Comment by alevskaya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alevskaya | Hacker News Reader

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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 abnormalities in mammalian cells. There are lifetime feeding tests for determining whether or not any cancers can be induced with wildly unrealistic dosing regimes. Lastly, there are epidemiological studies that monitor whether workers using glyphosate demonstrate increased occurrences of particular cancers.

For glyphosate, there is no evidence of mutagenicity or genotoxicity, there is no evidence of teratogenic potential in mammals. There are no statistically significant epidemiological correlations with exposure. Glyphosate is poorly absorbed by human guts, poorly absorbed by human skin, and does not accumulate in tissues.

This is the scientific consensus: there is no good evidence that N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine is a carcinogen, there is a mountain of evidence that it is not.

But at the end of the day, whether I'm arguing with GMO-skeptics or climate-change-skeptics, I can't prove that this scientific consensus is worthy of your respect. You can always retreat into a more hardline epistemological skepticism, you can always cast aspersions at the entire enterprise.

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?

Glyphosate is also a chelating agent. Glyphosate impacts the shikimate pathway, and is said to be non-toxic because humans do not possess the shikimate pathway. Yet the shikimate pathway is present in bacteria, archaea, and eukarya, and all of them are harmed by Glyphosate. Do we have bacteria in our guts utilizing the shikimate pathway? Yes we do.

You are running with the base assumption that Monsanto is benevolent and honest. This is where your cognitive dissonance stems from.

If only people remembered to check for unknown unknowns.

That would be ideal, but it's hard to see what you can't see, right ?

And that doesn't apply to the "Organic" Industry because...?

Nobody said it doesn't. But the whole purpose of organic is to do it in a way that has been tested by darwin natural selection for a long time in a very complex system.

Of course that doesn't mean the organic industry is doing things properly nor does it mean that this type of culture doesn't some other negative side effects.

But globally, I'll bet on the farmer cooperative that want to avoid pesticide to be less evil than a mega corporation that produce the Agent Orange. Does that sound silly ?

I really don't get how much you are willing to reverse this attack from Monsanto to organic sellers.

Sure nobody is perfect. And yes, the whole debate is tainted by pseudo science and bad faith. But come on, it's not even on the same scale.

Does he know Glyphosate mimics glycine? I'm pretty sure he doesn't. That's an unknown to him.

Whenever you study a complex subject, you have to be aware that there are things you might not know about. And there are also things you might not know you do not know.

That's an unknown unknown.

You're making light of a very serious issue among scientists and science. An honest scientist keeps looking for the unknown, a dishonest scientist (to himself) stops looking, and then it becomes dogma.

This guy thinks he knows it all, but he does not, and he does not even realize that there could be things he does not know. When you do that, you can easily switch from doing science, to (accidentally or deliberately) start pushing an agenda.

>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 well well know concentrated acid.

Now starting from here you know what the cost of what you don't know could be, and else can choose measures to mitigate that such as more research, bigger safety coefficient, additional staff, insurance, etc.

When we blame a company for not taking in consideration unknown unknowns, it usually means they just tried to build the very minimal legal requirement to put it on the market and make money. They may have known that it was risky, but they didn't bother.

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.

Yeah I prefer the term "precaution principle", it's more straight forward because it describes the action instead of what's motivate it.

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.

> You fail to account for the possibility of unknown unknowns, and again you're displaying biased cognitive dissonance.

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.

> 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.

You can't enunmerate unknown unknown, but you can plan for them. Simple things like let things fail and no single point of failure have built in protections against unknown unknowns. Its hard to argue this without using Taleb's ideas, which GMO advocates don't like.

I engineer proteins for a living. I know that glyphosate is a glycine analog. Re: bacterial processing -- We've fed tons of glyphosate to mammals to see if it causes cancers - it doesn't seem to. Mammals don't absorb it well. I certainly don't assume anything about Monsanto's benevolence, but you happily seem to assume that I'm made of socks.

> whether I'm arguing with GMO-skeptics or climate-change-skeptics, I can't prove that this scientific consensus is worthy of your respect

What about GMO-skeptics that belong to the scientific community?

Americans literally, honestly, do not know that they exist. Which is a fantastic achievement by Monsanto, tbh.

People who care should really look into why GMOs are banned in the EU.

They aren't banned in the EU.

Do you have a link to any individual nation state bans being based on scientific evidence rather than public/media outrage? Because the EFSA has been against the bans.

Because of political pressure. Trade bans aren't issued by scientists. They don't have that power.

Hence the word 'consensus'. There are plenty of scientists that don't believe in climate change. Most of them don't work on climate data. I've met vanishingly few biologists that think GMOs pose a health risk to humans.

I'm not arguing against the science, I'm arguing against the people.

E.G: I think GMO have a fantastic potential. It's a powerful technology. And like any powerful technology, it has a huge potential of destruction as well.

And I don't trust the people making money with it to take the necessary precautions to avoid a catastrophy. There are so many past and present events where money won over the benefit of the human specie.

I trust people like you, that are dedicated to analyze things and share conclusions.

But between you and the public, there is an army of people whose job is to hide/distort informations that will make them loose money, and show off informations that will make them win money. And they are better are it that the public is at critical thinking.

You talk about climat skepticism, and it's a good example of a generalized propaganda that entities with an interest in fossil fuel and live stock keep pushing. And it works. There are people that doubt climate change. There are leaders that act on it.

When there is an obvious conflict of interest in an entity of huge influence, one should ALWAYS be suspicious by default. The entity has to prove, over, and over again that it's doing the right thing.

Right now entities are usually, as they grow, turning into systems that buy PR campaign to tell you they are doing the right things instead of doing it.

Let me pull out this little gem from the WHO archives: http://www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf

In there you can read the statment from the tobacco industry:

1. That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer.

2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.

3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.

4. That statistics purporting to link smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves are questioned by numerous scientists.

Like I said, they are very good at controlling the story.

Defending them because that's the intellectually moral thing to do - while I understand that's something intelligent reasonable people wants to do - is not working in our favor.

Now you tell me that up to now, nothing is hinting that N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine is dangerous. But Monsanto still decided to have research about it ghostwritten. Such behavior is an alarm signal to me, and should trigger new investigations and tests for the next 10 years.

You don't need to convince me of the potential malfeasance of US corporate interests - I grew up in West Virginia, a state that's more or less been run by the coal industry for a century. :)

We should always remain vigilant of unappreciated risks, both health and ecological, from existing practices and chemicals. However, scientific studies are not cheap. In a world with an endless supply of serious problems, we have to prioritize research spending on science and engineering that's likely to actually improve life for the most people. Redoing the same experiments we've been doing to death for decades probably isn't the best use of limited science funding from a purely utilitarian standpoint. Industrial agriculture has quite a few more serious public health issues than glyphosate. (e.g. antibiotic abuse in animals)

Monsanto is not running out of money any time soon. We can always tax it specifically to finance more research. They want to play with dangerous techs ? Ok, well it's going to be long and expensive. And again and again and again. Any other way would be foolish.

So you're advocating against long term human studies?

That's... odd.

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