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Comment by John_KZ | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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>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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