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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

“All of the official samples passed the test and were within the legal limits of glyphosate residue. But those off-the-record, unofficial samples, though done with the same equipment and tested by the same chemists, showed glyphosate.

That’s right. The chemists found glyphosate residue on just about everything: crackers, granola, cornmeal, honey, oatmeal, baby food, and even corn. Their surreptitious corn test—one of the four items the FDA is actually testing—found glyphosate significantly over the legal limit set by the EPA. The chemists emailed their bosses to ask what to do. The FDA’s response (which was also captured in the FOIA documents): That corn was not an “official sample” and will thus be ignored.”

I remember watching a lecture from Vandana Shiva who claimed that glyphosate was harmful and making it in to our food. She cited some European studies that found glyphosate in a wide variety of products. She claimed that there were shady things going on in the US government that seemed to obscure these facts. At the time, I saw people writing her off as a nut, or claiming that her masters degree in physics and PhD in philosophy meant that she didn’t have the expertise to evaluate the biological effects of glyphosate.

And yet, I feel as though this article, if the claims are verified, does seem to back up her claims that glyphosate is more prevalent than our government would like to admit, and that there could really be official cover ups going on.

I’d really like to know what’s in our food.

View on HN

While this might prove her true that the US government is trying to hide the glyphosate levels in food, does it prove her claim true that it is harmful? It seems like the jury is out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Humans

Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be.

See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the vested interests to make a ton of profit and cause a ton of damage which they'll never pay for repairing. All made possible with a series of comparatively small investments to buy scientific research to keep the jury out. The Wikipedia section that the parent post links to straight up says that the only research that found no links was sponsored by Monsanto.

Edit: to be really clear, 'jury being out' refers to scientific consensus. We are not talking about issues where public opinion is uncertain despite scientific consensus, such as vaccines+autism. We are talking about issues where scientific evaluation of some phenomenon is actively prolonged or hindered by vested interests to delay regulatory action.

Counterexamples: asbestos, tobacco, alcohol, fossil fuels, climate change.

(On the latter two, the studies mostly have the correct outcome. What is difficult is convincing half of the American population that that matters.)

Who has supported the asbestos industry? Has there ever been a company that actually promotes asbestos?

Yes, in fact asbestos is still mined and marketed today: https://youtu.be/cy3piCUPIkc

Only white asbestos (also known as Chrysotile) --- and the great number of people who have been exposed to large amounts of it and lived long healthy lives certainly makes one wonder; AFAIK it's only the other types, particularly blue asbestos, which are unanimously carcinogenic and the industry stopped using them a long time ago, but the effects from that (and contamination of white asbestos with the other types) have continued and led the majority of fears.

This article is worth reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581056/

In the case of Mesothelioma I believe there's a fair amount of evidence that you need both : 1) Asbestos exposure and 2) to be a smoker. This might explain why some people exposed to asbestos remain healthy.

https://www.mesothelioma.com/blog/authors/staff/smoking-asbe...

Well, um, definitely yes.

https://www.pinterest.com/braytonpurcell/vintage-asbestos-ad...

Not a company exactly, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POB3Dr0uonc&t=75

Tobacco is definitely not a counter example; the industry managed to cover up / confuse the evidence for years.

Also see: Aircraft contrails and mind control, water flouridation and turning our children into Communists, cell phone towers and cancer, vaccination and autism. [1]

[1] None of these associations are actually true, but much ink and some research funding was spilled on the subject.

None of those are what an honest/sane individual would call borderline either, so why bring them up?

>None of these associations are actually true,

Have you done research on any of these yourself? Also, I don't think you can put all those things in the same basket. For example, the last two. Doing the research on those might require huge resources that are way above the head of a single individual or small organization...

And in similar manner, every such issue might have different aspects that it might be stupid to generalize all of them into one category.

Human beings have a natural tendency to do this, which is why we are so easy to fool. May be, don't try to do that...

So every single time a “vested interest” cares about something, they are wrong? Environmental groups have a vested interest in promoting catastrophe as it increases fundraising and their influence and power. I am not saying that all environmental groups are “bad” or “wrong” but they have equal incentive to trumpet their view of the world.

You don’t think billion dollar alternative energy companies don’t have incentive to overstate the case against fossil fuels? Guys like George Soros, often seen as charitable, have made billions of dollars by sowing discord and destabilization. His massive profit in shorting the pound is legendary. Could it be at least a little possible that everyone has a vested interest in something and facts don’t necessary matter?

The Sierra Club CEO makes over $600,000 per year at a non-profit! You don’t thing the Sierra Club has any vested interests tied to promoting specific agendas?

There are multiple sides to every story and it’s folly to assume that any side is acting benevolently.

Soros didn't destabilize the pound. The Bank of England destabilized the pound. Soros said it was a bad idea, and put his money where is mouth was, and made a fortune because he was right.

The "vested interests" have the sole purpose of making money for their shareholders. They are corporations, and that is the definition of capitalism.

The purpose of environmental groups is to protect the environment.

Who would be the most likely to act benevolently?

Are the environmentalists perfect? No. They are human. They make mistakes. Sometimes they do things that are counterproductive or totally ineffective. But their goal is to protect the environment. I'd call that benevolence.

On the whole, it's also far more likely for the environmentalists to get hurt or killed than the other way around. In 2017, four environmentalists were killed every week by the "vested interests". Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almost-f...

To summarize, your argument seems to be something like "Hey, look, the environmentalists are not perfect, we can't trust anyone, so we must stop attacking the polluters, they must be totally innocent!".

And that's just FUD.

Much of what's been written about bees and pesticides is also probably bullshit (not to put too fine a point on it). American honey bees are livestock, not wildlife.

>American honey bees are livestock, not wildlife.

Then if it's harming European honeybees, which are livestock as you say, do you not think it might be plausible that native pollinators and others insects might also be affected?

The "livestock" line is just a talking point, and the pesticide industry is pleased as punch every time we repeat it for them.

I think if we were serious about native wildlife we'd address habitat loss instead of fixating on comic book opponents like "the pesticide industry". Either way: reports of the impending bee-pocalypse are extraordinarily overrated.

Can't agree; know too many hobbyist beekeepers who've had 20-40 years beekeeping who can't keep a hive alive through a winter now. When I was a kid peoples' hives survived a harsh Minnesota winter. Now they all die even though we don't have enough snow to ski.

We don't have to guess or extrapolate from anecdotes; the price of pollination services are tracked, and have grown low single-digit percentages over the last several years, just like prices in general.

Complete outsider to this: any chance that is due to external factors, such as increase in number of competitors (perhaps foreign), or reduced demand (e.g. new alternatives)?

Referring to "price of pollination services" means the natural ecosystem has failed.

There is no natural ecosystem of honey bee pollination in the United States.

In my strange corner of the world that hasn't been "agronomically optimized", there aren't giant monoculture farms spraying insecticides, and there are dozens of species acting as pollinators.

No one pays for "pollinator services".

I suppose there's a business opportunity for someone to capture all the rainfall, dam the rivers, and sell it back to me as well.

Herbicides and pesticides aren't necessary for agriculture. They are necessary for a very specific type of agriculture that has been lobbied for and subsidized, starting with the Nixon administration's "get big or get out out" message to farmers. It's been successful by metrics like 'food produced per man-hour of human labor', and appears cheap because we are all forced to partially pre-pay under threat of violence (overly dramatic way of saying its subsidized through taxes), and ignoring massive externalities of ecosystem destruction.

You're missing my point. I'm saying there's no natural ecosystem for honey bee pollination in the US because there are no natural honey bees in the US. They're not a native species.

Okay, if that was your point all along then I understand.

Not to move the goalposts, just to share some food for thought. Making a distinction between native and invasive species implies there is some particular snapshot in time when things were "right", when evolution was "done", when new species stopped being introduced into ecosystem by various means and competing with each other.

I think we're concerned with different points. You're saying the pollinator services business is fine and profitable despite the use of insecticides.

I'm saying it's sad that a diverse ecosystem consisting of many pollinators which allowed trees and bushes to bear fruits and berries without paying for a company to truck in a bunch of bees has been replaced by something more profitable, but less resilient and healthy.

Yes, the subtext of my point is that there's a narrative that the American food supply depends on a natural resource of pollinating insects, and that it is threatened by an unnatural collapse of native pollinating bees.

In fact:

* the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species.

* there is strong evidence that no threat exists to commercial pollinators and that standard bee husbandry practices are working just fine. That evidence includes the price of commercial pollination, which would (obviously) rise if collapsing bee populations were making commercial pollinating hives scarce, but which are in fact possibly not even keeping up with inflation, along with the price of new queens (nuc prices have grown over the last 5 years, or at least seemed to be last time I checked, but beekeping has grown immensely in popularity over the last few years as well --- but queen prices haven't really budged at all; granted: my research method here is "find companies that sell queens, follow their prices on archive.org", so I'm ready to be rebutted).

* the honey bees that tend to dominate this conversation are a non-native invasive species. There's a pretty widespread and well-documented belief that the US "feral" honey bee population was wiped out in (IIRC) the mid-80s --- not by pesticides but by another invasive species, the Varroa mite --- and that subsequent to that event, every honey bee you've seen "in the wild" since then is technically somebody's property. That may be changing? There may now be a significant number of feral colonies? Nobody's crop depends on them.

* the entire reason honey bees exist at all in the US is to support at-scale agriculture. They're livestock.

* it is entirely legitimate to worry about things we're doing to threaten native insect species! My objection to the conversation about native pollinators is twofold. First: I think it's disingenuous to imply that threats to native pollinators are the existential threat to our food supply that people claimed CCD was. Second, and much more importantly: neonicotinoid pesticides are not the major threat to native pollinators; they're just a cosmetically appealing villain we insert into this narrative to reassure ourselves that there's a "big pesticide" bad guy we need to organize against. The reality of species loss in the US is that it's a consequence of habitat loss, which implicates all of us, not just some shadowy faceless corporation.

"* the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species."

So the orchards that cultivate a healthy ecosystem through a diversity of species, and care given to soil health, which grow, produce, and sell fruit for only slightly above factory farming rates aren't part of the food supply?

If you only define food supply = factory farming monoculture, then absolutely the "least bad herbicides and pesticides" are the best thing possible.

Eating almost entirely locally costs far less per year than the difference between and entry level vs top of the line laptop. Eating from nearby food producers who take care of the land is not very expensive relative to other luxuries people invest in. Habitat loss may be inevitable, but factory scale, chemical based monoculture does not implicate all of us, and personal action is quite reasonable.

It's probably less effort than changing your diet for other reasons, but people seem to be more motivated to change their diet for body image reasons, or the soylent-esque lifestyle optimization, etc.

It baffles me that more people aren't raging environmentalist lunatics as I am.

FYI if you think this is bullshit, here's a public demonstration of an alternative to factory farming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3riW_yiCN5E There's a free hour long video that's more in depth but I realize even expecting 10 more minutes of anyone's attention is asking a lot.

And an argument for the importance of this pesticide issue that would be persuasive for people who aren't generally inclined to entertain restructuring all of modern agriculture would be...?

I don't have one. The pesticide issue and species collapse is one of many entry points to get people to entertain (or better participate) in restructuring all of modern agriculture.

There are other reasons too (resilience, independence, better economics for small communities) and the common response of "bigger must be better because thats what the free market has produced" is invalid when there has been so much government intervention that has given and continues to give much advantage to the existing system.

So basically I implore you to entertain the idea of restructuring agriculture even though you implied you aren't inclined to :)

I'm fine listening to the arguments of people who believe we need to restructure all of commercial agriculture. That's a coherent perspective.

What I'm not fine with are people pretending that a bee-pocalypse threatens commercial agriculture as it exists today as a stalking horse argument. I'm not saying that's what you were doing.

Well I hope we meet again on a thread that's a more appropriate platform to spread my lunatic gardener beliefs.

I enjoyed the discussion and learned something new about the honey bee.

It could be varoa mites, for example, that's causing the die off. It could be the result of artificial insemination of queens by distributors, creating a cheap stock and poorly survivable colonies. Just a some alternative ideas to consider...

Here's a link to WaPo article that bees are doing just fine https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/10/belie...

Another fallacy: relative privation. Let's not worry about the bees and pesticides because of bigger problems.

I think the problem here is that over-emphasis, bluster and hyperbole are so normalised and frequent now that the use of emphasis to try and draw attention to an issue is now practically useless (maybe it was never useful...).

Perhaps we shouldn't worry about any of these 'small problems' because we're working hard to destroy the Earth anyway...

No, once again, the glossary of logical fallacies you're working from isn't serving you well. I would be arguing relative privation if I was saying "things are so bad elsewhere it doesn't matter if the bees were dying", or "the bees are dying and that's all that really matters".

In fact, what I'm saying is that the bees are pretty much fine, and not an issue at all.

A matter of differences between intent and actions I guess, you suggested the concern should be redirected to habitat.

How fine is 'pretty much?' How not-fine should we let it get before we show concern?

This seems to be general sentiment in that we are not overly concerned about the impact to wildlife until it becomes 'endangered,' at which point we need to act...

>what I'm saying is that the bees are pretty much fine, and not an issue at all.

You have stated this opinion many times, I think we are all clear on that.

Do we have more than your authority to go on in evaluating your claim?

I think HN would become a very uninteresting place to debate if every discussion devolved into unsupported arguments from authority, which seems to be the logical fallacy you are relying on in your 'argument.'

How does that fact change the narrative? If anything, it makes it worse.

It does take away a bit of the emotional appeal of pristine, natural, innocent public resources that need protection from greedy farmers when the bees are owned by and grown for a different group of greedy farmers instead of being championed by people with purely altruistic motivation. But that they're declining when there are people with expertise and financial incentives trying to make more of them means there's a pretty serious problem.

They are in fact not declining. There is no indication at all that a reliable supply of bee-driven pollination service in the US is in any way threatened. You'd be forgiven for not knowing that, though, since the story is presented in the media as if farmers relied on wild honeybees (an invasive species eradicated several decades ago by the Varroa destructor mite) rather than commercially managed bee husbandry.

The information I've turned up suggests that commercial bee colonies are also rapidly dying off. https://beeinformed.org/2016/05/10/nations-beekeepers-lost-4...

Are commercial pollination services perhaps using robotic bees? Because pollination services went up by something like 1% since that article was published.

Are the bee sources still the same? Bees are often imported from other regions to meet supply.

I have no idea. Why does that matter?

If all the bees keep dying perhaps you'll eventually run out of bees to import.

The argument here being that there is a reserve supply of latent bees not used for commercial pollination, backfilling the commercial supply?

I think robot bees are a more plausible explanation.

According to the article you yourself linked to support the claim that there's no problem, that's exactly what they do -- purchase extra bees. That and split colonies (which creates weaker colonies which are more susceptible to death). And this same article admits a substantial price increase in products requiring bees for production.

How would you reconcile "substantial price increase due to bee requirements" to "sub-inflationary increases in pollination prices"? Again, you don't have to guess about this: pollination prices are tracked and published. We don't need the axiomatic method to figure this out; Google does just fine.

Regardless of that, the article does not support your argument of robot bees being more likely and demonstrates the former to be true.

Robotic bees are a joke, not a serious proposal. The reality is: these are insects, and bee husbandry provides commercial pollinators with an essentially limitless supply of them.

If you are participating in a debate and you want to argue for something, usually you post the sources for your claim instead of asking your interlocutor to find them for you. Especially when you've just shared a source that actually contradicts your claims.

Specifically, this is the passage I am referring to in, again, the article you yourself provided as evidence for your claims:

> The price of some of that extra work will get passed on to the consumer. The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006, for instance. And Kim Kaplan, a researcher with the USDA, points out that pollination fees -- the amount beekeepers charge to cart their bees around to farms and pollinate fruit and nut trees -- has approximately doubled over the same period.

> "It's not the honey bees that are in danger of going extinct," Kaplan wrote in an email, "it is the beekeepers providing pollination services because of the growing economic and management pressures. The alternative is that pollination contracts per colony have to continue to climb to make it economically sustainable for beekeepers to stay in business and provide pollination to the country’s fruit, vegetable, nut and berry crops." We have also been importing more honey from overseas lately.

Since you can literally just Google [<year> pollination price] and the first hit will contain a table, not following up on this point seems like willfulness on your part.

I am not an expert in the field or anything, but it's not necessarily the case that, because pollination services have gone up slightly, the problem is solved. It could be that they've been able to work through this problem so far but will not be able to do so indefinitely.

[Citation needed]

Happy to:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-...

That's the Washington Post noting bee colonies at a 20 year high (a timespan that includes the tail end of the original Varroa epidemic!) in late 2015.

Then, go look up pollination service prices since 2015 --- a trivial Google search! --- and compare them with inflation.

First, wild honeybees were not eradicated by Varroa. There are many papers written and researchers who have studied substantial wild honeybee populations for decades, and chronicled their decline and resurgence to pre-Varroa numbers. What has happened over the last few decades is that wild North American bees have adapted and are thriving, while 'babied' commercial bees are struggling.

Second, the number of commercial bee colonies for pollination services is not declining because beekeepers can choose to focus on making more when they need to. A reliably-consistent number of colonies can exist whether 5% die out every year or 50% (although at different cost). Having said that, what IS declining is the annual survival rate of colonies, which is linked to many factors, of which pesticides likely play a part. This is a not-so-subtle difference. Just because it doesn't immediately threaten commercial pollination doesn't mean there is no issue.

You just wrote a comment that essentially says there's no issue. Wild North American bees† are thriving. Commercial bees are "struggling". But they're not struggling in any way we can measure, since prices for bee-driven services aren't changing.

If neither commercial pollination nor wild populations are threatened, why is this a top-of-mind issue? My contention: for the same reason glyphosate is. These are cosmetic problems that are easy for us to talk about and assign blame for, without confronting the thorny systemic issues that really implicate out way of live.

† Presumably you either mean invasive feral honey bee colonies, since honey bees don't belong here, or native bee species like the Bombus bees, which aren't exploited at scale in agriculture.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1393

check out this study. Science is a reputable journal. sure, it's just one study. but there are thousands more.

looks like there is ample evidence of bees being harmed by pesticides.

I don't think you heard me say that neonicotinoids don't "diminish bee health".

This conveniently ignores the other side of the coin where interests are aligned and it's the conspiracy theorists that are harmful (e.g. vaccine manufactures and autism).

All functioning economies have vested interests in things good and bad. The only thing a vested interest means is that scrutiny is needed on the actions of the vested parties.

On what planet is the jury out about vaccines and autism? There's not a single research paper suggesting a link between those.

You are falsely conflating scientific consensus with public opinion.

SO what about cell phone radiation and cancer, or maybe GMO food and cancer?

What about that fiction?

a pretty informative read re: cell phones and cancer: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-t...

(as usual, article headline is clickbait, not chosen by writer, please do not judge the content based on the title)

Could you do the TL;DR of that? I skimmed it, because it's the long-form type of read I hate (little meat, lots of unrelated stories). Is there anything there that stands up to the standard counterargument called "non-ionizing radiation"?

I think hueving just meant to say that not every institution is corrupt, and the medical industry is good when it comes to vaccines. The vested interests, in this case doctors, are doing great, and the anti-vaxxers are bad.

Again, the jury was never out about vaccines, there's no scientific research claiming they are harmful. This scenario is not analogous to the grandparent post where scientific consensus is being actively manipulated by vested interests to delay regulatory action

Doctors don't make vaccines. Pharmaceutical researchers do. And pharmaceutical manufacturers wouldn't blink twice before selling you drugs that they know are harmful, there's plenty of well covered precedent for that. It's not that the medical field is more or less moral, it's just that in the case of vaccines, they actually perform well with no significant side effects so there's no reason to engage in morally questionable business practices to sell them

I've also read that vaccination is not a big moneymaker.

I can't really even understand what this comment is trying to say. Vaccines aren't harmful. But doctors don't make vaccines, pharma companies do. And pharma companies would gladly hurt you. Conclusion: ???.

I think what is meant (from the post in question, not necessarily your summary): cui bono arguments are particularly ineffective for those claiming vaccines are harmful, because doctors, who generally consider vaccines to be very effective and mostly harmless, are not particularly financially vested in the continued use of vaccines (unlike the manufacturers, presumably.) If the use of vaccines was curtailed, doctors would arguably have more work.

>because doctors, who generally consider vaccines to be very effective and mostly harmless, are not particularly financially vested...

Interested does not always have to be financial. It is hard for a community to go back on its beliefs. So in all probability, it is possible that a doctor can ignore the negative effects of a vaccine they are seeing due to this and huge perceived peer pressure in talking against the current medical consensus (Which is, as stupid as it sounds, All vaccines are completely safe)

Lets not put all vaccines into a sigle category. There are many different types of vaccines, from how they work to how they are actually manufactured, and they all carry different levels of risks. Blanket statements are not helpful.

There are extensive, multi-stage, rational, mandated procedures for not putting every candidate vaccine into a single category. Categorizations based on anecdotal evidence and superstition are not helpful.

Actually there are public registries of known incidences of harm from vaccines (i.e. VAERS etc). This again goes to people arguing in Black and White and refusing to rationally engage the middle grounds:

I don't believe there is research (at least verified/mainstream) that has determined widespread harmful effects of vaccines. I.e. the risk of issue from vaccines is lower than the risk of disease being caught (sorry don't have exact odds here to verify this). There are also no (that I'm aware of) long term generational studies of the effects of vaccines other than obvious observation that disease incidence has reduced.

To be clear, the point I'm making is that economic interests are aligned for vaccine manufactures to make vaccines and for people to take them. Just because both sides have a vested interest in taking them, there isn't suddenly an invalidation of all pro-vaccine research (e.g. everything that shows no link between vaccines and autism).

In college, I did a deep dive into GMO safety research for journal club back when the Seralini "GMOs cause cancer in mice" paper hit (2010 or thereabouts) and found quite a counterexample to your rule: bogus (obviously p-hacked) science from Seralini and an aggressive misinformation campaign from Greenpeace to convince people that Monsanto was using terminator genes (bio-DRM) against poor farmers when the truth had been quite the opposite for some time (Monsanto patented the idea, promised not to use it, and kept the promise).

Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid.

EDIT: oh, and there's a National Toxicology Program study -- "cell phones cause cancer" would be the sensationalized headline -- working its way through the bureaucratic pipes at the moment with another round of "review" landing in a few months. Somehow it got through the first draft and review process while completely ignoring the first law of toxicology, so I suspect it will pass the second round as well, and while I trust the official document will contain sufficiently reserved wording the media circus that spins up around it will become a second excellent example of bullshit from the "little guys."

You're just throwing out the tu quoque fallacy for I'm not sure what reason. Hey the 'other side' does it too so let's not make a big deal here!

Black and white opposition to everything with cherry-picked arguments is becoming more and more prevalent, and it doesn't help us solve (or even rationally discuss) any problems or even understand them better.

That's in fact not an instance of the tu quoque fallacy.

It is. You're implying that the other commenter's post is invalid as 'blind opposition' because 'their side' of the argument behaves the same.

* Edit on below: On re-reading you're correct, you were categorising their comment. My apologies!

No. Tu quoque is an appeal to hypocrisy. Pointing out that other concerns with big industry have been misleading, as with Seralini's apparently fraudulent glyphosate study, is an appeal to credibility.

You're misrepresenting the chain of the conversation:

A: The jury is out on [topic].

B: Whenever a jury is out, with one side having massive funding you know what the outcome will be [implying the massively funded camp is wrong and trying to hide it].

C: Here is a counter-example where the side with funding was correct. So maybe your over-generalisation is wrong.

You: You're throwing out a to-quoque fallacy, blind opposition is bad.

GP was opposing blind opposition, and you're arguing that they are blindly opposing skepticism. I'm not sure you read the conversation completely before you replied.

>> Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid.

What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer?

What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them? The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be suffering any damage.

With regards to GMOs, the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives. On a brief glance, I can't find a detailed estimate of the Humanitarian effects, but Borlaug received a Nobel peace prize for it and that scale of impact does seem plausible.

[1] See discussion below about relative importance of engineering disease resistant varieties vs fertilizers and pesticides. I only have a vague familiarity with the green revolution and could be mistaken.

That's not what the green revolution was. It was pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.

While GMOs are not harmful and banning them is overall bad, they don't have nearly the same magnitude of impact on agricultural productivity as herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Thanks for the feedback - I've updated my comment to express uncertainty.

As I understand it, a big part of the green revolution, especially initially, was Borlaug developing a strand of wheat that was resistant to many common diseases and had higher yields. This seems born out by a quick skim of his [wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug), although I'm sure nitrogen fertilizer, etc, also played large roles.

I don't have the time to do a deep dive right now, so I've just updated my previous comment to be uncertain.

That's legit. I think that with further reading, the nuanced view is that it's both the high-yield strains of staple foods that Borlaug developed and the high-input farming style, in combination.

But my point is actually that modern GMO plants, the Monsanto ones that people are currently freaking out about, don't revolutionize yields. They improve them on the margin, but it's not another green revolution, at least so far.

Its mostly well accepted in plant breeding circles that the improvement in crop yields in North America in the last ~30-40 years can be 66% attributed to genetic progress (i.e higher yield, more disease/pest tolerance, better adaptation, etc.) and the remaining 33% can be attributed to agronomic factors (i.e earlier planting, better/more precise equipment, better soil/nutrient management, etc.)

Norman Borlaug would disagree with your characterization of the green revolution. Much of the Green Revolution involved the plant breeding.

I completely disagree. Quite a lot of the work done during the Green Revolution was breeding plants that were more hardy and resilient to the environment. For instance, Norman Borlaug worked on strains of wheat that were resistant to stem rust (something that had caused starvation in Mexico several years earlier). Pesticides, herbicides, nor fertilisers help with stem rust. GMOs also allow the breeding of plants that have higher yield, which is something we need if we want to feed the world.

You also have things like Golden Rice, which help people who have vitamin A deficiencies and don't have access to vitamin A sources to be able to get vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiencies kill almost a million children under 5 each year especially in South-East Asia. It is only practical to solve this problem through GMOs. (Greenpeace also protested Golden Rice, meaning they protested against programs that can save tens of millions of children. Whether or not you hold that against them is up to you, but if they want to play the "blood on your hands" game I don't see why I shouldn't.)

To be clear; pesticides, herbicides, and fertilisers are very important to agriculture and many more people would be starving without them. But the same is true of GMOs -- they are more than just "not harmful"; they are necessary.

Breeding (even hybridizing) plants is not considered GMO or all carrots, corn, and avocados would be considered the same. I'm a supporter of GMO, but directly modifying (or inserting) genes is different from selective breeding and even cloning. I don't particularly like breeding plants that are (more) tolerant of high doses of proprietary pesticides (insect=animal killers) or even herbicides, because like overusing anti-biotech at low doses for feed lot weight gain it is a recipe for eventual disaster.

> Breeding (even hybridizing) plants is not considered GMO or all carrots, corn, and avocados would be considered the same.

It is a different technique, but the purpose is the same. [1] gives a good overview over why discriminating between the "more natural" genetic modification techniques and the "less natural" ones is not a reasonable middle-ground. Healthy skepticism around particular GMOs (meaning particular plants) is completely fine (and should be encouraged -- like all skepticism), but skepticism around all plants produced by a given group of techniques doesn't make much sense imo.

Regarding proprietary pesticides, there is a legitimate issue there (as there is with the patenting of biotech -- or patents in general) but it has been hijacked by anti-GMO protests making claims that farmers were sued because of cross-contamination from other farms and similarly false statements.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcbTVEr3_X4

Yes GMO is different: unlike random chance we know exactly what genes we changed and what each does. Random chance seems to solve some problem and we never both to ask why or what the side effects might be.

I'm sure Monsanto and the GMO lobby's objective was saving lives in developing countries, not profits. When they pushed GMOs bundled with pesticides and herbicides they did so aided by the corruption in these countries, where the farmers were doing quite fine replanting seeds. Now they're abusing a BASF product to ripen tomatoes overnight.

Who gives a shit about motivation? Do you care if your take-out food was made in the expectation of a financial return, or does it need to be made out of the restaurant owner's sincere love of feeding strangers?

Considering what motivates someone can often be useful.

People can behave and make drastically different choices based solely on motivation. People will often pick and choose what information they choose to share or choose to hide based largely on the motivations that are driving their project.

Motivation can drastically alter the way an idea is presented to the audience in which it is being presented.

Obviously we would prefer to have one hundred percent accurate information to base all of our decisions on but sadly, we don’t —- considering the motives of those who are selling us whatever they’re selling is wise.

Motivations here as are complex as the players involved. It's entirely reasonable to expect that researchers who invented e.g. golden rice were thinking about the lives it'll save. It's also entirely reasonable to expect companies to support development and deployment of it because it's profitable for them.

On a less extreme end, companies sure want crops with improved resistance to pathogens and insects for profit reasons, but this is the case where their incentives somewhat align with public good.

> It’s entirely reasonable to expect that researchers who invented e.g. golden rice we’re thinking about the lives it’ll save.

Absolutely. I was simply responding to the above poster’s implication that we should never consider motives when someone is selling the entire world a product.

And I agree with you completely that it’s reasonable to expect there was some altruism in producing golden rice. It’s also reasonable to expect companies who have billions of dollars tied up in their patents on the world’s food supply might selectivity choose which information they share in order to make their product appear in the best light possible. In some ways it would be unreasonable to assume they would share their negative info with us, they have an incredible amount to lose if we don’t buy into their products.

And look, I’m certainly not suggesting that GMOs are evil, I am incredibly excited by some of the advancements we’re seeing. I’m just saying there is nothing wrong with considering motives when different data streams seems to be in tension with one another. Simply considering motives as one small piece in the puzzle is rational.

I believe to make informed decisions, we need as much information as possible. And understanding motivations is just more information to help us parse. Again, I’m incredibly pro-gmo, but I’m also willing to consider there may be consequences to some products and some policies - particularly when these policies are mixing intellectual property and patents on something as important as the worlds food supply.

Complex motivations, with humans that's almost a truism, agreed.

>companies sure want crops with improved resistance to pathogens and insects for profit reasons, but this is the case where their incentives somewhat align with public good //

If we ignore all other aspects of the public good. Yes we want cheaper food, but not at the cost of poisoning of farmworkers or consumers, eutrophication, destruction of bio-diversity, destruction of soil structure that aids long-term fertility and reduces erosion, etc.. These are all externalised [potential] costs.

>It's also entirely reasonable to expect companies to support development and deployment of it because it's profitable for them. //

Every day this becomes less reasonable to me. Why should we allow the financial profit motive of a small number of capitalists be the primary driver as opposed to the general good of the demos; it seems so perverse to reduce the decisions on managing of economic aspects such as food production to "what makes the owners of Monsanto et al. the most money without producing a provable and immediately catastrophic harm". Bof.

Our information about the benefits of GMO is pretty thorough and persuasive, so in this case, we don't need to care about motivations.

A lot of this information comes from studies affiliated with industry:

A 2011 analysis by Diels et al., reviewed 94 peer-reviewed studies pertaining to GMO safety to assess whether conflicts of interest correlated with outcomes that cast GMOs in a favorable light. They found that financial conflict of interest was not associated with study outcome (p = 0.631) while author affiliation to industry (i.e., a professional conflict of interest) was strongly associated with study outcome (p < 0.001).[129] Of the 94 studies that were analyzed, 52% did not declare funding. 10% of the studies were categorized as "undetermined" with regard to professional conflict of interest. Of the 43 studies with financial or professional conflicts of interest, 28 studies were compositional studies. According to Marc Brazeau, an association between professional conflict of interest and positive study outcomes can be skewed because companies typically contract with independent researchers to perform follow-up studies only after in-house research uncovers favorable results. In-house research that uncovers negative or unfavorable results for a novel GMO is generally not further pursued.[130]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont...

This is one very good reason why the motivation of industry should be examined carefully. If their motivation is profit and they are allowed to optimise for that alone without any oversight or regulation AND on top of that they are the keepers and dispensers of information about their product, what chance does the general public have to make an accurate assessment of their product's safety?

That's some cult-level doublethink going on here. Of course you need to understand motivation. "Who cares what the motives of ISIS are, they're rebuilding towns and cities destroyed by imperialist aggression.." <= try that experiment in thought.

And also enslaving and killing by the thousand. So no, a utilitarian view doesn't support that idea.

I do care because it makes farmers dependent on Monsanto seeds + chemical packages, for they cannot compete with the ones that are using these products and go out of business otherwise. This reduces food diversity, aids big agricultural conglomerates while harming small producers and leads to creation of food deserts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

> the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives.

This argument is moot, industrialisation saved those lives, not GMO, GMO only provides a 5% increase to crops in the developed world. Tractors, fertilizers and proper agricultural techniques saved the developed world (just like it did in the current developed one) not GMO.

Furthermore, currently, world-wide more people die from the "side effects" of too much food; not enough is not the challenge.

We have the food. It's just "unevenly distributed."

Furthermore, my sense is, the argument for the world needing GMOs is based on the animal protein heavy diet. Such animals are resource / feed intensive. Shift the diet to less meats and more plants and the fact is you feed more.

I'm not here to make a case for zero meat. Only the the pro GMO argument is based on a myth, a myth that I've seen plenty of reasonable people buy into.

I think as the developing world grows economically we will continue to see higher demand for meat. Eventually the only thing stopping higher meat consumption will be the fact that the price has been pushed higher and higher by limited worldwide production capacity intersecting with high demand.

I don't disagree. But the "need" for so much meat is a myth. The level of. First World meat consumption is bad for the planet, and bad for those who consume it.

Health, ethic, eco and moral downsides. Yet we're sooo blinded and confused.

Isn't there a chance GMOs will be able to allow the crops to be (chemical) pesticide free, so that way you can avoid putting cancer-causing chemicals on the food in the first place. That seems like a huge win to me.

Like others have commented below GMOs (well, GMO crops specifically) were not the main driver of the Green Revolution. So the question remains- what are the harms that can come about by not using GMOs?

My understanding is that, at this point in time, the harms are primarily financial. For instance, when the EU imposed a moratorium on GMO crops, the reaction was primarily for countries that, until then, sold GMO crops to EU countries, to complain to the WTO about trade agreement violations- in other words, their financial interests were damaged.

As to issues of food security and feeding the people of developed nations, as I understand it, there is an ongoing debate on whether GMO crops are really needed to achieve this, or whether better management of existing agricultural resources, or better distribution of current food production, can do the job. In other words- GMOs may be beneficial, so not necessary, therefore not using them would not lead to harm.

No, the harms are environmental. Spraying weed killers (ie glyphosate) uses much less carbon than the mechanical methods. Tractors pulling something through the soil need a lot of fuel. A sprayer running over the same field spraying a gallon of glyphosate uses much less fuel. If you have any concern about global warming you should demand that only GMO crops be grown.

Note that I work for John Deere. We sell to farmers who are both for and against GMO so I'm not supposed to have a bias, but I still need to make this connection clear.

As a separate comment, since it's a bit of a digression- the Green Revolution has not been all good. High yield agriculture has an -I believe- uncontroversial effect on the environment, including habitat loss and reduced crop biodiversity, but apparently also carbon emissions (because it relies on fossil fuels). There's a discussion of the environmental impacts on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution#Environmental...

This includes an ominous note about reliance on non-renewable resources:

Dependence on non-renewable resources

Most high intensity agricultural production is highly reliant on non-renewable resources. Agricultural machinery and transport, as well as the production of pesticides and nitrates all depend on fossil fuels.[73] Moreover, the essential mineral nutrient phosphorus is often a limiting factor in crop cultivation, while phosphorus mines are rapidly being depleted worldwide.[74] The failure to depart from these non-sustainable agricultural production methods could potentially lead to a large scale collapse of the current system of intensive food production within this century.

In other words, the Green Revolution may not be much more sustainable than the Industrial Revolution and may prove to be just as harmful further down the line, exactly because it allowed us to feed an additional 5 billion mouths or so. I guess the argument is that it doesn't really scale that well.

including habitat loss

It's not quite that simple—in many places increasing yields means using less land. In particular, leaving marginal land fallow.

But the factors are pretty complicated, in the US especially dominated by policy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691921...

On the other hand, how much land was exhausted and then left fallow? How much was taken over for other uses (such as urbanization)?

And if we hadn't had yield increases, would we be using more land now? Or just eat less meat?

Edit:

While worldwide agricultural land has increased, in the US it decreased from 63% to 51% of the total 1949-2007 according to this survey, which draws from USDA data:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012/march/data-feature...

"Rural Kansas is dying. I drove 1,800 miles to find out why"

https://newfoodeconomy.org/rural-kansas-depopulation-commodi...

U.S. census data tells the story. The population in most of Kansas’s rural counties peaked 50 years ago or earlier.

In that 110 years ago was "earlier", that's true. But why not say that, unless the purpose is to mislead?

Saved a billion ~human~ lives, perhaps. It caused the death and destruction of many billions of non-human lives. It massively reduced bio-diversity on 90% of the earths surface.

It has to be said, it has to be acknowledged, the 'progress' of man has come at an extraordinary cost to every other living thing.

Do you believe that a human life should be valued more than say, a worm?

Hunger is not an efficiency problem. Hunger is a political problem. Handwaving that away to propagandize for an industrial food corporation is… not good.

Their are unseen cost

>The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be suffering any damage.

It's also the region of the world least susceptible to food shortages.

>What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them?

lower crop yields, more starvation, more malnutrition

Starvation and malnutrition are political problems.

I find the argument 'if you don't support the food megacorporation that means you are killing billions of people' to be impossible, disingenuous, evil hyperbole.

As you say, a perfect solution might be a redistribution of global food supply to allocate more to starving regions. I will support you in 'fighting the good fight'. To me, the pragmatic solution is to grow more food with the same resources that you have. The only hyperbole is in equating not feeding someone with starving them.

To equate GMO tech with the megacorps that profit from them is a strawman argument.

What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer?

Unlike athermal levels of non-ionizing radiation, bullshit is never truly harmless.

> What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer?

Telcos will earn less money. Phone manufacturers will earn less money.

On the other hand, maybe app creators will finally learn to create apps that work perfectly fine offline (i.e. in the airplane mode).

There's chance GMOs will be able to be pesticide free, so that way you can avoid putting cancer-causing chemicals on the food in the first place. That seems like a huge win to me.

Or it could backfire horribly and create populations of insects that are immune to their protections:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_maize#Res...

"Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

The OP is clearly NOT suggesting "blind opposition" to industrial progress - in fact, what is wanted, is absolutely transparent, non-blinded research.

But, this is not what is on the table. You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts: companies such as Monsanto WANT BLIND FAITH in their products, and work very avidly to ensure that the public - and their representatives - do not get to see all the facts.

So, what exactly is your intention here?

We could flip the original sentence as: "Blind faith in industrial progress..carried by the tide of public policy..is causing and will continue to cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

Yes it will be paid back. By generations to come. While the corporations who invented/introduced/pushed the stuff and got governments to support them by adjusting laws to allow doing it keep flourishing...

That's the sad truth, that coming generations will be paying for our short-sighted pursuit of profit and "progress".

This reminds me of the Long Now Foundation [0]. At least there is hope, that there are people aware of the need for long-term sustainable thinking, and are actively promoting it.

"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries." Stewart Brand

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

> The OP is clearly NOT suggesting "blind opposition" to industrial progress

Yes they are.

> "Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be."

OP is literally saying that from the moment the waters become slightly murky you can reasonably assume that the big vested interest is in the wrong. FUD stirring past this threshold is inevitable, so this amounts to blind opposition to >billion dollar vested interests, which are a reasonable proxy for industrial progress.

As for the inevitably of FUD-stirring, I'll again hold up Greenpeace as my example. Monsanto does many evil things, but instead of focusing on those, Greenpeace decided to engage in Fox-news level truth wrangling so that they could milk the juicy "terminator gene" soundbite. They did it again as the Seralini scandal developed -- but since I had my own "ground truth" opinion (which agrees with the scientific consensus supporting retraction) I saw their claims of suppression/censorship in a very different light. From that day forward I stopped assuming good intentions from environmental groups and adopted a "read both sides" policy. It was eye-opening.

> You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts

Right back atcha.

> So, what exactly is your intention here?

Self-styled environmentalists turned back the clock on clean energy by fifty years when they sank nuclear power. I don't want them to do the same to my food supply, but they're half way there. I don't want them to do the same to my cell phone, but I hear war drums beating in the distance.

"Blind opposition to industrial progress [...] will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

Meanwhile, in reality: the exact opposite

> pesticides and bees

The EU is implementing a total ban on neonicotinoid pesticides by the end of 2018.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/eu-agree...

Only for outside use. They are still legal for use in greenhouses. I'm not disagreeing that this means they acknowledge the potential harm for bees, but it's not a "total ban".

Don't forget leaded gasoline: https://www.thenation.com/article/secret-history-lead/

I think that the common people have no way of knowing the real truth about something. And all our decisions should be based on this simple fact of modern life...

Why so pessimistic? Aren't there any independent labs where you can send your samples for testing and then see results for your self? Send to multiple labs for more control.

This is not always possible. For example, take the claim that a certain thing X in some eatables is harmful/not harmful for human beings. Such a thing might not be possible without long term study. Or the claim that smoking will kill you, but what if you want to know if smoking moderately is as bad as exposing to automobile pollution every day? Or living in an area with polluted air. Mainstream narrative today emphasizes on the dangers of smoking, but it does not really does the same with automobile pollution? What if you want to know the truth about this? Can this be so easily done by a common man?

Even in cases where this is possible, like pesticide residue in vegetables, You might have to run the experiments for a large number of samples for some amount of time to get a real picture. Which might be feasible, but way out of the comfort zone of a concerned person, who has a normal life and the associated hassles to deal with...

Those cases have another interesting feature - you're wasting time worrying about them.

When scientists have problems figuring out whether or how much something is harmful, it's because it's so harmless it's hard to measure. If e.g. artificial sweeteners caused cancers the way many believe, you'd see people dropping dead left and right, with cancers clearly linkable to the use of sweeteners.

Those studies are obviously important, on a population scale. For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause.

>If e.g. artificial sweeteners caused cancers the way many believe, you'd see people dropping dead left and right, with cancers clearly linkable to the use of sweeteners.

Wait a min. I don't remember smokers dropping dead left and right in all those times when almost everyone smoked..

Another one is the effects on lead in automobile fuels. Again people were not dropping dead. Despite the issues about it that we have since discovered...

I think these kinds of apologetic behavior is vastly more dangerous than any hindrance to "progress" that might be caused by being more cautious...

>For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause...

Not sure. How does producing vegetables myself, or making sure the vegitables I buy are free of residue, or limiting my exposure to air pollution put in me more danger than those things could ever cause...

If you think pesticide residue cannot do much damage, take a look at Endosulfan tragedy in India.

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/No-en...

> Wait a min. I don't remember smokers dropping dead left and right in all those times when almost everyone smoked..

Because the effect isn't very much pronounced. It's somewhat in the middle between eating rotten meat and using artificial sweeteners, in the sense that it really does damage health over long periods of time, which will result in worse life quality and quicker death of some fraction of smokers. Accordingly, scientists figured that out relatively quickly.

My whole point is that the difficulty for science to tie a cause to an effect is proportional to how strong impact that cause has. Saying that artificial sweeteners, or glyphosate, are clear carcinogens literally means the effect is strong and pronounced, which directly implies it's easy to find.

> Another one is the effects on lead in automobile fuels. Again people were not dropping dead. Despite the issues about it that we have since discovered

That was more subtle, but again, found relatively quickly.

> If you think pesticide residue cannot do much damage, take a look at Endosulfan tragedy in India.

I'm not saying that. We know Endosulfan is toxic. And it is being banned worldwide; the story you linked is about politics, not science.

Again, my point is only this heuristic: the health danger of a substance in mass use is roughly proportional to how easy it is to verify it. When you get to the point that the only indication of danger is that some mice might have had bad reaction to a substance, except the other studies show they didn't - when you have no sensible mechanism explaining the danger and only weak statistical correlation - at that point, costs of alternatives should outweigh any worry you should have. For example, the alternative to artificial sweetener is sugar, which is known to be much more dangerous to health. The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc.

>That was more subtle, but again, found relatively quickly.

Wait. What? How do you measure "relatively quickly"? As far as I know, we have been using it even after the problems were known.......

>The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc.

Any source for this claim that there are no, absolutely no safer alternatives? Also, is there any proof that a safer alternative is fundamentally impossible to make? Also, have we thought about using safer alternatives, and the hit in production that it might cause. Can we live with that?

Surely you should be providing safer alternatives if you're convinced of them?

Oh yeah, that's a really efficient approach. Like the average person knows how to buy that service, what it should cost, or what to do with the results.

That and, entities with large amounts of power (such as a titanic corporation with billions in revenues) are compelled to exploit any avenue for making more money, compelled to exploit any externalities they're not actively held responsible for, and compelled to hire astroturf and pay for false information to the exact extent that they can, not legally, but practically, get away with it.

They are compelled to be this because if they don't the next guy will do it and beat them, and there's an ocean of evidence demonstrating that 'good people' will go along with all of it if seeming authority demands it.

History's littered with this. To be like 'oh, but THIS time we have to give the corporation the benefit of all possible doubt, because their PR statement says if you don't then billions of people will die and all will be lost'…?

No way. No way. The fundamental truth of society is that the powerful will take advantage. Acknowledging that goes back to the Magna Carta. This is no time to ditch that and turn over unquestioned power to gods, kings and corporations.

Not all ignorance is deliberate. Almost none of it is -- ignorance is the default.

Some things we don't know yet. Others have effect sizes so small distinguishing them from zero is a true and deep challenge, even with tremendous study done. Some things actually do have effect sizes of zero, and no amount of evidence will stop people from demanding more study.

And also, Any amount of study does not say much if all of them uses flawed methodologies ("but that is the best we have" does not make it any better), which has been a serious issue lately..

Anti-GMO is a multibillion industry. There are rich, vested interests on both sides of this debate.

> See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

Cigarettes come to mind, too.

>The Wikipedia section that the parent post links to straight up says that the only research that found no links was sponsored by Monsanto.

By my count the section lists 7 studies, 3 show no links and 4 show links.

You can probably add cigarettes to that list.

> "All made possible with a series of comparatively small investments to buy scientific research to keep the jury out."

I agree with 99.9% of what you said, except this bit. I hate to mince words __but it's essential to this tactic__. Simply put:

This is __not__ - and never should be considered - scientific research.

It's fiction.

It's a perversion.

It's the kind of nonsense Orwell warned us about.

There is only one thing more unconscionable: "Real" Science and its ilk remains silent. In addition, certainly, the FDA isn't the only lab capable of making making these test.

But this is contemporary / modern science. Again. Is it any wonder so many have so much doubt?

>Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, > you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be. > See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

I'm not sure you notice the grave strangeness of your comment. There's no jury out there on climate change. The basics are pretty clear. I also think the relation of some pesticides and bees dying is hardly controversial (though it gets muddy when you get into the details and ask which pesticides). For plastic packaging and cancer I'm not sure what the evidence says, but I guess it's complicated. I don't think any scientist seriously doubts that pain medication can be addictive (again, details may be more complicated and uncertain).

So you have 3 examples where the science is contrary to the interest of a billion dollar vested interest. What do you make of that?

(Of course having settled science doesn't mean political action follows, which is most evident when it comes to climate change. But that's a different question.)

There's nothing strange: GP is giving those as historical examples of this sort of behavior by the industry, not claiming the jury is out today on these topics.

Especially with climate change, there is no doubt the industry has done all it can to cloud the issue in the past, and still continues it. You could add other things (e.g. smoking) to the list.

You know there is a multibillion industry with vested interests against GMO: the organic food lobby.

>> See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

Also, Asbestos, DDT, Thalidomide, etc.

I find that in discussions like this people often automatically adopt a defensive stance For Science, Technology and Progress, but they're missing the point that it is not science (i.e. scientists, or the scientific method) that is responsible for disasters like that- it's corporations. And they care not one jot about science, technology or progress, let alone feeding the poor or curing the ailing, or anything humantiarian and compassionate like that. It's the industry that destroys the environment and causes public health disasters, then tries its best to keep it all under wraps while people die.

Bottom line- defending big financial interests is not defending science. It's just defending someone else's money.

yep, you hit the nail on the head here.

often, the real evidence is extremely clear, but there is enough obfuscation created by those with an agenda to make things look inconclusive.

yet another example is polygraph tests and similar more modern devices.

all of the independent evidence says they're trash. but "the jury is still out" because there are a slew of very low quality studies performed by people hired by the companies who make the devices.

anyhow, we've known that monsanto was lying about this for quite some time, and we have also known that they have corrupted the parts of the US government responsible for regulating their behavior for quite some time.

it isn't okay for pesticides to be in our food.

> It seems like the jury is out

Ah yes, the jury is always out. Better do nothing and instead politicize the issue while pretending to debate the "science" for a few more decades.

> the jury is out

What we currently have is galf a dozen independent studies suggesting it might be a carcinogen. And one Monsanto backed study saying it has no immediate harm.

It is not so easy to dismiss. Both groups of studies can be correct.

If the assumption has been that it is not getting into food, when in fact it has, it is reasonable to ask whether studies have been based on valid models of exposure. Furthermore, the article you link to is almost entirely preoccupied with the cancer risk, which is far from the only danger of environmental toxins. this seems to be a case where the burden of evidence belongs on those calling it harmless.

>does it prove her claim true that it is harmful?

Always reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM

The recent news is that Monsanto have known for a while that the formulations containing Glyphosate are harmful as a whole, while isolated Glyphosate may not be particularly harmful.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/08/weedkiller-t...

I'm no fan of toxic chemicals in our food and I don't trust the government or corporations to do enough to protect it, but it seems fair to me to say that a PhD in philosophy and a master's in physics are not particularly relevant to claiming expertise in evaluating toxicological claims.

It's fair to say that, because it's true, but it's not in and of itself a reason to write somebody off as a nut, or assume they have not found any other way to gain expertise on the thing they are talking about. I think OP's point was just that people used her unrelated qualifications as a way to dismiss her without reference to her actual argument.

That's totally fair, and you interpreted what OP was trying to say better than I did.

A high school dropout can be a source of expertise if she commits herself to learning the subject material and understanding the context of the claims she is making.

When someone with a PhD in philosophy is per se blacklisted regarding other matters of worldly concern, credentialism has gone too far.

Yes. In fact, from a slightly different perspective, one can easily argue that this very credentialism is a component of the control apparatus exploited by the "vested interests".

To become credentialed in a field, you must spend multiple years repeating the same things over and over, getting programmed to perceive and approach problems in compliance with the field's orthodoxy.

There is a small core of people who decide whether you will gain your credential or not. These persons generally have interests besides just "train the best new $OUR_FIELDers out there", if only because that's subjective and will take many years to play out. They're generally looking for funding, projects, publications, appointments, etc. In charge of those people is university administration, and their conflict of interest is so obvious and inherent that it's a waste of time to type it out.

So you have this big powerful apparatus that has many little gullets that can be made to respond much more favorably by pouring a little money here, a little prestige there, etc. Many of these "gullets" will balk if this is done openly, but if you add a thin layer of abstraction and ambiguity, very few people will even notice the relationship, let alone care. It really only takes a minimal amount of obfuscation to get people to jump on board with something that has direct personal benefit to offer.

As such, the perspective of intelligent outsiders who haven't gone through an elaborate niche-specific brainwashing process should be valued, not dismissed.

In the same universe where there exists a non-trivial number of highly successful subject matter experts that are college dropouts, why do you believe this?

There's limited time and a lot of bullshit to wade through, and I'm busy enough staying abreast of my chosen fields. Credentialism is often abused, but it remains a useful heuristic. It's definitely not useful for people who are expert enough to evaluate claims in and of themselves, but that's not most people. I'm not an expert in medicine, biochemistry, or whatever, so I'm not qualified to sift out the genuine autodidacts from the cranks. Whereas, I'm qualified to sift out autodidactic programmers who dropped out of HS.

By your own measure of credentials I find her reasoned, data backed opinion more valid than your skepticism.

What are your credentials?

A person's credentialing does not make facts any less true.

I believe the debate is around whether or not they are facts to begin with.

Yes, which is why I said "facts" and not "the facts." There is the point of this situation, and the point of ignoring a person's informed opinion. I was discussing the latter.

>Yes, which is why I said "facts" and not "the facts."

Wow that is an extremely subtle distinction.

Statistical analysis is generally universal and independent of a given discipline; nor does it require a PhD.

Society encourages everyone to draw simple, binary boxes around people, but people are more complicated than that.

She didn't do the research. She was trumpeting research done by people with training in the field.

I would argue that her advanced degrees put her far above average in her ability to read technical literature on the subject. She’s not doing original research in the field, merely sharing what she has learned from reading existing research. Knowledge she would like to spread when our own FDA puts its head in the sand.

I can understand that as reason to doubt her findings, and have further investigation, but the empirical evidence is increasingly agreeing with her...

Neither is a massive corporate PR budget, but it'll work wonders at widely spreading the specific claims that benefit you, whether or not you just made them up or paid to have them written down by a third party.

That PhD in philosophy is likely to give an otherwise naive person the useful information of, "yes, seemingly nice people will act like this if it benefits them, or if they've deferred to some authority that requires it of them". It'll also give a grounding in 'rationalizing such decisions'.

I don't think discrediting the person, rather than their arguments, furthers the discussion.

It seems like it would be really simple to know what's in your food by simply testing for it right?

If you're telling me that X substance is in some good that is freely available then it should be easy to prove it. You can catch the EPA/FDA red handed by simply doing some independent testing. The only reason I trust the EPA/FDA over the PhD you refer to is that the barrier of entry to testing something that I can buy off the shelf seems so low that lack of evidence, in this case, really hurts the accusation.

Like if I said bricks float in vegetable oil. That's trivially falsifiable.

Am I mistaken about how difficult it should be to test for glyphosate?

The health effects of glyphosate are another story, that is certainly much more difficult to prove and is a legitimate topic of discussion, especially considering how many times industry has withheld health issues in the past.

> Am I mistaken about how difficult it should be to test for glyphosate?

Read the article? The "official" samples contained nothing. "Testing" is not just the process of testing the sample in the lab, it takes place in a context. That context matters a lot, as this example shows. Even if your lab process is reliable, you can do a lot to influence the result before you have a sample on the plate of the technician. It's the same as with any measurement, any study: Before doing the actual measurement there is far larger and more important process that remains mostly invisible or ignored (even when it is published). Focus only is on the "numbers", because "numbers don't lie"...

My point is that anybody who knows how to test for glyphosate can go to the grocery store, buy a box of ritz crackers, an ear of corn and some canned soup and test them.

The food I eat is easily testable by an independent lab. If you make an accusation about a product you could easily test because it's freely available I am suspicious why you didn't.

There certainly are controlling interests that exist in our market and government. Regarding players like Vandana Shiva, though, it's also pretty clear that the pendulum swings in both directions; you're better off reading another critic's opinion. The New Yorker had a big piece on her, by the way.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt

> I’d really like to know what’s in our food.

Why? Don't you trust the free market?

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