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"This is the end result of an education system that has not prepared people for the modern world, if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity grea
by rsync 11y ago
"This is the end result of an education system that has not prepared people for the modern world, if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity greater than water from a reservoir and and half of people are still not sure it is safe to drink then we have a massive problem."
It has nothing to do with the education system and everything to do with human social evolution and evolutionarily stable strategies.
You're looking at the problem "like a nerd"[1] wherein you have a fixed set of definitions and guidelines and the end product (the water) fits or exceeds all of them and therefore, presto! Anyone who disagrees with your framework is therefore an idiot.
But these people aren't disagreeing with the stats - they don't care about the stats. They have a built-in, knee-jerk revulsion to drinking anything that came from sewage. That might not be rational or useful in 2016, but it has been tremendously useful over the past hundred thousand years of human social evolution. In fact, so useful, that people without that revulsion have been heavily selected against.
If your response to this is to show them more and more data and "proof" you're missing the point.
[1] ... to use Nassim Taleb's technical term.
- brenschluss 11y ago> They have a built-in, knee-jerk revulsion to drinking anything that came from sewage. That might not be rational or useful in 2016, but it has been tremendously useful over the past hundred thousand years of human social evolution. That's not necessarily true. First-world capitalist society focused on intellectual labor does a great job of mentally dividing the world into 'clean' and 'unclean', where everything unclean moves invisibly through a series of subterranean pipes. If you go to any farm, this division is much more vague. Farmers dump horse manure onto soil, from which your vegetables grow. Bruised and almost-rotting apples are picked, crushed, and pressed to create apple cider. Milk comes from the teats of a cow into a tin pail that might have some bits of hay that are later strained out. The notion that humans have "built-in, knee-jerk revulsion" to sewage is a trained behavior arising from an ignorance or a visceral distance from production processes. Many humans also probably have "built-in, knee-jerk revulsion" to the sight of animals being slaughtered, with their blood draining into a pool, yet will happily devour a plate of barbecue. Why would we consider that recycled water from sewage would be any different?
- rsync 11y ago"If you go to any farm, this division is much more vague." I live on a farm and we have fairly stark divisions here.