Weird. Both of these should be textbook examples of how to tell lies using only "scientific" truths.
It's very easy to look at both at these data points and think "oh, so it's okay to just go and support GMO and ignore organic farmers". In reality though, the criticism against GMO is how its wide-scale adoption destroys genetic diversity, and how this lack of diversity is a huge potential source of systemic risks.
Always worth remembering that our staple crops are already GMO - just done by hand over thousands of years. Corn used to look more like wheat does today. All of the derivatives we've created from the wild mustard plant. Bananas used to have seeds.
Moving goalposts is a common argument used by GMO opponents. People absolutely do disagree with the genetic modification. All the time. Even throughout the comment threads in this submission.
And if we want to talk scale, do you see corn that looks like wheat being planted and harvested? At all? Of course not - it wouldn't provide enough yield to be useful.
Bananas is also an example of this process of “GMO-by-hand” stopping due to economic reasons, leading to monocultures susceptible to disease, twice as I understand it.
> In reality though, the criticism against GMO is how its wide-scale adoption destroys genetic diversity
That's only one possible outcome, and I think it's not a very likely one long term. Genetic modification can create large numbers of variants, so could potentially increase genetic diversity significantly.
I think more of a criticism is the unknown consequences of modified genetic material escaping into other species by horizontal gene transfer.
These are indeed links but quite random ones. Mostly they are reporting that growing two things together in a field can give higher yields than growing a single thing. None seem to be related to GMOs, which could obviously also be grown with complimentary species to increase yield.
All crops are inclined to be grown in monocultures. That's because even if you'd get more yield pairing with other species — as in these studies — pragmatically the time and cost of sowing, harvesting and separating multiple species outweighs the theoretical yield gain per unit area of a monocrop.
There is no biodiversity in agriculture. Whether or not the seeds you purchased have been edited to add drought resistance or high vitamin A content or other fantastic benefits to humankind you are still growing a monoculture, just as you were with non-GMO crops.
On the local level, yes. But I pointed out that the issue is with "wide-scale" adoption. GMO manufacturers make it so that the same, e.g, rice or carrots or tomatoes are grown in different parts of the world.
To re-iterate: there is no biodiversity in agriculture. As an example, "non-GMO" bananas are cloned from a single species the world over. If you'd be concerned about a single disease destroying genetically-identical crops worldwide, that happened with the Gros Michel cultivar in the 20th century. Competing GMO banana products would introduce more diversity than exists today.
Links showing that the primary criticism is as you say; most critics of GMO and proponents of organic that I know are all about "only putting natural stuff in my body"
That's not a belief, this is a stated preference, and you would be fully entitled to ignore it as "invalid criticism" due to the confusion between facts and opinions.
The belief that you are actually asking me to "back up with links" is that GMO reduces genetic diversity. Do you really need a link for that?
There's no need to get so worked up. But yes, you have to provide more evidence than just a claim, expect everyone to assume that it's somehow logically congruent, and that all skeptics are stupid.
It could be that 10 different heirloom crops have been displaced by 10 different GMO varieties (perhaps each optimized for water usage, pest tolerance, nutrition depending on regional needs).
I don't know if this is what actually happened, but it's certainly not true that the existence of GMO crops will by definition significantly decrease overall biodiversity.
I think the parent's point was providing evidence that the lack of biodiversity causes harm. To put this plainly - if every banana that is harvested in a farm and consumed by a human is identical, then so what? It doesn't mean bananas that aren't harvested by humans also will share that same DNA.
Even then, if every banana in the world was genetically identical what harmful effect would this have? I can probably speculate, but I'm genuinely curious what the science says.
On the basis of the article that you linked to, I think it would be more accurate to say that "currently available GMO food is not thought to be harmful to humans."
There is nothing inherent in genetic modification that prevents if from being used to create food that is harmful when consumed by people (or animals) - whether due to toxicity or negative dietary effects. There probably isn't much incentive to do the former (except maybe as a weapon of war or terrorism), but engineering unhealthy but addictive foods isn't hard to imagine.
Similarly, theres nothing in the technology that prevents it from being used to develop plants or animals that cause harm to their environment - for example by runaway reproduction, excessive use of resources like water, affecting species equilibria, etc.
I personally wouldn't be worried about eating a GMO foodstuff, but I'm extremely unhappy about the environmental impact of ideas like terminator seeds or engineered pesticide resistance that leads to over-use of pesticides, and I wouldn't call them "safe".
> On the basis of the article that you linked to, I think it would be more accurate to say that "currently available GMO food is not thought to be harmful to humans."
I would actually say instead that "there is no reason to think that genetic modification itself introduces any additional danger to the food". Of course you can create dangerous food using GMO. You can also just poison it, too.
> There is little scientific evidence of benefit or harm to human health from a diet high in organic food, and conducting any sort of rigorous experiment on the subject is very difficult
It would be more correct to say "healthier than non-organic food". I read your message at first thinking you meant organics were unhealthy :)
Yeah I don’t think you can say that about GMOs - besides the issues of seed patenting/subsequent litigation and self terminating seeds - the EPA was just ordered to re assess the safety of roundup. And there’s plenty of studies that show round up probably isn’t great. https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...
The paper you link isn't a study, it is a "discussion", and the author also states the following:
> The emails further demonstrated that since 2005 Monsanto has attempted to destroy my team’s work and reputation, in particular by recruiting third-party, supposedly independent experts at the highest levels to voice ghost-written and biased arguments (Henry Miller or Wallace Hayes, for instance [10,11,12]), who did not, however, publicly disclose their links with Monsanto
I'm not saying that the author is wrong, or that their criticisms of the other study are meritless (I have 0 experience in this field), especially with the widespread ethics concerns they point out.
But this particular paper doesn't draw any conclusions.
I never said it draws any conclusions - I'm just saying that "GMOs are harmful" has not been conclusively invalidated by data by any means - and there's definitely plenty of data out there to cause concern IMO.
I don't buy organic food because I think it's healthier either btw. I do it because of the environmental impacts - same reason I buy local as much as possible via CSAs for my meat and veggies - whether they are certified organic or not (you can usually find a local farm that has practices just as good or better than certified organic anyways). It's super ironic to me that people think they're being environmentally friendly or saving the earth with GMO non-organic food just because it isn't meat. For all the conspiracies around Bill Gates I think his ideas of using tech to save the environment are scarier because it's actually ignoring science.
The title of this post says "conclusively invalidated by data" and I'm not sure anything is conclusive when it comes to organic food.
The evidence that the Moderna vaccine lowers the risk of death due to COVID is conclusive in the sense that a controlled, double blind study was performed and we have determined with some degree of certainty (>99.9%) that the vaccine is effective. But it's relatively easy to design an experiment.
How would you even go about designing an experiment for organic food. Giving a vaccine is binary... it was given on two occasions or it wasn't. With organic food, if there are benefits to it, they are most likely over a much longer term. So you'd need to police a participant's eating habits for years or maybe even decades to test your hypothesis. It's not a practical experiment to perform. At best we can say "there's no scientific evidence that organic food is better for you than non-organic", but that's not the same as saying "we have concluded with 99.9% certainty that organic food is no better for you than non-organic food".
Certain things just can't be tested effectively, especially things as complicated as diet. This is why dietary recommendations change so frequently. Still, not everything requires conclusive science. There's never been a controlled experiment showing that parachutes save skydivers' lives. But sometimes common sense trumps the need for scientific inquiry.
EDIT: Please don't read this as anti-science. On the contrary, science is great for answering certain questions, but has limitations for other questions.
"The world is getting worse" is a belief perpetuated by the media and repeated by many people to explain their own unhappiness. However, many important indicators show things are getting better globally https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health...
The world itself never gets better or worse. Facts or data about the world are not value-laden. We impose our values and judgments of the world and decide whether things are getting better or worse.
We might make judgments to this end that misalign with our values or misunderstand the data, but that doesn't mean a judgment like "the world is getting worse" will ever be wrong. It will always true in some respects and not true in other respects.
I'm genuinely curious; did you truly not understand the intent of author in the comment you are replying to?
When someone says the "world is worse", I automatically know they mean a value judgment "for them" or "for humans" or "for animals" and not some scientific, objective measure on the "Planet Earth Goodness Scale".
A valid criticism in this case is that they are clearly valuing humans above other species because the world is objectively worse for the Rusty-patched bumble bee, to pick an example, which is critically endangered.
I don't know, but Steven Pinker (the loudest proponent of this claim) says such sincerely, and besides him, most ordinary people are moral/value realists and think there are genuine answers to these types of questions.
Yes, but that is still value laden. You cannot objectively compare 2 different domains like the benefit of improved healthcare vs the cost of destroyed ecosystems.
Doesn't this just shut down conversation instead of nuance and clarity? It's definitely one way to address the ambiguity in a question like "is the world getting worse over time?" but doesn't seem useful: dismissing the question entirely discourages learning and discussion rather than adding to it. Instead, we could think of what most people (or an imagined reasonable person) might mean by that question, and how the media and scientific communities define and engage it.
For others, there's possibly quite a large room for cherry-picking data. I'm very happy if the following can be proved to be negligible ( or wrong ):
>Extreme poverty falling
I'm not sure how the math ($1) can already be an adjusted for inflation / price variances. Probably should be using the income / wealth equality instead.
>People in developed countries have more leisure time
But not in developing countries. Following the links, I find our working levels stay pretty much the same above the 2000h line. Also I'm interested in how much we compare to pre-industrial level.
>Smoking is down, but not so much in developing countries
>Homicide rates have fallen dramatically, but only counting US and EU
>The share of income spent on food has plummeted in the US
No mention of developing countries. World-wide the homicide rates looks to be about the same-ish ?.
>People have been getting taller for centuries
There are more to nutrition than height, and world-wide looks like it has been same-ish since 1970.
>More people in the world live in a democracy now
50/50 on this one, mainly cause I'm not sure if the democracy index is measured objectively, or they just extend to whatever countries on good terms with the US.
>Tech & Moore's law
I'm skeptic of more tech leads == better life, particularly when more people reported more internet time ~= decreased mental health.
These are mostly international statistics, and a lot of the progress being made is first China and now Africa and India catching up with the west. And that's great.
In the United States, however, things have been going somewhat backwards since the mid 70's. The millennial generation is poorer than their parents were at the same age. Civil rights are beginning to get rolled back. The political situation is fraught.
There are also, as others have pointed out, a number of red flashing danger signs coming from the environment. The earth is limited, and we're treating it as if it's infinite.
So, from my point of view, here, the "world is getting worse" belief has some justification.
If anyone is curious about more data why the world (for humans) isn't actually getting worse, there is a whole book written about it (with lots of data points described and discussed): Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker
> A commonly-held lay public perception holds that the world is in terrible shape; for some, 2016 was the "worst year ever" and the year that liberalism died. In contrast, Pinker argues that life has been getting better for most people. He sets out 15 different measures of human wellbeing to support this argument, with the most obvious being the uncontroversial fact that, statistically, people live longer and healthier lives on average than ever before.
> It argues that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have brought progress; shows our progress with data that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness have tended to rise worldwide; and explains the cognitive science of why this progress should be appreciated.
There are many metrics. I was mainly interested to know which ones would be selected. The whole thread is about using data instead of widely held beliefs...
In America:
"Don't swim for 30 minutes after eating or you will cramp"
"You should be drinking 8 glasses of water a day"
In Korea:
"Sleeping with a fan on is dangerous as it will steal your breath"
> "Don't swim for 30 minutes after eating or you will cramp"
That's a new one for me, but I'm from Europe. I spent my childhood on rivers and lakes, rapidly alternating between food and swimming (and other things). No cramps due to food (scarcely any at all to be honest). I've had a lot more cramps in swimming pools than in natural water, now that I think about it.
> "You should be drinking 8 glasses of water a day"
I could believe that. I used to drink ~4 glasses a day, but it made me feel like a lizard (without really realizing the cause at the time). Now I drink more than 8 and feel much better.
Don't hold me to this, but if I recall, the recommendation is to consume 8 cups (1 cup = 8 oz ≈ 0.23L) of water a day, and the water contained in our food counts. This is to say, people conflated 8 cups of water to mean 8 glasses of water.
'conclusively proven' is a high bar, particularly when paired with 'commonly'. If it has been conclusively proven false then why is it still commonly believed? It's pretty easy to say 'because I'm smarter than everyone else' but it's also a cop-out.
Can it be proven for every single person or living entity? Can it be proven for every location? Can it be proven for every time, every season, every year. You can show the minuscule odds that someone will win the lottery yet people do win lotteries. What can you prove?
I imagine that for a while it was conclusively proven that heavier objects do not fall faster than lighter ones but it was still commonly believed. Maybe it is still widely believed today.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." After being hit by a truck, surviving cancer, returning from a long war, or losing a child, experience (data) teaches you otherwise.
I'm not sure you could "prove" either way on this with any amount of data.
My personal anecdote is that hard times made easier times more fulfilling, and early hardship in my life has made later hardship much easier to deal with, in comparison to my peers.
But there is also a limit to that of course. Not sure how I'd handle losing a child for example, or if I'd ever be able to overcome something like that.
Hormesis is definitely "a thing". Getting hit by a truck may injure you to the point of being permanently weakened, but a series of lesser traumas will generally improve your bone and connective tissue strength.
The phrase is technically incorrect, but the spirit of it absolutely is.
A very recent one for me is that a lack of electrolytes is not a likely cause for cramps. The current science is still up in the air and the conclusion at the moment is "we still don't really know"
Not to be pendantic but I guess since we are talking about science and data, that article suggests to me that people do intend to do things to maximize happiness, but that they’re not very good at it, not that they originally seek out to not maximize happiness. There are some in things in there that could imply it but it doesn’t seem to go there.
I think the difficulty is that we all have many desires that are in equilibrium. We might say that we want to quit smoking, or lose weight, or whatever, but in practice that desire has to overcome other desires, and particularly the individual's time preference, to come to a new equilibrium.
The fact that the new equilibrium doesn't shut out all other desires in favor of a single focus shouldn't be surprising at all.
Vaccines causing autism seems like a good example. The original studies about this were fraudulent/wrong, and their effects have basically never been replicated since.
Also that of people only using 10% of their brain, since it's more accurate that people use different parts of their brains at different times. No, using 100% wouldn't give you psychic powers or make you superhuman or whatever else some works of fiction and new age mystics might posit.
Well with the advance of video gaming and high refresh rate displays that went out of the window quickly. Nowadays you even have 120hz displays on smartphones so easy to show someone the plain difference between 30fps and 120fps.
At home I have a 240hz monitor and even the difference between 144fps and 240fps is noticeable albeit not that big difference as between 30fps and higher ones.
Beliefs that are invalidated by data are guaranteed to be wrong.
Beliefs not conclusively supported by data may be wrong. Some such beliefs turn out to be essential to human functioning, like "My life is not just an extended dream or hallucination," "I have the ability to choose what I do," and "It is wrong to murder other people for their possessions."
I'd say the former is more interesting than the latter.
Oh there are plenty of interesting and innocuous ones in either category... Perhaps the most important part is almost no one cares what is true on certain classes of questions.
> Perhaps the most important part is almost no one cares what is true on certain classes of questions.
My experience has been slightly different, which is that almost no one is willing to accept that they could be wrong about certain classes of questions.
This has similar effects to no one caring what is actually true, but it is not quite the same thing.
To me, not caring what is true is exactly that - not caring. Your actions might be rooted in truth or not, but you don't care. You get your dopamine hits and who gives a shit how they came to happen?
Being certain that you're right is quite different. There, you care very intensely about what's true, but you're so confident in your knowledge of what's true that you can't even conceive of being wrong.
Both of them lead to pretty terrible behaviors, but the underlying reasons for those behaviors are quite different, IMO.
It's logically impossible, which is proof. The being would be unable to create an immovable object, because if they're omnipotent they would be able to move the object, if they can't move the object then they are not omnipotent.
I get the sense you aren't interested in this sort of feedback, but I'll give it a shot just in case:
I think when the average Christian or Muslim claims that God is omnipotent, they mean something like "God can do all logically possible things that don't fundamentally contradict its character."
Why's that matter?
Because the proof by contradiction you've constructed doesn't apply in their frame of reference.
Ok, sure, the paradox can’t be solved. But most of the time ‘omnipotent being’ would refer to a deity of some sort, and this only rules out an absolute deity of a very specific and narrow definition. I don’t think it applies to any of the deities I’ve come across in literature, religion or movies. I think the paradox itself is the problem.
You're changing the rules. The thread asked "What are examples of common beliefs conclusively invalidated by data?", I replied "Omnipotent beings", now you're bringing in "deities" that you specifically have come across in "literature, religion or movies". Now, given that I don't know you, and nor presumably does the person who asked the original question, how are we to know which movies, religions and literature you have been exposed to in order to ascertain whether the deities that you specifically know about would be covered by my answer? Obviously we can't. So given that, maybe it broadens out to just "deities", but of course, not all deities are supposed to be omnipotent. Which is exactly why I didn't say "deities". So in summary, I was right and you've constructed a very bizarre new argument to try to justify your original, very wrong, nitpick.
Your paradox only shows (conclusively, I might add) the logical impossibility of omnipotence _under one definition of omnipotence_. Not a very good one, nor one that is widely used by anyone who has thought about omnipotence at all. Other definitions of omnipotence (such as: being able to do all logically/metaphysically possible things) do not fail to this paradox, but beings that satisfy them would still be "omnipotent".
It's interesting however to consider _what exactly_ people believe counts as "omnipotent being" when they say they believe in the existence of one (e.g. religious people). If asked, many would probably only give the definition "omnipotence is being able to do anything". But "anything" doesn't necessarily mean "anything at all". People say to their children "you can do anything if you set your mind to it!" and that "anything" is not qualified explicitly, but it also is restricted to "anything that a normal human being can reasonably achieve given enough effort". If you pressed anyone on this issue, they wouldn't update their belief, they would update the definition they give you. Perhaps with omnipotence one would have the same result, where "being able to do anything" really means "being able to do anything not self-contradictory", and pointing that out doesn't change the belief, only the stated explicit definition. The reason I think this digression is interesting is that we're in a thread about "commonly held beliefs", and here we have a belief that is arguably about the definition of a word; but there is a missing step between believing that there can be omnipotent beings and producing one definition that would satisfy that belief, especially when multiple subtly different ones could be given, and not all of them are logically inconsistent or self-contradictory. It's a problem of epistemology and philosophy of language, of course, and not really about logic or theology.
Mind you, I don't think that any omnipotent being exists, not by any reasonable definition of omnipotent. I do believe one can make reasonable definitions of omnipotence that are consistent and logically possible; but there is no reason to believe that any such being exists.
As one of the posters above pointed out, I don't think you're particularly interested in discussing subtleties. Perhaps pointing out inconsistencies in this topic or argument doesn't change your belief of being right, but will just change the stated definition of "being right"... So I would like to extend a gentle reminder that discussions, even on the internet, do not need to be about being right. Sometimes nitpicking adds to the discussion, but it doesn't need to prove anyone wrong. We all get everything wrong all the time, but through talking about this stuff we all get a chance to learn something, to change a little. It really sucks that as soon as we _perceive_ the tiniest accusation of being wrong, we stop being kind and make huge asses out of ourselves to vindicate the truth of our superior, and usually very inconsequential, arguments.
3. Vaccines causing long-term damages more than Covid while Covid causes long-covid with long term damages 1 in 10 times and vaccines cause long-term damages 1 in 100,000 times.
4. Republican presidents being a good thing, they have a horrible economic track record, completely wreck the country every single time and Democractic presidents spend their terms building them back up until the next Republican president comes. https://itdoesnotaddup.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/capture21...
Basically every major right-wing talking point. :D
We've banned this account for using HN primarily (exclusively, in fact?) for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed on HN, regardless of which ideology or politics you favor. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so please don't create accounts to do this with.
Let’s see. It’s the 1980s, and our economy has been beset by 8-12% annual inflation, amidst general stagnation.
Is there anything we could do in this situation to increase economic output, and thus the supply of goods and services, and maybe even increase employment at the same time? Might any of those, perhaps, be promoted through the investment of capital, in any manner at all?
No!!! Like Nixon and Ford and Carter before us, we shall maintain very high taxes on the returns from capital investment, as we try subsidizing demand once again with stimulus spending! It’s sure to work this time.
How does failed economic policies show that "Trickle down economics" works? We've had a long period of stagnate wages results in a real reduction in buying power for a large portion of the population, objectively the "trickle down" part is not working.
And the same for other forms of media. Before video games became the scapegoat, we had people believing similar things about movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop games, music, etc. It'll probably be said of future forms of media too, if it isn't already.
Either way, the stats have never panned out for this sort of belief, and it usually seems to be a way to avoid having to think about political, social or mental health issues, access to weapons, or any other possible cause that might be controversial with a portion of the electorate.
> Vaccines causing long-term damages more than Covid while Covid causes long-covid with long term damages 1 in 10 times and vaccines cause long-term damages 1 in 100,000 times.
Do you know what long term is? We literally don't have enough data to determine which way this will go. According to the NIH they're collecting long term data that will end after 3 years of study[0]. I'm old enough to remember that COVID-19 started around November of 2019. The current date is June of 2022, if my math hasn't failed me, we still haven't hit 3 years of having COVID. Further, the vaccine came out in December of 2020. It's stupid to try and say that the vaccine is perfectly safe long term, the same way it's stupid to say it's dangerous long term. We literally just do not know.
And from that study you listed on trans folks regretting transition:
> Thirty-nine percent (39%) of respondents experienced serious psychological distress in the month before completing the survey (based on the Kessler 6 Psychological Distress Scale), compared with only 5% of the U.S. population.
> Forty percent (40%) have attempted suicide in their lifetime, nearly nine times the rate in the U.S. population (4.6%).
> Seven percent (7%) attempted suicide in the past year—nearly twelve times the rate in the U.S. population (0.6%).
So apparently trans folks are only 9-12x more likely to attempt to commit suicide, but we're still being told that there's absolutely no harmful physiological effects. After all they don't regret it.
"The majority of respondents who were out or perceived as transgender while in school (K–12) experienced some form of mistreatment, including being verbally harassed (54%), physically attacked (24%), and sexually assaulted (13%) because they were transgender. Further, 17% experienced such severe mistreatment that they left a school as a result.
In the year prior to completing the survey, 30% of respondents who had a job reported being fired, denied a promotion, or experiencing some other form of mistreatment in the workplace due to their gender identity or expression, such as being verbally harassed or physically or sexually assaulted at work.
In the year prior to completing the survey, 46% of respondents were verbally harassed and 9% were physically attacked because of being transgender. During that same time period, 10% of respondents were sexually assaulted, and nearly half (47%) were sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime.
Nearly one-third (29%) of respondents were living in poverty, compared to 12% in the U.S. population. A major contributor to the high rate of poverty is likely respondents’ 15% unemployment rate—three times higher than the unemployment rate in the U.S. population at the time of the survey (5%).
Respondents were also far less likely to own a home, with only 16% of respondents reporting homeownership, compared to 63% of the U.S. population. Even more concerning, nearly one-third (30%) of respondents have experienced homelessness at some point in their lifetime, and 12% reported experiencing homelessness in the year prior to completing the survey because they were transgender."
I feel like this kind of mistreatment is the reason for the self-harm. Trans people deserve respect and understanding, and then the suicide rate will go down.
> Forty percent (40%) have attempted suicide in their lifetime, nearly nine times the rate in the U.S. population
In their lifetime, not "since transitioning". If you felt like you were trapped inside someone else's body, you might attempt suicide too. A huge number of trans people go into the transition already fairly psychologically harmed by this, so none of these numbers are saying what you're implying they're saying.
Bio/organic food is healthier than the regular food: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#Health_and_safety