Comment by throwaway042722 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway042722 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway042722

Please, before you comment how evil Monsanto is, read the Cochrane review of glyphosate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866614/

This is produced by the Cochran which "is a British international charitable organisation formed to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving health professionals, patients and policy makers. It includes 53 review groups that are based at research institutions worldwide." (from Wikipedia).

Unless you are an expert in the field, you are not likely to do better than a Cochrane systematic review.

The review concludes "Thus, a causal relationship has not been established between glyphosate exposure and risk of any type of LHC." (LHC is lymphohematopoietic cancer).

I find there are a lot of parallels between anti-GMO and anti-vax: calling it "unnatural", saying it is for mainly for profits by multinational corporations, implying conspiracies to suppress evidence against.

Note that also, in the current environment, there is also a lot of money and fame to be gained by being contrarian (especially when you involve trial lawyers). So saying "follow the money" can cut both ways.

Funny thing about the Monsanto cancer case is that they know that the problem is in the Roundup formulation (including surfactants that are required to get the glyphosate across the waxy plant cell wall barrier) yet Monsanto financed studies on purified isolated glyphosate to demonstrate it didn't cause cancer. Sneaky and dishonest, isn't that? Why not just do the study with the Roundup formulation?

> Mike DeVito, acting chief of the National Toxicology Program Laboratory: “We see the formulations are much more toxic. The formulations were killing the cells. The glyphosate really didn’t do it".

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

https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/about_ntp/bsc/2017/december/pr...

As far as Monsanto and GMO, modifying certain crops to make them resistant to weedkiller just so you can dump more weedkiller on the field... might be good for weedkiller sales, but I don't think 'feeding the world' is the goal here, more like 'maximizing product sales'. Dumping all that weedkiller into lakes and rivers also destroys the base of ecosystems, which is unwise.

https://toxics.usgs.gov/highlights/glyphosate02.html

If you are not using roundup, you are still using something. "Organic" pesticides do not work better so you will generally be using more and that goes to the same places roundup does.

I like those field-crawling robots that use AI-assisted vision to identify and laser-blast the weeds early in their growth stages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26841519

This is not the first thing an organic farmer reaches for when they have a weed problem though.

I use "Organic" pesticides in vineyard and I'm not using it more. I use even less. The thing with "organic" farming is not only that you just spray and it's done. You need to do also other work to manage the healthy environment in your plot. Most people around who use conventional pesticides have neglected vineyards. They are only pruning in spring then tile rows in between, spray and thats it. They do not care about lateral shoots etc. Some even use herbicides - which is completely unnecessary especially in this age of mechanization (there are even electrical hoes for small scale farming).

...therefore it's OK to lie about the toxicity of roundup?

No. The type of pesticides we are talking about is herbicide which kills plants. RoundUp is sprayed directly onto the food. Alternatives are not because that would kill the crops.

In response to an article about how Monsanto has undue influence on scientific studies, you posted a review paid for by Monsanto...

> This work was supported by Monsanto Company, the original producer and marketer of glyphosate formulations.

Am I understanding your argument here to be that Cochrane Reviews are untrustworthy?

"We do not accept commercial or conflicted funding. This is vital for us to generate authoritative and reliable information, working freely, unconstrained by commercial and financial interests." If your research is sponsored by Monsanto, the producer of RoundUp, I would argue that is considered conflicted funding.

I went to https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search (redirected from their cochrane.org site) to search for this review and it wasn't there when I searched for "glyphosate". This is starting to look a lot like they're purposefully trying to mislead people into thinking this is an official Cochrane review, I am surprised Cochrane allows this.

Never even heard of Cochrane Reviews until tonight, but am I understanding your argument here to be that there exist organizations that are somehow immune to bias and corruption and are perfect at editorial filtering?

Supported or not, I don’t think you understand the weight and quality of Cochrane reviews.

... can you find one covering Glyphosate? A sibling comment notes that what's linked upthread isn't one.

Do you wish to enlighten us?

well, from my googling around it seems Cochrane holds a high position in the health field when discussing research, sort of similar to the ACM or the IEEE, or maybe the CRA. But I think maybe more guarded of their reputation and the reputation of its publications.

I'm googling around as well, and they seem to be an umbrella for a large number of publications. I just can't believe that every iota of information under their purview is of perfect veracity, regardless of their level of rigor and process. No entity is that perfect.

>No entity is that perfect.

I think people are suggesting not perfection, but a higher standard and thus increased likelihood of it being correct and requiring a higher standard for proving it incorrect or biased.

Do you have an organization that, if they publish something even if it runs counter to your own opinions, you assume that it is fair and likely to be correct?

Only those that I have immediate experience with do I trust to have the intention of being unbiased. Even then I would be hesitant to assign a label such as "likely correct" to such a complex topic, unless likely here just means > 50%.

>Only those that I have immediate experience with do I trust to have the intention of being unbiased.

sure, but as you said earlier you have no knowledge of this organization prior to this post. There seems to be two types of people in this post, those who know exactly who Cochrane is and who think knee-jerk accusations of bias are ridiculous and those who don't know who Cochrane is.

I'm betting the people who don't know who Cochrane is are not people who need to have lots of access to high quality health research, in other words not experts in any field where one should be expected to know who Cochrane was.

If a lawyer came out and told you that the latest ACM study on efficiency of parallel computation was part of a conspiracy by Apple how much weight would you place on their opinion?

I've worked in multiple fields, and I understand human nature. I would trust an org to have good intentions and generally put out good research, but I know that all humans and organizations are fallible, and including ACM. A bad study can get through any org. It doesn't have to be corruption either, just a miss. I never insisted that it must be corruption.

if you're just googling things to participate in an internet argument, what are you adding to the conversation?

Cochrane is generally well-trusted. It's not perfect and it has been manipulated. They are better than nothing, though.

It's not even a Cochrane review, the newly-created, anonymous account appears to have been lying.

> In response to an article about how Monsanto has undue influence on scientific studies, you posted a review paid for by Monsanto...

Anonymously

>I find there are a lot of parallels between anti-GMO and anti-vax:

it is a Monsanto gospel

"Crowe (Monsanto) preached a scientific gospel of GMOs that went something like this: If you’re pro-science, you must be pro-GMO. If you’re anti-Monsanto, then you’re anti-GMO. Therefore, if you’re anti-Monsanto, you’re anti-science. His objective, it seemed, was to render opposition to GMOs as ridiculous as belief in Bigfoot, and to amass a movement that could be counted on to shout that message from the rooftops."

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31310371

this is not a "true" Cochrane Review

https://www.cochrane.org/search/site/glyphosate

your link just used the method ( ~ aggregation of Ghostwriting researches)

EDIT: check the https://www.cochrane.org/search/site/vaccine

This is an interesting point. Can you say more? How do we determine whether this is a "true" Cochrane Review? Thanks!

https://www.cochrane.org/about-us

"Cochrane is an international network with headquarters in the UK, a registered not-for-profit organization, and a member of the UK National Council for Voluntary Organizations."

Search

1. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search

2. type "glyphosate"

3. see the results.

Cochrane Reviews : 0 <------ ZERO

Cochrane Protocols : 0

Trials : 14

Editorials : 0

Special Collections :0

Clinical Answers : 0

Ah, duh, I should have looked at the link posted upthread, too. Thanks!

in the "Cochrane Trials"

1.) "Measurement of Agricultural and Dietary Glyphosate Exposure Among Pregnant Women" January 2022

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

"Human exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) is increasing rapidly worldwide. Most existing studies on health effects of glyphosate have focused on occupational settings and cancer outcomes and few have examined this common exposure in relation to the health of pregnant women and newborns in the general population. We investigated associations between prenatal glyphosate exposure and length of gestation in The Infant Development and the Environment Study (TIDES), a multi-center US pregnancy cohort...........Our results indicate widespread exposure to glyphosate in the general population which may impact reproductive health by shortening length of gestation. Given the increasing exposure to GBHs and the public health burden of preterm delivery, larger confirmatory studies are needed, especially in vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and newborns."

"Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."

Both authors appear squeaky clean though from prestigious institutions. They've published about several other carcinogens throughout their careers and have appear to have no trouble with funding. I'm not sure why they'd be incentivized to ruin their careers over a single publication.

Do you want to expound on this? "squeaky clean" is a subjective value judgement of little value, and I can list dozens of heavily corrupt individuals from "prestigious institutions".

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866614/

This is a Monsanto sponsored papers.

"Funding: This work was supported by Monsanto Company, the original producer and marketer of glyphosate formulations."

"Disclosure statement The sponsors were provided the opportunity to review the manuscript prior to journal submission, but inclusion of their suggestions was left to the discretion of the authors, who retained sole control of the manuscript content and the findings. Statements in this paper are those of the authors and not those of the authors' employer or the sponsors. The authors are employed by Exponent, a scientific research and consulting firm that provides services for private and governmental clients, including on projects concerning glyphosate and other pesticides. In the past five years, Ellen Chang has provided consulting services through Exponent on behalf of Monsanto Company on other issues, and she also has provided consulting services on other pesticides and lymphohematopoietic cancers for other clients."

Wasn’t there a school groundskeeper who won a lawsuit whose decision was based on it being carcinogenic? If memory serves, he had a lawyer vs a huge team of high priced attorneys who, after a long lawsuit, failed to convince the court. I’m not an expert but courts are designed to adjudicate technical issues like this: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-glyphosate-lawsuit-...

Courts are not designed to adjudicate technical issues like this; the conventional wisdom in our separation of powers is that they're uniquely bad at it, which is part of why controversies in upper courts so often devolve to the question of whether fact-finding should be deferred to legislatures instead of court cases.

> controversies in upper courts so often devolve to the question of whether fact-finding should be deferred to legislatures instead of court cases

You might be right but not what I typically have observed. Usually if things are fuzzy higher courts kick it back to lower courts to work on it more. Deferring to the legislature is what I see when what the public seems to want is at odds with what the court can do based on the law as it's written, which is a different dynamic completely.

A court of law is not a court of fact.

Well, in common law countries, it is the literal job of a first instance court or judge to play the role of “trier of fact”. These are however “legal facts”, and not necessarily “scientific facts” (I absolutely hate to call something a fact that is not a fact, but it is what it is: the law treats “facts” differently than science).

Due to courts being very poorly equipped to deal with science, and due to rules of evidence making it very difficult to introduce science into the courtroom, court decisions are very often wrong on the science, and sometimes ignore relevant science entirely. Science in the courtroom is a pretty important and difficult problem to solve.

Edit/addendum: counter-intuitively, there are also good reasons why courts will deliberately avoid getting into the weeds with science. Basically it all comes down to the fact that the court system recognizes that it is poorly equipped to deal with scientific evidence. Barriers exist to make the courts more time-efficient and also in an effort to make it harder for the court to be misled by legal advocates on either side. It’s very easy to find someone with a PhD to support either side, or to find seemingly contradictory papers to support either side, and it basically takes an expert in science to recognize a real subject matter expert… Anyway, it’s a mess of a problem.

> courts are designed to adjudicate technical issues like this

Since adjudicate just means to decide something judicially, that is tautological but technically correct. Beyond that narrow definition though, a jury trial is not the mechanism to decide a scientific and probabalistic question like whether spraying weed killer caused a particular case of lymphoma.

It's not tautological because of the end of the phrase "technical issues like this". In other words, courts in this case aren't a bunch of laymen sitting around guessing whether this chemical is harmful. They're reviewing the research straight out of the mouths of the most qualified experts both sides can bring to the table. The court's decision on this was the product of the science.

No. The court's decision was what a non-expert jury of peers was convinced of by lawyers. The lawyers' jobs are not to help the jury reach the truth, but to do anything legal to win for their clients, including torturing both facts and the often arbitrary rules of courtroom procedure. There may have been evidence presented that originated with the scientific process, but no, the court's decision was not 'the product of science'.

Courts do not make legal decisions based on technical information. A court/jury could find the exact opposite of what science said and it would still be considered legitimate legal determination.

Decisions like this are based on the testimony of subject matter experts.

Yes, but it doesn't follow from that that courts make determinations of law based on scientific evidence. Some SMEs simply lie and the court can't tell. IN other cases the SME testifies, but it doesn't affect the decision.

[deleted]

You are not allowed to comment this way on HN. This is spelled out in the guidelines, and is probably the single most common mod correction Dan gives.

Yep, fair enough. I'll remove the comment. Others have phrased it better.

It's sad that the "well you're just a paid shill" retort is used to heavily nowadays. Not just for GMO related discussions either. It's got to be the laziest, empty non-argument out there and I wish more people would call it out for what it is.

Personally, I blame the rise of paid shills for the rise of accusations of being a paid shill.

It's hard work imagining what mental gymnastics people do to rationalize a career spreading lies. Not so much the people who desperately take the job of repeating them, but the people who strategize around what they can get the public to believe.

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