Hacker News Reader

Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

Here is something that I believe to be true -- it is bad to contaminate the environment with industrial processes when we do not understand the consequences of said contamination.

It isn't about feeling, it is about rolling the dice with the future of everyone's health, and inadequate steps being taken to stop this process.

View on HN

I agree, like I said I am philosophically opposed to this contamination as much as anyone else.

It's not about philosophical opposition. It's about applying correct cost-benefit analysis in the face of uncertainty. When the harms of a substance are uncertain, the rational analysis actually requires you to assume a wider distribution of risk, and thus calculate a higher potential cost. That's why insurance companies can charge lower premiums when they have lots of data about a particular form of payout, and higher premiums when they have less data: uncertainty adds cost.

For some reason humans have a weird, irrational quirk where they miscalculate uncertain risks by assuming that the outcomes will fall on one side of the distribution until it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that they won't. It's a reflection of the same miscalculation that makes running a casino extremely profitable.

I agree with all that. If you have the idea that philosophy is irrelevant cloud-talk, that is not my intention or usage of the term. To me it's about the principles you bring to a topic, including principles of risk and cost-benefit analysis.

I think we should be transparent as to the reasons why we're going after this risk. If we don't know very much but feel the potential implications are sufficiently grave, let's be honest about that. Rather than latching onto alarming but potentially low-quality studies as providing us the truth, which leads to whiplash, loss of scientific credibility, and polarization, as we've seen during the COVID pandemic.

>> For some reason humans have a weird, irrational quirk where they miscalculate uncertain risks by assuming that the outcomes will fall on one side of the distribution until it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that they won't.

And this quirk may be the end of us - e.g. don't react to AIs getting smarter and smarter until it's too late to do anything.

I had the same thought as the reply-er above.

You’ve given the impression that principles are not appropriate to act on.

Notice the difference in removing the word “philosophically” from your response.

I don't notice any difference, nor do I accept that I have given such an impression objectively, although I regret that some many have gotten that impression from their standpoint.

I merely think we should separate our principled opposition to contamination from our assessment of what we actually know scientifically about the effects of said contamination.

You actually said the exact opposite of that

I did not. Feel free to peruse the other replies in this thread to see what I actually say.

I'm talking about the difference between epistemology and prudence. We can be honest that we don't really understand the risks of these chemicals, and at the same time take prudential action to mitigate the risks we don't know about.

We use water for processes other than residential drinking water. Eventually, PFAS contamination will reach a level where additional filtering will be required to prepare water for industrial uses. Given the difficulty of removing PFAS, it's likely that this filtering will come at a high cost. These higher costs will be propagated through the economy.

I, for one, don't want to pay these costs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com