4 ms·

The chapter about minorities ruling majorities was really insightful. He mentioned how if even a small percent of people become anti GMO, then GMOs will die out

The chapter about minorities ruling majorities was really insightful. He mentioned how if even a small percent of people become anti GMO, then GMOs will die out. A scary thing to keep in mind with the whole "label it" debate that was on here a few days ago.

golergka 10y ago
And a good way to fight that is to form a stubborn minority that only eats GMO food.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  that won't work in the EU which have have a much more sceptic view on these things. Their principle is the direct opposite of the US. If there is just the slightest risk that something is dangerous they forbid it. In the US they only forbid things if there is overwhelmingly evidence that points towards it being dangerous.
  - triangleman 10y ago
    Then how do you explain the ban on ephedra? Something like 2 people die and it's off the market. Meanwhile, Tylenol kills hundreds of people annually and it's still allowed. I was going to use Thalidomide as another counterexample, but I don't know how things are in Europe compared to the 60's.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      Anomalies
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    This discussion is about whether GMOs will naturally be phased out of the market because of a minority that refuses to eat them. Just like it's hard to find non kosher food, because there's a minority that won't eat it. If the government just outright mandates how food has to be produced, then no one has a choice, and of course that won't work. That's a different situation entirely. Anyway your generalization is overly broad. The US also is restrictive of new things. Especially in e.g. the medical world. See all the startups running into trouble with the FDA. But also things like drones were banned commercially until recently. Even GMOs did have to get FDA approval, so your statement is simply wrong. You can't just go out and make your own GMOs and sell them. I think it's just a general trend, that richer countries become more conservative, and more afraid of new things (and able to afford such policies.) Many technologies we take for granted would never be legally viable if they were invented today. Early automakers would have been sued out of existence for all the traffic accidents they caused. Or, speaking of GMOs, traditional crop breeding literally involves letting the crops randomly mutate in unknown ways (sometimes artificially through irradiation!) No way that would have been approved by modern regulators.
ikeboy 10y ago
That only works if GMOs don't have a significant advantage over non GMOs. And if they don't (in terms of price, properties, etc) then there's really not much point to them, no reason to get excited.
- bduerst 10y ago
  Assuming that public policy is based on merit, and that consumers can make critical decisions free of bias. One has only to look at the new exemptions for vaccinations to see that this clearly isn't true, and has modern-day repercussions.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  They don't have a significant advantage. The price of non GMO food is only slightly higher. Most of the cost of food is from processing and transportation, not at the agricultural level. But to the farmer, GMO yields are significantly higher, and can be the difference between making a profit or a loss. It also means less use of pesticides, and safer pesticides, among other possible advantages like disease resistance. On a world scale, we produce more food with less land, which is definitely good. And especially important for the third world. The future of GMOs also has a lot of potential. We could engineer plants with many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost, etc.
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    If all the factors you mentioned don't lead to a big price difference, then that's the market telling us that they don't really matter. If production is cheap, then there's a lot of supply, and there's little to be gained by optimizing supply. I stand by what I said. You cannot simultaneously have GMOs that are a significant improvement overall without them negating the "minority" argument, and ones small enough to be undermined by a vocal minority shouldn't matter. "many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost" If any of those were a real problem, then production would be a greater percent of the final cost. If changing those doesn't really change the final product price, then they're not important.
dagw 10y ago
if even a small percent of people become anti GMO, then GMOs will die out Not if they are a measurably better product the won't. If GMOs can offer food that is significantly tastier and/or significantly cheaper then they will do just fine. I'm not a big fan of GMOs per se. but offer me something I actually want and I'll happily buy your product
- mseebach 10y ago
  I think the problem here is one level of abstraction further out. It's not whether anti-GMO types can keep you and I from buying GMO products -- indeed, it's unlikely that GMOs are going to have much to offer western middle class consumers. The big kicker is the effect this battle have in the third world, where GMOs hold the potential of a much larger impact (see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice ).
  - bduerst 10y ago
    Precisely. There can be many merits to a better supply chain, which are invisible to the end consumer. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with manufacturers selectively labeling their supply chain methods. There is a problem with forcing them all to, when there is no evidence to support it. Even with nutritional labels, consumers have a right to know what is in the good for making decisions based on health reasons.
msrpotus 10y ago
He's really wrong about the kosher example in a way that makes me wonder whether he really understands a lot of what he's talking about. Anyone who is familiar with kashrut knows that only vegetarian foods (with a few exceptions) are reliably kosher, because it takes very little to make them kosher, just paying for an inspection and certification to say that there aren't any animal products. But if you want kosher meat, kosher cheese, kosher wine, or kosher cooked food, it's significantly more difficult to find that. Why? Because those impose real costs on the producers that force them to change their practices. If you want kosher meat, that excludes pork and animals have to be treated differently. If you want kosher cheese, it can't have rennet (an animal protein), which most cheese does. If you want kosher wine, it needs to be processed in a specific way. And if you want kosher cooked food, not only does the restaurant have to follow all of those rules but they also can't serve milk and meat together. Suddenly, it becomes a lot less common to find kosher food if you actually care about it and aren't just cherrypicking an example for a book. If you want a real lesson from kosher food, it's that companies will adopt all sorts of certifications and make any number of promises as long as they don't have to significantly change what they're doing. But if you ask them to do something that would really cost them money, then they are much less likely.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  He explicitly makes your point, though I agree it could be elaborated (otoh it's only a draft). >Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with Kosher laws doesn’t change the price by much, not enough to justify inventories. But if the manufacturing of Kosher lemonade cost substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear proportion to the difference in costs. If it cost ten times as much to make Kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps in some very rich neighborhoods.

golergka 10y ago

And a good way to fight that is to form a stubborn minority that only eats GMO food.

ThomPete 10y ago
that won't work in the EU which have have a much more sceptic view on these things. Their principle is the direct opposite of the US. If there is just the slightest risk that something is dangerous they forbid it. In the US they only forbid things if there is overwhelmingly evidence that points towards it being dangerous.
- triangleman 10y ago
  Then how do you explain the ban on ephedra? Something like 2 people die and it's off the market. Meanwhile, Tylenol kills hundreds of people annually and it's still allowed. I was going to use Thalidomide as another counterexample, but I don't know how things are in Europe compared to the 60's.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Anomalies
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Houshalter 10y ago
  This discussion is about whether GMOs will naturally be phased out of the market because of a minority that refuses to eat them. Just like it's hard to find non kosher food, because there's a minority that won't eat it. If the government just outright mandates how food has to be produced, then no one has a choice, and of course that won't work. That's a different situation entirely. Anyway your generalization is overly broad. The US also is restrictive of new things. Especially in e.g. the medical world. See all the startups running into trouble with the FDA. But also things like drones were banned commercially until recently. Even GMOs did have to get FDA approval, so your statement is simply wrong. You can't just go out and make your own GMOs and sell them. I think it's just a general trend, that richer countries become more conservative, and more afraid of new things (and able to afford such policies.) Many technologies we take for granted would never be legally viable if they were invented today. Early automakers would have been sued out of existence for all the traffic accidents they caused. Or, speaking of GMOs, traditional crop breeding literally involves letting the crops randomly mutate in unknown ways (sometimes artificially through irradiation!) No way that would have been approved by modern regulators.

ikeboy 10y ago

That only works if GMOs don't have a significant advantage over non GMOs. And if they don't (in terms of price, properties, etc) then there's really not much point to them, no reason to get excited.

bduerst 10y ago
Assuming that public policy is based on merit, and that consumers can make critical decisions free of bias. One has only to look at the new exemptions for vaccinations to see that this clearly isn't true, and has modern-day repercussions.
Houshalter 10y ago
They don't have a significant advantage. The price of non GMO food is only slightly higher. Most of the cost of food is from processing and transportation, not at the agricultural level. But to the farmer, GMO yields are significantly higher, and can be the difference between making a profit or a loss. It also means less use of pesticides, and safer pesticides, among other possible advantages like disease resistance. On a world scale, we produce more food with less land, which is definitely good. And especially important for the third world. The future of GMOs also has a lot of potential. We could engineer plants with many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost, etc.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  If all the factors you mentioned don't lead to a big price difference, then that's the market telling us that they don't really matter. If production is cheap, then there's a lot of supply, and there's little to be gained by optimizing supply. I stand by what I said. You cannot simultaneously have GMOs that are a significant improvement overall without them negating the "minority" argument, and ones small enough to be undermined by a vocal minority shouldn't matter. "many times greater photosynthesis, or the ability to grow in salted land, to not be damaged by frost" If any of those were a real problem, then production would be a greater percent of the final cost. If changing those doesn't really change the final product price, then they're not important.

dagw 10y ago

if even a small percent of people become anti GMO, then GMOs will die out Not if they are a measurably better product the won't. If GMOs can offer food that is significantly tastier and/or significantly cheaper then they will do just fine. I'm not a big fan of GMOs per se. but offer me something I actually want and I'll happily buy your product

mseebach 10y ago
I think the problem here is one level of abstraction further out. It's not whether anti-GMO types can keep you and I from buying GMO products -- indeed, it's unlikely that GMOs are going to have much to offer western middle class consumers. The big kicker is the effect this battle have in the third world, where GMOs hold the potential of a much larger impact (see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice ).
- bduerst 10y ago
  Precisely. There can be many merits to a better supply chain, which are invisible to the end consumer. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with manufacturers selectively labeling their supply chain methods. There is a problem with forcing them all to, when there is no evidence to support it. Even with nutritional labels, consumers have a right to know what is in the good for making decisions based on health reasons.

msrpotus 10y ago

He's really wrong about the kosher example in a way that makes me wonder whether he really understands a lot of what he's talking about. Anyone who is familiar with kashrut knows that only vegetarian foods (with a few exceptions) are reliably kosher, because it takes very little to make them kosher, just paying for an inspection and certification to say that there aren't any animal products. But if you want kosher meat, kosher cheese, kosher wine, or kosher cooked food, it's significantly more difficult to find that. Why? Because those impose real costs on the producers that force them to change their practices. If you want kosher meat, that excludes pork and animals have to be treated differently. If you want kosher cheese, it can't have rennet (an animal protein), which most cheese does. If you want kosher wine, it needs to be processed in a specific way. And if you want kosher cooked food, not only does the restaurant have to follow all of those rules but they also can't serve milk and meat together. Suddenly, it becomes a lot less common to find kosher food if you actually care about it and aren't just cherrypicking an example for a book. If you want a real lesson from kosher food, it's that companies will adopt all sorts of certifications and make any number of promises as long as they don't have to significantly change what they're doing. But if you ask them to do something that would really cost them money, then they are much less likely.

ikeboy 10y ago
He explicitly makes your point, though I agree it could be elaborated (otoh it's only a draft). >Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with Kosher laws doesn’t change the price by much, not enough to justify inventories. But if the manufacturing of Kosher lemonade cost substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear proportion to the difference in costs. If it cost ten times as much to make Kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps in some very rich neighborhoods.