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Comment by strainer | Hacker News Reader

Everything is totally fine until it bites hard enough to beat the marketing and legal campaigns run to promote and protect it. "Totally fine" is simply the orthodox professional position towards new potentially lucrative practices. Because it is a burden on the career opportunities to those who think otherwise.

Putting cattle remains in cattle feed was fine until CJD was discovered, mass producing CFCs was fine until the chemisty of the ozone damage was understood. More chemists assured leaded petrol was fine and the few who complained were attacked... this list is huge. Its totally fine to mass produce plastics still. So to assure the generally well informed about the safety and wisdom of a technological proposition - you would need to be able to carry more detail than just adding 'I am a related professional - this is fine'

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This is a pretty poor form of argument. You can't just make blanket statements like this without evidence.

What evidence do you have that our understanding of CRISPR and genetic modification today is on par of our understanding of CFCs and CJD in the 20th century?

It's like saying that we shouldn't release any new drugs because of the thalidomide catastrophe.

I did reply to a blanket statement based on a bare claim of professional expertise - and with examples to plentiful historical evidence of premature confidences in technological understanding. There is no evidence that this fallibility has not carried into this century.

My argument was not like saying "we should never do anything like this because of past grave accidents in comparable novel products and practices" It was to be measured and wary of bare professional and institutional assurances.

Regarding the characteristics of plants and animals that we should feed to our children and mass rear in our environment - I am of the mind that the characteristics should be as well evidenced by the long history of life as we can afford.

> premature confidences in technological understanding

CRISPR-Cas9 (the method used here) was first successfully used seven years ago. According to the article, the meat may go to market in two years pending a safety review. So that's nine years from lab to table. How soon is too soon? What makes you think doing it now would be premature as opposed to ten years from now?

> It was to be measured and wary of bare professional and institutional assurances.

From where would you like to get assurances? Do you have to conduct the study yourself?

> Regarding the characteristics of plants and animals that we should feed to our children and mass rear in our environment - I am of the mind that the characteristics should be as well evidenced by the long history of life as we can afford.

That's all well and good till climate change reduces arable land and we have to extract as much as we can from the remainder.

> I am of the mind that [...]

Which is totally fine, but unfortunately that position is neither informed by any specific evidence, nor informed by a principled understanding of the technology in question (which is where deferral to expertise can come in handy).

You should note that there's a difference between an appeal to authority fallacy, and deferral to expertise, and while the former is fatal to any logical argument, the latter is an entirely appropriate and useful heuristic: https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/03/20/the-rules-of-logic-...

Allow me increase your principled understanding of GMO safety - anyone that thinks that any technology is safe, should be kept away from it. All technology confers capabilities and all capabilities can be misapplied accidentally or negligently in the pursuit of private advantage. Fire is not safe, you have to be safe with fire.

What determines the safety of any commercial application of technology is regulation. No technology is safe - don't lose contact with fundamental facts in the coarse of trying to maximize your argumentation and technological expertise.

Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me, this is totally new information to me and I had never considered that technology and tools could be misused. My understanding of biology has now been improved. /s

So he needs to provide proof but you don’t? It’s fine for you to use a slippery slope argument and straw man combined but he needs citations? Interesting.

I happen to be a biochemist by training (12 years of postsecondary including cancer research for my MSc) who is completely outside the field. I'm working as a software engineer for non-bio-related companies. I have no intention of going back to pipetting liquids around all day.

So yeah, for what it's worth, zero potential conflict of interest whatsoever.

So you just doubled down on basing your assurance solely on the strength of your own experience pipetting liquids around all day. The safety of GMO food is not even overall determinable by whatever biochemical insights you might have, unless you somehow feel that problematic GMOs simply could not be created accidentally or unscrupulously. The safety of GMO produce is dependent on the performance of regulatory bodies, not the raw capabilities of the latest approved technologies.

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