Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

> the carcinogen

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."

View on HN

EPA safe guidelines are changed all the time often by much more than 1 order of magnitude. E.G. lead has gone from .5ppm being safe (1995) to 20 ppb (2023).

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.

That people with Alzheimer's cook in aluminum doesn't prove causation.

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.

Sure, you can avoid it if you don't trust it. But you can't claim that it is something that it has not been proven to be. Don't falsify reality even if you have good intentions.

In the absence of any strong evidence, a wise man would be well-served in treating the ingestion of a novel chemical as deadly.

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.

I was with you until the quote at the end. What does that even mean?

It's an aphorism suggesting the importance of the Lindy effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

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.

If lead pipes were good enough for the Romans, they should be good enough for us!

> 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.

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.

Are you cautioning against overdosing on figs?

It also ignores the particular size of the figs that should be consumed. And it ignores the season that they should be consumed. And it ignores the weather conditions that you should consume them in. And it ignores the hour at which they're consumed. And it ignores the gender of the person that should consume them. And it ignores the eye color of the person that should consume them. And it ignores the hair length of the person that should consume them. And it ignores the precise composition of nitrogen in the soil with which the fig tree has been grown in. And phosphorous. And potassium. And it ignores the day of the week in which the fig should be consumed. And it ignores the material of the utensils used to consume the fig. And it ignores the age of the person that consumes them.

Just enjoy your figs, Paul.

I can see the appeal of simple, science-sceptical traditionalism.

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.

It's funny that you use wine as an example of "obviously safe" drink. Because wine is chock full of not-safe-for-human-consumption chemicals (e.g., tannic acid) that would be illegal to use if it were synthetically prepared, but since it's "natural", it gets a free pass. And if you tried to remove all of those chemicals, you'd find that the resulting flavor profile is absolute garbage.

I can also point out--we've been drinking out of lead pipes for thousands of years, so they're obviously safe, right? ... right?

>> 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.

> 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 problem here is you are asking for the impossible: strong evidence that novel chemicals are safe. How could you ever get that? It's impossible to prove a negative.

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".

We have plenty of strong evidence for the safety of tons of things. My ancestors have been consuming cow's milk, mache, and wine for thousands of years. If these things were not safe for consumption, we wouldn't be consuming them to this day. My bloodline wouldn't have made it this far. We don't add poison hemlock to our mache salads because thousands of years ago, some poor souls gave us strong evidence that it's not something you should eat, and that knowledge was passed down to us.

> wine

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.

https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/33/6/1128/7295464

This logic is not formally valid. It's a reasonable basis of belief for a pre-science culture, though.

Also, FWIW, cow's milk has objectively changed in the last few decades.

We have to compare potential downsides though, we have two choices, we can: * not ingest novel chemicals or * ingest novel chemicals that may be carcinogenic, but scientific research will not be able to prove anything either way

Do you not think that it is rational to choose option 1, given our understanding of the Lindy effect?

It depends on the benefit of the chemical vs. the risk. One-sided assessment isn't wise.

> In the absence of any strong evidence, a wise man would be well-served in treating the ingestion of a novel chemical as deadly.

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?

> 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.

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.

In the absence of monopoly, advances in technology result in improvement in value for the customers. Profit margins are constrained in any competitive industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com