I was actually seriously considering tossing my kitchenware. It was only me inertia that kept me from it. I wonder how long the afterlife of this one is going to be; reminds me of the autism causing vacines hoax
Really, you bought Tupperware? Even if you don't ask yourself whether any contaminants were released by it in your food, maybe the fact that it gets stained by pasta sauce to a point where it becomes an Internet meme makes it shitty kitchenware?
Even without exposure to food, plastic deteriorates with sunlight exposure or even just age... Why spend money on stuff like this? Buy a porcelain salad bowl instead, get a wooden spatula, put some oil on it so it endures washings.
So if HN doesn't even care...
Interesting. My understanding was that HN yanks a thread off the front page as soon as it has more comments than upvotes, because that's their indicator of being "controversial".
Which never made sense to me, because I leave hundreds of times more comments than article upvotes.
I have read that a lot of times but this doesn't seem to be the case, I can remember multiple times when I clicked on something on the front page and it had more comments than upvotes.
This is currently on the front page with 245 points and 274 comments:
If you had told me that Cocoa Krispies were 50% rat feces, but then came back and said you'd made a mistake and was off by an order of magnitude, it's only 5%, I think it would be pretty reasonable to not update your conclusion that Cocoa Krispies were significantly contaminated with rat feces.
I love how threat inflation turns chemicals from innocuous to deadly in the absence of any strong evidence.
No, we cannot say this chemical is a carcinogen. Read the wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decabromodiphenyl_ether
> In 2004, ATSDR wrote "Nothing definite is known about the health effects of PBDEs in people. Practically all of the available information is from studies of laboratory animals. Animal studies indicate that commercial decaBDE mixtures are generally much less toxic than the products containing lower brominated PBDEs. DecaBDE is expected to have relatively little effect on the health of humans."
If you adopted a life strategy of "only avoid things after scientists have conclusive evidence it's dangerous for you" then you'd have unnecessarily ingested hundreds of various poisons over the last 100 years.
2024 https://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/news/aluminium-and-alzh...
> This research has shown higher aluminium levels in the brain and the fluids that bathe the brain in people with Alzheimer’s when compared to healthy individuals. But just spotting higher levels doesn’t mean they are a cause of the disease. > [...] most scientists think that aluminium build-up in the brain is more likely to be a consequence of Alzheimer’s disease rather than a cause.
Ah yes, the "most scientists" card. "more likely" is also hilarious! Most doctors are more likely to smoke camel.
2010 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21157018/
> The hypothesis that Al significantly contributes to AD is built upon very solid experimental evidence and should not be dismissed. Immediate steps should be taken to lessen human exposure to Al, which may be the single most aggravating and avoidable factor related to AD.
The science folk need an entirely different level of evidence than I do.
No, the wise man doesn't have strong evidence to the contrary. And no, he's not interested in finding out either. The consequences of ingesting a novel non-Lindy chemical is an unknown unknown that the wise man is not interested in discovering.
Of course, if the potential upsides are great enough, the risk of downsides might be worthwhile.
In the case of the chemical spatula, the downsides are uncertain, but there's the possibility of cancer. The upsides are...greater corporate profits?
The wise man is going to have to pass on that one.
Moderns would do well to try and be more like the wise man. Scientific studies are not the holy grail of knowledge. New studies are coming out all the time, both negating and reaffirming old conclusions. Is this schizophrenic flip-flopping not enough to convince the modern that Scientism isn't the end-all-be-all?
Unknown unknowns emerge at the tails of novel changes introduced to complex systems. Scientific studies are unable to account for these long-tail events. When it comes to your environment and your body, be more Lindy, and stop deferring to the myopicity of Scientism to guide you.
>Eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years.
And doesn't this just privilege tradition? Chemicals will be grandfathered in for spurious reasons, not because they are actually any safer. Famously, chemicals in plants very often light up the Ames test for carcinogenicity and would be ruled out by your argument if they weren't "natural".
Do you not think that it is rational to choose option 1, given our understanding of the Lindy effect?
Also, FWIW, cow's milk has objectively changed in the last few decades.
Thank you for a most excellent example illustrating my point and demolishing yours.
Alcohol is estimated to cause 4.5% of all cancers in Europe. It's a Group 1 carcinogen, yet it is privileged because of tradition.
> The wise man is going to have to pass on that one.
We should be all happy to deliver increase value to the shareholders, in whatever way we can. After all, they are the most important people in the world. The wise man is not too wise if he doesn't believe that.
Isn't this why we (used to?) feed things to mice to learn about them? To collect additional evidence of safety after basic things like knowing what general kinds of things interact with people's biology say it's probably safe?
>>> Eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years.
> I was with you until the quote at the end. What does that even mean?
I think it means "don't consume anything foodstuff that doesn't have a long record of safety (v.s. trusting the guy in the white lab coat that says the new thing is safe, since in 20 years some other guy in a white lab coat may find it's actually very unsafe in some previously unknown way).
It appears to be a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, here's a fuller version: https://manassaloi.com/booksummaries/2016/01/21/bed-procrust...:
> Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
The longer something has been around, the longer it will continue to be around. The longevity of something also validates its efficacy and resiliency.
If people have been eating figs and drinking wine for thousands of years, then it's probably good and safe for you to do as well.
If traditional salad recipes avoid the use of conium maculatum, then you should probably avoid it too.
If your ancient ancestors didn't cook with margarine, then you probably shouldn't cook with it either.
But it does not pass the smell test.
There is a plethora of substances and practices that are quite harmful, but have been used for millenia. This is because your suggested methodology fails to detect really anything that does not cause traceable and observable harm before the next generation is raised. And that's a lot of things.
"Science" adds value compared to pure traditionalism because it analyzes precisely how things are harmful, and helps discover mitigations and strategies that pure outcome-driven traditionalism would never have explored.
Examples:
- Lead pipes (used successfully for over two millenia-- harmless? no.)
- Basically every carcinogen ever (e.g. Radon: people in affected regions did simply not know about keeping it out of cellars/dwellings, and just died of lung cancer sometimes)
- Salmonella, syphilis, cholera and other pathogens-- they are non-issues with proper prevention and/or countermeasures-- without those, people just suffer and/or die.
- Alcohol consumption during pregnancy
edit: I'm not saying that "sticking with what worked in the past" is wrong, or useless information, but its just that-- a statistical prior for harm. It won't reliably tell you neither which things are harmless nor which are harmful, it just gives a rough indication of which it might be.
This is ignores the amounts consumed. Just because a thing is safe at N mg/day doesn't mean it is safe at all doses. The change circumstances of human existence make attempts to come up with simple, eternal rubrics at best a bit chancy, and at worst completely misleading.
Just enjoy your figs, Paul.
I can also point out--we've been drinking out of lead pipes for thousands of years, so they're obviously safe, right? ... right?