= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Squark comments on "All natural food" as an constrained optimisation problem - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (64)
This is a good point.
Not sure I understand what you're saying. Are you being ironic?
Of course. But we weren't discussing a specific choice, as far as I can tell.
Yes.
I do think we are discussing the choice to buy "natural food" and prefer it over genetically modified food.
In this case, an in-depth discussion would require analyzing the potential health hazards given what we know about the genetic modifications involved and the regulations in place, versus the cost difference and some way to compare the two.
And we should probably start by defining "genetically modified".
Under some definitions almost all commercial crops and farm animals are genetically modified. There are no wild cows and Golden Delicious apples don't grow on trees in forests.
EU laws have well defined definitions.
I came across two definitions:
"Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are organisms, such as plants and animals, whose genetic characteristics are being modified artificially in order to give them a new property."
That's extremely broad and vague (and incorrectly uses present progressive rather than past tense)
"organisms in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination".
A bit more precise, but still not well-defined. Is artificial insemination GM? What about irradiation to increase mutation rate? And technically, the DNA of the organism isn't altered; it has the same genes it was born with.
Definitions are always a tricky business. As far as I understand the current EU definition of genetically modified allows irraditation to increase mutation rate. I don't know whether the organic food regulations do.
Recently I posted something about the EU commision wanting to say that coloring eggs red or blue makes them not fall under the organic standard. It's not possible to read a single paragraph about the definition to really tell you what falls under it but you have bureaucrats who do mind all the little details.
Which is kind of the point. How can we have a meaningful discussion about something, when it takes pages to define it? And if the definition is so complicated, then it really isn't legitimate to ascribe companies' aversion to complying as simply not wanting to inform customers.
By actually thinking about the issue? Just look at how many pages Eliezer needed to explain his idea of "truth".
That's not what I do. Companies lobbies on multiple fronts at not wanting to inform customers.
I don't think that companies would have an issue to explain on a web page in a few pages what their production process entails. I can't even easily find out whether or not beef I buy in my supermarket comes from grass-fed cows or whether it doesn't.
Companies do have lawyers that can read a bunch of pages and then apply the correct label.
I practice we often don't know much about the genetic modifications involved. If you buy some foot item in the US as a customer that contains some genetic manipulations there no way for you to know exactly what they modified.
Even if you would know which genes they exchanged, we are at a point where we don't even know what all the genes in the human body do.