Re:Golden Rice meets food safety standards in three leading ...
by KingMob on Sunday May 27, 2018 @09:39PM
(#17170148)
I think you should read Taleb's followup Antifragile sometime. The point is not that black swans are unlikely, but that they are catastrophic, and we can't even quantify how unlikely they are, so we have to find ways to prepare for them without basing it on probability estimates.
That "something really bad" might be localized ecological collapse, which I find pretty compelling, too.
Re:Golden Rice meets food safety standards in three leading ...
by extrapickles on Friday May 25, 2018 @06:56PM
(#17158830)
Exactly. Possibly getting cancer when you are 70-80 would be a minor price to pay to not be guaranteed to starve to death when you are 5.
This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).
Re:Golden Rice meets food safety standards in three leading ...
by KingMob on Sunday May 27, 2018 @09:41PM
(#17170154)
A black swan would be less on the scale of "higher long-term risk of cancer", and more like "unintended side effect wiped out pollinators and now the local agriculture is imperiled".
Re:Golden Rice meets food safety standards in three leading ...
by abalone on Friday May 25, 2018 @06:59PM
(#17158850)
That is not "plainly more compelling." There is no undo button for GMOs -- once they are out in the wild there's no eradicating them.
For well over half a century we have understood that most famines are a result of entitlement failures, not lack of food availability.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of...
That's a non-sequitur, and you're adding the loss stats in with waste.
> And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster...
Once it's a black swan, it's already discounted, the term itself means the thing is unlikely.
I think the subject deserves more study, but we have people dying of hunger right now, and that's plainly more compelling than "something really bad might happen, we have no idea what, why or how likely it is."