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You're right that conclusive research can be impractical or neglected for many environmental and social impact "sciences". This is why psychology, ecology, biol

You're right that conclusive research can be impractical or neglected for many environmental and social impact "sciences". This is why psychology, ecology, biology, medicine and even chemistry weren't always taken seriously by more rigorous disciplines. No innovation really marked a moment between when they were denigrated as soft sciences that couldn't make sound conclusions and their role in society today. It's mostly just a cultural shift and a loss of implicit skepticism in them. So yeah, it's hard to know stuff like "how dangerous are plastics" as rigorously as "how much energy is released when these two nuclei fuse" But there's also a practical weight that matters in a lot of these pursuits. Plastics overtook the world during a time when people weren't really considering their impact at ecological scale and didn't have sufficient models and tools to really assess what they might do to biological systems over lifetimes or generations. It was a historical accident that happened fast and without many brakes applied and now "plastics everywhere" is a pervasive background noise that's very hard to meaningfully control against. So the controlled science which was never conducted initially, and we now think probably should have been, is almost impossible to perform because we're left in that that fuzzy "soft sciences" place where everything is already plasticked. But does that mean we should just keep charging ahead without trying to look, and that maybe a mindful step back from unscientific historical use would be worth considering even without conclusive evidence (since such evidence is now too hard to gather)?

pardoned_turkey 3y ago
You're cherry-picking plastics here. The same can be said about just about any technology developed in the past 200 years, so what makes plastics special? We laugh at people who talk about the "precautionary principle" for vaccines or cling onto dubious research that purports to show some ill effects. Or, how about applying the precautionary principle to air travel - after all, do we really know the effects on your body of frequently changing timezones? We've been using plastics for a long time. They improved the world in important ways. There's nothing we can detect in large-scale studies of industry workers or other exposed groups that would suggest they're dangerous. That's kind of it. Every story you see on HN about microplastics is hand-wavy and involves dubious assertions and hypotheticals, and the alternative is... what? That we go back to making all commodity items out of metal, with a more serious environmental impact, higher transportation costs, and so on? There are wasteful uses of plastic which should be curtailed, e.g. for packaging fresh produce - but the concern here isn't microplastics, just pointless trash.
- jtrn 3y ago
  I am sorry, but I am not able to connect with what you are saying. Many technologies have been studied properly and been found to be safe or unsafe. Smoking, non-ionizing radiation, airbags, alcohol consumption, exercise, beta-blockers, metformin, GLP-1, antipsychotics—all of these have been well studied and have been found to be clinically, not just statistically, relevant with regards to safety. Even vaccines are much better studied and understood with regard to risk compared to microplastics. So, I don't think I am just randomly picking on plastic research. I am holding it up as an example of research areas that are triggering skeptical red flags, as opposed to research that isn't stuck in the speculative phase. I also wasn't commenting on the issue of overproduction of goods, which I have thought about, but that is not what I was focusing on here.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    To me the key is whether someone can advance a plausible and falsifiable chain of cause. Otherwise it feels a bit like an argument from anxious cynicism: "There must be a major danger or tragedy with everything including X, if we don't see it, that just means it's been good at hiding."
- sheepscreek 3y ago
  What makes plastic special is a) they are unnatural b) human and animal bodies have no mechanism to get rid of it, especially at nano-scale. We know enough about heart attacks to know they can be caused by plaque build-up in arteries. We don’t know enough about nano-plastic or micro-plastic buildup in our bodies, or its effects. At the very least, it’s worth investigating the role of plastics and ruling it out.

pardoned_turkey 3y ago

You're cherry-picking plastics here. The same can be said about just about any technology developed in the past 200 years, so what makes plastics special? We laugh at people who talk about the "precautionary principle" for vaccines or cling onto dubious research that purports to show some ill effects. Or, how about applying the precautionary principle to air travel - after all, do we really know the effects on your body of frequently changing timezones? We've been using plastics for a long time. They improved the world in important ways. There's nothing we can detect in large-scale studies of industry workers or other exposed groups that would suggest they're dangerous. That's kind of it. Every story you see on HN about microplastics is hand-wavy and involves dubious assertions and hypotheticals, and the alternative is... what? That we go back to making all commodity items out of metal, with a more serious environmental impact, higher transportation costs, and so on? There are wasteful uses of plastic which should be curtailed, e.g. for packaging fresh produce - but the concern here isn't microplastics, just pointless trash.

jtrn 3y ago
I am sorry, but I am not able to connect with what you are saying. Many technologies have been studied properly and been found to be safe or unsafe. Smoking, non-ionizing radiation, airbags, alcohol consumption, exercise, beta-blockers, metformin, GLP-1, antipsychotics—all of these have been well studied and have been found to be clinically, not just statistically, relevant with regards to safety. Even vaccines are much better studied and understood with regard to risk compared to microplastics. So, I don't think I am just randomly picking on plastic research. I am holding it up as an example of research areas that are triggering skeptical red flags, as opposed to research that isn't stuck in the speculative phase. I also wasn't commenting on the issue of overproduction of goods, which I have thought about, but that is not what I was focusing on here.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  To me the key is whether someone can advance a plausible and falsifiable chain of cause. Otherwise it feels a bit like an argument from anxious cynicism: "There must be a major danger or tragedy with everything including X, if we don't see it, that just means it's been good at hiding."
sheepscreek 3y ago
What makes plastic special is a) they are unnatural b) human and animal bodies have no mechanism to get rid of it, especially at nano-scale. We know enough about heart attacks to know they can be caused by plaque build-up in arteries. We don’t know enough about nano-plastic or micro-plastic buildup in our bodies, or its effects. At the very least, it’s worth investigating the role of plastics and ruling it out.