I think that the common people have no way of knowing the real truth about something. And all our decisions should be based on this simple fact of modern life...
They are compelled to be this because if they don't the next guy will do it and beat them, and there's an ocean of evidence demonstrating that 'good people' will go along with all of it if seeming authority demands it.
History's littered with this. To be like 'oh, but THIS time we have to give the corporation the benefit of all possible doubt, because their PR statement says if you don't then billions of people will die and all will be lost'…?
No way. No way. The fundamental truth of society is that the powerful will take advantage. Acknowledging that goes back to the Magna Carta. This is no time to ditch that and turn over unquestioned power to gods, kings and corporations.
Even in cases where this is possible, like pesticide residue in vegetables, You might have to run the experiments for a large number of samples for some amount of time to get a real picture. Which might be feasible, but way out of the comfort zone of a concerned person, who has a normal life and the associated hassles to deal with...
When scientists have problems figuring out whether or how much something is harmful, it's because it's so harmless it's hard to measure. If e.g. artificial sweeteners caused cancers the way many believe, you'd see people dropping dead left and right, with cancers clearly linkable to the use of sweeteners.
Those studies are obviously important, on a population scale. For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause.
Wait a min. I don't remember smokers dropping dead left and right in all those times when almost everyone smoked..
Another one is the effects on lead in automobile fuels. Again people were not dropping dead. Despite the issues about it that we have since discovered...
I think these kinds of apologetic behavior is vastly more dangerous than any hindrance to "progress" that might be caused by being more cautious...
>For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause...
Not sure. How does producing vegetables myself, or making sure the vegitables I buy are free of residue, or limiting my exposure to air pollution put in me more danger than those things could ever cause...
If you think pesticide residue cannot do much damage, take a look at Endosulfan tragedy in India.
[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/No-en...
Because the effect isn't very much pronounced. It's somewhat in the middle between eating rotten meat and using artificial sweeteners, in the sense that it really does damage health over long periods of time, which will result in worse life quality and quicker death of some fraction of smokers. Accordingly, scientists figured that out relatively quickly.
My whole point is that the difficulty for science to tie a cause to an effect is proportional to how strong impact that cause has. Saying that artificial sweeteners, or glyphosate, are clear carcinogens literally means the effect is strong and pronounced, which directly implies it's easy to find.
> Another one is the effects on lead in automobile fuels. Again people were not dropping dead. Despite the issues about it that we have since discovered
That was more subtle, but again, found relatively quickly.
> If you think pesticide residue cannot do much damage, take a look at Endosulfan tragedy in India.
I'm not saying that. We know Endosulfan is toxic. And it is being banned worldwide; the story you linked is about politics, not science.
Again, my point is only this heuristic: the health danger of a substance in mass use is roughly proportional to how easy it is to verify it. When you get to the point that the only indication of danger is that some mice might have had bad reaction to a substance, except the other studies show they didn't - when you have no sensible mechanism explaining the danger and only weak statistical correlation - at that point, costs of alternatives should outweigh any worry you should have. For example, the alternative to artificial sweetener is sugar, which is known to be much more dangerous to health. The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc.
Wait. What? How do you measure "relatively quickly"? As far as I know, we have been using it even after the problems were known.......
>The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc.
Any source for this claim that there are no, absolutely no safer alternatives? Also, is there any proof that a safer alternative is fundamentally impossible to make? Also, have we thought about using safer alternatives, and the hit in production that it might cause. Can we live with that?