Last time there was a campaign against fluoridation in my town it was extremely innumerate and resorted to emotional appeals like "do you want chemicals in your water"? That has coloured, perhaps unfairly, my perception of the issue ever since.
There’s also a movement to fight iodizing salt.
Somehow a pro-cretinism movement seems appropriate for our moment in time.
I know you're deriding this as an invalid, small-brain appeal, but this is actually sound.
It's like that meme with the bell curve of the layperson, the midwit, and the genius. The layperson and the genius know that adding these chemicals to the water isn't worth the risk, they'll just articulate it in different ways. They might argue that adding "chemicals in your water" is not Lindy, that there's higher order unknown unknowns and risks that the layperson and the genius would rather not take. That the upsides simply aren't worth it versus the downsides.
Contrast that with the midwit who will appeal to bureaucrat-scholar "experts" and their myopic scientific studies. In this way, the sacraments of Scientism make it easy to fool the midwit, especially when midwit media apparatuses will dismiss the opposition per ad hominem as an inferior "Them" to the midwit's superior "Us".
But try convincing a midwit of that without a peer-review study!
This argument, in any context, always reminds me of the fluoride episode of Parks and Rec.
It costs money to provide fluoridation. Most municipal water is not consumed by people, and your grass, toliets, and showers don't need it; adult humans don't really either, it makes a more significant difference during the growth of teeth. The monetary benefit of fluoridating the public doesn't seem very big, but is fairly poorly measured. Eliminating the fluoridation budget or redirecting it towards direct dental health initiatives could be a better use of public funds. Maybe the opex isn't enough to care, but when the capital equipment for fluoridation reaches its end of life, maybe don't spend the capex to replace it.
I don't know if fluoride in the water is bad. But you cannot let yourself be driven to a position because the wrong type of people are taking the other position. That type of decision making is devoid of all logic, even though you got there by reacting against a position that was devoid of all logic. You need to get to a position by tuning the emotion out.
A similar argument counters Pascal’s wager. There’s hypothetically infinite potential ways to end up in eternal suffering and for any ways to avoid it there’s the possibility that doing to opposite is in fact required. Thus the potential downside alone isn’t enough to compel action without some other reason to suspect a particular belief system is correct.
Is that the case here? Solely? Most of the world doesn't fluoridate their water.
Cost is also a real concern for much of the world.
Sure, that's not scientific (I haven't deep dived into the science), but it is a useful heuristic against bad science. For 50 years, the science in the US was no evidence many industrial chemicals added to food were harmful, even though they were banned in most of the EU and Japan. Lo and behold, CA finally bans them:
https://www.reedsmith.com/en/perspectives/2023/10/new-califo...
Oh wow, FDA just banned Brominated Vegetable Oil 2 months ago... (banned in UK / EU since 1970)
There are plenty of reasonable arguments against fluoridation of water that countries can fall on various sides of: lack of proper water infrastructure in the first place, moral/ethical/political arguments around mass-medication of citizens, overall net economic value for their specific populations, etc. Individuals and nations can reasonably come to different conclusions based on both data and philosophy.
Those aren't the arguments being opposed here.
'The activist groups had a growing, but highly controversial, body of scientific evidence to draw from. Scientists had long known that very high doses of fluoride can damage bones and teeth. Since the early 1990s, a modest body of scientific research has also suggested that fluoride can harm brain development, leading to measurable drops in children’s IQ. Many of those early studies, experts say, were poorly done. And some took place in communities where fluoride naturally occurs in the water at levels much higher than the 0.7 milligrams per liter that U.S. communities currently add to their tap water.
Still, the signs of negative IQ effects were consistent enough for some experts to raise questions. “More research is needed to clarify the effect of fluoride on brain chemistry and function,” a panel of experts convened on behalf of the EPA wrote in 2006.
Starting in 2015, the National Toxicology Program, an office housed within the National Institutes of Health, began preparing a major review of fluoride research — at least partly in response to a nomination from the Fluoride Action Network.
Around the same time, the government institute that houses the NTP helped fund new studies in Canada and Mexico that looked at levels of fluoride in pregnant women’s urine, and then investigated whether those levels were correlated with a drop in IQ in their offspring. The researchers found some signs of an effect.
The results concerned some environmental health researchers. “As the literature continued to accumulate, we were more and more convinced that there were no single flaws that could explain the consistency in the findings,” John Bucher, a retired NTP toxicologist and a lead author of the report, told Undark in an interview conducted late last year.
In August, after years of delays, the NTP released its final report, finding, with moderate confidence, that fluoride exposures at levels above 1.5 mg/L “are consistently associated with lower IQ in children.”'
There are serious researchers finding mixed results based on the levels, not just crunchy social media accounts.
“Fluoride exposure at levels above 1.5mg/L”
0.7 is less than 1.5, which really says everything here. Vitamin D toxicity is also a thing, but we supplement milk with Vitamin D because that’s a net benefit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_toxicity
If research actually showed 0.7mg/L was unsafe advocates would bring that up. Instead they try and imply that studies suggest something they don’t, which should be all the justification necessary for the general public to ignore them.
Again like the parent said, you have to evaluate each issue on its own merits.
Evaluation isn’t free, where I can remain undecided at effectively zero cost.
I am not in the market for a new GPU therefore I don’t need to have an opinion on what’s good value for money.
No, but when the opposing side only ever seems to provide (and appears to entirely rely on) innumerate, scientifically illiterate, illogical, or otherwise bad arguments, at some point you have to stop listening.
> That has coloured, perhaps unfairly, my perception of the issue ever since.