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Comment by John_KZ | Hacker News Reader

You can still buy all of these things if you want. They come with the appropriate labeling. I'm sorry if your concern is purely linguistic, but "organic" isn't a reserved word. Benzol is organic too. Organic laws are a thing too. Different kinds of organic.

Some people want to eat the same way people ate for millennia. Good for them. It's one of the benefits of living in a free market society. People have mistakenly thought a lot of things to be safe or dangerous, but if something has been working for thousands of years, even imperfectly, it carries a guarantee nobody else can provide.

Finally I don't understand why people are so angry at organic produce. I rarely buy it too, but what's the big deal? It sounds like they need to prove something. I don't get it.

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>but if something has been working for thousands of years, even imperfectly, it carries a guarantee nobody else can provide.

my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts. something being used for thousands of years merely means it doesn't cause harm in small enough timescales so that people can associate it with the effects. see: smoking, which is dangerously poisonous, but the effects are on such long timescales that its negative effects are dissociated from it.

>Finally I don't understand why people are so angry at organic produce. I rarely buy it too, but what's the big deal? It sounds like they need to prove something. I don't get it.

I guess the anger is directed to both the people that are gullible enough to buy it and continue to perpetuate the myth that it's somehow better, and the companies pushing organic produce (by exploiting said ignorance, and perpetuating said ignorance as a way to sell high margin produce)

>my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts.

This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on. No assumptions about mechanisms and correlations. Just facts.

You then proceed to explain how if something can bypass this method of testing it's only causing mild, low-level symptoms on large timescales. This is a much better guarantee than a paper published on nature. For me at least, because this is an opinion. You're free to be wrong, just as I am. Time shows who's gullible and who's not.

>This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on. No assumptions about mechanisms and correlations. Just facts.

You're throwing around the word "fact" a little too liberally. "people did x for thousands of years" is a fact, but it's not a guarantee of safety. "x is safe because people used it for thousands of years" is a guarantee of safety based on your opinion, but it's not a fact.

>You then proceed to explain how if something can bypass this method of testing it's only causing mild, low-level symptoms on large timescales. This is a much better guarantee than a paper published on nature.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you accepting that harmful substances that cause mild, low-level symptoms can "fly under the radar" of "the test of time"? Or are you saying that the fact something is used for a long time is automatically a better proof of safety to you than a study published in nature?

>This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on.

I don't really follow you here. You mean that the guarantee is about safety? I mean back then our life expectancy was lower. The fact that humanity survived with old methods doesn't mean what we did was safe(r) in general. It just means that enough people survived so that humanity didn't die off as a whole. That is a very weak guarantee.

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