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Those Opposed To Scientific Consensus Bolstered By 'Illusion of Knowledge' (edmontonjournal.com)
The Edmonton Journal reports:
Recently, researchers asked more than 2,000 American and European adults their thoughts about genetically modified foods. They also asked them how much they thought they understood about GM foods, and a series of 15 true-false questions to test how much they actually knew about genetics and science in general. The researchers were interested in studying a perverse human phenomenon: People tend to be lousy judges of how much they know. Across four studies conducted in three countries -- the U.S., France and Germany -- the researchers found that extreme opponents of genetically modified foods "display a lack of insight into how much they know." They know the least, but think they know the most. "The less people know," the authors conclude, "the more opposed they are to the scientific consensus."
Science communicators have made concerted efforts to educate the public with an eye to bringing their attitudes in line with the experts," they write in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. But people with an inflated sense of what they actually know -- and most in need of education -- are also the ones least likely to be open to new information.... Extreme views often come along with not appreciating the complexity of the subject -- "not realizing how much there is to know," said Philip Fernbach, lead author of the new study and a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder. "People who don't know very much think they know a lot, and that is the basis for their extreme views."
Slashdot reader Layzej links to Rational Wiki's article on "The Backfire Effect," to illustrate Fernbach's observation that "People double down on their 'counter-scientific consensus attitudes'.
"Epecially when people feel threatened or if they are being treated as if they are stupid."
Science communicators have made concerted efforts to educate the public with an eye to bringing their attitudes in line with the experts," they write in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. But people with an inflated sense of what they actually know -- and most in need of education -- are also the ones least likely to be open to new information.... Extreme views often come along with not appreciating the complexity of the subject -- "not realizing how much there is to know," said Philip Fernbach, lead author of the new study and a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder. "People who don't know very much think they know a lot, and that is the basis for their extreme views."
Slashdot reader Layzej links to Rational Wiki's article on "The Backfire Effect," to illustrate Fernbach's observation that "People double down on their 'counter-scientific consensus attitudes'.
"Epecially when people feel threatened or if they are being treated as if they are stupid."
Duh!
(by the way, First Post!)
Unfortunately the "experts" sometimes have a financial incentive to "know" what they claim is true. Therefore you have people disregarding consensus. Companies spend millions on "experts" who will tell you GM crops are perfectly fine. They might be right, or they might be lying.
That was my first thought too. You misspelled Kruger and could have added a link but otherwise, you basically said all there is to say to this.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Take a cheat of paper and a pencil ...
Draw a box, draw a box around it.
Put some labels inside: inner box "stuff you know that you know it", outer box "stuff you know that you don't know", rest of the paper "stuff you don't know about that you don't know".
The inner box would e.g. be your native language, the outer box would be "you know there are other languages, but you speak none or know their names", or "you don't know angels blood type" ... the rest of the paper is the "unknown unknown" ... things you have no glimpse about that anyone else knows anything about it. Imagine a thousand year ago living person not knowing anything about fusion ... and suns and stars.
Actually I would like to see the list of questions and the rational why they ask about GMOs ... looks more like a black ops of pro GMO activists/lobbyists than a scientific study about self presumed knowledge.
If you wanted to make a study about "self presumed knowledge" you would use 100 to 1000 questions about different topics of science and nature ... or even politics and arts and sports.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Those most invested in promoting it are the most economically invested in its success.
If you are.using an E to add to the sound of U that is represented by the German umlaut, the E goes after the U. Krueger would not have been wrong. Krueger is a valid spelling of the last name, however Krüger IS most correct.
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
John P. A. Ioannidis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Further reading:
"There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias".
- Dr John Ioannidis (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”) August 30, 2005 http://journals.plos.org/plosm...
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine".
- Dr. Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books January 15, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness".
- Richard Horton, Editor, “The Lancet” April 11th 2015 http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/...
"Scientists these days, especially but not only in such blatantly corrupt fields as pharmaceutical research, face a lose-lose choice between basing their own investigations on invalid studies, on the one hand, or having to distrust any experimental results they don’t replicate themselves, on the other. Meanwhile the consumers of the products of scientific research—yes, that would be all of us—have to contend with the fact that we have no way of knowing whether any given claim about the result of research is the product of valid science or not".
- John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blog...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Article summarized:
Smug fake-science Monsanto shills sneer "nah nah, you're a stupid-pants!!" at everyone who doesn't want to poison themselves and damage the environment with dangerous frankenfoods
They have never been wrong, not ONCE!
If they say it is so and that it is safe we can trust that 100%, history has proven that. This is not mere mortal we are talking about, these people are scientists!
The problem with this world is that wise people are full of doubt, and dumbasses are full of confidence.
I don't trust neonicotinoids because scientists were suppressed by corporations. Call me old-fashioned but I don't trust ignorance and I don't trust those who promote it. The experts were abused, trolled and hounded. That doesn't tell me the experts were right, but it sure as hell gives me cause for concern about the corporations. Particularly as the corporations prefer ignorance, trade secrets and suppression of data.
If we are to hold experts as different from non-experts, then I must regard scientists who do the leg-work as more credible than bean-counters and snotty executives.
In the case of GMO, the same holds true. I cannot be certain an expert will be right, but they're more likely to be right.
What do the experts say? Well, in Europe (where the experts are actually expert and therefore worth listening to), GMO is banned by scientific advice.
Why not American scientists? Well, let's take something that isn't controversial. Bleached chicken. We now know chlorinating chicken doesn't kill salmonella or other pathogens, all it does is stop any existing methods from detecting salmonella. Studies show American chicken is extremely unsafe and unsanitary because it is bleached.
This should have been spotted very quickly in America, since it is their practice and all scientists are raised from hatchling (what, you thought scientists were human?) to listen to the Precautionary Principle.
So, no, I do not regard Americans as experts.
But that's ok. If there's something real, it'll be spotted by the EU, Russia, China, India or Africa, all places with scientific traditions. China's is perhaps the oldest, although they took a rest for a bit. If it's important, they'll notice and publish. I don't have to listen to one specific group. If it isn't replicated, or can't be, then it's not worth me paying attention to. If EU scientists don't trust the results, then they're experts and I listen to experts.
Is GMO food actually harmful? There's no proof of that. The precautionary principle doesn't require that there's proof of harm, it requires that you don't do anything if you don't understand the risks. Since it is applied here, it follows that a very large body of highly credible experts say that the risks aren't adequately understood to the standards expected by their profession.
GMO research is therefore substandard. There may be no risks at all, but the research isn't there.
Is it inherently harmful? Of course not! Horizontal gene transfers are remarkably common, albeit usually not from squid to pigs. I daresay that happens occasionally, though.
But it's only with CAS9 that they've been able to GMO humans to cure genetic diseases without an unacceptable cancer risk. Early retroviral inserts were more troublesome. Ergo, I would need to know the expert opinion on different generations of GMO food.
I don't see any problem with this. Ask an expert about a specific generation of GMO, not about GMO in the abstract. GMO in the abstract is safe, GMO in a specific formulation isn't necessarily and there may not be the data.
Should we put blind faith in GMO? With the myriad of techniques and the refusal of EU scientists to approve it, I'd say no. Blind faith in a specific technique, that's not so unreasonable, if EU scientists think it is safe.
Pesticide-enhanced crops? No, that's stupid. You're making resistant insects and killing off the beneficial wildlife. We know that. And most create pesticides either banned or temporarily halted prior to a ban due to the incompetence of the formula and the extreme damage to the environment.
Drought-resistant crops? If the EU scientists say it's ok, then ok.
Although, frankly, we massively overproduce food and America has a massive obesity problem. Reducing farmland to an absolute minimum and re-wilding the relinquished land would go a long way to improving health globally.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Feel free to Google it for yourselves!
Googling will only show me answers from several billion dumb-asses, o queen of the swords.
As much as I welcome this study, it didn't really ask the right questions and unfortunately kind of insinuates that knowledge of GM technology is the most important factor in judging whether GM food should be allowed. That's not true in general, my arguments against GM food have almost nothing to do with the way the genetic modifications work or with direct environmental impacts, they are political and philosophical. I'm pretty sure others have similar doubts.
The philosophical argument is a bit complex, involving several steps and premises. First, there is not much doubt that in the far future humans will drastically modify species including their own, given that almost every technology that has ever been invented has been used. Second, nevertheless it seems possible to kind of limit the impact of technologies, as for example the bans against nuclear proliferation show. Not every nation has nuclear weapons -- at least not yet, and that seems a good thing. Third, the larger the possible negative and positive long-term consequences of new technologies, the more you will need to err on the side of caution. (Technically, this could mean that you should use possibility theory instead of Expected Utility principles, for example.) Fourth, the more a technology is accepted and used in a society for one purpose, the more likely it will also be accepted and used for other purposes. Once GM food is ubiquitous, maybe animals will be modified next, and then humans, and so forth. I'm not claiming that there is an inevitable slippery slope, but some caution seems advisable. Fifth, human history has shown so far that humans are incapable of judging the very long-term impacts of technologies correctly. Both the net positive and net negative effects are blatantly misjudged once we're talking about time spans of 100-200 years. If you combine all those points, especially the third and fifth, then it seems that not being too liberal about GM technology and thinking this through in a bit more detail could be advisable. You certainly don't only want geneticists specializing in GM food in your expert panels for evaluating the technology. At the very least, we should perhaps delay or restrict technologies with a potential to have a high impact on the ecological system in the light of point five and point four. Again, the claim is not that a slippery slope is inevitable, but point five is still something to take into account. It's naive and irresponsible to make this a debate about "GM food" only.
The political point is simpler. The corporations who most fervently lobby for GM food have a proven history of not necessarily having the best interests of their consumers in mind, neither the interests of farmers nor those of end consumers, and have in the past been involved in all kinds of shady business about pesticides, seeds that make farmers dependent on the company, aggressive lawsuits against customers and aggressive patent policies, and so on. They also are lobbying very intensively against labelling GM food, even though there is almost no sane reason against such a requirements. In fact, their attempts to explain this rationale are mostly ridiculous despite the fact that they spend so much money on P&R. For example, they frequently argue that "there is not enough space on the packaging". In reality, their motivations are purely economical, they want to ensure that in mass production GM modified and non-GM-modified resources can be freely mixed in order to save costs. This is only a benefit to large food corporations, of course, who destroy smaller farmers and companies by sheer numbers. Irrespectively of the more philosophical worries, this alone should give you reason to think twice. Do you want no mandatory labelling, no free consumer choice, and instead laws that favour large corporations with a shady past? Do you wish to support Nestle and Bayer instead of local farming? Then maybe you should politically support GM food. If not, if you think that large food corporations are not necessarily the best choice for consumers
Although many EU countries do not grow GMOs, Europe is one of the world’s biggest consumers of them.
And that includes France.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There was once widespread agreement about phlogiston (a nonexistent element said to be a crucial part of combustion), eugenics, the impossibility of continental drift, the idea that genes were made of protein (not DNA), homosexuality was a mental disease. and stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and so forth—all of which proved false.
Science, Richard Feyman once said, is “the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Scientists today purport to tell us how the world works, just as yesterday's high priests did. Those without means to directly confirm what is said (the majority of us), need to take their word for it.
Of course today's scientists support their contentions with data, facts etc. which supposedly were collected without any bias; just like yesterday's priests supported their contentions with "evidence" collected (charred stuff, etc.).
Finally today's Scientists corroborate each other's findings, just as yesterday's priests did.
Unfortunately, just as yesterday, there are Scientists today that skew stuff for their own interests and muddy the waters, and too many of the unwashed masses are willing to follow them.
All in all I will still take today's scientists over yesterday's (or today's) priests, but I do have to keep an open mind to figure out if what they are saying is truly the way things work, or if they are just guessing to give themselves a name.
TFA points out how people can cherry pick the information they want to believe and then call themselves experts on a subject.
Unfortunately I don't see a way to fix this....
'consensus' has no place in science. A scientific fact does not care whether 1 or 1 billion so called scientists believe it. Even fundamental scientific 'facts' need to be reevaluated and questioned all the time with no emotion or attachment either way. Beyond that is proselytizing your religion. It might not be so bad when the scientific consensus is that GMOs are harmless but how long will it be till the 'scientific' consensus is that biological sex is now known as gender and is an illusion that doesn't matter but there are definitely 59 of them at least and you better believe in them to be a tolerant person otherwise we'll destroy your livelihood?
Yes, if you disagree with the scientific consensus, then you will get a lot of facts wrong (which are based on scientific consensus - or at least science). It's like saying flat earthers get the question about the earth being round wrong. This may be true, but you could have deducted this without doing any research as it's a tautology.
"You are wrong [geneticlit...roject.org], whilst growing GMO crops in France is prohibited, their import and consumption is perfectly legal: "
Well... One little thing might be that insects aren't mammals. There are great numbers of things insects can eat that you cannot. There are also a great number of things you can eat that **specific** insects (or classes of) cannot. Take a Monarch caterpillar and put it in a container of nice, fresh fruit - and watch it die. Your sentence exposes your physiological ignorance.
Well, the observation about their wheat and its effects on friends and acquaintances who have visited there, is as real as it gets.
Being wrong about France and their use of GMO products is embarrassing, but I will accept when I am wrong.
I still stand by the statement about GMO wheat no longer being food for people through its modification.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Stephen Hawking
Then again, maybe he repeated some other quote he read and I'm now victim of the illusion of knowledge myself?
A real scientist doesn't even give a shit about "experts". Experts can be (and have been) wrong. No scientist should "believe" any other scientist. Show me the EXPERIMENT, show me the DATA, and let me reproduce it for myself. Then we'll talk about whether we agree or not. All of this "belief" in science or in studies or in experts is absolutely contrary to the scientific method which MANDATES reproducible experimental results. Failure of this model, which is what we have now, lets us believe in charlatan "experts" and bogus agenda driven "studies" which no one either has the time or money to reproduce, and be led down a path that's not necessarily the TRUTH - which is what science ultimately looks for.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I just trust the people that decide what to modify and how not at all. First, they will not have the best interest of the consumer at heart, they will want to maximize profits and, if they can, make people as dependent on _their_ product as they can. So the incentives are already utterly perverted. Second, they will not care about long-term environmental impact, they will care about short-term profits. With the power of modification that comes with GM, that could cause huge disasters that society (not those causing them) will then have to pay for. Now, I know that it is hard to cause such disasters. Most dangerous stuff is not viable in the field. Most modifications are small. But it just takes one instance (e.g. by a bad actor desperately trying to get rich) and we are screwed.
With that, I am very much opposed to GM food production (not research) at this time. Incidentally, this is also my main objection to the nuclear-industrial complex. It is not the tech, it is the people I have a problem with.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Of course the opposition to GMO is in large part an argument about whaet scientists don't know and the limits to their knowledge that they don't recognize.
I am also not sure what statistical studies tell us about the actual merits of the discussion. Some people are ignorant, they don't recognize it and oppose GMO. So what? That tells us nothing about the actual merits of their position, it is essentially just an ad-hominen argument. There are plenty of people who are not ignorant, recognize the limits of their knowledge and oppose GMO.
There are a lot of people who are "allergic" to MSG, but despite it's formidable sounding chemical name (monosodium glutamate), it is simply the sodium salt of glutamic acid, one of the most abundant amino acids in the human body, involved in a wide variety of physiological processes. Double blind studies show the Chinese Restaurant Effect is equivalent to a placebo.
Nonetheless I do not doubt for a moment that sensitive individuals experience a variety of food allergy responses after the consume food they *know* might contain MSG. Those responses are the immune system reacting to contaminated foods, and the ability for the brain to be able to trigger such responses makes evolutionary sense.
So our bodies can respond to ontological labels our brains place on the food we eat. It doesn't matter if our gut can't distinguish GMO wheat from traditionally selectively bred wheat, if we know it's there we'll feel it. It's not all in our head, but our head triggers it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"In one of their studies, 91 per cent of 1,000 American adults surveyed reported some level of opposition to GM foods." By WHY are they opposed? Are all forms of opposition to GM foods the same, and due to lack of science knowledge? The "rural" people I know are opposed to GMOs, not because of some perception that the food itself is unsafe, but because of how they experience the legality and economics of the ways the patents and intellectual property are enforced and regulated -- that these are bad for farmers. When you hear about the evils of Monsanto (try Google*), you don't find as much about "GMO seeds are teh evil" per se, but that the requirements, the fees, the lock-you-into-a-contract stuff is deeply problematic. Thus one could indeed be fairly ignorant about genetics but well-informed about these economic and regulatory issues, and still have a reasonable justification for opposition to GMOs. It really depends on how these researchers asked their questions, and I can't find a link to the questions in TFA. *Although this is a highly-contested area of internet space, with misinformation, sock-puppet accounts and more. So I'm not including any citations because the point is not whether these are correct, just whether the conversation re. opposition to GMOs is really about them being unhealthy vs. GMO-company economics being unhealthy. (edit: why has /. removed my newline breaks?)
English speaking people tend to misspell certain German digraphs by swapping the letters, for example ie (writing weiner instead of wiener) or ue (Kreuger instead of Krueger). I have no idea why, though.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Oh the idiot again.
Why don't you read your damened link, and try to comprehend it.
For animal food GMO is ok.
All food that is tainted with GMO food must be labeled. Allowed level for GMO food in human consumer products is at the 1% range ...
Most all over GMO growth is banned. No one really has an issue with eating it. Growing and destroying the local eco systems are the problem.
We don't eat it because we do not want to support that unnecessary industry. That is all. Oh, but that changed since a few years. With GMO food that is poisonous to insects and rats ... who in his sane mind would eat that?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A monarch caterpillar does not know it can eat fruits.
Pretty stupid example.
Most insects can eat 100 times per gram of weight the poison that would kill you ... should give you to think about what is going on with GMOed food hat produces its own poison or GMOed food that is resistent to poison put on it.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Krueger would be wrong, because that person already chose Kruger as the anglicization.
I'm waiting for the study that shows matter is made of atoms. People want to know!
And the "models" are a straw man argument. There are much more elementary arguments for Global Warming that don't need complicate models. For instance, we can measure the absorption spectrum of Carbon dioxide, and it's even possible to calculate it down to ten digits, and in accordance to the actual measurements. We have the Venus and the Mars (both have about 95% Carbon dioxide in their atmospheres, and we can measure the Greenhouse effect there. Actually, all celestial bodies with an atmosphere have a Greenhouse effect, even the Saturn moon Titan.
We know the development of the Carbon dioxide contents of the atmosphere during the last 120 years. In 1900, it was about 270 ppm, in the 1950ies, it was 300 ppm, in the 1980ies 330 ppm, and it's 410 ppm now. We can easily find out how much additional Carbon dioxide we need to add that much to the atmosphere (about 700 billion metric tons). We also know how much coal and oil we have mined (270 billion metric tons) and burned since the year of 1900, and how much Carbon dioxide it has generated (1000 billion metric tons). So about 70% of all that Carbon dioxide is still in the atmosphere, and 30% has disappeared (e.g. has acidified the ocean waters, increased the plant mass on Earth or formed compounds with minerals in the Earth's crust).
See? No complicated models. Just pure numbers and basic Arithmetics. The models serve a totally other purpose. They try to predict which effects the increased Greenhouse effect has: How much warming will actually happen? How strong will the melting of the glaciers be? How will weather patterns change? What will be the new layout of the climate zones? And when will we experience how much of what effect? And yes, here we have lots of uncertainity, and partly, we have large error bars. But the general statement stays the same: Global temperatures are rising, the ocean levels are rising, coastal areas will experience more flooding and will be lost, conditions for crops will change, and all that will lead to a large amount of resettlements of people, e.g. much more migration than today.
When someone says "they are the professionals" or "I am the professional" ignore them. They have nothing intelligent to say. Everyone is a human and they have the same problem... wanting to be right regardless of the outcome of the argument to get there.
First is the gate-keeping... the idea that if you are not credentialed in some way to speak on the subject then your input is not valid.
Next comes the Sheeplism... if you say something that is not "group-think" approved then you must be marginalized or discredited.
Then comes the Closed-Loop problem. The same people teaching the subject only pass or certify the people that believe in the subject in the "proscribed" way leading to in-the-box thinking where thought conformity is encouraged more than the goal of knowledge transfer or individual creative thought. It leads to mono-idealism where at best only one or two camps of anything can exist because there is no support for a 3rd since you are not allow to have your own opinions and will be over-powered by the already present non-thinking larger group of idiots.
And just like this article... Being opposed to scientific consensus makes you an idiot. Well, that in and of instead only reveals the moron writing this article is the biggest fucking moron. There has been more than enough scientific consensus that were wrong. In fact many "famous" scientists have spoken at length about problems like this and having to face it down in their professional careers. The endless cacophony of people seriously affected by the illusions of their own superiority calling out people that are actually more correct than them as morons.
It's also notable that they have knowledge that Dunning-Krueger *is* a thing.
Accurately describing how your detractors would react even *before* they start doing it is the best way of discounting anything they have to say. You *knew* they would, so you're smarter than them by default, right?
It's really just a way of psychologically profiling people ahead of time to make yourself sound reasonable: better to be the one who calls the behaviour out first because it gives your information the ring of truth just for knowing human psychology.
So it could go either way. The base truth is: an average person knows next to nothing about GMO foods and at worst the patents on them are designed to control the food supply and trade of poorer nations.
If a GMO food is patented, it ultimately doesn't matter if it can even feed people in 50C+ equatorial weather. If you're forbidden to collect seeds from the patented crops or are forced to use terminator seeds, you can't control what you feed to others in your nation and a multinational corporation has control of farmers.
People don't have a problem with science being used for good, but when Monsanto releases a new pesticide that destroys crops of other farmers, they have every right to scream. Clearly the author of the article is s shill for big agriculture and isn't actually reporting.
....has been well documented for 20 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...â"Kruger_effect
-Styopa
There are a LOT of people all over North America that have problems with wheat.
If they go somewhere like France (where it is Illegal to grow/use GMO wheat) they can eat anything, but the moment they get home, the problems start again.
That's an interesting assertion, can you show any studies done on a statistically significant group of people who cannot consume wheat in the USA but can abroad?
If the wheat is modified to be "resistant to bugs" so that the bugs can no longer eat it, what makes the engineers think it's still food for humans?
Well, the traits that make plants resistant to bugs frequently do not affect humans at all. Look at how voraciously humans consume peppers that are high in capsaicin, for example.
Is it little wonder that so many people are having trouble processing wheat (or other GMO foods)?
Less than 1% of the population has celiac disease, and somewhere around 0.4% actually have a wheat allergy. We could argue about whether that counts as "so many," but I have been unable to find any indication that there's a difference in those numbers based on nationality or whether you're eating GMO wheat or not.
There are so many sources on Youtube alone (yes, I know, that's not the best source, but come on!)
Youtube isn't "not the best source," it's a horrible source. It's filled with crackpot nutjobs who have no evidence and think that owning a camera makes them an expert.
Feel free to Google it for yourselves!
I did and found nothing. Can you provide a source that is actually backed by evidence?
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
English speaking people tend to misspell certain German digraphs by swapping the letters, for example ie (writing weiner instead of wiener) or ue (Kreuger instead of Krueger). I have no idea why, though.
German "wie" is pronounced roughly like English "we". IMHO, the same logic applies to a lot of other common misspellings: you know how the word sounds, then you try write it as if it were a word of your native language. To me, this always gives the impression that the person never studied any foreign languages, because (omg) different languages have different logic for spelling and pronunciation.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
First off, we don't have a food shortage, we have food distribution issues and corruption.
I've got nothing against advancing the fields of genetics. I fully expect future programming languages to be genetically based and we'll eventually engineer organisms to do stuff for us. However I am against how most companies are doing it. Currently they're producing fruits that taste better. Meaning sweeter fruits which means fruit with more sugar. They're turning healthy food into candy so you'll buy more of it from their company. I don't agree with that type of change. Until GMO laws require companies to say what feature they added/removed/changed so people can make educated choices if they want to, I'm forced to be against all GMOs. Considering the bullshit of allowing non-human readable labels on food, we'll never get the labeling laws I want.
Lastly, remember Firefly.
Why would anyone trusty anything from Rational Wiki? This is a site that reports Donald Trump is an honorary Cossack, based on a second hand report from a Russian tabloid of questionable veracity.
As ever, this promotes something that supports the general bias of the site, so they mention that this is a thing, and assert it strenuously, but don't put any weight on the studies that contradict the findings. There's a single link to a paper that claims "Evidence of factual backfire is far more tenuous than prior research suggests. By and large, citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their ideological commitments." but no mention of this in the article body.
Ironically, Rational Wiki is a victim of confirmation bias. Although to be fair, I'm pretty certain the entire site is satire.
Oh look, a perfect example of what the article claims.
You have zero knowledge of the subject, and claim that if it isn't suited for insects that that somehow has any bearing on suitability for humans.
There are indeed. I read this interesting book on crop circles and another on astrology.
They were complete and utter bollocks, of course, but I learned a fair bit about what the authors claimed was the truth.
What this article ignores is a long, long history of science telling us to do one thing, while eventually having to recant the whole thing,
How many people still believe that aluminum causes Alzheimers? That eggs are bad for your health? There are a lot of other examples where consensus has been wrong, and not just by a little bit.
So why should we not be skeptical of what climate scientists say now? Why should we not say, even if the prognosis for warming is right, what if they are wrong about root cause?? The reasonable person with any kind of understanding even of just modern, never mind ancient, history SHOULD be a skeptic, always - with good reason. It's the rabid non-skeptics you learn over a lifetime to distrust completely.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So it's not the "Dunning-Krueger" effect, it's the "Stunning-Goober" effect.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You're assuming that everyone's opposition to genetically modified foods is based in science. If it's based in something else, then their ignorance of the science is irrelevant.
E.g.: My opposition to genetically modified foods is based around patent law and biased food safety regulations/regulators. I do happen to have a reasonably good understanding of genetics, but that's almost irrelevant to my opposition. (It's relevant to certain corner cases, so I can't say actually irrelevant. E.g. the spread of BT infusing genes into the weed gene pool is likely related to the decline in butterflies and many other insects, though I wouldn't call it a major cause without a study.) So I'm not intrinsically against genetically modified foods, but I'm strongly against the existing implementation. (As a related fact, I don't use either MS software or Apple software because I won't agree to their EULAs.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Ego is inversely proportional to knowledge ~ Albert Einstein.
While they reference Trump, it think it applies to almost everyone with an internet connection. Trust me on this. I know a lot.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
ever heard of the lunatic fringe?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Enough said.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
"Objectivity" is impossible to obtain by one's self.
So Newton's Laws of Motion were not objectively true until a lot of other people agreed that they were? And Archimedes' groundbreaking work in mathematics, which anticipated such 18th century advances as the integral calculus by over 1900 years, cannot have been objectively true as very few others at the time - possibly no one at all - appreciated their importance.
No explorer - especially an explorer in space or on a far planet - should ever be alone, lest her scientific judgment be hopelessly subjective.
It is worrying to reflect that Einstein's shockingly innovative ideas about relativity did not become "objective" until after they had been published. Although if that were the case, how could he have arrived at them while he was the only person in the world thinking along those lines?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
First and foremost, you don't need to be outside of the scientific consensus to have an extreme viewpoint. You don't need bad data to propose bad solutions. People are doing it absolutely every day. And this notion that scientific consensus means anything, and that no new information is allowed through those hallowed halls is equally troubling. Not arguing that every idiot with a microphone should be allowed to speak. Just saying that the scientific consensus has been dead wrong, more than a few times in the last 500 years. We need to be open to new and iconoclastic ideas. We'll be worse for the ware if we dismiss everything as crazy and/or uninformed.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Oh, and... fuck orthodoxies.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
This phrase is never used when there is a real science. It used only for politically favored modeled outcomes in very complex systems.
Nobody uses the phrase "scientific consensus" when it is actually achieved: when series of definitive experiments are carried and then carried again and again.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
For animal food GMO is ok.
All food that is tainted with GMO food must be labeled. Allowed level for GMO food in human consumer products is at the 1% range ...
So, you can or cannot sell GMO food to humans? Because you kind of just said both.
No one really has an issue with eating it.
So why is it down at 1%, if there's no issue - and what about the other slashdotter in this thread who explicitly states otherwise - that they have a big issue eating it? And somehow I'm the idiot? Of course, you're the one who also didn't realize the US Midwest is East of the Rockies, and wanted to talk about the Florida mountains, so...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
> German "wie" is pronounced roughly like English "we".
In what region of which German speaking country?
I've heard it many times, on the East side of the Rhine river, and in Vienna (the Wien in Wiener, by the way)
In both places, the 'Wie' is pronounced as a straight 'Vee'. There is no hint of anything like a rounded vowel, such as in the English 'we' or French 'oui'.
No good deed goes unpunished...
The Backfire Effect has been grossly over-sold. Even the original evidence for it wasn't all that strong in the first place, and attempts at confirming it haven't been doing so well:
If you like cheap irony: the widespread conviction that the Backfire Effect is real is itself a sign of cognitive limitations-- people really like that story, and won't let go of it.
Which part of:: there is no issue with eating, but there is an issue with growing/planting most of GMO food, don't you get?
1% is not ok, it is the law ... that is all. Because factories that e.g. treat soy beans can not be expected to clean perfectly after they used a bunch of GMO soys and switch for a different customer later to non GMO soys. Obviously the second batch can contain traces of the first.
Sorry, but do you really have mental problems? If so I will try to be more polite and explain things more carefully in shorter sentences to you ...
and what about the other slashdotter in this thread who explicitly states otherwise - that they have a big issue eating it? That is their problem, not mine. I simply don't eat GMOed food, I would not buy it if I saw it in a grocery. If you mean the health problems regarding wheat from the US versus wheat from/in France: that is most certainly a treatment issue of the food/wheat (bread!) and not caused by the fact that the US version is a GMO one ... but: the devil is a squirrel. I don't know for what purpose the wheat in the US is genetically modified or what proteins or other things are inside "ordinary wheat" does not have. And I don't really care as long as it is forbidden to sell it anywhere on the planet where I use to live, which is EU and the Tiger nations. The main reason I never was in the US is the gun problem and the food problem.
I'm anti GMO e.g. because the US always put pressure unto the EU to allow to sell their junk here. Same bullshit they tried 20 - 30 years ago to get all Japanese rice farmers out of business by trying to force Japan to change import laws for rice, tariffs etc. Americans are often so dumb it is unbelievable. Unfortunately US retaliated and destroyed the Japanese economy for it ... but well, Japanese and the rest of the Asians has a long long memory. Ah, for some strange reason you call the orientals and not asians ... I keep forgetting that :D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So eating GMO is fine, but you're not supposed to grow it. Got it. That's about as retarded as talking about the Florida Mountains...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Sure ... if you know nothing about GMOs ... the answer makes perhaps sense, I mean, to you.
Florida has mountains, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... dumbass.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Maybe you confuse water vapor with methane? This is actually much more potent than Carbon dioxide. Luckily, it has also vastly less concentration in the atmosphere (1.8 ppm compared with 410 ppm for Carbon dioxide). Thus it's absolute Greenhouse effect is thus only about a quarter of that of Carbon dioxide. And it gets destroyed very fast by sun rays. If we stop producing methane, the methane content of the atmosphere will drop immediately (within days!). But as I already wrote: About 70 percent of the whole Carbon dioxide we produced within the last 120 years) is still in the atmosphere.
Only a dumbass would consider a 95 meter hill a "mountain". Hey, did you also figure out that the Midwest is East of the Rockies?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Sensitivity to poisons also varies from one poison to another. Why would something be selected for use as an insecticide if it harmed humans more than it did insects? An insecticide would be chosen because insects are sensitive to it whereas humans are not -- that's what makes it an 'insecticide'.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The typical claim is that some people are 'gluten sensitive', even if they don't have actual celiac disease. I have some anecdotal evidence that American wheat tends to aggravate inflammatory bowel disease, whereas European wheat doesn't as much. The most plausible speculation I've heard is that American wheat has more glyphosate residue on it due to higher usage (for desiccation especially).
FWIW, glyphosate came to market in 1974, and the first reports of non-celiac gluten sensitivity were reported in 1976. I.e. the condition might not predate glyphosate, even if it's coincidental timing.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Clearly he works for Big Insect.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Never happened. That chunk of wood wasn't given by NASA to a museum, it was given to the Dutch Prime Minister by an American ambassador.
Either the ambassador or the PM (or both) obviously had a brainfart and believed that the token gesture was actually a real moon rock. That was a rather silly assumption given that the thing was about 90 times larger than the real lunar rock samples which were given out to friendly nations. The Dutch received something like 5 actual moon rock samples, so it's not like they didn't know what size the things were supposed to be ...
I think what he means is that the English pronounciation of the wie in wiener sounds identical to the English word spelt we.
This reminds me of how older children are most likely to die in a survival situation (lost in the woods in the winter etc.) because younger children follow their instincts and adults have enough knowledge to reason out their survival. Older children attempt to reason out their survival but don't have the knowledge/wisdom to do so as successfully as if they had just followed their instincts.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
That's an interesting hypothesis, but there is really no good reason to suspect that roundup has any effect on IBS, and certainly no known mechanism for such an action. It's just a wild guess.
Should be easy enough to test though. Would be great to see people complaining about "gluten allergies" actually put together a good study testing such a hypothesis instead of just waving anecdotes at us.
Why would something be selected for use as an insecticide if it harmed humans more than it did insects? An insecticide would be chosen because insects are sensitive to it whereas humans are not -- that's what makes it an 'insecticide'.
But they are not chosen that way. And if you would follow the news you would knew that stuff like roundup is about to be abolished on most parts of the planet: because it harms humans.
How you come to the braindead idea that there are poisons that harm insects more than humans is beyond me anyway. Insects are the resilent parts of the eco system ... they are the beasts that nearly survive anything.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Hmm... People from Vienna (German: Wien) are Wiener, people from Hamburg are Hamburger...
We're one delicious people, folks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is known that IBD diagnoses have spiked in the USA in the past couple decades, which suggests an environmental factor. Use of glyphosate for desiccation of wheat became popular in the late 1990s. I did some quick Googling and it seems glyphosate may affect gut bacteria, the jury's still out on that for humans, so my next best guess would be directly causing inflammation of the gut, if it were implicated. This was mostly over my head but it suggests glyphosate might cause tryptophan deficiency which could lead to IBD and other maladies. Couldn't find any experiment that specifically found a link between glyphosate and IBD.
Another possibility I learned of while researching this is that benzoyl peroxide, which is added to white flour to bleach it, is causing inflammation somehow. It's not added to flour in the EU.
And of course there are countless other possibilities I haven't considered. Probably the best place to start would be a study on if European wheat really does cause fewer digestive problems, since it could be tested cheaply, quickly, and easily.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It is known that IBD diagnoses have spiked in the USA in the past couple decades, which suggests an environmental factor
Possibly, but not necessarily. It could be due to changes in diet, a change in the obisity rate, a change in the prevelance of a related condition, or even genetic factors.
More importantly, you're assuming that the increase is limited to the USA, but this is not the case. A quick search shows that rates in some (or maybe all) EU nations have also gone up. And some studies have found that rates seem to be going up globally:
https://www.mdmag.com/medical-...
If you're going to point to the increasing rates in the USA as evidence, you first need to show that nations which do not use glyphosate at all (or use very little) have not had a corresponding increase.
Lastly, keep in mind that glyphosate isn't just used for drying wheat; it's also used for drying oats, and several other plants. This doesn't change anything as far as the increase in IBD goes, but if the "gluten allergy" people were really reacting to glyphosate, they should have issues with far more foods than just wheat. Oats are often suggested as a replacement for wheat, so we should have seen some problems there for sure.
We obviously have very different editions of the bible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your link says ulcerative colitis is nearly twice as prevalent in Norway as it is in the US. Norway isn't part of the EU (although is part of the european economic area) so may not have the same regulations/food properties as EU countries. Importation of wheat or processed foods made using US wheat should be kept in mind, though. The Western diet causing microbiota changes which increase susceptibility to IBD seems likely.
I doubt that Norway uses so much more glyphosate than the US that that would plausibly explain the difference in people having the disease. However, that says nothing about symptoms being triggered by consuming glyphosate, once one already has the disease, which was what I was originally talking about. Good point about the oats, though. It could be that people give oats a pass since they don't contain gluten, like the opposite of confirmation bias. As usual, more research is required.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
English speaking people tend to misspell certain German digraphs by swapping the letters, for example ie (writing weiner instead of wiener) or ue (Kreuger instead of Krueger). I have no idea why, though.
Because we won the bloody war.
Jokes aside, people unfamiliar with a language will mispronounce it because they simply aren't the letter sounds they're used to. With common languages like English and German we often have the same sounds but different spellings. It gets really difficult with very foreign languages like Thai that have a "pb" sound that is very hard for a westerner to pronounce. With English, we're kind of used to it as English itself is a mongrel language and defending it's purity is like defending the virtue of the town bike.
But proper nouns don't change according to language. A German bloke named Krueger would still be Krueger in English.
Also Slashdot shite unicode support so anything with an Umlaut or Virgulilla (tilde above the N used in Spanish) can't be easily displayed here.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The fact that the 15 true or false questions were not shared makes me question if they were as factual as claimed. If I was to make a questionnaire, and on make half of the items talking points of an argument I was promoting, I would be unsurprised to find the people who disagreed with me performing poorly. So until it is verified that the questions aren't of the "GMO crops will save billions of lives in the coming century: True or False?" variety, I will treat this study very skeptically.
The point in any case is are you safe from accidental seeding?
Yes, you are. Provide just one single example of someone being sued for "accidental seeding", or shut the fuck up.
Yes, we aren't insects. But you seem to forget that there is more bacteria in us than there is us in us. If you choose to eat a food that kills bacteria very effectively, but doesn't hurt human cells. you can still end up harmed because your gut biome has been destroyed. Of course Monsanto knows what their product does, they just don't want you to know what it does.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
The highest elevation in Florida is Britton Hill at 105 meters/345 feet above sea level. If you consider that a mountain then you're the dumbass.
This is the highest mountain in Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Albeit it is objectively just a hill. A pile of "mud". They call it a mountain. I don't have the time to research which hills in Florida are called mountains ...
But we could agree on calling everything just an "elevation" ... asshole.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I first came across the backfire effect as such roughly two years ago from the following presentation:
Dan Saks on talking to C programmers about C++ — September 2016
Key point: If you're arguing, you're losing.
Some of my old bookmarks:
18m00 "show me all the data you want, C++ is still undesirable"
28m00 Jonathan Haidt and motivated reasoning
43m50 ethics of persuasion
46m50 backfire effect
55m26 concrete suggestions
Concrete suggestions begins with the simple question: "how would you define a data type?" and then delivers a lesson on articulating what you (probably) already know.
Then there's a case study on developing a type safe array memcpy in pure C (you can almost get there, but not quite).
Along the way there's a pointed case study in humility porn on implicit decay in function argument context, which I think is intended to raise "good grief" eyebrows on both sides of the aisle.
What is array decaying?
Exceptions to array decaying into a pointer?
This presentation feels as old as dirt and twice as slow, but the value is solid.