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You don't start with evidence, you don't even start with a hypothesis, you start with an aesthetic intuition and chase it, like a heliocentric model with ptolem
by mistercheph 2y ago
You don't start with evidence, you don't even start with a hypothesis, you start with an aesthetic intuition and chase it, like a heliocentric model with ptolemaic epicycles vs newton's model, both describe the phenomena at hand, how do we pick the one that guides our next questions?
The intuition that we should globoindustrially produce man-made materials and dispose of novel waste materials in our water supplies until proven toxic and cancerous is a mistake, and we should be coming at the question from the other side, assume naturally occurring materials are less harmful than man-made ones until we have evidence indicating otherwise.
It turns out that it is really, really hard and motivated work to find evidence of the harmfulness of many materials, and there is no commercial incentive to do so, and the health of human beings and the natural world are suffering because we accept "three papers in the last 2 years checked this novel plastic and couldn't find much evidence of harm" as a good enough answer before we start manufacturing thousands of tons of it and dumping the manufacturing wastes into our rivers.
- pfdietz 2y agoSo, we should consider materials dangerous because of aesthetic feelings, not evidence, and that lack of evidence should be taken as evidence they are dangerous? I don't think you realize you've descended in self parody here.
- mistercheph 2y agoHow much evidence is sufficient to establish harmfulness or the absence of harmfulness? How do you determine, in general, the sufficiency of evidence to answer any given question where our primary access to knowledge is empirical correlation? You can keep yourself afloat a little longer with some yarn about basing that standard on some other empirical residue, but why that empirical residue and not another one? If you consider the question seriously, you will realize that at the bottom is not a set of empirical facts that control our investigations, and how we decide what their conclusions are, but aesthetic intuitions. As noticed by Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Schrodinger, et al. And in my view, we have enough evidence that the standards of evidence used by the present regime of medical and ecological scholarship to establish the absence of long term environmental and health risks of novel materials, are seriously insufficient, and the solution must come externally, derived from the mode of knowledge which "science" is subject to and not master of. That mode of knowledge which is capable of hearing all the mountains of papers screaming that "we've checked and everything is all groovy man nothing wrong in this asbestos here!" and pointing at the world and saying, "Either your mode of investigation was flawed, or your evidence was fabricated, so we should check again."
- pfdietz 2y agoI was asking for any evidence that natural rubber is less harmful. None was provided.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoNatural rubber at least has the benefit that it is biodegradable.
- pfdietz 2y agoBut of what relevance is this to the issue of damage from ingested microplastics? The microorganisms that biodegrade refractory materials (like wood or rubber) would be attacked by our immune systems. Nor are the chemicals these microorganisms use -- strong oxidizers -- be something we'd want to have produced in our bodies. Vulcanization reduces the rate of biodegradation of rubber, I understand. From what I looked up, it seems it takes natural rubber 300 years to biodegrade in the environment. This doesn't seem to me to be fast enough to significantly affect human exposure.
- CyberDildonics 2y agoThis seems like a barely connected rant about how nothing is real, but if you have evidence you should just link it.
- oharapj 2y agoI agree that it's much wiser to approach novel materials and chemicals we employ with a 'guilty until proven innocent' approach, and that there should be much more stringent requirements to vet for safety. In in ideal world this would extend to generational IQ changes with increased exposure, however I doubt this is practical and would probably involve testing on monkeys instead of mice. Materials and chemicals that we've used for centuries or millennia without issue should probably go on the 'innocent until proven guilty' list, but should still be investigated. I don't think that it's necessarily wise to classify this kind of thinking as an 'aesthetic intuition', though. I simply think that the longer we've been in contact with a substance or material as a species the more we know about its safety profile, and so it's wiser to start with the relatively newer or man-made materials/chemicals.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoI don't think this is fair, it's a provocative point of view that sounds like the start of a pollution cleanup journey that may actually happen. Besides, alcohol, which people also put in their bodies regularly, is known to cause also sorts of horrible problems, and yet it's a very legal drug. So we already live in a world where the counterfactual - that strong evidence of dangerousness demands regulation - is false.