Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of Chemophobia In the News
eldavojohn writes "American news outlets like The New York Times seem to thrive on chemophobia — consumer fear of the ambiguous concept of 'chemicals.' As a result, Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Deborah Blum has decided to call out New York Times journalist Nicholas Kirstof for his secondary crusade (she notes he is an admirable journalist in other realms) against chemicals. She's quick to point out the absurdity of fearing chemicals like Hydrogen which could be a puzzler considering its integral role played in life-giving water as well as life-destroying hydrogen cyanide. Another example is O2 versus O3. Blum calls upon journalists to be more specific, to avoid the use of vague terms like 'toxin' let alone 'chemical' and instead inform the public with lengthy chemical names like perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) instead of omitting the actual culprit altogether. Kristof has, of course, resorted to calling makers of these specific compounds 'Big Chem' and Blum chastises his poorly researched reporting along with chemophobic lingo. Chemists of Slashdot, have you found reporting on 'chemicals' to be as poor as Blum alleges or is this no more erroneous than any scare tactic used to move newspapers and garner eyeballs?"
Yes. This is not an either/or question here; both are true.
So when is Kirstof's writing an article about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide?
First bad joke?
Need I point out the most dangerous of all chemicals, Dihydrogen Monoxide? Especially with this year being the 100th anniversary of the Titanic incident, where a large number of the fatalities were actually due to DHMO poisioning, a fact that the One World Government has covered up?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I find much in the popular media to be anti-chemical. Invariably, "Chemical" is used as a perjorative, almost always being prefixed with either toxic or hazardous. Further, it seems that the term "organic" means without "chemicals", which is idiotic, since Every! Single! Thing! is composed of chemicals.
So, anyway, I have a wonderful time with the chemophobes, preferring to use the term "Organic" to refer to a class of covalently-bonded chemicals, primarily composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms, with various other elements occasionally found.
So, most pesticides (with the exception of things like Bordeaux powder) are organic, as artificial sweeteners, etc. Water is never organic, btw.
I find it somewhat annoying that there seems to be a mainstream association with the "natural" to mean "safe". There are lots of naturally occurring dangerous substances.
They've successfully re-educated the public and turned a good word (hacker==hobbyist) into an evil word, such that stores yank magazines off shelves if the title says, "How to hack your Linux computer". And you expect reporters to correctly published chemical formulas when they never took chemistry classes in college??? LOL.
(And yes I picked the subject on purpose.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Science illiterate, social media sheeps.
That's funny .. I was going to suggest Science illiterate, anti-education Conservative rednecks.
...
It all comes down to
IGNORANT PEOPLE
I say ignorant rather than stupid because of something a colleague told me years ago:
Ignorance can be cured with education. Stupidity can only be cured with a hand gun
So as I am an optimist I am hoping for "ignorant"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
...they're just usually not the right ones. For example, the token anti-vaccine person I know rails first about vaccines. Then, if pressed, he will say that the issue is the mercury. Then, if pressed more, he will say some specific compound involving mercury such as thimerosal.
The point is, people can fixate on names all day. It's people's tribalism that's the problem. If one person has a terrible problem with one doctor, that means that he or she will tell all of his or her friends that doctors are bad, and science is bad, and that home birth is the ONLY WAY. And then he or she will go out in search of anecdotes and outlier studies to support his or her claim.
And yes. There will be studies to support any claim. This is why news sources need to slap their sources' confidence intervals right next to any reporting done on studies, ever.
Sorry, but once that phrase was co-opted by the enviro-wackos to mean that all chemicals were bad it should have been clear that things were going to take a turn for the worse. Today it is clear to everyone that "chemicals" are bad. Nearly everyone does not understand that "chemicals" are things that are present in the heavily filtered water you are drinking, the nice organic food you are eating and in the very air you are breathing. Most people think you can filter out all the "chemicals" and that if you do not, you aren't safe.
This has been going on since the 1970s and with 40 years of it behind us there is almost nothing anyone is going to be able to do to stop it.
We have politicians that believe this or at least profess to agree with their constituents who believe it. Laws are being made to accomodate these beliefs.
Shit, responded to wrong parent. When is Slashdot going to get a comment "edit"?
That's why I like Duvel, it only contains about 92% of it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
To some extent, yes. On the other hand, our society is built upon specialization so not everyone can be expected to invest in literacy in all fields. Really where the failure occurs which allows irrational fear of "chemicals" to evolve is in the large number of cases where an actually harmful chemical does real damage, and said damage is denied and covered up by institutions which the public feels powerless against. That poisons the well, and after that, is is open season for sensationalist media profiteers.
I find it hard to call a group of conspiracy theorists and/or worry warts "sheep" by the way, because the true sheep are the people that rely on arguments to authority to dismiss any disturbing information. Modern society is more like a bunch of confused squirrels.
Someone had to do it.
Yes, they are using the word "chemicals" wrong. Get over it. Use your brain to substitute something that is correct and listen to what they are saying. Just because they paint all chemicals as evil, and they are wrong, does not mean that all chemicals are safe. With snakes, I assume they are poisonous unless I know otherwise. Why not do the same with things I put in my body?
Sig intentionaly left blank
you can bombard some people with facts, and logic, and 2x4s all day long, and they will stubbornly refuse to accept a stone-cold fact if it falls on their foot.
they are beyond cure, or explaination, or apology.
they are morons. their little pea-brains are furiously working all the time to reject information and cling to what The Voices tell them. they are not capable of understanding that...
FACT: enough of anything is a poison.
FACT: some stuff is more poisonous than others.
FACT: some stuff is so frikkin deadly that if some nut whispers its name a continent away, birds fall in flight.
FACT: grouping all these types of chemicals as one by either side of a stupid argument should require using those idiots as guinea pigs in testing all known classes of chemicals in LD100 tests.
you're welcome. next global issue, please... .
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It all comes down to ...
IGNORANT PEOPLE
I say ignorant rather than stupid because of something a colleague told me years ago:
IGNORANT PEOPLE with internet access.
100 years ago, ignorance spread rather slowly. Today, you can convince 1000 people of some bullshit in a matter of seconds.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Truth1: Chemistry reporting is as bad as all other science reporting.
Truth2: The Chemical industry is as unconcerned with "externalities" as any other business.
Reporters will get you to panic even if they don't have a good reason; the reason that reporters are capable of spreading panic easily is because chemical manufacturers will poison you in order to make a buck. So, from a certain standpoint, the response of the general public is rational - they don't trust the chemical industry, and they shouldn't, so why not err on the side of caution when dealing with certified professional liars (marketing, PR and advertising people). Particulates are bad for you; the chemical industry (and domestic manufacturing generally) denies this, but they're lying. Vaccines are not harmful; but they are a big emerging profit center for pharma. If vaccines were harmful (again, they aren't), would pharma lie about it? Damn straight they'd lie through their teeth. So it becomes a double problem - it's difficult to educate the public about what is safe (vaccines are safe), and at the same time it's difficult to get robust action on what isn't safe (airborne particulates are not safe; neither are most chlorinated organics, heavy metals, etc.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
As a liberal that has lived in a commune (Zendik Farm, Bastrop Texas, late 90's) I can attest to the huge number of hippies afraid of "chemicals", Sodium lauryl sulfate (derived from coconut or palm oils) is one that really grinds their gears. Fuckers kept tossing my toothpaste when I wasn't looking.
This is usually a liberal issue, unless you live in a cancer cluster and then you'll see a fair number for conservatives pick up the chemophobia banner.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Isn't this just a case of colloquial vs. technical language?
I think most non-technical folk associate the term "chemical" with artificially manufactured or extracted substances not usually encountered in our little corner of nature. Colloquial meanings often differ from modern technical usage (see also "organic", "work", "weight"). Words mean different things in different contexts - deal with it.
By all means challenge specific cases of "chemophobia" but you won't win any hearts and minds by telling people they're stupid because they don't use the same definition of "chemical" as you.
Also, remember the hidden wisdom of the old "dihydrogenmonoxide" joke: there ain't no such thing as a "harmless substance" and anything can be toxic or dangerous if too much of it turns up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, harmless old Sodium Chloride might not seem a problem until every food manufacturer starts adding it in huge quantities to make their product tastier without paying for more expensive spices.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I thought salt was a vegetable.
There is an excellent book, Fly in the Ointment, that debunks a number of these kinds of issues.
I especially like the one about peeling apples because they have been coated in chemicals. The chemicals they are coated with is simple wax used to replace the naturally occurring wax that is removed during the washing process. Why wash the apples? To remove fungus spores, dirt and insect eggs. Why replace the wax? To prevent premature spoilage due to excess oxygen getting to the fruit.
In a shocking report released by slashdot contributor mcgrew today, the Times and other newspapers use "scare tactics" to "bring eyeballs and ad revenue." Experts were appalled to find that media outlets across the nation were engaging in what amounts to terrorism in a ploy to control America's eyeballs, extorting advertising agencies in the process. It is not known at this time what reporters want to do with our eyeballs, considering that it is currently illegal to sell human body parts; it is assumed that such large businesses would have a tough time discreetly participating in the black market.
You're thinking of pizza.
Jonathanjk.com
I don't think the layperson fears "chemicals", so much as artificially produced and altered chemicals that are in our food.
It's not the chemicals (or the elements) themselves that are feared, but what they do to our body -- and the lack of disclosure about what they are doing. Look how long it took to get the trans-fat containing partially hydrogenated vegetable oil removed from our food (which wasn't even removed, but when manufacturers had to report trans-fat grams, suddenly hydrogenated oils weren't so necessary for many of their products).
So even that innocuous hydrogen that is so important to basic life can become a threat when combined with other chemicals.
Of course, the Hindenburg disaster gives another reason to fear "harmless" hydrogen. (ok ok, so maybe it was the fabric shell covered with incendiary paint that triggered the disaster, but the 200,000 cubic meters of flammable hydrogen didn't help).
There are distortions everywhere. Some are more subtle than others. When Kirstoff generically refers to "chemicals", most people recognize that he is either biased or using shorthand for "a compound which I did some research on and found to be risky in the context in question." Deciding which he is doing is an exercise for the reader, and must always be. Using "perfluorooctanoic acid" is certainly better for an educated audience that has the will, time, and ability to do its own research, but it is better for Kirstoff to do the research and shorthanding -- in a truly unbiased fashion, which may not be the case here -- for an audience that either lacks the will, time, or ability to dig deeper on their own. Perhaps ideal is for the article to have hyperlinks for more information.
While we're on the subject of distortion, I recently read a summery that had a couple of strong shorthand distortions in it, which may provide some interesting points of comparison:
"Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Deborah Blum" -- appeal to emotion -- it asserts that the reader should assume that Deborah Blum is an expert on science matters because she won an award for writing. If her article stands on its own, leave that bit out. If it rests on her expertise, this brief note is not enough to establish it. This sentence is fine for an audience that has the time, will, and ability to check on Deborah Blum's actual credentials, but relies upon the author's research and integrity for those audience which lack those criteria.
"decided to call out" -- appeal to emotion -- trying to get the listener to emotionally go along with a rebel who's fighting the power.
"have you found reporting on 'chemicals' to be as poor as Blum alleges or is this no more erroneous than any scare tactic used to move newspapers and garner eyeballs?" -- false dichotomy -- the options are "Kirstoff is wrong because Blum says so" or "Kirstoff is wrong because he uses scare tactics."
Distortions are everywhere, and journalism necessarily calls for using shorthand. Eldavojohn wanted to communicate the essence of Blum's piece without reproducing it verbatim. He used shorthand which he hopes will give a fair image of the underlying work, by using turns of phrase which would -- in isolation -- be clear-cut distortions. The point is elegantly made by Blum herself (though she gets it backward):
But if we, as journalists, are going to demand meticulous standards for the study and oversight of chemical compounds then we should try to be meticulous ourselves in making the case.
No, you are wrong. It is specifically the case that chemical compound oversight should be far more technical than public writing. Public writing, whether from Eldavojohn, Blum, or Kirstoff, is about communicating complex underlying issues in a brief and simplified form. That is its very nature. If such simplification is biased, then there is a very serious problem -- but the mere act of simplification is not a fault in itself.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Disclaimer: I am a PhD chemist, but I am not your chemist (or something like that).
The nebulous threat of 'chemicals' has been present for years, but there has been a bit of an uptick in rhetoric recently.
Much as the traditional computer hacker resents the rise in the use of the term hacker in the media to mean malicious computer criminal, most chemists I know are quick to dismiss the silly bias against 'chemicals' in the media. But the term has become a catchphrase for the larger population, and pointing out that everything is made of chemicals has little effect. 'Organic' food is the same way - no one would eat inorganic cucumbers (aka rocks), but the word organic means something else in that context.
Long-hand chemical names won't fix it, because your eyes just gloss over the *fnord*perfluorooctanoic acid*fnord* chemical names. If you want to call out specific chemicals, give them a shorter name (maybe spell them out for people who really want to know), but then explain them and why they are bad.
There are plenty of naturally occuring chemicals that will kill you in small doses, there are manufactured chemicals that are perfectly safe to spray on your children, and every spectrum in between. If the media wants to call out 'chemicals', I think we would all appreciate them specifying which ones.
The whole 'fraking' thing is a great example of this. Most 'fraking fluid' is water and PEG (polyethylene glycol, a harmless 'chemical' found in lots of beauty products - see what I did here?). So who cares if you inject that into a shale formation miles below the water table? Are there other chemicals in there that might be harmeful? Could be (and often are). Call them out specifically if you want me to worry about them. But we have a problem here - people won't panic if you tell it like it is, making it much better to light someones tap water on fire! What's burning? Not 'fraking fluid', not any of those nasty 'chemicals', just natural gas that was probably there before any drilling started. But if you tell people that the oil companies are pumping nasty chemicals into the ground, and show them a faucet on fire, they'll draw their own conclusions, based an anecdotal evidence rather than logic and causality. And this is, or course, exactly what was supposed to happen in response to the scaremongering in the media.
People love to get riled up about something, and there are no shortage of chemicals that they could be getting riled up about. Some more careful journalism, and a requirement that most people need at least science 101 and math 101 to really understand the information they will be presented with would all be good, but I don't see any of those changes happening in the short term. It is at once wonderfully reassuring and extremely terrifying that you don't need a brain to have an opinion.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
There are two components to this. The first being that we are a society of specialists. It is impossible to know everything about everything, the best you can hope for is knowing a little about everything. The second part, are chemical corps and their cousins--typically referred to as big chemical and big pharma--that are well known for chasing the dollar regardless of the cost in terms of the effects their products have on people and the environment. When combined, this causes people to have a natural distrust of all of these poly-syllabic words on the back of the products they buy. In many cases it's well founded, others at least suspect. It isn't uncommon to learn that commonly used additives for food and cosmetic preservation, coloring, etc. or even the materials used in their containers area actually not very healthy for you. One of the earliest examples in human history being that of lead. But has been followed on by plenty of others, mercury, radium, DDT, PVC, hydrogenated oils, ... Even now we're learning that even though people or test animals don't drop dead or develop tumors, etc. right away it's still quite possible to manifest negative consequences many years later. There's also reasonable concern over synergistic effects of chemicals considered safe in isolation being quite the opposite when combined with certain others.
Under this kind of climate, is there any wonder why when given a choice between ingredient lists that look like, "wheat, sugar, soybean oil, salt" or "wheat, high-fructose corn syrup, sorbitol, maltodextrin, salt, yellow no. 5, polysorbate 80" people are going to prefer the former?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
The latest article by Kristof points out the dangers of "endocrine disruptor" chemicals and he makes it clear (from the very first sentence) that he is talking only about these chemicals. The red herring about hydrogen and oxygen was inserted by his attacker. Kristof says nothing about hydrogen.
Endocrine disruptors have been shown to have serious adverse effects and they are poorly studied and regulated. He is calling for more study and regulation. They are becoming ubiquitous in our environment (from your cash register receipted to most canned foods).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The most oxymorontastic product I've seen recently was "Carbon-Free Organic Sugar". Not only are "Carbon-Free" and "Organic" direct contradictions, but all sugars contain carbon by definition.