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> given that we waste ~40% of all food produced That's a non-sequitur, and you're adding the loss stats in with waste. > And that discounts any Black Swans ly

by ben509 8y ago

> given that we waste ~40% of all food produced That's a non-sequitur, and you're adding the loss stats in with waste. > And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster... Once it's a black swan, it's already discounted, the term itself means the thing is unlikely. I think the subject deserves more study, but we have people dying of hunger right now, and that's plainly more compelling than "something really bad might happen, we have no idea what, why or how likely it is."

extrapickles 8y ago
Exactly. Possibly getting cancer when you are 70-80 would be a minor price to pay to not be guaranteed to starve to death when you are 5. This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).
- KingMob 8y ago
  A black swan would be less on the scale of "higher long-term risk of cancer", and more like "unintended side effect wiped out pollinators and now the local agriculture is imperiled".
abalone 8y ago
That is not "plainly more compelling." There is no undo button for GMOs -- once they are out in the wild there's no eradicating them. For well over half a century we have understood that most famines are a result of entitlement failures, not lack of food availability.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of_exchange_entitlements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of...
KingMob 8y ago
I think you should read Taleb's followup Antifragile sometime. The point is not that black swans are unlikely, but that they are catastrophic, and we can't even quantify how unlikely they are, so we have to find ways to prepare for them without basing it on probability estimates. That "something really bad" might be localized ecological collapse, which I find pretty compelling, too.

by ben509 8y ago

extrapickles 8y ago

Exactly. Possibly getting cancer when you are 70-80 would be a minor price to pay to not be guaranteed to starve to death when you are 5. This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).

KingMob 8y ago
A black swan would be less on the scale of "higher long-term risk of cancer", and more like "unintended side effect wiped out pollinators and now the local agriculture is imperiled".

abalone 8y ago

That is not "plainly more compelling." There is no undo button for GMOs -- once they are out in the wild there's no eradicating them. For well over half a century we have understood that most famines are a result of entitlement failures, not lack of food availability.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of_exchange_entitlements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of...

KingMob 8y ago

I think you should read Taleb's followup Antifragile sometime. The point is not that black swans are unlikely, but that they are catastrophic, and we can't even quantify how unlikely they are, so we have to find ways to prepare for them without basing it on probability estimates. That "something really bad" might be localized ecological collapse, which I find pretty compelling, too.