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Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

Could be safe in agricultural use even if it wasn't safe enough in household use. Best not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Cheap food with /almost no/ risk of developing a condition or losing functions of the body is better than expensive food with a marginal reduction in risk.

Even if we were "missing out on" 41,000,000 IQ points(this alone sounds arbitrary and unprovable) in the U.S., that would be 0.2 IQ points roughly per person... I'm not even sure that's statistically significant by any definition.

Then again, maybe I'm just dead wrong about that and I need to shut up and hop on the hysteria bandwagon.

I certainly don't like that Dow conspired to suppress completed research, although it is also abhorrible that people gave in to that pressure, probably through paltry bribes.

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> in the U.S., that would be 0.2 IQ points roughly per person..

These IQ points are not equally distributed. The poor and the very poor will suffer far more from these problems - they are likely a rather small minority in the U.S. Wikipedia says 13.5%: Then it would be at least 1 IQ point.

In reality a small but really poor minority will suffer far more from these problems because they don't have access to better alternatives or lack the education to even be able to assess their situation.

The problem with /almost no/ risk is that we don't know. In regards to chemical substances very small doses can also have an effect. Can't we be at least honest?

I don't know for sure if this would help or not but why don't we forbid chemicals for wider use until they are proven as not problematical? And why don't we keep an eye on pollution e.g. in flats as a requirement for renting them?

Is it unreasonable to be cautious in these matters? After learning about the history of industrialization?

As is it now it looks like a matter of class and income and education and this should really not be the case.

Understandable, but we shouldn't assume that this is the only thing that hurts the poor.

We could say that fast food is somehow predatory, causing obesity in the poor, but of course many of the poor rely heavily on fast food providers, which provide food which is no more calorie-laden, salty, or sugary than anything you pick up at a fancier restaurant. If you fuck with fast food, many people will feel it in the wallet, and these are the people who need the most not to feel it there.

You could say that these toxins unfairly target the poor(although I have a hard time believing they do), but exposure to fluoride means that their dental health is significantly better just from drinking tap water, cheap industrial pesticides mean food is cheaper, healthier, and more reliable.

You have to ask yourself, what is more important to your average impoverished american? a 50-100 dollar a month difference in family food/medical expenses, or a tenuous, debatable 0.2-1 point IQ difference out of an atlantic article talking about a single study?

It would be nice to reduce the impact of these industrial wonder chemicals on human health, but before throwing them out the window, we have to assess whether we will be doing more harm than good by doing so.

Also, most municipalities that I know have atmospheric pollution restrictions as a public health service, and they regularly test air quality, although it's rare or unheard of that there is an actual issue in my particular city that would be reasonable cause for outright evacuating people from their homes, although

I can think of one instance where ground pollution was measured and reported on by the city, causing them to shut down an area to replace the topsoil(which had traces of various things dumped decades ago by the previous users of the land: an automobile service shop).

Following that, again, who are you to say that a couple years of exposure to traces of atmospheric lead is going to cost them more livelihood than not being able to live there? The only ethically-sound thing you can do is inform them of their risks, and let them make their own decisions.

>You have to ask yourself, what is more important to your average impoverished american? a 50-100 dollar a month difference in family food/medical expenses, or a tenuous, debatable 0.2-1 point IQ difference out of an atlantic article talking about a single study?

Now, assuming for a moment that the study is right, and that this is focused on a small subset of the population and thus we are talking a one-point drop,[1] as far as outcomes on an individual's life go, you have diminishing marginal returns on IQ.[2] The point here being that a small increase in intelligence is going to help someone that is significantly below average much more than it is going to help someone that is already significantly above average, when you measure outcomes in things like income.

[1]I think speaking of IQ say, in deviation from the mean or percentile or something like that gives you a better handle on what's going on than "IQ points" though I read now that the two are convertible.

[2]http://web.archive.org/web/20060521185816/http://www.america...

You want to increase your IQ a point, do crossword puzzles.

>You want to increase your IQ a point, do crossword puzzles.

Do you have a reference for that?

In my own experience, my test scores have not significantly changed over the last 23 years.

Now, I'm not claiming that any test is perfect... but from what I have experienced and what I read, they do measure something that does not change all that much after you reach the age of reason.

Very good, I'm aware that the degrees could count more for those lacking in general. I have a fairly high IQ, 99.7 percentile or thereabouts, so honestly I have no idea what difference one point makes.

> "Cheap food with /almost no/ risk of developing a condition or losing functions of the body is better than expensive food with a marginal reduction in risk."

Precisely. Any statement like 'x is bad' should either provide a realistic alternative or discuss the cost/benefit of using x.

> Could be safe in agricultural use

Didn't we find that some pesticide(s) is/are (partially) responsible for bee colony collapse disorder?

I don't think so, since many of the pesticides being blamed have been in use long before CCD appeared.

Neonicotinoids, the class of chemical pesticides most commonly blamed for CCD, were introduced into widespread use around the time CCD appeared. I don't think anybody has definitely proven causation (and see the various posts, even today, about problems in deriving causation from correlation). But there appears to be neurobiological evidence for some link between the way the pesticides work and the way bees behave. As far as likely suspects for the cause of CCD go, it's high on the list.

Yes, neonicotinoids are implicated. They are certainly not the only factor, as your (partially) points out, but the evidence seems to indicate that they weaken bees in ways that interact with mites and climate stresses to lead to colony collapse.

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