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Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

I am fairly convinced that this comment section is among the best demonstrations for "isolated demands for rigor" I have personally ever seen, especially paired with any comment section about an AI-related article

When we are trying to predict the implications of unproven technologies on complex worldwide economies, there is talk of "obvious inevitability"

When we express concerns that chemicals humanity recently started coating the entire planet with at an alarming rate seem to get really deep into every kind of living tissue and nearly everything else we've ever seen bioaccumulate like that has caused a lot of unforeseen issues that took a long time to suss out but most turn out to be at least somewhat harmful, there's all this "well we don't have longitudinal RCTs with enormous sample sizes showing the specific harms of every specific plastic published in prestigious journals yet so who knows really"

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> I am fairly convinced that this comment section is among the best demonstrations for "isolated demands for rigor" I have personally ever seen,

I’ve found HN and other comment sections to lean in the direction of assuming the worst about microplastics, historically.

However, I think we’re all getting tired of the constant “sky is falling” tone around these studies that can’t demonstrate harms outside of extremely narrow and exaggerated lab circumstances.

Meanwhile, the alternative medicine gurus have adopted microplastics as their excuse for nearly everything.

> Meanwhile, the alternative medicine gurus have adopted microplastics as their excuse for nearly everything.

Used to be, you could ignore the alt types because you had to buy their magazines to know what they were thinking. Now apparently everyone needs to be aware of what they are thinking and make sure they have the exact opposite opinions of the alt types so they seem sane or whatever. You can just ignore the them you know, they are not in the room with you.

5 years ago I didn't routinely have to have conversations with family members about why they should get vaccinated against deadly diseases. Now I do.

They are absolutely in the room with us, and they're getting people killed.

Destroying your critical thinking apparatus for the sake of a bunch of kooks is going a bit too far for me.

My mum was a kook in this sense. Steve Jobs, too.

Critical thinking includes knowing that such people exist and aren't that rare.

I think there's an issue of burden of proof at play. If these microplastics were a drug, they would need to go through an expensive and onerous vetting process that consists of both safety testing and efficacy testing for a particular indication for it to be legal to sell someone if and only if a doctor specifically prescribed it for that person. Even if you believe, as I do, that efficacy testing shouldn't stop people from voluntarily accessing potential cures, safety testing doesn't strike me as unreasonable

These microplastics are crossing the blood-brain barrier in a significant portion of the population without most people even intentionally ingesting them. Hell, it's hard to avoid if you try. Our society slathers this stuff over everything. In my lifetime I've seen a giant swath of packaging for food go to plastic from some other material, presumably to cut costs. I recently bought a new oven and I guess they put those stupid plastic phone screen covers over the glass panes on both sides of the oven door. Do they just ship all glass with this stuff applied to it now?

The burden of proof to ensure these things are safe should be on the companies selling them. The companies that make these substances already have vast research arms for designing the polymers, and if they were held to even the FDA's standards for drug safety we would have a lot more studies about this stuff. These companies are also heavily subsidized by governments, which might even be part of why downward pressure on price seems to make everyone go to plastics. Like why exactly is it cheaper, even if you don't bake in the entire R&D budget of inventing them, to use novel polymers made as byproducts of petroleum than it is to make glass or cardboard packaging?

We should, in the same way that we do for pharmaceuticals, hold these orgs to a standard of demonstrating that this bioaccumulation doesn't cause some kind of harm, because the alternative is that some researcher needs to come up with a specific claim of harm, fund a study despite there being significant pressure from these orgs to never do such studies, and certainly never publish if the results might credibly make them look bad, and somehow translate that into making bespoke positive policy prescriptions that would likely be fought tooth and nail by same. That expectation is not a sane default

Most of the direct human exposure seems to come from polyester, which we have raced to make the dominant clothing and bedding fabric.

Massively subsidizing anything to do with oil has certainly caused all these byproducts to be super artificially cheap, so with the governments with globe-spanning military empires absorbing most of the cost and ensuring not even the mildest threat of accountability for "externalities" in an economy designed to reward single-minded monetary optimization, it was pretty inevitable that things made of oil would get pervasive everywhere

Maybe we should convince government to do less of those things somehow?

I mean, yes.

But also:

Polyester is just so cheap that any feasible oil tax wouldn't amount.

For the past several years a large fraction of people have literally been inhaling every lungful of air through a frangible polyester microfiber that they wear around their mouth & nose. We tear these fabrics to shreds and then manually extract the lint from the dryer with our bare hands so it won't start a fire. Putting the finest dispersal mechanism we have, micro-spun fibers, directly into our lungs, and not even thinking about the consequences, seems like maybe it's an orthogonal bad choice we are making which could have orthogonal solutions.

On one hand, I strongly agree that some mitigations are personally achievable and that this is smart to do. Personally, I preferentially buy natural fibers (cheaper than you might think if you thrift 'em), and I cold wash and hang dry the polyester garments I do own

However, I am also wary of the push to view mitigations or "consumer behavior" generally as a means to actually deal with this kind of problem at scale. Like the whole carbon footprint thing BP was pushing for a while. Still in the public lexicon, doesn't do jack shit about real emissions at scale, but great for gotchas on activists. We have significant poison control and food quality control regulations because people can't really develop all the expertise necessary to vet all their own stuff, and it's a huge drain on society to make them do so rather than just solve that coordination problem centrally. Also, monopolistic consolidation has made even very organized boycotts dubiously feasible in forcing change in companies who respond more to their investors than their customers.

To me, governments exist to solve exactly this kind of problem, even though there are many other areas in which I would like them to mind their own business. In this case a lot of why petrochemicals are so cheap is because the cost of doing business for oil companies is heavily subsidized, so removing those subsidies wouldn't even require a new tax, and that money could be productively spent on lots of stuff, like maybe medical research even

Under our brand of capitalism, the system pressures the working class doubly hard to use the cheapest things on the market, and guilts the middle class to aspire to more expensive goods which are Ethical, or Natural, or Lite, or Healthy, or Artisan, or whatever buzzword of the day prevails.

Boycotts are a luxury that only the middle class can afford to participate in, and they don't really have the potential to participate in more than one or two at a time.

That is not a restriction that an effective boycott of an entire industrial method can labor under. The "personal responsibility" crowd have it dead wrong - we are trapped in this system and have very limited choices about what we consume, far too limited to allow us to collectively throw out an industrial technique that is anything less than lethal to us.

Yea, we seem to agree that people can't actually push the needle on these kinds of issues in a meaningful way through their individual choices as consumers. That's a dead end, and it's one industries that fear getting regulated have settled on pushing at every opportunity, exactly because it's a dead end

Ultimately, the only thing powerful enough to take on a cartel is a government. A lot of people have negative feelings about the abstract concept of government, and certainly the government sucks sometimes. Nearly any way that an individual can come up against power has the potential to suck a lot

However, democratic governments for all their failings are far more responsive than consolidated industries to pressure from people who want change. Our "brand of capitalism" - by which I mean the particular economic and regulatory policies of the US government at this moment in time - is doing significant harm to the majority of people, in a way that it just wasn't in my parents' generation, and it doesn't have to stay this way. The options are not accept how things are or tilt at windmills by doing a master's thesis worth of research for every item we buy at the grocery store. The political will for better safety nets, better research and regulation, economic policy that helps the majority of people instead of a tiny sliver of the most deep-pocketed, and siccing the government on the cartels that increasingly dominate every industry is pervasive. The bet cartels are making is that they can create apathy and confusion to forestall this until they can burn down the institution of democracy itself

Everything you say above can be said of global warming too. Yet there’s good reason to be cautious.

In a way the constant alarmism without solid evidence can be counterproductive

> However, I think we’re all getting tired of the constant “sky is falling” tone around these studies that can’t demonstrate harms outside of extremely narrow and exaggerated lab circumstances.

I mean, this was once essentially the case for "cigarettes are bad for you".

Well, we've been exposed to microplastics for decades, but what does the evidence say? Afaict, not much.

We don't need RCTs, nor do we rely on them to make causal inferences about long term exposures, nor would an RCT be possible with microplastics.

But we need some converging lines of evidence before we go chicken little. What's the alternative?

> Well, we've been exposed to microplastics for decades, but what does the evidence say? Afaict, not much.

The revelation that you are likely to have microplastics suffused throughout your body seems far more meaningful than "not much".

The effects of this are unknown, but it seems reasonable to be concerned about potential harm until it's effects are studied in vivo and it's statistically not more harmful than the utility we get out of it. That alone seems like decades of research. You don't need to throw up your hands and act like you can't hypothesize even if the answers are out of your reach.

The fact that we can't pin down a strong effect on human health outcomes after decades of exposure should be a relief. We do have in vivo studies, but afaict they don't seem to pan out in human health outcomes.

> The fact that we can't pin down a strong effect on human health outcomes after decades of exposure should be a relief.

I can't say this means much to me when exposure to plastic has been accelerating that entire time.

Still, I do sincerely appreciate skepticism as a useful part of any dialogue about hypothesized health impacts.

Personally, I don't see an issue with avoiding consumer-grade plastic except when necessary.

It's not important how "relieved" you feel, it is important that we exercise scientific rigor when we notice something like this. I don't want scientists to look at the lack of evidence of harm, and just breathe a sigh of relief and carry on with other studies. I want scientists to see the overwhelming microplastic problem, and exhaustively study the risks, and harms, and the solutions.

I see no benefit in hand waving away a potentially serious public health problem just because you aren't seeing any anecdotal evidence of harm.

In the last century the landscape of human health problems has pretty drastically shifted (more cancers, more obesity, more asthma, perhaps more mental illness, lower rates of maiming, less malaria and consumption deaths, and frankly this is all just deaths, which is not the only kind of health outcome we care about) so the fact that we can't suss out all the cause and effect from every factor and every outcome is neither surprising nor an argument against it being alarming any time a novel foreign substance can penetrate cell membranes and readily bioaccumulates

Like we study mechanisms for a reason. "Little things get into all your cells" isn't a specific causal argument for specific health outcomes, but it's reasonable to assume it might do something undesirable based on what we know about how cells work and other cases like it. Also, the intervention space is pretty large and some scaling back on plastic usage from the current levels would not be some crazy obvious harm either

Also, "we haven't found effects yet" is especially troublesome in a case where the contaminant in question is a cash cow for an industry that has continuously spent more money than I can even meaningfully reason about suppressing science and muddying discourse about products they sell. Sowing doubt has been an explicit strategy of the petroleum industry for greenhouse effects and it took a long time for us to even definitively know that, so now that we do, why should I assume the same companies aren't taking the same approach for this problem? Again, it feels like isolated demands for rigor

> The fact that we can't pin down a strong effect on human health outcomes after decades of exposure should be a relief

What kind of strong effect are you looking for, immediate death?

That fact isn't reassuring to me at all. There's a wide variety of increasingly common health conditions that have an unknown etiology -- ADHD, autism, CFS, IBS, mental illness, obesity, etc.

The fact there isn't an immediately obvious health outcome is worrying because it just as likely has a wide reaching effect on a great many bodily systems, making it difficult or impossible to isolate exact consequences from varying exposure.

> There's a wide variety of increasingly common health conditions that have an unknown etiology -- ADHD, autism, CFS, IBS, mental illness, obesity, etc.

And the number of people named Killian corresponds well with the rise in incidents related to airbags:

https://tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/2599_popularity-...

You don't just get to pull random things that are going up (assuming that they're going up, which you haven't actually shown) and blame them on something else that is ostensibly going up. That doesn't suggest anything. Ever. [1]

That is pretty sus, after all. Oh look, I just made MSCI's stock go up:

https://tylervigen.com/spurious/correlation/1639_google-sear...

[1] But hey, waitaminute...violent crime is down since the 1970! Did microplastics do that, or does it only work for bad stuff?

Taking a step back, my point was simply that there's a large number of common ailments that we don't understand. We don't know what causes them and we don't know how to cure them. Our understanding of human biology is grossly incomplete. We are nowhere close to first principles here.

We also have a long history of introducing new compounds into the environment and then many decades later saying oops, turns out those are toxic. BPA and PFAs recently, to name a few.

Where does that leave us? Who knows. I'm not saying microplastics are responsible for any of those diseases. I'm saying we don't really know what the hell is going on, so some alarm and caution seems appropriate. And, call me crazy, I'd say accidentally coating the planet with a new substance isn't a good thing. There is nothing reassuring about this situation.

No no no, you don't get to point at "common ailments" and assume you've explained anything. What common ailments do you think we don't understand, don't know the causes of, or can't cure?

Go to your doctor with eczema and ask what the problem is. They won't know, and sorry there is no cure. Hell go to your doctor with a migraine -- good luck. Have a food allergy? That should be simple to explain and fix, right... well actually we can't.

Maybe we can cure your asthma? Nope. We can't cure your diabetes either, sorry. Type 1? We don't know how you got that.

Better hope you never have any auto-immune disorder or mental illness. Doctors won't be able to explain it or cure it. And hopefully you never got long Covid. Cross your fingers on cancer, alzheimers, and parkinsons.

I could go on but I wonder, isn't our lack of understanding an obvious truth?

> what does the evidence say? Afaict, not much.

That's only because we have no way to gather evidence, because almost everybody alive has microplastic exposure, so we don't have a control group.

It's just the nature of poorly understood psychology and the long human lifespan that most scientific research wouldn't be able to establish causality on a whole host of negative things (e.g. look how long it took to even get agreement that football concussions were detrimental in the long-term).

My impression is people are generally alarmed but without any science of what the harms are it’s hard to understand what we need to do about the situation. The science is still very immature, and there are lot of other bad things (PFAs for example) that are likewise ubiquitous and permeate everything and everywhere that we have a pretty clear notion of their dangers. Even then it’s hard to assess how severe the harms are for microplastics yet. Part of the reason is they’re clearly not overtly dangerous. The way in which they are dangerous is very poorly understood, so what policy or regulatory actions could we take today? Ban plastics globally? “Plastic” is a very broad term for a specific mechanical characteristic of a material and includes lots of monomers and polymers, some of which we know are inert enough in life we use them for implants in human bodies already. Are those micro plastics dangerous? Who knows. Should be bans everything that has the characteristic of being “plastic?” That’s absurd. So while I might agree we need to “do something,” that something will need to be super subtle and targeted out of bare necessity.

> Even then it’s hard to assess how severe the harms are for microplastics yet. Part of the reason is they’re clearly not overtly dangerous.

This is a contradiction.

How so? Something can be unknown impact but known to not be overtly dangerous. Cyanide is overtly dangerous. You ingest it then you die. That’s overt. Some things take decades of research to identify their danger because their method of action is subtle and confounded that isn’t contradictory.

It's a soft, warm blanket of denial, because the actual implications of it are too scary.

As humans, we seem to really like warm blankets. See: high school football and CTE

But why there is a contrast between how we treat emerging technologies versus environmental pollutants?

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