has not prepared people for the modern world

Not quite.

> if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity greater than water from a reservoir

This statement hinges on our ability to accurately measure the purity. This is far from settled and I can understand the hesitation.

Personally, I would take a look at the methods of purification. If they're using tons of chemicals, and most purification processes do, then I would pass.

I would prefer they use osmosis and then dump the contents out where they can filter down to natural aquifers, allowing natural filtration to take place. Then you pump it back up using the infrastructure we already have in place and put it through the regular process.

The UK has some of the best drinking water in the world, my local water company does hundreds of thousands of tests each year of which <.3% where over there own limits which are mode stringent than required standards, you can do these things to a given standard if you want to.

Example report for my region

http://www.ywonline.co.uk/web/WQZ.nsf/0/26AA27A47E437B1B8025...

You can have the best testing in the world and the test will still only detect substances that it was designed to detect. By definition, it can't detect anything we don't know about or are looking for.

The natural filtration process has been around since forever and we know it works well. There is no reason not to use it.

Probably every drop of water you've drank contained molecules that were present in the body of Julius Caesar at the time of his death. (etc.)

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