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Elo comments on Rationality when Insulated from Evidence - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (60)
I think I disagree on these examples. I don't know that these were all proven safe. And not for very long. Even when they were proven "safe" temporarily, there were some science or medical events that caused concern.
Your idea of "proven-safe" is that they were used for two decades without proof of problems. Those examples fit that standard.
Were they used for two decades without strong evidence of problems while people were looking for such evidence?
They look to me like things that no one had any idea were problematic -- until at some point evidence of trouble started to appear, and fairly quickly it became consensus that they were bad. (Possible counterexample -- I'm not sure of the dates -- is cigarettes, only because there was a very well-funded systematic disinformation campaign conducted by the tobacco companies.)
In the case of GMO, some people have worried (publicly, vocally) about safety from the very beginning. That's quite different from lead pipes or asbestos or even cigarettes.
The standard should be comparing outcomes in users and non-users after 20 years. The idea is that 20 years is enough to show any effect that exists, and we shouldn't refrain from adopting the new thing waiting for even more evidence to come in.
Cigarettes, asbestos and leaded water would all show strong effects after 20 years, not as strong as after 50 years, but certainly enough to identify a problem.
Certainly some things have a very delayed effect, but they are very very few compared to things that have a quick effect; most foods that are bad for you show an effect within hours to months. We shouldn't treat every possible new food as having a significant risk of an effect 30 years later unless there's a specific reason (plausible mechanism).
Why? Especially when the discussion is not about banning the food but about people's right to know that they are eating a new food.
But even if that's true it's besides the point because GMOs aren't "a food" but a group of a large amount of different foods.
Letting plants produce poisons to not get eaten by insects suggest to me a plausible mechanism that involves the poison also harming humans.
Because if we're too suspicious, we pay the opportunity cost of whatever makes it an attractive new food in the first place.
The problem is that this bakes in certain assumptions about what makes a food new in a potentially dangerous way and so requires mandatory labeling.
Agricultural technology is always changing. We don't require labeling for most of the changes, even though our prior for their potential danger might be much higher than for GMOs. Examples of things that don't require labeling: which pesticides and antibiotics were used, and in what amounts; what diseases and parasites may have been present; what the storage and transportation conditions were.
For all of these things there are regulatory frameworks. But I can't think offhand of any examples, other than GMOs, where the legal status is "you may do X, but you have to label it appropriately". E.g., there's no "you may use the new pesticide X, but you have to label each piece of fruit sold as being X-positive". When people want to signal they're not using something, it's up to them to label produce as "organic" or "X-free"; everyone else doesn't have to label theirs as "non-organic". This difference sends a strong signal to the public that GMOs are presumed to be more dangerous (or risky/unproven) than every other legal agriculture technology.
And, as you point out, generalizing and regulating all GMOs as a group makes no more sense than regulating all pesticides as a group.
I wouldn't have a problem if we distinguish GMOs into different classes and put the resulting class on the label.
That's not really true. Ingredient lists require the disclose of many substances that are added to new foods. People have a right to know whether their food contains aspartame.
I would also support requiring big producers to provide that information. Products could have a barcode that can be scanned and the information could be provided via the internet.
Certainly, I agree: there is no reason that we shouldn't be able to know every detail about the materials and processes that go into our food, but surely you acknowledge the connotative difference between:
"Scan this to see all relevant information"
and
"Governmental authority mandates that we declare this food to contain GMO"
There are issues with compliance costs that make it hard to force disclosure of all information. The compliance costs fo writing GMO wheat instead of wheat on a ingridient box are little.
I would be happy if the companies would have a choice to put up a scan code that provides all relevant information in exchange for not having to write things on the label.
The compliance costs include the costs of tracking the wheat through the processing chain just in case it's using GMO wheat Monday and non-GMO wheat Tuesday.
Also, mandating the label would make people think that GMO is dangerous, because they would assume that labels are only for things the consumer is supposed to care about .
Would you favor the idea of putting labels on food stating whether it has any ingredients that were picked by illegal immigrants?
I think businesses that sell food products should already track in detail what kind of wheat their suppliers provide.
No. If I look at the ingridients list of the Thai-Soap it tells me that it contains peas, but it's not something I'm "supposed to care about". I'm not buying Thai-Soap based on whether or not they contain pea's and the obligation to provide that information doesn't imply that the government thinks I should care about it.
That's like the some US states requiring taxes for illegal drug sales. I don't think that trying to enforce labeling is the most straightforward way to deal with something that's illegal.
This is a good point. But it still stands in contrast to non-disclosure of everything that's not an ingridient: processes, pesticides, etc. Produce like fruit or raw meat doesn't have any "ingridiends".
Why the difference? I lean towards thinking it's in large part historical, political, and accidental, rather than reflecting any real difference in what's appropriate or required.
GMO's are ingridients.
Golden Rice looks different than normal rice, so people who want to buy it can see the difference and make informed decisions about what they want to buy. With a lot of other GMO products that isn't the case.
That's technically true, but it misses my point.
Suppose I buy some bread. The label will list "wheat" as an ingredient. There are many varieties of wheat with various genetic differences between them, produced in part by directed breeding. The label won't say which variety was used, unless the genetic engineering was done by a particular set of modern technologies, in which case it must say it's GMO.
Clearly, to benefit the customer, the label should list (classes of) genotypical and phenotypical variations, perhaps only those that have been deemed legal-but-potentially-dangerous. Listing the technology used to originally breed that variety is irrelevant, and feeds on a naturalistic fallacy (just like the term "organic food").
As an aside, all varieties of rice look different. My store stocks long, short, round, brown, red, etc. rice. I have no idea what, if any, the difference is. I wouldn't pay special attention to a new golden variety if it wasn't specially labelled.
It's true that if people want to know something - for whatever reason - then it's plausible for the government to mandate providing that information. This allows people to buy or boycott food to support various non-health/nutrition-related, but still important, causes.
On the other hand, I'd like government to support many endeavors that are beneficial for everyone as long as they remain secret, but would make people angry if they were widely known. For example, I might support nuclear power, which public opinion is generally against; so I don't want products to be labelled as 'made using electricity from nuclear power'.
I feel that in these subjects, like nuclear power, GMOs and organic food, the mainstream public opinion is for or against them not just because it's misinformed on a factual level, but because people have real preferences for e.g. 'not eating unnatural food' even if they believe it's good for your health.
As we go on in this century the amount of genes that will be different with GMO's is likely to increase. What kind of shelling point would you propose to decide when people should have to add a label?
In the spirit of informed consent I don't think that's reason to withold information from them.
I think that transparancy and free flow of information is vital to dealing with risks arising from new technology. I don't want government burocrats who think it's best to keep new technology that has an effect on people secret because the people might not like it.
(Btw, I don't know much about this, but one difference about rices is their starch structures. Different starches hydrolyze to various extents when you cook them, which seems to me to at least matter calorically (the amounts of washed out saccharides will not be the same). I mention this since it's already a "continue this thread", so less likely to distract people.)