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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

I have to admit, whenever I see something like this, my immediate response is: who paid for them to write this. I am reminded of the many talking heads in finance prior to 2008 who assured us that our financial system providing more debt than ever to support home loans was good for the economy.

I'm not saying it's impossible for organic to have downsides. It's not even impossible that those downsides might be substantial. I am saying it's impossible for me to trust an article that says so, given the way our newsmedia industry works. A good portion of our news is ghostwritten for them by industry, and this looks a lot like what I might pay for the ghostwriting of if I were, say, Monsanto. Is this true? I have no idea. But I am suspicious.

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Ad hominem: the article author, Bjorn Lomborg, is a noted climate change skeptic[1] whose work has been declared "scientifically dishonest" by watchdogs in the past[2].

The money seems to come from his being an environmental edgelord. Private funding -> almost nonexistent foundation -> Lomborg's pocket[3].

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ten-most-important-climat... [2] http://fivu.dk/en/publications/2004/annual-report-2003-the-d... [3] https://theconversation.com/still-no-consensus-for-bjorn-lom...

Do you apply the same standard to claims about "organic" products?

What are you talking about? Organic foods are an absence of herbicides, pesticides, and narcotics. It's not like you're choosing the lesser of two evils or something.

Organic foods are an absence of specific herbicides, pesticides and narcotics; not all of them categorically.

Just your assumption, unfortunately.

> The pesticides that are allowed for organic food production are typically not manmade. They tend to have natural substances like soaps, lime sulfur and hydrogen peroxide as ingredients. Not all natural substances are allowed in organic agriculture; some chemicals like arsenic, strychnine and tobacco dust (nicotine sulfate) are prohibited.

http://npic.orst.edu/ingred/organic.html

Um, there is no assumption here. I guess I could have clarified "Organic foods are an absence of many herbicides, pesticides, and narcotics."

Non-organic simply has them all.

Although that may be true of many articles it is possible to check the author's credentials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg

His public record seems to me to suggest he really does hold these views.

A challenge is that with this debate (say organic vs GMO) both sides have a lot at stake financially and you can make this argument either way. How then should one decide what to trust and read?

Well in such cases, I apply the precautionary principle and do the thing that is the least risk. In this case, it's minimizing unknown chemicals in my body.

I tend to go by: 1) which side has more money to spend? 2) which side is introducing more foods/chemicals/conditions which are more different from what my ancestors evolved for?

Which is totally not a guarantee, I freely admit.

Curiously, our ancestors evolved to eat cooked, genetically modified food. Modified by selection yes, but genetically different from anything that came before.

The odd 'paleo' diet is nothing we're equipped to handle anymore. Nobody has eaten like that for 100,000 years, and we've moved on biologically?

Does “organic” necessarily mean non-GMO? Personally I think GMO is great but dislike massive use of fertilizer and pesticides. And really, that’s mostly for downstream effects. I want to encourage sustainable land use and reduced environmental harm. Fine with me if we need to hack some plants to enable that.

I recognize that genetic modification is sometimes used to enable greater use of these chemicals (eg roundup ready grains).

How about taking the competing arguments at face value and evaluating them against each other? If qui bono is the only question you ask, you shut down a lot of your brain.

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