7 ms·

Or the staggering number of anti-GMO laws and business ad campaigns.

by BookmarkSaver 8y ago

seibelj 8y ago
Educated people who hate GMO are instant signal that they don’t understand science. A good filter
- mathgladiator 8y ago
  Or that they understand science and don't want to be in the experimental group. They would rather be in the control.
  - bumblebritches5 8y ago
    Amen. It's hilarious to me how most of those "hur dur ur anti science11111!!" people literally don't even understand anything about what they're talking about, the talking box just told them that they're ok so they parrot it back to feel smart.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    That's a rather elegant and funny way to put it. Unfortunately, a huge issue is that it's almost impossible to be in the control group anymore. Or if it is, it demands huge efforts and is very hard to check the success of it. I understand the scientists defending the GMO. But quite often, they assume people in charge are making decisions the same way they do. However, the people in charge often make decisions according to economical factors, science being just a tool toward that goal.
- sersi 8y ago
  I don't necessarily hate all GMO but I'm very dubious about GMO crops that are engineered to withstand Glyphosate better and I prefer not to eat such crops because they are more likely to have been treated with this herbicide.
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    Why do you have that preference? It's my understanding that the alternatives are worse.
    - hutzlibu 8y ago
      Organic food is worse than food wich was treated with various chemicals to kill living things? Thats news to me. But you probably mean "alternatives" for producing dirt cheap. Then yes, there are much worse substances around. Doesn't make it good, though.
      - driverdan 8y ago
        Organic food is treated with pesticides and herbicides too. There's a limited list of allowed chemicals, some of which are much worse than glycophosphate.
        barrkel 8y ago
        To be sure we're all on the same page, there are differences in organic regulation in the US vs the EU. I don't know much about the US situation, but an outline of EU general regulations for organic plants is https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-rules-on-production/plants-and-plant-products_en https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-rules-... : > Basic substances allowed in organic agriculture comply with two criteria: i) they are of vegetable or animal origin ii) they are considered to be "foodstuff"
        icebraining 8y ago
        That's not true, though, there are authorized exceptions, like copper. See Annex II, table 3: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L_.2016.116.01.0008.01.ENG https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=uriserv%...
      - daveFNbuck 8y ago
- 21 8y ago
  Right, don't forget about people who are opposed to nuclear because of Fukushima. A good filter of people who don't understand science and how safe the nuclear industry is.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    I'm pro nuclear, but given that the side effects on the oceans and hence the entire planet are still to be accounted for and that we won't know before decades, I find that comment quite arrogant. It's also discarding the real suffering of all the people that were affected by the 3 major nuclear accidents. I have a friend of mine who his medicated for life because of Chernobyl. Black and white are rarely the winning colors.
    - Jedd 8y ago
      I suspect parent's comment was actually sarcastic, rather than arrogant. Nuclear is a term burdened with ambiguity - most people mean nuclear fission, some people mean nuclear fusion. As far as filters for scientific understanding, it's probably better than 'GMO is bad'.
    - Turing_Machine 8y ago
      > I'm pro nuclear, but given that the side effects on the oceans and hence the entire planet are still to be accounted for and that we won't know before decades, I find that comment quite arrogant. The ocean already has about 4.5 billion tons of naturally-occurring uranium in it, as well as many other radioactive substances. Fukushima wouldn't have made a significant difference in that figure if they'd ground up the entire reactor to a powder and dumped every single bit of it in the ocean. You could perhaps produce localized contamination by doing that, but not on the scale of the oceans as a whole. For that matter, the Soviet Union used to dump their scrap submarine reactors straight into the ocean. They did that with a bunch of them.
      - sametmax 8y ago
        > The ocean already has about 4.5 billion tons of naturally-occurring uranium in it Intensity and locality are important factors. You can eat a spoonfull of sugar everyday for a year and be ok, but eating 365 in one day is going to be a different story. Because ocean are very complex an interactive system, and local intense event can then have a domino effect on the rest. Now as I said, we don't know the effects yet. I'm not pretending I know if it's bad either. That's the meaning of "we don't know". But given we have only one planet and we kinda sitting on it, it seems very silly to me to state "nah, we'll be fine" and discard risks. That's how teenagers react.
- p1necone 8y ago
  Lots of smart people have problems with Monsanto's business practices rather than GMO specifically.
  - KC8ZKF 8y ago
    Maybe we should have "Non-Monsanto" labels then, instead of "Non-GMO."
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Also, the fact is that Monsanto, which has had trouble with its ethical reputation, is very adamant about GMO. So if you don't trust Monsanto for most things, you will especially not trust it to tell you the truth about the safety of its products nor about the completeness of their tests to ensure said safety.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Also, the fact is that Monsanto, which has had trouble with its ethical reputation, is very adamant about GMO. It's adamant about the safety of its GMO lines and (in the case of Roundup Ready) the pesticide products that are complementary to them. It's, OTOH, also a big producer of non-GMO seed and actively markets products to the organic food industry.
    - nradov 8y ago
      What specifically has Monsanto done that was unethical?
      - sametmax 8y ago
        It creates seeds you can't harvest, plant and grow again to maintain a captive market. When it can't do that, it sues farmers that harvest, plan and grow the seed it wants to protect. This includes Monsanto's crops contaminating other crops like in the Vernon Hugh Bowman case. It also promoted (at least in France) round up as biodegradable but we eventually found out it didn't, and went to contaminate the drinking water. Which is a problem, given that glyphosate based products are currently in the process of being banned in Europe. The answer from Monsanto to that has been ghostwriting reports and pretend they didn't come from them.
- redstripe 8y ago
  That's not saying much. Most of us don't understand most science behind anything outside of our limited specializations. These beliefs are manifestations of people's distrust of large institutions. People believe GMO is bad because they believe that large corporations would do anything for a buck regardless of long term consequences. Alien abduction, anti-vaxers, 9/11 inside job and other conspiracy theories are just ways for people to express their distrust of government. Global warming deniers don't trust the liberal media. The pattern is: I don't trust X. What is the worst thing I could believe about X.
  - cgag 8y ago
    There's a world of difference between a proper conspiracy and thinking GMOs and powerful pesticides might not be a good idea. I don't avoid them but I don't think it's all that unlikely they'll turn out to have negative effects.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Educated people who hate GMO are instant signal that they don’t understand science. Not actually being familiar with the science in a particular domain and not understanding as science are very different things.
- ksec 8y ago
  And you just filter out most of of the world. Most in EU are against GMO, China is against imported GMO ( They only allow certain GMO options / products ) The only nation on earth that is a large proponent of GMO food is US. But even US consumers are divided on this issues At one point in time I thought GMO was a necessary evil, in order to feed the world better. Simplot used to pride their GMO potato that has much better yields then anyone else on the planet. But climate changes proves no breed is best for all time. In the mean time, a few European companies ; failing to combat the GMO production yield and had comparatively worse climate to grown potatoes, manage to outrun any US companies potato yield with machine learning. This is of course an over simplify version of it, but the story proves we don't need GMO to feed the world.
sametmax 8y ago
GMO are a very powerful technology. Like anything powerful, an intelligent person calls for caution. A lot of people are worrying about GMO in food because we don't have enough data about them. We are changing things that could have important biological, health and ecological impacts, but the companies producing them are not willing to test them extensively for safety during 20 years before selling them. We don't know what are the long term effects of cross breeding the GMO species with non GMO ones. We don't know the long term effects of the fauna. We don't known the long term (on decades) effects of ingesting any of them. What we know is that if you give mouses the GMO food in isolation for a short time, they don't develop apparent problems. That's not a lot to go on, especially since very simple products, like processed meat, revealed themself as being carcinogenous on the long run (http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/ http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/). That's not science to me. That's business as usual. I don't trust business. History taught me that for profit entities don't make the right decisions on this. After all, we knew asbestos was dangerous in 1920, but had to wait 1980 to act on it. After all, we fed cows with meat while knowing it's an herbivore, leading to spongiform encephalopathy. After all, we used the least safe nuclear technology we knew about because it was more suited for our military ambitions. On a technology as complex as GMO, with a lot of interactions in different systems, it can take a lot of time to realize something is wrong. If it happens, it will take even more time before we act. The companies creating GMO will then, as usual, protect them-self to the extreme, and eventually just pay some money to get out of trouble, money they already earned by selling the GMO anyway. So yes, whether it's GMO in food, nano-particles or anything that is very potent, I think it's fair to say "hey, slow down, we are not doing our homework here" when the other side is just trying to sell it to everybody. It's a matter of agenda.
- girvo 8y ago
  And yet none of the food we farm hasn’t been modified, genetically. None of it is natural. Are you as worried about new strains of rice? I can see a good argument to worry about all of it, but picking a particular method and demonising it confuses me. But perhaps it’s because I’ve not been exposed to the anti-GMO propaganda (and pro-) that the USA is flooded with that I’m not “intelligent”?

Or the staggering number of anti-GMO laws and business ad campaigns.

seibelj 8y ago

Educated people who hate GMO are instant signal that they don’t understand science. A good filter

mathgladiator 8y ago
Or that they understand science and don't want to be in the experimental group. They would rather be in the control.
- bumblebritches5 8y ago
  Amen. It's hilarious to me how most of those "hur dur ur anti science11111!!" people literally don't even understand anything about what they're talking about, the talking box just told them that they're ok so they parrot it back to feel smart.
- sametmax 8y ago
  That's a rather elegant and funny way to put it. Unfortunately, a huge issue is that it's almost impossible to be in the control group anymore. Or if it is, it demands huge efforts and is very hard to check the success of it. I understand the scientists defending the GMO. But quite often, they assume people in charge are making decisions the same way they do. However, the people in charge often make decisions according to economical factors, science being just a tool toward that goal.
sersi 8y ago
I don't necessarily hate all GMO but I'm very dubious about GMO crops that are engineered to withstand Glyphosate better and I prefer not to eat such crops because they are more likely to have been treated with this herbicide.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  Why do you have that preference? It's my understanding that the alternatives are worse.
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    Organic food is worse than food wich was treated with various chemicals to kill living things? Thats news to me. But you probably mean "alternatives" for producing dirt cheap. Then yes, there are much worse substances around. Doesn't make it good, though.
    - driverdan 8y ago
      Organic food is treated with pesticides and herbicides too. There's a limited list of allowed chemicals, some of which are much worse than glycophosphate.
      - barrkel 8y ago
        To be sure we're all on the same page, there are differences in organic regulation in the US vs the EU. I don't know much about the US situation, but an outline of EU general regulations for organic plants is https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-rules-on-production/plants-and-plant-products_en https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-rules-... : > Basic substances allowed in organic agriculture comply with two criteria: i) they are of vegetable or animal origin ii) they are considered to be "foodstuff"
        icebraining 8y ago
        That's not true, though, there are authorized exceptions, like copper. See Annex II, table 3: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L_.2016.116.01.0008.01.ENG https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=uriserv%...
    - daveFNbuck 8y ago
21 8y ago
Right, don't forget about people who are opposed to nuclear because of Fukushima. A good filter of people who don't understand science and how safe the nuclear industry is.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I'm pro nuclear, but given that the side effects on the oceans and hence the entire planet are still to be accounted for and that we won't know before decades, I find that comment quite arrogant. It's also discarding the real suffering of all the people that were affected by the 3 major nuclear accidents. I have a friend of mine who his medicated for life because of Chernobyl. Black and white are rarely the winning colors.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    I suspect parent's comment was actually sarcastic, rather than arrogant. Nuclear is a term burdened with ambiguity - most people mean nuclear fission, some people mean nuclear fusion. As far as filters for scientific understanding, it's probably better than 'GMO is bad'.
  - Turing_Machine 8y ago
    > I'm pro nuclear, but given that the side effects on the oceans and hence the entire planet are still to be accounted for and that we won't know before decades, I find that comment quite arrogant. The ocean already has about 4.5 billion tons of naturally-occurring uranium in it, as well as many other radioactive substances. Fukushima wouldn't have made a significant difference in that figure if they'd ground up the entire reactor to a powder and dumped every single bit of it in the ocean. You could perhaps produce localized contamination by doing that, but not on the scale of the oceans as a whole. For that matter, the Soviet Union used to dump their scrap submarine reactors straight into the ocean. They did that with a bunch of them.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      > The ocean already has about 4.5 billion tons of naturally-occurring uranium in it Intensity and locality are important factors. You can eat a spoonfull of sugar everyday for a year and be ok, but eating 365 in one day is going to be a different story. Because ocean are very complex an interactive system, and local intense event can then have a domino effect on the rest. Now as I said, we don't know the effects yet. I'm not pretending I know if it's bad either. That's the meaning of "we don't know". But given we have only one planet and we kinda sitting on it, it seems very silly to me to state "nah, we'll be fine" and discard risks. That's how teenagers react.
p1necone 8y ago
Lots of smart people have problems with Monsanto's business practices rather than GMO specifically.
- KC8ZKF 8y ago
  Maybe we should have "Non-Monsanto" labels then, instead of "Non-GMO."
- sametmax 8y ago
  Also, the fact is that Monsanto, which has had trouble with its ethical reputation, is very adamant about GMO. So if you don't trust Monsanto for most things, you will especially not trust it to tell you the truth about the safety of its products nor about the completeness of their tests to ensure said safety.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Also, the fact is that Monsanto, which has had trouble with its ethical reputation, is very adamant about GMO. It's adamant about the safety of its GMO lines and (in the case of Roundup Ready) the pesticide products that are complementary to them. It's, OTOH, also a big producer of non-GMO seed and actively markets products to the organic food industry.
  - nradov 8y ago
    What specifically has Monsanto done that was unethical?
    - sametmax 8y ago
      It creates seeds you can't harvest, plant and grow again to maintain a captive market. When it can't do that, it sues farmers that harvest, plan and grow the seed it wants to protect. This includes Monsanto's crops contaminating other crops like in the Vernon Hugh Bowman case. It also promoted (at least in France) round up as biodegradable but we eventually found out it didn't, and went to contaminate the drinking water. Which is a problem, given that glyphosate based products are currently in the process of being banned in Europe. The answer from Monsanto to that has been ghostwriting reports and pretend they didn't come from them.
redstripe 8y ago
That's not saying much. Most of us don't understand most science behind anything outside of our limited specializations. These beliefs are manifestations of people's distrust of large institutions. People believe GMO is bad because they believe that large corporations would do anything for a buck regardless of long term consequences. Alien abduction, anti-vaxers, 9/11 inside job and other conspiracy theories are just ways for people to express their distrust of government. Global warming deniers don't trust the liberal media. The pattern is: I don't trust X. What is the worst thing I could believe about X.
- cgag 8y ago
  There's a world of difference between a proper conspiracy and thinking GMOs and powerful pesticides might not be a good idea. I don't avoid them but I don't think it's all that unlikely they'll turn out to have negative effects.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Educated people who hate GMO are instant signal that they don’t understand science. Not actually being familiar with the science in a particular domain and not understanding as science are very different things.
ksec 8y ago
And you just filter out most of of the world. Most in EU are against GMO, China is against imported GMO ( They only allow certain GMO options / products ) The only nation on earth that is a large proponent of GMO food is US. But even US consumers are divided on this issues At one point in time I thought GMO was a necessary evil, in order to feed the world better. Simplot used to pride their GMO potato that has much better yields then anyone else on the planet. But climate changes proves no breed is best for all time. In the mean time, a few European companies ; failing to combat the GMO production yield and had comparatively worse climate to grown potatoes, manage to outrun any US companies potato yield with machine learning. This is of course an over simplify version of it, but the story proves we don't need GMO to feed the world.

sametmax 8y ago

GMO are a very powerful technology. Like anything powerful, an intelligent person calls for caution. A lot of people are worrying about GMO in food because we don't have enough data about them. We are changing things that could have important biological, health and ecological impacts, but the companies producing them are not willing to test them extensively for safety during 20 years before selling them. We don't know what are the long term effects of cross breeding the GMO species with non GMO ones. We don't know the long term effects of the fauna. We don't known the long term (on decades) effects of ingesting any of them. What we know is that if you give mouses the GMO food in isolation for a short time, they don't develop apparent problems. That's not a lot to go on, especially since very simple products, like processed meat, revealed themself as being carcinogenous on the long run (http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/ http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/). That's not science to me. That's business as usual. I don't trust business. History taught me that for profit entities don't make the right decisions on this. After all, we knew asbestos was dangerous in 1920, but had to wait 1980 to act on it. After all, we fed cows with meat while knowing it's an herbivore, leading to spongiform encephalopathy. After all, we used the least safe nuclear technology we knew about because it was more suited for our military ambitions. On a technology as complex as GMO, with a lot of interactions in different systems, it can take a lot of time to realize something is wrong. If it happens, it will take even more time before we act. The companies creating GMO will then, as usual, protect them-self to the extreme, and eventually just pay some money to get out of trouble, money they already earned by selling the GMO anyway. So yes, whether it's GMO in food, nano-particles or anything that is very potent, I think it's fair to say "hey, slow down, we are not doing our homework here" when the other side is just trying to sell it to everybody. It's a matter of agenda.

girvo 8y ago
And yet none of the food we farm hasn’t been modified, genetically. None of it is natural. Are you as worried about new strains of rice? I can see a good argument to worry about all of it, but picking a particular method and demonising it confuses me. But perhaps it’s because I’ve not been exposed to the anti-GMO propaganda (and pro-) that the USA is flooded with that I’m not “intelligent”?