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Comment by Tomco | Hacker News Reader

This study has been debunked. It was paid for by an environmentalist group and the people behind the study used a faulty methodology to get the results that they wanted.

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Who funded the debunking?

I find it disturbing when conversations about the validity of studies (or criticisms thereof) center around things like funding or ideology rather than methodology. It is another way of saying, "I don't take seriously anyone who disagrees with me," which is not good intellectual hygiene.

The problem is that science is being essentially undermined by funding battles. The lay person or even casual scientist can't make substantial fact based decisions and can't trust the summaries. Hence the doubt about any study.

I agree with your first statement (though your second takes it too far IMO). Still my question was relevant. Our judgments of these things are necessarily probabilistic and trust-based, at least in the absence of personally replicating a given result. Following the money is important in estimating the odds.

Money involves desire. Desire involves emotion. Emotion trumps intellect. That may be disturbing, but it's a bedrock fact about human nature.

Citation?

Here is Monsanto's response to a more recent paper by the same authors:

"The authors present no new information, raise no new issues, and reiterate theoretical concerns that already have been dismissed by experts and regulatory authorities around the world."

http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/IJBS-GMO-health-risk...

That is what you'd expect from the company who produces GM corn. Any third-party non-partial analyses of papers by those same authors?

There was some interesting discussion over at Discover magazine:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/01/15/gm-corn...

They mainly channel Karl Haro von Mogel, who notes on his blog "the authors have a little history of making mistakes with statistics with this same data set" and points to further information:

http://www.biofortified.org/2010/01/organ-failure-organ-dama...

Sorry, accidental downvote (big thumb, small screen).

I'd like to add that, partiality aside, the Monsanto's argument is fallatious and unconvincing (appeal to authority). Give me data from independent, properly designed studies, not the mere opinion of experts.

Consider a set of politicized disciplines, S1, S2, .. Sn (e.g. climate science, GM foods research). Let P1, P2.. Pn be proponents of prevailing theory in respective discipline, and D1, D2, ...Dn be their detractors.

Define coherence K as cardinality of (P1 & P2 &... &Pn) | (D1 & D2 &...&Dn).

Varjag's conjecture: as n approaches infinity, K asymptotically approaches zero. Therefore if true, the argument from authority is rendered relevant.

(the proof is left as an exercise to a reader)

I'm not sure I follow you.

P_i and D_i are sets of proponenents/detractors for discipline S_i, right?

I so, I assume that the & and | boolean operators you use are substitutes for set union and intersection, respectively.

Assuming that the opinions on the various topics are independent, I would rather see K tend to

    \sum |P_i| == \sum |D_i|

What am I missing?

___

Also, for my previous post:

    s/(appeal to authority)/(appeal to potentially corrupt authority)/

The point was: people are incoherent in their dismissal of argument from authority. E.g. many (most?) in anti-GM movement also acknowledge anthropogenic global warming as true, obviously having no issue with IPCC authority on it.

Given enough controversial subjects people care for, no one is going to be knowledgeable in all of them. But people invoke "arguing from authority is a fallacy" only when they are not sided with the said authority.

In fact, you are correct; argument from authority is not a fallacy. Those who think it is do not understand argument from authority. When the authority is relevant to the subject at hand the argument is relevant. It is appeal to misleading authority which is a fallacy (http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html).

>The point was: people are incoherent in their dismissal of argument from authority. E.g. many (most?) in anti-GM movement also acknowledge anthropogenic global warming as true, obviously having no issue with IPCC authority on it.

This is just using an ad hominem to attack people who cite the argument from authority fallacy. Science is also based on careful examination of empirical evidence, not unsubstantiated pronouncements by authority figures.

Oh, if only it was that easy!

Consider how long it took to get rid of phlogiston theory in physics, even when falsified by experiments. The physicists of the day were careful and rigorous, honest scientists, and their opponents did not have (initially) any alternative theory to replace it with.

And perhaps we are giving too much credit to most people involved in public debates for examination of empirical evidence. I can say honestly that I tried to read the whole IPCC report, but got barely 1/4th in (it is incredibly thick and dense with facts). Very few of my peers though even glanced as the cover, yet their opinions on it are not any less strong.

I wouldn't say I'm particularly convinced of the evils of GM food. I think it's generally harmless, at least from what I've seen.

Still, I would not put as much trust in a study/debunking coming directly from Monsato than I would a study coming from other sources.

This study is actually a statistical reanalysis of earlier studies that was found lacking. The same group also produced a 2007 Greenpeace funded study that was rejected. The 2009 reanalysis was also widely rejected (by the French High Council of Biotechnologies Scientific Committee, The European Food Safety Authority GMO Panel, and Food Standards Australia New Zealand).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MON_863

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