5 ms·

It's always a cat and mouse game, isn't it? Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry, then something else always pops out on the other end. When w

It's always a cat and mouse game, isn't it? Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry, then something else always pops out on the other end. When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? Is there a possibility that if things could have been more optimal for the delicate balance of different life forms on Earth, nature would have done it all by itself? Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Can the food we produce be considered "natural" at all, or we have altered the chemistry of the whole chain so much that we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes and species ad eternum? Good morning, all!

crq-yml 3y ago
Whenever a politician says "we don't want to inhibit innovation", always call them out for being for sale to whoever lobbies them.
MattGaiser 3y ago
> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? Realistically, never, because these chemicals are solving real problems for us. We would need to be willing to leave problems unsolved for decades to do this.
jenadine 3y ago
> Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Back to when 75% of the population worked in the fields many of them as slaves? Surely you don't want that back.
- Filligree 3y ago
  He did say “we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes”.
burnished 3y ago
Yes 'We'? Maybe never, maybe a successor civilization will, maybe we'll figure out simulation and organ on a chip well enough to do those long term studies in only a year or two Not for the scale we operate at, at least for our current level of ecological mastery. I presume you're gesturing at different planting techniques that reduce reliance on pesticides. Not endorsing the paradigm. Yes and no. Yes, because we are in a state of nature - we are nature. No, because we've been modifying our environment for thousands of years, you might not even recognize the precursors as food. The chemistry isn't altered, the organism is. ..shuffling diseases.. around different social classes? Huh. What a suspicious thing to say
lijok 3y ago
It depends on what you see the objective of the human species to be
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  Easy! Maximization of index funds.
- oven9342 3y ago
  The objective of the human species is the annihilation of any kind of life on the planet in the seek of profit. pesticides and insecticides play a crucial role in this task, together with PFAS, co2 and EMR in the form of light pollution, for example
lukas099 3y ago
Are you discounting the benefits of advances in agriculture? Such as producing more food on less land? (Granted, it would be better if more of the land were given back to Nature instead of suburban sprawl, but that’s a different problem and I digress)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- blackhaz 3y ago
  No, I advance a half-baked argument, don't take it as a maxim. All I am saying is that some developments in agriculture that may seem as advances today may not seem so if we take a longer time scale into consideration.
IggleSniggle 3y ago
Nature is always evolving, and I think it's a mistake to consider human contributions as "unnatural." All kinds of plants produce a wide variety of pesticides as a natural defense without human intervention, and are cooking up new varieties to trial against the real world. Diseases are in a constant arms race with immune systems regardless of humanity. I'm not saying we can't get better at predicting the side effects of things we introduce into the system. But I do think regarding the cat and mouse game as "industry vs nature" is reductive dualism and shallow thinking. We are nature. Considering humanity as apart from nature was one of our more misguided ideas. Industry is a part of nature, an active participant, not in opposition to it. We were doomed to shuffle diseases around long before industry. There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." That just serves as a kind of denial that we are active participants, and reinforces a subtle idea that we are Gods apart from "Nature."
- skhunted 3y ago
  There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. This is precisely what people mean by saying what we are doing is unnatural. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." But most people believe this is the right word to use. I don’t think they will change their minds.
- thuuuomas 3y ago
  Regardless of what’s “natural”, widespread contamination from industry should reduce or remove the limits to industry’s liability. Externalities are real & must be accounted for.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Agreed, and this is exactly what I was trying to say. It's an ecosystem and we're a part of it.
dauertewigkeit 3y ago
Pesticides scale really well. The alternative would be to control the environment more, but that does not scale so well. Maybe with increased automation we could do some inroads in this direction. Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.
- WhitneyLand 3y ago
  Aren’t many insect larvae are not bad for you containing proteins, fats, and other beneficial nutrients? So as long as the potato isn’t rotted you wouldn’t even have to remove it. Biggest risk might be, ironically, if the insect contained pesticides.
  - google234123 3y ago
    Yuck, ignoring all parasites and pathogens...
    - aszantu 3y ago
      can't eat potato raw anyways
      - google234123 3y ago
        You can’t kill those without turning the potato to charcoal.
- owenpalmer 3y ago
  Aigen is a robotics company working on scalable, clean, farming. https://www.aigen.io/ https://www.aigen.io/
  - azinman2 3y ago
ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
>Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry That chemistry, like fertilizers, is why we can feed 8 billion people.
- jajko 3y ago
  Yeah, with various poisons that will mess up some and kill others, and who knows what are long term consequences on genome. Not that great of an achievement if you ask me, since we know better, but its not as price efficient.
  - PoignardAzur 3y ago
    You say that like the health effects of pesticides are anywhere on the same scale as "starving to death".
    - jajko 3y ago
      Its not binary, it never was. West throw absurd amount of food away. West is getting progressively fatter with US firmly leading (I'd presume due to food lobbying getting extremely powerful there earlier than elsewhere and realizing for some breadcrumbs you can pass literally anything, like sugar is healthy). I am not saying not use anything. But have long term studies paid by producers of said things (with oversight of government) and then let it on your crops. Currently its exact opposite and government reacts after SHTF, utter stupidity if you care about more than just immediate profits.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry. They think like this: as long as there is an absence of evidence of harm in the initial science, then that means evidence of absence. Long-term, higher-order effects & unknown unknowns are ignored in Scientism, and this ignorance is status quo. It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects, dropping agent orange in Vietnam, and killing sparrows in Mao's China. It's the very spirit of modernity.
- metabagel 3y ago
  > You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry. You're painting with far too broad of a brush. I personally see a lot of push back on HN against those "philosophies".
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  > It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects Genetically-modified foods are fine: the main problem is when GM plants are wind-pollinated. And even that's largely due to patent law[0]: the harms of wind-pollination from monoculture is there regardless of where the genes come from. Genetic modifications to insects are only to wipe out populations, as far as I can tell – it doesn't hugely matter what the long-term side-effects are, in that case, because there won't be any organisms around to experience them. There was a lot of research done into the effects of anti-mosquito gene drives before the (very recent) releases into the wild, because we have learned from the Four Pests campaign. [0]: https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute
- google234123 3y ago
  It's dumb to conflate an action done in war and what a tyrannical madman did to science based GMOs.
manoDev 3y ago
The problem is thinking in terms of optimization at all. There’s no optimum, only trade-offs. But under capitalism, the problems all reduce to “make more X with less”. If GDP is increasing, we’re doing great - doesn’t matter if life sucks. Everything is optimized until it all turns into shit.
scotty79 3y ago
> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? It's a curious question, how many eff-ups humanity needs to learn what's the optimal way to do something that's fairly new. Do we need to introduce and be forced to withdraw tens of substances? Hundreds? Thousands? How many failures until we can learn from them how to do this properly? How long did it take for aerospace industry?

crq-yml 3y ago

Whenever a politician says "we don't want to inhibit innovation", always call them out for being for sale to whoever lobbies them.

MattGaiser 3y ago

> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? Realistically, never, because these chemicals are solving real problems for us. We would need to be willing to leave problems unsolved for decades to do this.

jenadine 3y ago

> Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Back to when 75% of the population worked in the fields many of them as slaves? Surely you don't want that back.

Filligree 3y ago
He did say “we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes”.

burnished 3y ago

Yes 'We'? Maybe never, maybe a successor civilization will, maybe we'll figure out simulation and organ on a chip well enough to do those long term studies in only a year or two Not for the scale we operate at, at least for our current level of ecological mastery. I presume you're gesturing at different planting techniques that reduce reliance on pesticides. Not endorsing the paradigm. Yes and no. Yes, because we are in a state of nature - we are nature. No, because we've been modifying our environment for thousands of years, you might not even recognize the precursors as food. The chemistry isn't altered, the organism is. ..shuffling diseases.. around different social classes? Huh. What a suspicious thing to say

lijok 3y ago

It depends on what you see the objective of the human species to be

DinaCoder99 3y ago
Easy! Maximization of index funds.
oven9342 3y ago
The objective of the human species is the annihilation of any kind of life on the planet in the seek of profit. pesticides and insecticides play a crucial role in this task, together with PFAS, co2 and EMR in the form of light pollution, for example

lukas099 3y ago

Are you discounting the benefits of advances in agriculture? Such as producing more food on less land? (Granted, it would be better if more of the land were given back to Nature instead of suburban sprawl, but that’s a different problem and I digress)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
blackhaz 3y ago
No, I advance a half-baked argument, don't take it as a maxim. All I am saying is that some developments in agriculture that may seem as advances today may not seem so if we take a longer time scale into consideration.

IggleSniggle 3y ago

Nature is always evolving, and I think it's a mistake to consider human contributions as "unnatural." All kinds of plants produce a wide variety of pesticides as a natural defense without human intervention, and are cooking up new varieties to trial against the real world. Diseases are in a constant arms race with immune systems regardless of humanity. I'm not saying we can't get better at predicting the side effects of things we introduce into the system. But I do think regarding the cat and mouse game as "industry vs nature" is reductive dualism and shallow thinking. We are nature. Considering humanity as apart from nature was one of our more misguided ideas. Industry is a part of nature, an active participant, not in opposition to it. We were doomed to shuffle diseases around long before industry. There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." That just serves as a kind of denial that we are active participants, and reinforces a subtle idea that we are Gods apart from "Nature."

skhunted 3y ago
There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. This is precisely what people mean by saying what we are doing is unnatural. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." But most people believe this is the right word to use. I don’t think they will change their minds.
thuuuomas 3y ago
Regardless of what’s “natural”, widespread contamination from industry should reduce or remove the limits to industry’s liability. Externalities are real & must be accounted for.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  Agreed, and this is exactly what I was trying to say. It's an ecosystem and we're a part of it.

dauertewigkeit 3y ago

Pesticides scale really well. The alternative would be to control the environment more, but that does not scale so well. Maybe with increased automation we could do some inroads in this direction. Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.

WhitneyLand 3y ago
Aren’t many insect larvae are not bad for you containing proteins, fats, and other beneficial nutrients? So as long as the potato isn’t rotted you wouldn’t even have to remove it. Biggest risk might be, ironically, if the insect contained pesticides.
- google234123 3y ago
  Yuck, ignoring all parasites and pathogens...
  - aszantu 3y ago
    can't eat potato raw anyways
    - google234123 3y ago
      You can’t kill those without turning the potato to charcoal.
owenpalmer 3y ago
Aigen is a robotics company working on scalable, clean, farming. https://www.aigen.io/ https://www.aigen.io/
- azinman2 3y ago

ThrowawayTestr 3y ago

>Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry That chemistry, like fertilizers, is why we can feed 8 billion people.

jajko 3y ago
Yeah, with various poisons that will mess up some and kill others, and who knows what are long term consequences on genome. Not that great of an achievement if you ask me, since we know better, but its not as price efficient.
- PoignardAzur 3y ago
  You say that like the health effects of pesticides are anywhere on the same scale as "starving to death".
  - jajko 3y ago
    Its not binary, it never was. West throw absurd amount of food away. West is getting progressively fatter with US firmly leading (I'd presume due to food lobbying getting extremely powerful there earlier than elsewhere and realizing for some breadcrumbs you can pass literally anything, like sugar is healthy). I am not saying not use anything. But have long term studies paid by producers of said things (with oversight of government) and then let it on your crops. Currently its exact opposite and government reacts after SHTF, utter stupidity if you care about more than just immediate profits.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry. They think like this: as long as there is an absence of evidence of harm in the initial science, then that means evidence of absence. Long-term, higher-order effects & unknown unknowns are ignored in Scientism, and this ignorance is status quo. It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects, dropping agent orange in Vietnam, and killing sparrows in Mao's China. It's the very spirit of modernity.

metabagel 3y ago
> You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry. You're painting with far too broad of a brush. I personally see a lot of push back on HN against those "philosophies".
wizzwizz4 3y ago
> It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects Genetically-modified foods are fine: the main problem is when GM plants are wind-pollinated. And even that's largely due to patent law[0]: the harms of wind-pollination from monoculture is there regardless of where the genes come from. Genetic modifications to insects are only to wipe out populations, as far as I can tell – it doesn't hugely matter what the long-term side-effects are, in that case, because there won't be any organisms around to experience them. There was a lot of research done into the effects of anti-mosquito gene drives before the (very recent) releases into the wild, because we have learned from the Four Pests campaign. [0]: https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute https://www.iatp.org/news/monsanto-the-seeds-of-dispute
google234123 3y ago
It's dumb to conflate an action done in war and what a tyrannical madman did to science based GMOs.

manoDev 3y ago

The problem is thinking in terms of optimization at all. There’s no optimum, only trade-offs. But under capitalism, the problems all reduce to “make more X with less”. If GDP is increasing, we’re doing great - doesn’t matter if life sucks. Everything is optimized until it all turns into shit.

scotty79 3y ago

> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle? It's a curious question, how many eff-ups humanity needs to learn what's the optimal way to do something that's fairly new. Do we need to introduce and be forced to withdraw tens of substances? Hundreds? Thousands? How many failures until we can learn from them how to do this properly? How long did it take for aerospace industry?