Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of successful charlatans and frauds out there. But those ones aren't fools. It's those that worry me.
* Breatharians that recommend not eating.
* People that stare into the sun for energy.
* People that recommend 'natural' cures or other inanities rather than science based treatments.
* dowsers that take your money to wave around a stick.
Sure, spoon bending is silly. Going to Mexico to 'cure' your cancer against the advice of your doctor? It happens every day, and it is anything but silly. These are the people he targets, not just the Uri Geller's of the world.
I think it's just politics as usual, it's a way to not be dependent on US techs, just another way to do things differently.
Europe doesn't have the same kind of free speech and democracy too that relies on government image. Europe has more strict and more authoritative rulings, EU doesn't take risks like the US does. In US it's much more loose.
> The politicians just don't listen to the scientists
There's the same problem anywhere you go.
This more reasonable side of the anti-GMO argument tends to get drowned out and dismissed when people see the pseudoscience 'natural' health arguments brought out front and center. It's pretty evident that arguments for restraint for reasons of long-term sustainability take a lot of effort to get any traction, especially when fighting profitability.
All this to say, the GMO debate, like everything in life, is not as simple as most people tend believe. It is something that should be proceeded with caution, but certainly continued. This I think is where I think the almost religious anti-GMO fervor really causes harm, in the same way anti embryonic stem cell research causes harm.
Move fast and break things is a great slogan when the systems you're moving are relatively simple and the consequences of breaking them are relatively minor. Global ecology is an extraordinarily complex system that we don't fully understand, and breaking it can cause real and life threatening damage to the people of the world. Not to mention the fact that reverting negative changes operates on the same time scale as the original negative change. If it happens that GMO breaks shit, you can't just submit a patch and have things working again in a couple hours.
GMO might lie in a kind of nexus of overlapping fears; there are definitely others in there, too.
From that point of view it seems like a real luxury that we can now afford to waste brain cycles on stuff like global warming or GMOs. We've gone from worrying about threats that are actually visible NOW - getting hit by a car, getting eaten by a bear - to threats that somebody intuits might conceivably start to harm somebody at some point in the distant future if current trends continue in some specific predicted direction.
It's the social equivalent of an auto-immune disorder.
Also e.g. anti-vaccine people have very real concerns. They just are not scientifically founded.
Here is a summary report on 10 years, 200 million euros of research in Europe:
"The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies."
ref.: A decade of EU-funded GMO research (2001 - 2010) http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/a_decade_of_eu-f...
Can you give any scientific references to support your "very real" concern?
They also have some very real concerns. It makes it all very complex to weed out who what to listen for and from who. The answer is probably that you should listen to arguments, not persons, and that you should begin with the arguments you find strongest.
(See for example Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma about medicine research.)
* "The State of the Science : Most of the evidence for the safety of genetically modified food crops comes from studies that only look at short-term effects … and from information provided by the same companies who sell those seeds." http://www.nymc.edu/sanewman/PDFs/GeneWatch_State_of_the%20S...
* Taleb: ''Wrong to say "the scientific method is based on evidence"; it is based on knowing how to deal with absence of evidence.'' ( https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/528646752124297216 )
* The Physics arXiv Blog: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/genetically-modifi...
* "The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)" http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5787
1. GeneWatch is an NGO. They don't have any scientific credibility.
2. Taleb is an economist of sorts, he has no scientific publications or credentials in biosciences. Also, twitter is not a very scientific reference.
3. and 4. Blogs and arXiv publications are not peer-reviewed, and they are not generally considered scientific publications. (Of course when an arXiv manuscript is submitted and accepted to a scientific journal, then it will be.)
Also about Taleb, he actually says "I, for my part, resist eating fruits not found in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean" [1], so his level of conservativeness seems to be to avoid any crop & food innovations younger than 1000 years.
[1] Quoted in: http://livepaola.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/nassim-nicholas-ta...
This is my point: In these matters people don't listen to the opinions of the actual scientists, but all kind of activists and preachers. Just like Randi said. You just demonstrated this.
Also, they apparently funded "remote viewers" for intelligence operations.
This was done in part because it was believed that the Russians were doing this, and administrators didn't want a "remove viewing gap." But it was stopped because it was tried and didn't work. If anything the fact that the program was ended is a good sign.
Uri Geller for example did. There are still people today that refuse to accept that he's a fraud.