9 ms·

We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful. Leaded gas

• anovikov 4y ago
  Thing is, it won't even be possible to demonstrate that unsafety on a low scale. I think we should just accept the risk. It will happen once in a while. We will adapt.
• hammock 4y ago
  Our rulers typically solve the lawsuits thing by limiting liability through statute. They did it with tobacco and they did it with vaccines
  • arcticbull 4y ago
    Guns too with the PLCAA
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• irrational 4y ago
  How do we determine the long term safety without first scaling it up? All of these things many seem innocent in a lab setting and it is only once they reach a critical point that the issues arise.
  • HidyBush 4y ago
    Usually if something is being eroded you check what chemicals the erosion releases. If you cook on a pan and you don't analyze the contents of the fumes you are totally responsible
    • gambiting 4y ago
      The problem isn't that no one knew what's in the fumes and that those chemicals are being eaten/inhaled. It's that in laboratory testing they never showed any impact on humans - but scale it to few billion people and then you notice increased liver cancer rates. The only good thing is that making non stick pans with this stuff has already been banned in US and EU for a good while.
  • Retric 4y ago
    Leaded gasoline and a few others seemed really unsafe at the time of introduction.
    • xchaotic 4y ago
      Exactly - lead was known to cause harm since well late Roman times I guess.
• Xeoncross 4y ago
  I feel like just when we start to realize we're destroying things with our chemical creations - before things can get fixed the conversation evolves to salving all of climate change. Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever before we try to stop everything all at once with some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?
  • GavinMcG 4y ago
    No, unfortunately multiple bad things can be happening at once, and FIFO isn’t a great way of dealing with that.
    • nfhshy68 4y ago
      Dealing with it with FIFO is better than not dealing with it. Yet we have a few billion people on the earth. I think we can spare a few thinking about other problems.
      • GavinMcG 4y ago
        …the comment was suggesting not dealing with it, at least until earlier-identified problems had been dealt with, so it’s not clear what you’re responding to.
        • nfhshy68 4y ago
          Not every comment reply on the internet is a counter argument to the one before it.
          • GavinMcG 4y ago
            No, of course, but if the comment was a response to the earlier one it may better have been posted there.
  • mlyle 4y ago
    > Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever Most of this comes down to figuring out what's harmful and regulating it. We can't outlaw "chemicals". And, of course, there's the whole cooperation in other jurisdictions problem, which affects the next point... > some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use? Look, uh, the climate change thing is bad. Really bad. And avoiding burning stuff is really hard. We can live without PFAS and glyphosate if we decide we really should. Avoiding burning stuff for energy is really hard. The chemical harms are complicated: there are some that are long-standing risks, but most of our concerns do not raise to the level of something that screws up climate, agriculture, etc, for centuries.
• nso 4y ago
  Has microplastics been proven unsafe?
  • mikro2nd 4y ago
    Yes. Yes it has.
    • dash2 4y ago
      It's always helpful to post a link to back your claims up. Presumably if gp is asking, it's because they couldn't find a credible source by Googling.
    • missedthecue 4y ago
      What harm does it cause
• ta8645 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • Calavar 4y ago
    The COVID vaccine isn't a radical new class of treatment; it's a vaccine - something which physicians have been giving on the regular for about 250 years. The oldest treatment in modern medicine. We understand their side effect profiles very well at this point. But even if you don't buy that argument, even if you believe that a new RNA vaccine potentially has a radically different risk profile than all previous ones: When the cost calculus is a known risk of many people dying now versus a nebulous potential risk of an unknown number of people maybe or maybe not having adverse effects of an unknowable sort later, is it really that contentious of a decision? We didn't have a 20 year trial period for the Polio or Smallpox or HPV or even Chicken pox vaccines before rolling them out. So why are so many people who were quiet about these other vaccines before now singling out the deployment of the COVID vaccine as an abomination?
    • ta8645 4y ago
      • landemva 4y ago
        > existential threat Mainly for those in high-risk groups such as older obese people. I got it 1.5 years ago, it sucked for a week at home, and I got better. A couple months ago I got blood test which shows I still have good level of antibodies. Even the CDC has moved on, so continuing to call this an "existential threat" may indicate an addiction to fear.
      • formerly_proven 4y ago
        Uhm, how exactly is or was COVID-19 an existential threat (to humanity)?
      • superchroma 4y ago
        It wasn't an existential threat. It could kill ten times the numbers it has and it wouldn't be. You could at least be charitable and use terminology like "possible existential threat", "potential existential threat" or similar.
• dwighttk 4y ago
  >would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use? How? Why limit it to substances? Social media is unsafe What point in time were we only using safe substances so we can use that list of substances as the baseline and then somehow only allow new substances to be used when their long term safety has been demonstrated somehow?
  • upsidesinclude 4y ago
    Is this even a real point? Yes, we should take new chemicals and study them for a significant time frame prior to extensive global use. The bar can be set higher. Don't conflate social science with hard science. Social media is great at steering populations, generating useful propaganda and generating useful profiles of individuals.... Why would governments want to restrict that?
    • dwighttk 4y ago
      who is we? what is a new chemical? who will study them? how long is significant? what does safe mean? who will limit global use?
      • upsidesinclude 4y ago
        I'm not interested in a Socratic dialogue wherein you bring nothing to the table.
• wahnfrieden 4y ago
  you think lawmakers are letting their highest-paying constituents expose themselves to that accountability?
• IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  I recommend the paper "Precautionary Principle" by Nassim Taleb and co-authors It does a great job presenting your argument in mathematical format as well as rebutting usual criticisms you may encounter
• VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  There was a now-deleted reply to this that made a great point: Is it possible vaccines could be included in your list? The answer to that is no, it is impossible for any vaccine to be included in that list, which gives rise to the more general point: modern scientific studies are so heavily agenda-polluted, that skepticism and conservative adoption are prohibited. That a handful of short-term (<100 years) studies are sufficient for rolling out unprecedented technologies to the entire world. That an absence of evidence of long-term effects is taken to mean evidence of absence. Whether it be DDT, GMO's, or PFAS, if the science to date can't detect harm, then there of course cannot possibly be harm - throw caution to the wind and roll it out 100% the world over, from Antarctica to Tibet.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful. You missed the problematic last step. We take technical innovations to a societal scale, discover a really harmful effect, and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it. It's expected that harms, especially through complex side-effects take time to emerge. We can't see the future, nor can we exhaustively test everything in advance. The problem comes with the response. A certain amount of market inertia is to be expected. Recalling and replacing products is expensive. But what is absolutely inexcusable, and ripe for immediate radical global action to address [1], is the disgraceful, blatantly criminal behaviour of large corporations who move to suppress science, discredit researchers, silence critics and bury bad news. Many problems concerning at-scale blow-back turn out to have been known about decades in advance of their impact. [1] https://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/the-corporate-death-penalty/ https://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/the-corporate-death... EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2] [2] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/08/its-time-bring-back-corporate-death-penalty https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/08/its-time-bring...
  • aetherson 4y ago
    This is nonsense. We have solved a ton of environmental problems in my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were legitimate worries about the ozone layer -- we banned CFCs and now it's a non-issue. Acid rain is vastly mitigated. Before I was born, we cleaned up America's rivers. And we've dropped per capita carbon emissions in the US by about 40% so far from its high in the 70s.
    • syzar 4y ago
      It’s not that we haven’t solved some major environmental problems; it’s that we haven’t solved all of them. In the U.S. we are also in a political environment where one party absolutely does not care. Republicans have gone from creating the EPA under Nixon and using cap and trade under Reagan to now considering environmental mitigation a leftist plot to destroy America. Dropping per capita carbon consumption is not the relevant thing to look at. When it comes to pollution and environmental effects the total amount is what matters. If x tons of a chemical causes a problem then talking about per capita values is meaningless.
• luxuryballs 4y ago
  meanwhile when new stuff is rolled out anyone questioning the safety or efficacy or theorizing about potential dangers is demonized as a quack, people are so compartmentalized that they can’t see that humans are still flawed and make mistakes, somehow current year everything is a godsend break through, it’s marketing bullshit and corruption
• antioppressor 4y ago
  No need, metaobeyverse is coming, and everything will be new and shiny there. Virtual cities don't need maintenance.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  > I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this Since it was considered to be perfectly safe when they used it, and they stopped 20 years ago (presumably when they discovered it was unsafe), I don’t think there’s any legal ground to stand on.
  • aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    They made money on something that turned out to cause damage. It's only fair that they give back the money they've made to mitigate the damage they caused. It doesn't matter that it was considered safe back then.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  It would be good to have an objective measure of unsafe. E.g. is the radioactive dust we are all exposed to from global coal plants unsafe? High levels of pm 2.5 from steel plants making your vehicles and roads? Low cost subsidized sugar making half the population obese? We all die in the end, trying to balance where to act is a hard problem because time is zero sum.
  • epistasis 4y ago
    That's the very core of the issue, not knowing what is unsafe. It's not that the concentration of these chemicals increases past what we thought was safe, what changed was our knowledge of his dangerous they are, making current levels unsafe. Any notion for "objectively" deciding these things has to account for unknown information, which means assigning subjective risk to these unknowns. I don't find an "objective" framework a coherent concept because of that. Ignorance of the world must be confronted head on and taken into account, and those that do not incorporate that risk directly into their cognitive models will perform worse at achieving their goals.
• zackmorris 4y ago
  To be clear, the US political party that starts with a D has been actively spreading awareness and working to ban the substances you mentioned since the at least the 1960s, while the party that starts with an R will never stop being in denial about their dangers. But we're all guilty of buying products created with those substances and driving cars so.. the fault lies with each of us on an individual level. What breaks my heart is that the people with all of the money and power actively prevent the rest of us from inventing better solutions. They've created an entire economy around dead end service jobs instead of automation, to keep us distracted and disillusioned so we can never catch a breather and disrupt their meal ticket. If it were up to me (it will never be up to me), I'd work towards creating open source alternatives for all resources necessary for life. I'd make a wiki of everything people work for (food, water, housing, incidentals) and make each one sustainable and as close to free as possible. Money would be optional and used for aspirations beyond necessity. It would be kind of a Jetsons solarpunk future where a backyard robotic hydroponic garden grows all non-animal macronutrients. Eggs and kefir would largely replace meat. The house would be made of 3D printed hempcrete and recycled materials. Power and HVAC would come from free (7 year amortized) photovoltaics and passive solar-thermal heat pumps connected to the buried irrigation system. This stuff is honestly so easy that I can only blame conspiracy for lack of adoption. Or maybe extreme laziness. Whatever the reason is, it's defeatist. So I'm trying to deprogram myself and incorporate these solutions into my own life. So far I've only succeeded in buying a used electric car though. It's just too hard to save the $10,000 to fix each problem one by one, so I pay out more than that to be a consumer and stay trapped in the matrix. Where are the loans for these solutions? Where's the political will?
• aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  >Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides Cigarettes, sugar, asbestos, hydrogenated vegetable oil, "clean" diesel cars...
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  In a lot of cases the harm was known up-front, but then a handful of people in charge of the profits decided to scale up to “all of society” anyway. Cigarettes, leaded fuel, and fossil fuels are all in this category. No individual manager at any corporation involved in this has a KPI that says: “Terminate the entire category of industry on which our profits are based.” This is the problem, and governments these days are just an extension of the same broken system. Chasing after profits will lead humanity off the edge of a cliff.