All of JustinMElms's Comments + Replies

Not the best place to put this comment, but there's a confusing mistake on the PLACE FAQ where the pie candidate shows a voting option for "Other Ice Cream Candidate" instead of "Other Pie Candidate."

Does anyone have an electorama account to remedy that?

Fair point.

I like both Volairina and your takes on the non-rational world. I was having a lot of trouble working something out.

That said, while Voltairina's world is a bit more horrifyingly extreme than yours, it seems to me more probably that cause and effect simply did not exist. I can envision a structure of elementary physics that simply change--functionally randomly--far more easily than that causality does exist, but operates in the inverse. I have more trouble envisioning the elementary physics that bring that into existence without a observational intellect directly upsetting motivated plans.

All that is to say, might not your case be the more extreme one?

This comment is going on a decade old, and if you still access this account, I would be curious about your stance on your above statements now.

I completely agree that breeding methods have their own flaws, which we certainly have seen come to dangerous fruition (pun definitely intended).

I also concede that breeding is quite slow in improving a plant, where direct modification would be much faster.

I furthermore agree that direct genetic modification is the future of crop improvement. Given that we better master the techniques and better understand the genomes in play every year, eventually direct gene modification will lack any of the uncertainty that I invoke right now.

But I likewise think it is ... (read more)

I would agree with you that the quoted statement is not terribly persuasive. I was simply encapsulating the actual argument at hand, instead of the straw-man argument of "method versus outcome." And while the vagueness diminishes the magnitude of the evidence, I don't believe it makes it non-zero.

To your second point:

in the context of "it's been fine for 20 years but we're not sure about the really long term", I don't see how the "rapid and intricate" quality is relevant.

I would add to ChristianKI's apt reply that while co... (read more)

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.

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 ... (read more)

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 sev... (read more)

Thanks, Ishaan. That was a lot of good directions to come at this from.

I especially found a few of them novel ways to eke out more confidence from an insulated problem:

If it's a political issue, try to find out what people who might plausibly be expertish in the area yet don't seem to be invested in debating the issue think about it.

check what known superforecasters in the field think (people who have a track record of successful predictions in that area). Superforecasters need not actually be loudly engaging with the issue, just ask.

check if people who

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?

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"

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.

Have you tried bayesian updates?

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 dece... (read more)

That's ridiculous: whenever I want to comment, I always observe that I am reading 4-year-old arguments and keep on scrolling.