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JustinMElms comments on Rationality when Insulated from Evidence - Less Wrong
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Quick option: Look for other forms of agents you trust. Friends you can outsource some of the research to. Public figures who you can have confidence in their ideas.
I hit the same problem when trying to work out climate change circa 15 years ago. Both sides were quoting different results from the same data sources. I had no idea who to trust.
In the end of that particular problem I decided that it didn't matter to the extent that it would affect my life either way.
In this case - Can you trust the local regulatory authorities to maintain your interest enough to keep you safe insofar as you can eat anything that hits the shelves but maybe not that new experimental kickstarter-soylent-product (for now).
Also worth pointing out for this instance only: GMO has been around for ~10-20 years now. We are yet to see negatives of the scale predicted by the opposition to GMO. Waiting long enough has yielded evidence of absence of risk.
Other options that come to mind: Have you tried bayesian updates? Write down your original position, stack information on each side and see how strongly you update each way. Then decide if that is enough for you.
(3) Can you devise a test or experiment for the beliefs that you want to hold. Obviously you don't have the rigour or the time to prove or disprove the risks associated with GMO on your own. But maybe there is something you can do on your own. Even finding a test-able premise, then reading papers relating to it. Is better than nothing.
Thanks for weighing in, Elo. I have learned from this that sometimes providing a concrete example for an abstract problem can be so distracting as to almost completely obscure the problem.
Yes, this has been the crux of my difficulty. I have done my best to follow Bayes Theorem, my prior probability is not a strong factor (I would not be exceptionally shocked one way or the other on this particular issue, so I put my prior probability at 60% for one side), and when I get to evidence updates, I basically only have two decent pieces of evidence "Scientific organizations X, Y, and Z (of C credibility) hold this position" and "Scientific organization A and B (of D credibility) hold this other position." And then I have "The argumentation for this position is more flawed than this other position."
That seems to be just about as far as I can get, insulated from direct observation or--as you recommend--experimentation. So I am able to calculate my posterior probability and have some confidence in my approach, but I can't help but feel unsatisfied about the scope of evidence that brought me to change my position.
Also:
That is strong evidence that GMO does not have observable risks within 10-20 years of adoption, but it is considerably weaker evidence about what GMO adoption looks like after 30, 40, 50 years or a lifetime.
You can replace "GMO" in this sentence with a lot of things. For example, "kiwi". Or "cell phone".
Yes, I would agree. And I completely assent that 20 years of evincible safety can be extrapolated into "long term" (however you define that) safety more than 10 years could be. My only position in saying the above is to highlight that "It's seemed safe so far" doesn't necessarily prove that to be safe in perpetuity.
Surely you are not arguing that 20 years is the magic asymptote at which safety rises to infinity?
Ain't no such animal.
I don't think that looking for forever guarantees is a useful exercise. The point was really the double standard applied to GMOs.
I agree: there is no "forever guarantee," especially as our life spans increase to experience new problems and our ability to detect problems improves, we discover new things that may be killing us or may have been harming us in the past.
That said: I'm unclear on the double standard you were pointing out. Was it something that I said indirectly? If that is the case, the point of my statement is that we have a longer body of evidence for traditional food engineering (selection, cross-breeding, etc) than we do for direct genetic modification by several orders of magnitude--conservatively: 50 years compared to ~5,000 years. That is A) not to say we haven't borked up a few times with traditional engineering and B) not to say that GMO are definitively less safe because they are new. It is just to say that we have definitively less evidence on the matter, and 10-20 years--less than half of a lifetime--is not a resounding endorsement.
All that said: I don't think this is even a particularly significant piece of evidence in the discussion--compared to say: reliable testing standards, risk analysis based upon the changes being introduced rather than the method of introduction, etc--as long as we can agree that 20 years of evident safety does not in itself prove that anything is certainly safe.
My comment was aimed more at one side in the GMO debate rather than specifically at you.
This is not true. First, both "traditional food engineering" and GMO are ridiculously broad terms and it's hard to say anything meaningful which applies to the whole category. The main issue, however, is that traditional cross-breeding and such perform major genetic surgery, albeit with crude tools. Look e.g. at this -- you think it's the same corn and wheat? The Green Revolution was so successful precisely because it changed the crops grown. The wheat you're eating is very much not the same thing which was eaten thousands of years ago.
I think you're drawing two specious conclusions:
First, "traditional food engineering" and GMO do refer to various practices, but there is a very clear distinction of method drawn by those terms. The "traditional" method short circuits natural reproductive process to cultivate desired traits, where as GMO methods entail the direct modification of genes by means external to the reproductive process. To say that repeatedly selecting the largest head of wheat and breeding from that stock is "the same" as injecting new DNA into an organism with a gene gun is absurd in the extreme. They share the same objective, of course, but the method is wholly different.
Second, the Green Revolution was the adoption and expansion of many agricultural practices of which high-yield varieties were one important feature. Obviously, "traditional" methods can have enormous effects. For instance, turning what amounted to an edible grass into a freakish calorie battery. That said, these slow and incremental processes have at least some evolutionary safeguards built into them simply from the time it takes and the holistic, less targeted changes. Once again, we are talking about a difference of method not of objective. The fact that there was a boom of food production prior to GMO does not mean that it is the same as GMO.
The question is why do you care about methods when you should care only about outcomes.
You will note that I said that they have the same "objectives" not necessarily the same "outcomes."
Granted, I agree that if we have two genetically and biologically identical organisms, one created by traditional methods and one created by direct genetic modification, then no, I would not care at all.
The argument is that--despite sharing the same objective of improving food production for humanity--traditional methods have a lower likelihood of unforeseen negative outcomes due to the rapid and intricate methods by which GMO are altered.
We care about differences of method because of potential differences of outcome.