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This topic is so aggravating. On one hand, you have the "Don't eat science words, they give you the autism cancer!" reactionaries, and on the other side, you ha

by beat 7y ago

This topic is so aggravating. On one hand, you have the "Don't eat science words, they give you the autism cancer!" reactionaries, and on the other side, you have the "Everything is completely benign, because science!" reactionaries.

manifestsilence 7y ago
Yup, I hear you. I try to put my faith on the in-between folks, who say, "we can't prove in a court of law that this is harmful, but in this case there is a plausible mechanism and the risks don't seem justified. In this other case, there's no plausible mechanism for harm or the benefits outweigh the risks." The people who show some kind of doubt are, as always, the ones to actually listen to.
- beat 7y ago
  Such a world we live in, where the fools are absolutely certain and the wise are full of doubt.
  - codr7 7y ago
    It couldn't be any other way. The more you really learn, the less ignorant and more nuanced you become.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  That sort of reaction is exactly why the Overton window works. If Alice says that 2 + 2 = 4 and Bob says that 2 + 2 = 8, then Bob is wrong and the answer is not 6.
- tcfunk 7y ago
  Sort of a tangent here, but I find very often in the workplace that my managers want me to tell them about how I "know" something will work. I never know if something will work. I can only be mostly sure that it will. It goes against my nature so much to respond to these questions the way that they want.
  - crdrost 7y ago
    If it helps you out personally, it may be nice to impose a translation filter between the rest of the world and yourself here? These other folks say “know” when they mean “have confidence in” and they are looking for you to similarly say “know” meaning that. Your internal meaning of knowledge can be much stronger, but they are just asking for you to give your reasons why you think that would be the case. You can feel free to hedge as well. “I think we can resolve all of these things if we just make a UserInteractions table on our end, rather than proxying all of this to the upstream API. We will still proxy the interactions, but our source of truth can be our table.” “How do you know that will work?” “Well, it involves taking on some risks, like when they update things and never tell our source of truth about them, then our two systems are out-of-sync. I think that probably the problem of synchronizing our table with their system is simpler and more tractable than getting their system to behave in a normal way where we don't get successful responses until we're sure that the interaction has happened. It would be different if everything was changing every second of course, but that isn’t what we’ve been seeing happen on our staging server. The rest of it is not too bad, there are three API endpoints which generate these UserInteractions and they all touch it but rewriting them can’t be more than a day’s work, so the only hard problem is populating this UserInteractions table in the first place, but that’s not an ongoing risk, just a one-time cost for a developer to pay. That’s why I’m confident that this is a good choice moving forward.” “How do you know that interaction times won’t suffer?” “Well, I cannot say 100% for sure but usually requests over the local network to the local database are going to be faster than general network requests, unless things are really unusually smooth between the two. But at our present number of users and our projected go-live numbers, I have seen MySQL setups handle that with no problem and if it is a problem then we’ll have to face that scaling difficulty either way, as MySQL is not just used for these UserInteractions but also for X, Y, and Z.” You see? I don’t need to claim absolute knowledge here, I just need to express: 1. There is some sort of cost-benefit analysis of trade-offs happening here, 2. someone has done this analysis, and, 3. more info can become available and I can be held accountable for this trade-off if this choice later becomes problematic. It’s sort of a part of negotiation rather than part of technical responsibility. If you can appeal to an outside authority (“The OWASP security guidelines clearly state...”) or at least an unbiased one (“I ran this by Susan, who is a developer at our contractor that we work with, and she agreed it was worth a shot and gave me some good feedback about a potential pitfall that I should avoid...”) or otherwise communicate that some sort of expertise has peeked in to a problem, then people feel naturally more confident and trusting about it. If you don’t do that then it starts to sound more like “we should do this because I say so” even when the problem is legitimate and painful. I guess I’m saying, think of yourself as a doctor talking to a patient about an upcoming surgery. They are right to have nebulous general concerns and they talk in funny ways that technically do not have much scientific value, but it is important to reassure them when needed, provide them options when needed, and just trust that if they lose trust of you and want to get second opinions, they are acting in good faith and have every right to be concerned about these things that are probably innocuous but have a tiny probability to kill them.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  Or sometimes they're just less informed. People who are well-versed with statistics have studied vaccines, gmo, and glyphosate the overwhelming majority all came to the same conclusion and they're confident in that conclusion. Maybe these things are dangerous but there isn't any good evidence they are.
throwaway5752 7y ago
If you ignore both of those constituencies and focus, then you have this editorial, that talks about the risks in terms of science and how it is interpreted by various regulator bodies. I count at least 6 links to prominent journals and 2 links to publications by the WHO and the EPA/EFSA. The author is a physicist and former editor of Nature.
radcon 7y ago
I know there are better examples, but the one that always comes to mind for me is Asbestos. Everyone thought that was safe, now it kills 100,000+ people a year. And to make matters worse, companies were able to suppress evidence of its danger for decades. We never know what evidence is being withheld from us, so I feel like a little irrational paranoia is actually rational. Edit: Oh, and how about Exxon withholding all that information about climate change for 40 years? That's another good one.
- avgDev 7y ago
  There is another good one. Bayer took HIV infected blood from US and Europe and sold it in Africa, infecting many people with HIV in the process. Also, many medications have under reported side effects. I myself have experienced insane side effects from an antibiotic. Doctors I have seen fail to report to the FDA and claim it is something else. I have talked to many people with the same symptoms and again they encountered the same issue with the medical community. While the FDA actually has been adding more and more serious side effects to the medications label, due to people self-reporting because doctors fail to do so.
  - timkpaine 7y ago
    Jesus....https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24785997 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24785997
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
This is false centrism. The 'science' side is perfectly prepared to accept any compelling data about risks or hazards. In many cases, these are the same people that have raised the alarm on various pollutants or environmental risks. But they don't say that about glyphosate because .. there's no evidence. It's just not there. All the terrible evils that this compound is supposed to have, such powerful effects, would be easy to see in controlled studies. Even small effects that are nonetheless epidemiologically relevant are well within what is detectable. Instead, what you get is a bunch of certifiable bullshit like Seralini, that Samsel guy linked above, etc. Stuff that is objectively bad science, so far beyond what is on the margin that it beggars belief. It's crap. The 'science' folk may seem a little defensive, and that's because we absolutely are. We care deeply about science and epistemology. We don't take kindly to liars, and there are an awful lot of them who take up this torch for whatever reason.
- beat 7y ago
  As a "science folk" myself, I care deeply about people just shouting "BUT SCIENCE!" to pretend their emotionally charged opinions are, somehow, facts. Which is absolutely what happens when discussing this issue.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    But the science really does only supports one side of this issue.
    - beat 7y ago
      Does it? It seems to me that there's a lot to it that simply hasn't been researched adequately yet.
      - JamesBarney 7y ago
        Glysophate is one of the most researched chemicals in the world. 99.9% of substances in food are less researched than glysophate and many exist in concentrations at least as high.

by beat 7y ago

manifestsilence 7y ago

Yup, I hear you. I try to put my faith on the in-between folks, who say, "we can't prove in a court of law that this is harmful, but in this case there is a plausible mechanism and the risks don't seem justified. In this other case, there's no plausible mechanism for harm or the benefits outweigh the risks." The people who show some kind of doubt are, as always, the ones to actually listen to.

beat 7y ago
Such a world we live in, where the fools are absolutely certain and the wise are full of doubt.
- codr7 7y ago
  It couldn't be any other way. The more you really learn, the less ignorant and more nuanced you become.
throwaway5752 7y ago
That sort of reaction is exactly why the Overton window works. If Alice says that 2 + 2 = 4 and Bob says that 2 + 2 = 8, then Bob is wrong and the answer is not 6.
tcfunk 7y ago
Sort of a tangent here, but I find very often in the workplace that my managers want me to tell them about how I "know" something will work. I never know if something will work. I can only be mostly sure that it will. It goes against my nature so much to respond to these questions the way that they want.
- crdrost 7y ago
  If it helps you out personally, it may be nice to impose a translation filter between the rest of the world and yourself here? These other folks say “know” when they mean “have confidence in” and they are looking for you to similarly say “know” meaning that. Your internal meaning of knowledge can be much stronger, but they are just asking for you to give your reasons why you think that would be the case. You can feel free to hedge as well. “I think we can resolve all of these things if we just make a UserInteractions table on our end, rather than proxying all of this to the upstream API. We will still proxy the interactions, but our source of truth can be our table.” “How do you know that will work?” “Well, it involves taking on some risks, like when they update things and never tell our source of truth about them, then our two systems are out-of-sync. I think that probably the problem of synchronizing our table with their system is simpler and more tractable than getting their system to behave in a normal way where we don't get successful responses until we're sure that the interaction has happened. It would be different if everything was changing every second of course, but that isn’t what we’ve been seeing happen on our staging server. The rest of it is not too bad, there are three API endpoints which generate these UserInteractions and they all touch it but rewriting them can’t be more than a day’s work, so the only hard problem is populating this UserInteractions table in the first place, but that’s not an ongoing risk, just a one-time cost for a developer to pay. That’s why I’m confident that this is a good choice moving forward.” “How do you know that interaction times won’t suffer?” “Well, I cannot say 100% for sure but usually requests over the local network to the local database are going to be faster than general network requests, unless things are really unusually smooth between the two. But at our present number of users and our projected go-live numbers, I have seen MySQL setups handle that with no problem and if it is a problem then we’ll have to face that scaling difficulty either way, as MySQL is not just used for these UserInteractions but also for X, Y, and Z.” You see? I don’t need to claim absolute knowledge here, I just need to express: 1. There is some sort of cost-benefit analysis of trade-offs happening here, 2. someone has done this analysis, and, 3. more info can become available and I can be held accountable for this trade-off if this choice later becomes problematic. It’s sort of a part of negotiation rather than part of technical responsibility. If you can appeal to an outside authority (“The OWASP security guidelines clearly state...”) or at least an unbiased one (“I ran this by Susan, who is a developer at our contractor that we work with, and she agreed it was worth a shot and gave me some good feedback about a potential pitfall that I should avoid...”) or otherwise communicate that some sort of expertise has peeked in to a problem, then people feel naturally more confident and trusting about it. If you don’t do that then it starts to sound more like “we should do this because I say so” even when the problem is legitimate and painful. I guess I’m saying, think of yourself as a doctor talking to a patient about an upcoming surgery. They are right to have nebulous general concerns and they talk in funny ways that technically do not have much scientific value, but it is important to reassure them when needed, provide them options when needed, and just trust that if they lose trust of you and want to get second opinions, they are acting in good faith and have every right to be concerned about these things that are probably innocuous but have a tiny probability to kill them.
JamesBarney 7y ago
Or sometimes they're just less informed. People who are well-versed with statistics have studied vaccines, gmo, and glyphosate the overwhelming majority all came to the same conclusion and they're confident in that conclusion. Maybe these things are dangerous but there isn't any good evidence they are.

throwaway5752 7y ago

If you ignore both of those constituencies and focus, then you have this editorial, that talks about the risks in terms of science and how it is interpreted by various regulator bodies. I count at least 6 links to prominent journals and 2 links to publications by the WHO and the EPA/EFSA. The author is a physicist and former editor of Nature.

radcon 7y ago

I know there are better examples, but the one that always comes to mind for me is Asbestos. Everyone thought that was safe, now it kills 100,000+ people a year. And to make matters worse, companies were able to suppress evidence of its danger for decades. We never know what evidence is being withheld from us, so I feel like a little irrational paranoia is actually rational. Edit: Oh, and how about Exxon withholding all that information about climate change for 40 years? That's another good one.

avgDev 7y ago
There is another good one. Bayer took HIV infected blood from US and Europe and sold it in Africa, infecting many people with HIV in the process. Also, many medications have under reported side effects. I myself have experienced insane side effects from an antibiotic. Doctors I have seen fail to report to the FDA and claim it is something else. I have talked to many people with the same symptoms and again they encountered the same issue with the medical community. While the FDA actually has been adding more and more serious side effects to the medications label, due to people self-reporting because doctors fail to do so.
- timkpaine 7y ago
  Jesus....https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24785997 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24785997

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago

This is false centrism. The 'science' side is perfectly prepared to accept any compelling data about risks or hazards. In many cases, these are the same people that have raised the alarm on various pollutants or environmental risks. But they don't say that about glyphosate because .. there's no evidence. It's just not there. All the terrible evils that this compound is supposed to have, such powerful effects, would be easy to see in controlled studies. Even small effects that are nonetheless epidemiologically relevant are well within what is detectable. Instead, what you get is a bunch of certifiable bullshit like Seralini, that Samsel guy linked above, etc. Stuff that is objectively bad science, so far beyond what is on the margin that it beggars belief. It's crap. The 'science' folk may seem a little defensive, and that's because we absolutely are. We care deeply about science and epistemology. We don't take kindly to liars, and there are an awful lot of them who take up this torch for whatever reason.

beat 7y ago
As a "science folk" myself, I care deeply about people just shouting "BUT SCIENCE!" to pretend their emotionally charged opinions are, somehow, facts. Which is absolutely what happens when discussing this issue.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  But the science really does only supports one side of this issue.
  - beat 7y ago
    Does it? It seems to me that there's a lot to it that simply hasn't been researched adequately yet.
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      Glysophate is one of the most researched chemicals in the world. 99.9% of substances in food are less researched than glysophate and many exist in concentrations at least as high.