4 ms·

You may be right — but it seems to me you are blithely equating absence of evidence with evidence of absence.

• muninn_ 10y ago
  Put it this way. If you see two apples, one organic and one not, but the one that is not is cheaper, you would only buy the organic one if you believe that it's healthier, or you feel like you're doing something "good". But if you do that, you're making that decision without evidence of the organic apple being better for you. The rational decision is to pay for the cheaper one, unless you're at least consciously choosing to buy an organic apple because you believe it's a value statement. If you buy the organic apple because you believe it's healthier than you're doing so without evidence and effectively asserting that such evidence exists. If we're to assume (and I think this is the proper assumption) that you don't have proper knowledge about the health effects, then the default choice where you're not positing that there is any evidence would to simply purchase the cheaper apple. In that case you're saying (I don't know) and taking that factor out of the equation, which leaves either price or lifestyle, which I mentioned above. I used to believe that GMOs were bad and organic was the way to go. I thought I had to stand up to big agriculture and buy local. I still mostly try to buy local for environmental reasons (and others), but I no longer factor "organic" into the decision. You can get "organic" just about anything these days whether or not it's actually "organic", and often times it's worse for the environment.