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Comment by kindadumb | Hacker News Reader

"be careful in doing your review." Says the lazy poster who just made a bunch of claims himself and didn't cite anything!

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The burden of proof is on the one making unsupported claims, not on the one questioning the unsupported claims.

(It's tedious to post supporting studies on every post, so there's nothing nefarious about claims being initially unsupported.)

I do agree that the "be careful..." comment is perhaps open to being interpreted as snarky, though it's always hard to infer the intent in a forum such as this.

>The burden of proof is on the one making unsupported claims, not on the one questioning the unsupported claims.

When public health issues are concerned, the burden of proof is on the ones saying exposure does not present any risks worth worrying about. The FDA doesn't usually come in with the approach that we should just try everything out and see how it goes.

It's low frequency radio waves from submarines. No, wait, it's copies of Jane Austen novels, that's what causing the problem. Hang on; it's headphones being worn by people near you. That's what doing it. Wait one; it's the after-effects of that landfill of ET game cartridges.

If you disagree, have you got any proof that these aren't the causes? Otherwise I guess it's start removing Jane Austen novels from the libraries.

Since you’re so comfortable with it, just go ahead and dose yourself with everything you can get your hands on. Here in the real world people express some hesitation before shoveling suspicious new products down their gullets.

Ever since I switched my entire diet to Soylent my diarrhea has never been better!

the FDA is actually very permissive when it comes to food - generally, things are allowed to be in it unless there is strong evidence it's harmful. It's the opposite with drugs.

It’s permissive about foods that are derived from things that are already generally regarded as safe.

If you come up with some kind of new petrochemical food-item to mimic tofu they’ll want you to get some pre-market approval first. If you’re starting up a new large food business, you’re also going to be subject to inspection to make sure your processes are safe and you’re not adulterating your products, intentionally or unintentionally, with stuff that might not be safe.

Wouldn't "Miracle Fruit" be an example of the FDA not being permissive when it comes to food?

the reason I said "be careful" is that I'm a staff scientist who already has done his due diligence, and often, when I ask people to provide refuting studies, they just go on Google Scholar and return with papers whose titles match their pre-existing conclusion. If you try to do that in an academic setting, you'll be laughed out of the room (and nobody will trust what you say any more).

I'm just working to save time by making people who make outrageous claims do the work to produce supporting evidence. I'm really tired of people (especially non-scientists) citing articles they haven't read or aren't qualified to evaluate.

Absolutely fair.

What? What exactly do you expect dekhn to cite? You expect them to prove a negative? How do you propose they do that?

GP asserted that some scary chemicals cause problems (no sarcasm intended; I find phthalates and bisphenols a bit scary myself), but provided no supporting evidence. dehkn asked for evidence. Pretty simple right?

>You expect them to prove a negative? How do you propose they do that?

they do this all the time in the pharma space.

just arrange experiments on mice where they're subjected to higher and higher levels of whatever chemical until they're subjected to a level several orders of magnitude beyond any realistic hypothetical human exposure. then you cut up all the mice and see if they're different from unexposed mice.

I've had 6 pet rats in my life and each one had tumors at the end. I wonder if that effect is properly controlled for as well.

...yes, it is controlled for. Read the comment above you again. They compare exposed rats to unexposed rats. That accounts for your concern.

I'm not being lazy. I am saying there is no evidence showing what the person claims. Do you want me to cite a non-existent paper?

Welcome to HN.

As someone who's been here for over a decade (and had this account nearly that long), I can assure you this is normal behavior for the forum.

The site doesn't encourage citing or critical thinking, although it does attract people who're interested in that. If you wish for a community like this, open a new thread and try discussing communities that do succeed at promoting critical and well-cited discussions like Reddit's /r/askhistorians.

I'm not sure if you're criticizing me for my reply above in which I ask the poster to provide data to support their claim. I'm a critical thinker, and when writing papers or making claims, can back up my claims with strong evidence. In this case, I am saying I have been unable to find a single paper that is high quality and supports the assertion that there is a detectable health effect in the population (excluding people who receive massive dosages, far beyond the dosages a regular person is going to get from eating food). I have seen many low quality papers purporting this, but in each case, I found either an invalidating error (failure to use bonferroni correction is most common, but there are many), or it was clear the author was being selective with their data reporting, or made an error in their procedure. That's pretty common, especially in the human health and nutrition sector, unfortunately.

It looks like you may have mistakenly replied to the wrong comment

I didn't say anything about my wishes. I just welcomed a new(ish) user.

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