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Comment by hereme888 | Hacker News Reader

Consider this study next time someone says "don't worry, the amount of our chemical in the product is minimal, well below the 'toxic threshhold', and safe to the environment."

Novec is the latest one I can recall, now being discontinued due to environmental and health hazards of forever chemicals.

One day we'll find out just how toxic the effects of trace pharmaceuticals in the environment, food, and water supply have been.

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This leads to a serious epistemic crisis where if we are all rational then we all must endeavor to understand that we know nothing about these things. Think about Wi-Fi. You're now going to have to empathize directly with all the people that don't understand it. Since we can't know everything and we can't trust anyone, we must resign to knowing nothing about any of this in general. Best to err on the side of caution though, since now the chance of something being terrible for us is 50/50.

I'm not sure I follow you.

The history of poorly-vetted (or "biasly-vetted") chemicals and trace pharmaceuticals is long and well established. I'm just advocating to advocate for your own health above trusting corporate statements further refined by a marketing team.

I wrote hastily but I said a couple of different things. I meant first that we should not presume to know that the corporate statements are true or false, but at the same time err on the side of caution due to the long and well established track record that you refer to. We can't assume they're dangerous or not dangerous, since we can't really know unless we're an expert in that particular domain, but we won't be experts in all domains relevant to our health, so it makes sense to remain neutrally skeptical while being more risk averse here. Then I was saying that this forces us to empathize with the people who think 5G and Wi-Fi are going to kill them due because they don't understand physics. Their claims are too strong, but their risk aversion due to their ignorance isn't and now we can relate. Do you get what I mean?

Usually the claims about Wifi and 5G are not "going to kill me now" but going to give us cancer, which is not as strong and more believable, hence why they gained traction.

There is a fine line between proving everything safe for use or allowing rampant pollution or even the tradeoffs between one pollution type and another. At one point in the past, we stopped using paper bags because they are heavy(increasing pollution) and kill trees, switching to plastic bags.

Got it, thanks

We won't find out "one day", we've long since found out. It just doesn't change shit because barely half of all humans can read with any comprehension (and this study implies the US achieves 80% reading with comprehension, so the bar is very low). Of the part that can read with any sort of skill, a significant fraction don't give a shit. The net result is that you're going to be poisoned, regardless of what we know.

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