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MartinB comments on Should I be afraid of GMOs? - Less Wrong Discussion
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That would be a topic I changed opinions on twice. Currently I am convinced there is a potential for danger that is noteworthy. The effects nutrition has on the human body are not actually understood well enough yet, and the genetic tinkering is also not that well understood. (As a IT person I intuitively want the source code to feel safe. Maybe that is asking too much.)
There is no reason to be deeply afraid as compared to other bad influences on your health, or to go about burning down fields. Just avoid the stuff if possible. And re:check every few years if there are new facts to consider.
The technology should be further used and researched. So far there is not too much real long term data - as with many other technologies. A General problem with highly unified systems is a possibility for a single point of failure that hurts a noteworthy part of the population at once. Here the risk of damage to the human body that only shows up after decades, and then takes effect whole populations at once.
We're talking about making small hacks to a system that's horribly complicated, undocumented, was written by Azatoth with goals in mind that don't match ours anyway. Yeah, we may not understand much about the hacks we're making, but we didn't understand much about the original system either.
You know the expression »never touch a running system«. With the plants available there is long term data, and you know what you get. With big changes there are all kinds of risks involved that can not be foreseen. Including the possibility for side effects. Can you assure a small hack is really just small?
Nope, but the risk of unexpected side effects may be smaller than many ordinary risks we take with what we eat. I wouldn't be surprised if some rare exotic plants like Rooibos had been studied less than GM rice or wheat.
I have an aversion towards "but we can never be sure" or "but there's always a risk" arguments ... Those can be used on nearly any topic and are useless until you try to figure out how much risk, which requires actual effort.
Yes of course. I do not like that line either.
There are other cases where food rapidly got widely used without enough examination of the long term effects. Look up the introduction of industrial sugar. That seems to be a real problem.
I presume the way you do that is by intelligently designing the source code -- rather than using the output of some unguided evolutionary process.
In other words, this argument seems to go in the opposite direction.
Maybe someday it gets to that.