And to me one of the worst, also recently covered by NPR: the big lies we were told about plastic being recyclable[1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

well the thing is, it's not impossible to recycle plastic, but the article also explains that really simple:

> Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."

1. no infrastructure for sorting, there is no 100% method as of today (basically no research is done on this topic) 2. even if it is feasible, nobody does it becasue it is expensive. 3. there are countries where plastic recycling works, but these are outliners and countries who heavily invest in sorting, recycling on the consumer side.

Disclaimer:

So I have a PhD in mtls science, and I studied a bit of plastics thermo. However I never worked on the recycling problem.

Plastics, or polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle - Just melt them and recast the part. 3D printing hobbyists even recycle their filament.

The problem is that any melted plastic doesn’t mix with any plastic other than itself. So if you have 99% polyethylene and 1% polypropylene and melt them together they won’t mix. But they won’t separate perfectly either (so you can’t skim the PP put).

Instead you get inter-penetrating phases (a spinodal). These phases have surfaces that don’t stick well together so the end result is that any parts made of this are exceptionally weak.

So this is the dilemma: if you have even 1% of different polymer in your mix, the plastic will suck. But we use at least 4 or 5 different plastics in everyday life all chucked into the same bins, all looking more less the same.

Solutions?

1. One solution is to heat all the plastics so that they break apart and therefore use them for feedstock. But this is very expensive, and the feedstocks aren’t very pure.

2 Make cat fuel. Cheaper then above, since the purity requirements aren’t as strong, but it’s basically the same as number 1. This doesnt increase CO2 emissions since the plastic is displacing oil

3. Burn it for energy. This needs far less strict requirements than 2 and lower CO2 emissions (since you don’t have to waste energy getting oil out). However, you’d have to basically ban public use of perfluorinated polymers or make them very expensive, or make them easy to identify (Teflon, gore-Tex.)

Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty.

4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.

> 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.

well I'm no expert in this topic, just a little bit more engaged with the topic. the biggest problem is that companies save tons of money not from different colors, but from different components. most cheese products for example have different types of plastic (MA/MH packaging, compound structure plastics are just cheap and easy to do), and most people do not know that if you don't separate them that it is way harder to recycle (some also just don't care). it's a hard topic and I've seen countries like sweden who tackle that problem by teaching everybody how to recycle plastics (they have multiple containers), but I do not thing that this is feasible worldwide. I mean I live in germany and my governement does not tackle the problem, they do not invenst, they do not regulate, all they do is calling itself "world champion of recycling", but what do they do? they declare burning waste as recycling (called thermetic recycling, point 3. but it's not recycling and we do not care about the emission when it comes to burning) or better, we declare it as recycled but ship it to africa / asia and don't look what they do with the waste at all. waste management is something that most countries don't feel pressured to change something. mostly because you would need to change multiple industries, the packaging industry and the waste management industry.

> Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty.

well a lot of things are nasty, but as long as they print money. it won't be banned/changed that fast.

Excellent point about the multiple components in products. Ppl don’t realize that there’s a plastic liner on their can of Coke (of course, that just gets burned off when the Al gets recycled)

About Germany’s “recycling” I despise it when “experts” talk down at ppl saying “white lies” because we’re too stupid to understand (Dr. Fauci, I’m looking at you buddy).

Burning plastic isn’t recycling and Germany’s neologism is sophistry.

But it is a decent solution short of significantly increasing the price of plastic. That’s assuming you burn it correctly. And correctly burning it requires very high temperatures to get rid of dioxins. It means making sure to reduce as much as possible Chlorine sulphuric and Fluorine in the feedstock. It means having excellent NOx filters. It means having super tough monitoring of the emissions

>I despise it when “experts” talk down at ppl saying “white lies” because we’re too stupid to understand (Dr. Fauci, I’m looking at you buddy).

What lie id Fauci say, that you're annoyed at?

I believe GP refers to the early lies about masks, so that people wouldn't buy them, so that there would be more available for health care workers.

I blame the person in charge at the time, who widely under-reported and downplayed everything the entire time they were in office.

All of the ills in policy and lack of transparency flowed down from that malignity of leadership.

Not in this case. The WHO also pushed the same charade.

When he gets asked about what percentage of people need to get vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity he keeps pulling out different numbers from his ass until he's pressed to give a fully accurate and honest answer. The truth is that we can't know for certain, but we can use models from existing diseases in order to try and make guesses which gives us a range which will vary in magnitude depending on the accuracy and correctness of the underlying model and its parameters. I don't think it's such a complex concept that people would be incapable of understanding a high level overview. Then as more data comes in or newer models are developed, you can tweak the range while providing a simple explanation for why the newer changes are believed to be more accurate. Fauci is a bad faith science communicator.

Edit: He has also admitted to providing different numbers over time in order to get people more comfortable with the idea. He needs to cut that paternalistic bullshit and just be straight with us.

When 1/3 of the country thinks the pandemic danger is already exaggerated if not completely made up, how can you possibly expect him to be honest about the harsh realities of what is still ahead?

Hell, what in the last 4 years has made you believe that half of the country ISN'T worth talking down to...

> When 1/3 of the country thinks the pandemic danger is already exaggerated if not completely made up

Maybe they think that because people in power keep lying to them.

That may work with you, but what makes you think it's the right approach for communicating to everybody? Public health reminds me a bit of behavioral finance, in which we admit that people don't act rationally in all cases and give advice accordingly. You can argue it's a cop out, that it's paternalistic, that is morally wrong. You'd be at least partially right about all of those things, but what if people achieve better outcomes?

I think people in Sweden will typically recycle (in separate bins) paper, paperboard, clear glass, colored glass and metal. Bottles and cans with deposit are returned in a machine for that purpose. Recycling other plastic containers is not as common, but I suppose some do.

What's cat fuel?

Getting rid of waste plastic in the environment is not impossible. The big problem is that manufactures only pay for the creation of the product. We need to have them pay for the disposal too. In time they will find the least expensive way to recycle it.

Typo, car. And for some reason I can’t push edits on my comments

Thx, I should have known. For a minute there I thought that it was short for a special type of fuel for machines.

I assumed "cat fuel" was some shorthand for "catalytically cracked fuel" which I simply hadn't heard before.

Which actually works, because that's exactly what you'd have to do!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking

"Cat feed" is raw material for the cat cracker unit.

Where heavy petroleum fractions and other applicable refinery streams are broken down into lower molecular weight hydrocarbons

The cat feedstock is some nasty material that looks worse than most crude oil.

It would seem feasible to introduce a small percentage of waste hydrocarbon plastics to the cat feed as it was being processed, in order to at least recover a bit of the fuel value from the plastic.

I can only imagine it is simply cheaper to continue to purchase the equal number of barrels of regular cat feed than it is to attempt to displace some of it using waste polyethylene & polypropylene which may even be possible to deliver at no material cost.

OTOH, for all I know people may be doing this already.

Yeah edit ability times out quickly.

Yeah, HN's short timeouts are a damn nuisance especially if one's as prolix as me (I've been caught out many times). That said, HN's edit duration is still considerably longer than say The Register's one of only ten minutes.

Of course, one should never be one's own editor as one always misses something - that is until one reads it the next day and sees one's glaring typos! But that's impractical.

It seems to me that a partial solution would be to allow small/limited edits after the normal timeout and or highlight the changes in some way. This would negate the problem of a subsequent poster's reply comment sounding ridiculous if the original post was altered too much.

This is a great comment.

> 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.

Humans don't have to sort the plastics, machines could. Is there a machine-readable but human-invisible marking we could give them? Like coloring them in a way that would be distinctive under a UV camera or UV light?

In my not-so-professional opinion, IR and Raman spectrography could give us something. Or density, depending on how selectively the industrialized mechanical processes are at resolving small changes in physical properties.

RFID chip maybe?

Convert plastic waste into e-waste?

From Wikipedia:

> Hitachi holds the record for the smallest RFID chip, at 0.05 mm × 0.05 mm......These dust-sized chips can store 38-digit numbers using 128-bit Read Only Memory (ROM). A major challenge is the attachment of antennas, thus limiting read range to only millimeters.

Sounds to me like RFID chips can be small enough to not worry about. Even at 1mm^3, you can likely just let it fall out while melting down plastic, and collect it later. Not that I'm advocating for doing so, I think enforcing a visible symbol indicating the contents is a far better idea.

If it's transparent, you've lost "color" control. But maybe some kind of radar/sonar-type response signature could work

It can be transparent in the visible spectrum.

But ya, the UV dyes are probably not very stable

This is likely a dumb outsider viewpoint but: is just burying plastics all that bad? The fact that they stay intact over geologic timescales would seem to make them an ideal carbon sink, which is something we could actually use more of - provided that feedstocks can come out of the carbon cycle (e.g. agricultural) rather than relying on petrochemicals.

Waste plastic has a negative value, right now. I think that burying it is even more expensive than to just dump it where ever it's possible, in some places. It may not be legal but as always if people can make a buck then they will. Laws or no laws.

It turns out that a lot of the plastic in the ocean is there because there are countries where people are just dumping trash in the ocean. It can be less expensive than transporting it to a dump and dealing with it there.

The answer has to include making waste plastic have enough value so that people find it advantageous to recycle it or at least to bury it.

I like your comment and the honest answer is I don’t know, but I see no problems with dumping plastic on the ground, vs in the ocean.

But some observations on your comment.

Is plastic, that was never in the atmosphere (for millions of years anyway), really a carbon sink? It seems that trough its entire lifecycle it never goes into the atmosphere.

Also, if you burn plastic you’re displacing oil that wouldn’t otherwise be burned. Oil that is never extracted. And don’t forget that it takes a lot of energy to extract oil, so burning plastic reduces CO2 emissions globally somewhat.

Also, I’m skeptical about the practicality of using landfills to create geological treasures for mankind 100k years from now. The problem with it is that I feel that it is wishful thinking that placates our conscience. It’s easy to imagine yourself living “sustainably” in geological time scales. It’s hard to live sustainably in 1000 year timescales.

The problem with burying plastic is that there's no room to do that locally, so you have to send it somewhere.

Burning is the only thing that makes sense, and that's OK if thebtotalt amount is "not too much", where current fossil fuel usage is "too much".

Plus, burying plastic will create jobs for archaeologists in a few hundred years.

Why can’t we force containers to be made of the same plastic?

Or use a better material, eg aluminium. I’ve seen aluminium bottles with aluminium caps. I realise the lining is plastic, but that little bit of plastic has to be better than a plastic bottle.

> polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle

The way to do big changes is one small step at a time, and the reasonable way is to start with the low hanging fruit. So the the interesting question isn't why we're being lied to by Big Recycling, but why the easiest steps aren't being taken.

It's almost fruitless to discuss these issues on online forums because otherwise intelligent people insists on explaining how hard the problem of universal polymer recycling really is, as if that would make all recycling of plastics (sometimes even all recycling, full stop) impossible.

Meanwhile countries such as Norway recycles 95% av all PET bottles while the US is stuck on 30%.

Yet every discussion that remotely touches on recycling has to iterate that it's all a big lie.

I lost all hope in plastic recycling. As an anecdote, outside of my building I've found everything from dirty pizza boxes, toilet paper, dog poop and socks in our recycling bins. There has also been plenty of plastic that isn't processed locally. I even put a sign up once about what is accepted, and still to this day I pull things out to correct what people throw in.

I really think progress with plastics has to be before the materials ever reach consumers. And if we are to recycle it by throwing it in a bin, I think there needs to be an incentive for people to play along and not mess everything up.

This is super interesting to me. Can you help out?

- what infrastructure is needed for sorting? - what countries are successfully doing that? Taiwan? - can "expensive" be quantified?

It requires human labor so it is expensive in countries where that is expensive. In countries where it is cheap there it isn't prioritized by the public, who ubderstandably instead want better paying jobs

The thing to do with plastics is:

1. tax it to discourage its use

2. bury it in landfills

And anti-GMO lobby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont....

I’m not suggesting you have an opinion here but when I see this I always want to mention the following: I have no issue with GMOs per se. But what I have a real issue with is when companies make herbicide resistant plants and then suggest we dump herbicides in to our soil. These poisons have a serious deleterious effect on the environment and it’s something we now have plenty of evidence for. We’ve also seen plenty of data that this increase in herbicides is causing cancer in farm workers.

GMOs can be great. Really I do believe that. But we’ve got these companies that don’t care about much beyond their bottom line pushing out GMOs that encourage extreme levels of biocide use and I and many others have a real problem with that.

The GMO debate is one of the great "we lost the message" moments. I feel like there was a time, probably right after WWII or so, when we tended to feel like science was actually moving us forward as a species, and in the last few decades, it's slipped away to the point where we can't even maintain trust in strong scientific consensus (see: anti-vax)

The opportunities for genetic modification are boundless: more nutrition! Higher yields! Reduced allergens! Not to mention complete green-field things like bacteria designed to clean up industrial waste. These are things that could make ordinary people say "we're moving forward as a species."

So what's the face of this brilliant new industry? A mediocre tomato whose primary selling point was a few days longer shelf life in the store, and some staple crops sold with the explicit feature of "you can pour MORE herbicides on them!" GMO didn't hit the market as a way to make good things better, it was a way to make lousy things viable. We blew the launch, and the entire product category has to spend decades building the goodwill it should already have.

Yes, it's oversimplifying to the level of malpractice to put it that way, but marketing and presentation matters.

Herbicide is how they're using GMO to give higher yields. Farmers aren't buying herbicides just to throw away money.

Higher yields means we can produce the same amount of food while converting less natural environments into farmland. So it's not all bad here.

another example is high yeild gmos which reduce nutritional content and increase water content to increase profits while delivering a lower quality crop

GMO means we can use chemicals that break down as opposed to more toxic ones that build up in the soil.

Often any of these chemicals kill the soil microbiology. The real problem according to regenerative farming advocates is the idea that dumping loads of artificial chemicals on to the field is some path to a solution. The alternative is to understand the living nature of the soil and feed it the way you would feed any other living thing.

So it is not a choice between “this chemical” or “that chemical” and many view that kind of thinking as the real problem. In this way the GMOs that you describe support that problematic kind of thinking.

That said, I am not familiar with what you describe. Which chemicals did not break down and how did GMOs allow us to use chemicals that do break down? I’d like to learn about that. Thank you!

This article seems to suggest GMO crops reduce pesticide use. Maybe we need to collect the data for both GMO crops and non GMO crops on pesticide use. But who should we trust to collect that data?

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/07/new-stud...

Your article is about pesticide use. But I am talking about the increase in herbicide use. Monsanto’s “roundup ready” line of GMO products is intended to be blanketed with glyphosate (aka RoundUp), a powerful herbicide. According to the following study, glyphosate use increased 15 fold since the introduction of “Roundup Ready” products.

https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...

Funny thing is, once people started blanketing with roundup, it didn't take long for roundup-resistant weeds to develop.

> Growing reliance on the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate has triggered the spread of tolerant and resistant weeds in the U.S. and globally [5–10]. To combat weeds less sensitive to glyphosate, farmers typically increase glyphosate application rates and spray more often [11–13]. In addition, next-generation herbicide-tolerant crops are, or will soon be on the market genetically engineered to withstand the application of additional herbicides (up to over a dozen), including herbicides posing greater ecological, crop damage, and human health risks (e.g., 2,4-D and dicamba) [6].

Roundup is used at tiny quantities. Yes 15 times as much is used, but that is still much less than a liter per hectare. And roundup strongly binds to dirt where nothing can get it until it degrades in about half a year. It degrades into common elements in the soil so it isn't making any difference.

According to this link, our original belief that it’s use is largely benign needs further study:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29117584/

Anyone can publish anything. Such as calling out the WHO even though they ignored most of the evidence. Then speculation about antibiotic resistance even though bacteria don't use the pathways glyphosphate targets.

Plastic is recyclable in the same way a sugary bowl of cereal is part of a balanced breakfast.

For the last couple of years I've been wanting to learn about how and when recycling works, cost comparison between recycled products and new products, environmental impact of landfill vs recycling, etc.

I don't know where to look for information.

What books should I read? what websites have good information and explanations? whom should I trust?

Recycling is like startup stock grants. It's maybe a nice bonus but is a 0 in expected value calculations.

In tech it is often incremental changes in the right direction rather than a paradigm shift/rewrite that succeeds.

Even if under current technology we are not able to profitably recycle goods, having an obviously detrimental to the environment material more heavily concentrated seems like a positive to me.

Good documentary on this: https://frontlinetv.com/plastic-wars-full-film

So, I've got a highly speculative hypothesis that BIG COFFEE will have a similar tobacco-like health event in the future. These are my semi-conspiratorial circumstantial evidences:

1. It's basically burnt bean water. Roasted is just a marketing term.

2. The constant rate of "New Study Finds Coffee Improves [insert health benefit]" articles

3. The incredibly powerful forces (industrial, corporate, personal) that would hold back such an event

I'm not willing to defend this hypothesis, but I would love some steel-manning

> It's basically burnt bean water. Roasted is just a marketing term.

I take offense to this line. Roasting is a very complex thing, you have to adjust the roasting curves to each coffee individually for optimal results, to get the best out of it. There's more coffee than you might think.

Search for Specialty Coffee and the Specialty Coffee Association. You may also watch some of James Hoffmann's videos on youtube. He's the World Barista Champion of 2007 and has his own roasting company. Coffee doesn't have to be bitter or taste burnt, it can be fruity and sweet. There are more tastes to be found in coffee than in wine. In addition to that, the community is not filled with as many snobs as the wine community and there's a lot of science being done on all kinds of things (for example by the Coffee Excellence Center in Switzerland).

That's all really neat, but same went for tobacco. Highly elaborate and detailed methods for ingesting poison.

I think alcohol is next, before coffee. But we shall see!

>I think alcohol is next,

I doubt it. There's a reason why it was considered an 'essential item' in a lot of places during the pandemic, why the soviets gave out vodka rations etc.

Alcohol's a useful tool for keeping a population compliant and sedated, people love it, it's super easy to make, hence why in many places the production and distribution of it tends to be highly regulated, otherwise just about anyone could do it, it's big business and in a lot of places, it brings massive tax revenues through sales so...I doubt it's going anywhere any time soon.

I mean what are they gonna do, ban yeast and sugar? Ban leaving fruit sitting too long? You can't really ever stop the production of alcohol. It just kind of happens naturally. It's not really possible to just ban the process of fermentation...

I think if people had to drink prison hooch or wait weeks to brew their own substandard beer, as opposed to drinking bottled craft beer or tasty wines there would be less alcohol consumption.

The history of the US prohibition says otherwise. Or rather, while overall consumption of alcohol probably did drop, the effect on society of pushing it underground was not positive.

From memory, alcohol consumption actually _increased_ during prohibition.

I suspect while that might be true initially people would soon get really quite good at it.

The Soviets gave out vodka rations because it was in their interest to keep their population addicted to alcohol. Like the nobles did before them, and like they did under Stalin. There’s actually a fascinating history about vodka and it’s use by the ruling parties in Russia over the last few centuries.

> Alcohol's a useful tool for keeping a population compliant and sedated

The same could be said for most forms of recreation.

I think the cat's already out of the bag with alcohol. At this point the issue is probably more that people just like cats.

We already know that alcohol is very harmful and that the "1 glass of red wine is good for you" was bull. Is there really anything but willfull ignorance keeping the myth alive at this point?

Humanity really lucked out on coffee, caffeine is pretty harmless all around. At max 3-4 cups a coffee a day is perfectly okay and not at all comparable to tobacco.

The coffee industry isn’t spraying chemicals and Bronchodilators on their products. At least to my knowledge.

Where's the best place to read more about this misuse of chemicals?

I’m quite sure they’re spraying a lot of chemicals on their products.

Coffee can be burnt bean water if it’s not made well.

I have a few coffee snobs in my life and they slowly are helping me see a light.

I am ok with caffeine being medicinal as needed than seeking a transcendant experience.

You know, there is a lot more done on the taste and flavors of wine than for coffee (in term of funding and research output). And a lot of science with that. In US the research is almost inexistent, but big at least in Portugal, France, Italy...

I would also like to second the recommendation of checking out James Hoffmann's YouTube channel!

He made me appreciate filter coffee and brew a V60 everyday!

Mate, if I lived in Burundi I might have a cuppa local coffee and enjoy the environment. But its not so healthy overdosing in Europe - not just for the locals but for Burundi as well. Its a vicious cycle that will break sooner or later.

You're forgetting a big one.

It's a cognitive stimulant that increases worker productivity.

So not only does the coffee industry have an obvious, direct incentive to promote the benefits and downplay any long term negatives, but EVERY corporate entity and even our government has an indirect incentive to downplay any negatives.

A company or society that hypes up it's young worker population on caffeine will likely out-compete organizations of humans that don't, even if major health problems show up later in life.

And an even bigger one - coffee is extremely lucrative, so there are enormous amounts of money in play to make sure it stays legal/popular/'healthy'.

Tobacco is/was also extremely lucrative. I don't think that's enough to protect it. But it's effect on societal productivity likely is.

As far as I'm aware Tobacco is still extremely profitable, despite being horrendously bad for health.

If it were introduced today there's absolutely no doubt it wouldn't be allowed.

I'd say that means it is being protected.

it is'nt protected per se, more like it got grand-fathered in. inertia and all that.

> it is'nt protected per se

...and you can guarantee a TON of people were absolutely certain the same was true about sugar not so long ago....

In my view, there is no corporate or industrial work without coffee. Work from home may damage it a bit.

none of those are even close to "evidence" You could say all of them about almost anything. Here's an example:

Listening to music:

1. it's just vibrations

2. constant rate of studies "listening to music improves mental health", "fetuses get smarter with music" etc.

3. the incredibly powerful forces behind music and keeping you listening to music

Therefore we'll hear that music is terrible for us soon.

In a way this has already happened though?

We know excessive consumption (can't think of a better word off hand) of loud noises leads to hearing loss, tinnitus, etc.

Certainly not the same as "music is terrible for us", but more of an "everything in moderation" kind of argument.

Eh, I can listen to music for 16 hours a day without hearing damage if it's not too loud. So what exactly would that mean? Like dont drink 212F coffee because it would boil your throat?

Also, 9 out of 10 radio stations say that listening to this song is good for you. Then again, all 9 of those stations are owned by the same evilCorp.

Thats like saying bananas are bad for you because if you eat them exclusively, you will get diabetes

I doubt that it's a major issue because humans have been drinking coffee for a long time, but not all humans, and we've discovered a lot of the things that are problematic for health, things like tobacco, asbestos, and leaded gas. Humans have been eating charred things for a long time, and while they seem to be somewhat carcinogenic, it also doesn't seem to be a big deal.

The natives also smoked tobacco for a long time, not saying coffee is good/bad just providing a counter example

The natural-cured tobacco that the natives smoked has almost no resemblance to cigarettes. The real problems began with sugar curing.

I don’t think there is anywhere near the anecdotal evidence to support this. Even when big tobacco was in full swing people knew smoking was correlated with cancer/lung disease/etc. I felt noticeably healthier when I quit smoking years ago. I’ve quit coffee and aside from caffeine withdrawal little difference in how I felt. What negative health effects do you propose are caused by coffee?

After quitting caffeine I can now fall asleep fairly quickly everynight. For 20% it could be negative.

It could be dosage and timing.

Coffee also affects my sleep but I need it to fight off my depression to some extent. So I have found one cup (250ml) early in the morning doesn't affect my sleep.

I have also found, I can have one more cup on the days I go running! (Physical exercise has something to do with caffeine efect on body)

I have a personal rule of no caffeine after 4PM. It helps with sleep! (6 hours before sleep is the idea)

I wasn't aware of these things until few years ago but now I do and I hope this helps someone!

After "quitting" coffee I'm extremely tired the day after actually drinking coffee.

Since quitting caffeine if I have a cup of coffee I have an incredibly hard time falling asleep.

You asked for proposals, and that’s how I present this. Not as a fact. But it seems to me looking into acrylimides as it relates to coffee roasting processes and the finished product is not an entirely absurd line of scientific inquiry.

And they can have my coffee when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

I don't eat processed meat and excercise daily. I like my odds even with coffee. I was briefly involved in a personalized cancer medicine company and talked to the prof there. He said if you don't smoke, avoid bacon and walk/run a few times a week you have essentially done everything you could. The bacon thing made me curious and it turned out almost all processed meat has nitrite (nitrosamine) added, which is a carcinogenic element. So much so they in fact used it to induce cancer reliably in lab rats. As to why food industry uses it - it is still better than botulism. As of 2021 we still don't have effective meat preservatives.

"Rats fed dimethylurea and 0.3% sodium nitrite for 36 days developed tumours of CNS, heart, thymus, kidney or thyroid in all animals (Sander, 1970)." http://www.inchem.org/documents/jecfa/jecmono/v05je15.htm

> The constant rate of "New Study Finds Coffee Improves [insert health benefit]" articles

Yep, this has become so inflationary, but it doesn't mean that studies and findings are invalidated per se. If multiple (independent) findings come to the conclusion X, then the correlation becomes stronger and stronger. When the correlation is strong (multiple findings conclude X), then you can be reasonably certain that X is likely. Or am I wrong with this?

> Or am I wrong with this?

Some percentage of studies will produce random (erroneous) results, so if one cherry-picks favorable outcomes and buries the rest an impression can be created to suit any narrative. Are they cherry-picked? I don't know. What I do know is that there is a strong demand for positive studies both the dealers to sell more stuff and from the addicts to justify their addiction.

Not to forget for the people doing studies to be able to publish and deliver something... Losing the income is quite big incentive to get out studies that at least on surface look good.

Then how would you decide whether a finding/study is valid or not? What is your modus operandi in that case? Is there an algorithm for this (for selecting good studies or for finding the truth)?

Meta-studies are most useful since someone proficient in the art has taken the trouble to find and analyze all relevant papers. Often times they also publish the method they used to discover and discard papers in addition to the analysis, specifically to avoid selection bias.

Studies published in reputable scientific journals like Nature are usually not bogus, especially if they were already replicated. However applying the results to everyday life is tricky - one certainly must not assign more meaning to them than the authors did, but also probably even less than that. Remember the mantra: the experiment shows only what the experiment shows, not the great opportunities you want it to show.

Note that "nutritional science" is not a hard science, their track record is abysmal. The nearest hard science we have to that is microbiology.

As a rule, all observational studies are junk - too many hidden variables, etc. There are some exceptions to it, but you will be best served by just assuming junk. If you're not willing to discard a particular observational study at least check if the study controls for obvious hidden variables - wealth, age, sex, health level, etc. For example there were "studies" that showed red wine correlates with good health, and the coverage was that we should all drink red wine. But guess what - rich people drink red wine and live longer because rich. Controlled for wealth, the effect disappears.

Thank you, I really appreciate your input!

> It's basically burnt bean water. Roasted is just a marketing term.

So, does that make toast “basically burnt bread”?

I think it means toast is "basically burnt seed mush"

I'd be curious about the coffee studies compared to how people consume coffee. So many people seem to drink theirs with a lot of cream and sugar.

Burnt rotted seed mush, even! The yeast fermentation step is essentially a controlled spoilage. And the result remains delicious.

I know an acquaintance who refers to bread as raw toast.

And they're both pointless, fallacious (non-)insights. Argument from inflammatory reframing? It doesn't change the facts on the ground. If you like the taste and/or psychoactive effects of coffee, relative to the cost, drink it! The fact that you can call it burnt bean water shouldn't matter to that.

I think you know the answer is "yes".

Steaks are just basically burnt meat.

Ideally they aren't

Knock the horns off and make sure it doesn’t moo was how my grandfather ordered his steak

The thing is cigarettes were known to be harmful for a century before anything was done. In 1867 a report found smoking associated with cancer and lung disease. cigarettes were popularly known as coffin nails. At this point several centuries in, we would know if coffee was having a significant impact on our health

This is all too often true for many things. Take asbestos for instance, the timescale with it wasn't just a century but about two millennia! The ancient Romans knew about its dangers, as those in asbestos mines were well known to suffer from what was then called wasting disease.

Move on about 1900 years to the late 19th Century and early 20th Century when the British Admiralty and others commissioned multiple reports into ships' boilermakers, etc. who were commonly found to suffer asbestosis or mesothelioma from the dust from the lagging on steam pipes and boiler insulation.

Despite these damning reports citing clearcut evidence of asbestos causing life-threatening disease, they were all but ignored as asbestos was considered too useful - it outweighed human health considerations.

Keep in mind that most of these reports were commissioned by governments - and unlike commercial interests with a vested interest in making money - governments are supposed to act in the interests of their citizenry but they didn't.

If governments don't give a damn then there's precious little hope until public pressure eventually forces them to act, which, all too often, is long after considerable harm has ourred to many individuals.

It's quite tragic really that those supposedly in charge of our governance can be so callous so often.

The problem with this idea seems to be that lots of studies show health benefits to drinking coffee. Now maybe it's just a correlation and not an actual benefit - but you'd be hard pressed to say it has negative health effects because the correlation goes in the opposite direction.

There was actually a lawsuit won in California that roasted coffee has carcinogenic compound however the state regulators quashed it. I'm surprised people don't continue to make a bigger deal about this. Why did the judge agree that it needs a warning?

https://www.winespectator.com/articles/coffee-no-longer-requ...

Pretty much everything has carcinogenic compounds, that doesn’t mean all that much. Coffee has been consumed for multiple decades by a large percentage of the world’s population. Any significant negative effect would be trivial to identify.

The list of countries by coffee consumption shows some of the healthiest countries in the world.

Obviously you could be suspicious of all the studies that show coffee associated with decreased mortality because of Big Coffee's influence, but you'd need remotely plausible way to show any harm at all here. Sugar and tobacco are very different in that regard. People knew in the 1700s that there was an association between tobacco and mouth cancer, and shortness of breath had been observed forever. Once cigarettes made tobacco widely accessible it became even more apparent, though not proven. (Sugar is less obvious but there are lots of anecdotes in history about overconsumption, like Napoleon's wife who had nearly no teeth because of sucking on sugar cane as a child.)

The margins on burnt bean water are insane. Even when accounting for paying a 'fair wage' to workers in a foreign country.

depends entirely on where you buy it walk into any gas staton/truck stop and you will get hot coffee for around a $1.00-$2.00 its drip coffee with half&half / nondairy creamer and sugar/assorted non-sugar sweeteners. buying beans and grinding them yourself your coffee is cheaper still. as long as you avoid starbuck/dutch bros *genaric espresso stands or Keurig cups the price is pretty damn low.

We see that most stimulants, legal or not. They don't lead to fair wage for producers unfortunately.

Coffee increases heart rate. Heart failure is a leading cause of death and caffeine could be a contributor at scale.

Exercise increases heart rate. That’s why I stay away from it. I still drink coffee though.

I’m with you man. My experience of caffeine is that it is one hell of a drug. From its effects on sleep (a vital process), to its control over our mood.

Exercising also releases hormones that greatly effect basically every human function/behavior. That in itself doesn’t mean it is bad/good.

Perhaps I could have been clearer. It’s bad effects on sleep and it’s bad effects on mood*

Also it's very good question of what type of coffee we are talking about. Black? Espresso? Or the sugar laden version with various various milk substitutes?

People also roast chestnuts and cashews over a fire. Marshmallows are also roasted. It’s seems like a term originating in common parlance and not specifically a marketing term. I seriously doubt coffee is carcinogenic (if that’s what you’re suggesting) besides the baseline grilled/roasted food danger to the stomach/small intestines.

That baseline danger is not negligible. You could read forever on the negative health implications of PAHs, invite you to do a google search. Does that mean the carcinogenicity makes coffee a net unhealthy beverage despite all of its health promoting qualities? Current studies would suggest no. Does carcinogenicity of other consumed roasted foods make them “net unhealthy” rather than not consuming them at all? As per current data, certainly for all types of meat, probably for all other types of roasted or smoked foods, obviously dependent on the amount of roasting/smoking involved.

“ I am not "anti-vax" -- but this shit is unprecedented.”

I’d suggest you hit up Wikipedia and learn about medical history. The smallpox (eradicated worldwide) and polio (eradicated in all but a couple countries) vaccine pages might help you learn that a worldwide vaccination campaign to stop a dangerous disease isn’t unprecedented.

“ I said NO - she can have ONE shot per week. After every vax, she was lathargic for the next few days.”

So you made her lethargic for 6 times a few days instead of a few days for just one time. Congrats on that?

The people who follow the recommended vaccine schedule don’t have any problems, according to scientific studies. Your concerns appear to be based on FUD you read on the internet or imagined yourself.

would you deploy six patches at once to all your production servers with no idea what the outcome will be and you have no idea what's in those patches other than their name when you already had a two week outage caused by a previous attempt at doing such?

If those patches has been deployed before for decades on millions of servers? Yes, of course.

I have no idea what the outage is supposed to be on your example, a bad reaction?

The point is that vaccines are more blindly accepted than they should be. We tech people are way more cautious with patches on full production systems.

The outage analogy is that assume you were patching your systems (all of them) against, say Duqu, and you blindly deploy the Duqu patch to your "millions" of servers, and instead - you INSTALLED Duqu to said servers. That is bad.

The "outage" (clearly you didnt read my post) - We went to Chicago to go to the zoo for a week. Prior my Daughter got the chicken pox vaccine. The first night in Chicago, she actually got the pox from the vaccine. and it ruined the vacation and we had to stay an extra week, basically in the hotel until she was clear to fly. That was an extended 'outage' to our vacation...

Clear?

> The people who follow the recommended vaccine schedule don’t have any problems, according to scientific studies.

Can you please provide some of the studies? Primarily I want to actually do some research and I want to know what the evidence is that it is safe.

I no longer trust authority's scientific claims as this article and several other revelations seem to indicate I shouldn't.

Why would you ask for studies only to assert you don't trust them?

I want to review the studies because I don't trust the claims of media or other authorities, not because I don't trust studies.

That said, I do intend to be critical of the studies as well--anyone should be. I want to review replication, funding, methodology, etc...

I'd like to know what the actual evidence is for long term safety of the current recommended vaccine schedule.

At this point in medical history, with the number of people that didn't know they were participating in an ad-hoc longitudinal study over decades of how well or dangerous the accepted standard inoculation schedule is, I get the feeling you're couching close to conspiratorial thinking as "healthy skepticism".

The vaccines themselves and vaccine scheduling change over time. How would we know if something harmful was introduced?

Unless of course as you state we are unwittingly participating in ad-hoc longitudinal studies.

There are any number of `modern` diseases with seemingly unknown causes. It's not a stretch to be skeptical of the safety of modern medicine in general.

>"I’d suggest you hit up Wikipedia and learn about medical history"

My brother is the director of the VA for the state of Alaska, was commander of the 10th medical wing USAF, personal flight surgeon to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the pentagon, among many other accolades. (Colonel Timothy Dean Ballard)

My grandmother was a surgical nurse in san jose and los gatos for 50 years and did medical malpractice consultation for 20 years.

My Aunt is the NICU lead at El Camino.

My step-grandfather was a top cardiologist (and mayor) for Saratoga. FL Stutzman

I was the technical designer/Implementation/TPM for El Camino Hospital, Good Samaritan, SF General, Nome Alaska Hospital and rebuilt Fred Hutchinson Cancer research center in Seattle as well Swedish and Virginia Mason (my first three hospital jobs when I was 20)... and many others...

I know a lot about medicine. I am speaking as a parent - not denying fn vax. I am saying that KIDS (TODDLERS) don't need that much shit pumped in them all at once.

>My brother is the director of the VA for the state of Alaska, was commander of the 10th medical wing USAF, personal flight surgeon to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the pentagon, among many other accolades. (Colonel Timothy Dean Ballard)

>My grandmother was a surgical nurse in san jose and los gatos for 50 years and did medical malpractice consultation for 20 years.

>My Aunt is the NICU lead at El Camino.

>My step-grandfather was a top cardiologist (and mayor) for Saratoga. FL Stutzman

I think all of that's irrelevant unless they agree with your conclusion. As someone related to psychologists, I can attest that being related to people in a field doesn't necessarily result in you being well-versed in their field. Source: It's basic psychology, and if you disagree then you'd agree I know a fair bit about that.

OK Frasier...

I'm not really understanding what relevance one child having a rare reaction to the varicella vaccine has to do with your decision to extend the duration of the normal side effects of other vaccinations on your other child, and not sure how either of those things related to your claim about Big Vax Baba Yaga.

Stringing together a series of non-sequiturs is not the same thing as constructing an argument.

It was due to how lathargic they would be for days. I am not really understanding why you think SIX vaccines into a 20 pound body seems OK?

Do you have kids and did you give them six vaccines all at once?

What the heck does that not make sense to people for?

It makes the kid miserable.

And if you have one of your kids get chicken pox from the vaccine during a family vacation to go to the chicago zoo, which she couldnt do and we had to stay in chicago another week - so yeah, fuck risking it.

Maybe my kids were extra sensitive - but would you deploy six patches at once to all your production servers with no idea what the outcome will be and you have no idea what's in those patches other than their name when you already had a two week outage caused by a previous attempt at doing such?

> I am not really understanding why you think SIX vaccines into a 20 pound body seems OK?

Because body weight and number of vaccines don't really have any relationship?

> Do you have kids and did you give them six vaccines all at once?

I have two relatively young kids, I don't think they've ever been recommended for more than four at a time, but I could misremember, the numbers never been a big deal. I've never had them given less than what our pediatrician recommended. The CDC schedule has some ranges in it so I see you could possibly end up with six at once.

Haven't observed any relationship between number of vaccines and side effects, either. The times they've gotten one have been pretty much the same as the times they’ve has a bunch.

> It makes the kid miserable.

I'm not aware of any evidence that more vaccines at once does that; I am aware of evidence that spreading them out over a succession of weeks extends the length of time that they are likely to experience side effects.

> And if you have one of your kids get chicken pox from the vaccine during a family vacation to go to the chicago zoo, which she couldnt do and we had to stay in chicago another week - so yeah, fuck risking it.

I'm not sure how you think that very rare side effect (varicella vaccine produces chickenpox in about 2% of cases, but even in the vast majority of them it's extremely minor with a few pox, nothing like what you describe) of a single vaccine has anything to do with your belief in a higher risk from giving multiple vaccines at one time rather than spread out 1/week. That makes no sense at all.

> Maybe my kids were extra sensitive - but would you deploy six patches at once to all your production servers with no idea what the outcome will be

I wouldn't apply any patches to a server with no idea what the outcome will be, but that's not analogous to the case with vaccines, anyway. The only reason I might spread out different batches is to make placing blame for any unexpected problems easier, but even that is only a benefit because patches can be backed out. Your analogy is deeply flawed.

> when you already had a two week outage caused by a previous attempt at doing such?

But even by your own account, the “outage” wasn't caused by the practice you were later avoiding, which simply magnified the impact of common side effects without doing anything to mitigate the risk of serious, rare ones.

Why do you think "Big Vaccine" is conspiring to give your baby shots all at once instead of spaced out? They get paid either way and doctors probably get paid more if you space out.

Why do you think being lethargic 6 times in a row is better than once?

2% of chicken pox vaccinationa cause a mild case. That's unfortunate, and probably shouldn't get the shot during a travel month, but it's better than catching a full case at an unexpected time, isn't it?

Your post claims you are not anti-vax and all it states is how anti-vaccine you are.

Reading comprehension: I said I am not anti BAC, but I’m not going to let them put 6 vaccines in my daughters 20 pound body all at once

> Reading comprehension: I said I am not anti BAC,

No, you did not.

Yes, reading comprehension is important. You said, literally quoted:

"I am not "anti-vax" -- but this shit is unprecedented."

Yes, powerful lobbying organizations not only had success with the food industry, but with things like Brexit too.

There's also an interesting finding[1]:

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

In the US the "elite" is literally drafting laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...

> The ALEC website states that its goal is to advance "the fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism"

It's right there in the open but I would guess most people never heard of it. A rich people private club to steer the country's legislation. I can't even imagine the level of corruption and self-serving interest

Wow, fantastic article.

Good.

Do we really want QAnon (And on the other side, many of HN's crazy ideas) to be top of our politics?

Unfortunately that's 2014, forever ago in internet years, the tide is turning into the mess we have now.

That's an interesting proposition/sentiment. I haven't thought about that. As if "neo-monarchy" (the status quo) is necessary for us "dumb" humans.

But there are problems as well with that. Brexit is a good example. Rich people got their way by fooling the masses through targeted propaganda. And the masses got screwed (lost many rights) because of that.

But your sentiment is a little cynical/hyperbolic too for my tastes. Not everyone is a QAnon maniac. I think the majority of people are decent.

But we are all easily manipulated, which is the danger. The link in your post supports this conclusion.

If we had "benevolent monarchs" (riches, people of power) who have always our best interest in mind, I would agree with you. But these "monarchs" aren't benevolent they simply do not care about us other than manipulating us as "dumb sheep".

And I still believe that the majority of people (us) are decent. Yes we can be like sheeple, but the best cure for that is education and/or political prevention mechanisms against our ills (lobbying, populism and gullibleness).

Yeah or Black Lives Matter! Whoops!

And 50 years from now, what will the story be about say Corona virus, or global warming? Why are we so sure that this time everything is on the up and up? For instance Big pharma stands to make billions of dollars on the back of Corona, so it's not like they're just our disinterested saviours.

Maybe everything is exactly as it is reported on the news and by the politicians. I mean, they have a great track record so we should probably trust them.

But how is everyone so damn sure? I look at the history of manipulation like outlined in this story and am now mostly unmoved by the demands that we "listen to the science" when used as a cudgel.

> And 50 years from now, what will the story be about say Corona virus, or global warming? Why are we so sure that this time everything is on the up and up? For instance Big pharma stands to make billions of dollars on the back of Corona, so it's not like they're just our disinterested saviours.

I dunno, in both cases Big Oil is probably pretty interested in research that suggests coronavirus and global warming aren't real. Big Oil is at least as big as Big Pharma and, as far as I know, bigger than any "green" energy company.

Maybe they're politically toxic to researchers at prestigious universities, but if we're going to reduce this down to "who stands to profit?", Big Oil seems hard to argue against.

Yes, we're kind of at the mercy of free-market competition to keep things honest. But that mechanism didn't work in any of the cases cited above. So I just don't understand why so few people are skeptical, given the history.

because we can see these things with our actual eyes

What things? and where can you see them? And are you sure you can see them with enough clarity to truly judge the proper statistical relevance? For instance polls say that people who watch the nightly news believe that violent crime is getting worse... they can see it with their own eyes. But if you believe some purported science, violence has been on a decades long decline.

Unfortunately people can be prone to mass delusion and moral panic. Check out this for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi...

I can observe people getting sick with covid, i can observe 60 degree weather in the winter and weeks long heat waves, this isnt the news, or misremembering things

People get sick of things all the time of all kinds of things, doesn't mean that a global lock down is the appropriate response or that the statistics you're accepting are actually correct.

And there are many explanations that could explain heat waves, you can't use your eyes to justify an acceptance of the global warming explanation. All you've done is accepted the dominant narrative on faith.

Face it, you just don't know what is true. You can't know as an individual.. all you can do is hope that the people who say they know, actually are correct. But that requires trust and faith.

Your premises are sort of correct but your conclusion is not, because it is a hyperbole.

A physicist may not have personally built up mathematics from the base axioms, but he/she can trust that he/she can apply the learnt formulas when appropriate without it, because there are others who done so, and there are overlaps between all these. Similarly, while there are some problem with reproducibility in sciences (often it is due to lack of knowledge of statistics), there are large agreements in the science community on basic facts.

Understanding science is a mentally challenging thing, and we are by nature lazy. That doesn’t make the easier to understand alternative true.

This isn't about laziness or the difficulty in understanding anything. There is a fundamental limitation of perception and cognition. Science can only describe what it sees. But it never knows if there is something important yet undiscovered that will change the analysis, because you just can't know what you don't know.

The universe is always capable of surprise. We are trapped forever with a limitation in what kind of pronouncements we can make about truth. The best we could ever say, is that something appears to be true today.

For instance, there is a chance that we are actually in a simulation -- that we're literally just a running computer program. If that is the case, the programmers of that simulation could change the instructions that control our physics at any moment. And everything that you have declared "true" will have to be reevaluated.

This might seem unlikely, but it is not impossible, and so science has to keep an open mind and hedge its bets when making any declaration about reality. Science can only give you a probability that something is true, it can not ever say things with 100% confidence.

Occam’s razor.

Science does have some “dependency” on the philosophy of sciences, and while pedantic, simulation is a possibility, but so is “the world popped into existence this morning in a state that we have a collective memory of an imaginary past, and with dinosaur bones in the ground etc”. But this requires much much more presupposition than the scientifically accepted position with the Big Bang et al.

And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible, but not probable explanations we can make up.

> And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible

That's fine. We have to be pragmatic and can't go around worried about ghosts. But the point is that we have to be honest about the nature of "truth". It is provisional and only our best effort given our relationship with the universe.

And because we must admit that there is no such thing as 100% truth, we should be more humble than going around making pronouncements with such certainty as if we know more than we are actually even able to know.

On that basis it is impossible to literally know anything. At a certain point to function as a human some basic reasoning and common sense needs to be applied.

Yes, that's the pragmatic approach, which is necessary. But just because you apply some "basic reasoning and common sense" doesn't mean you have any more access to the truth than anyone else. Science teaches us just how much we don't know, and in fact can never know. It's worth remembering that and having some humility in our pronouncements since the very nature of our relationship to the universe leaves us largely unable to say things with certainty. As the star wars nerds say.. only the Sith deal in absolutes.

You "dunno" and think "Big Oil" in interested in research that says "the coronavirus isn't real"? What are you basing that on? There is no research that says the corona virus isn't real, that's absurd nonsense.

I'm not saying that they want to prove coronavirus is literally not real, I'm saying that oil prices generally track with the kind of economic activity that a pandemic messes up [1]

> As economic activity slowed sharply across the globe, demand for petroleum and petroleum products plummeted. The drop in demand, coupled with an unexpected increase in supply, led to a collapse in crude oil prices and subsequent impacts on prices for refined petroleum products and other downstream items, notably gasoline. As economies reopened, the initial price downturn gave way to reduced oil production and some renewed demand. As a result, prices for oil products partially recovered.

so they would prefer a world in which the coronavirus is not a serious problem that merits shutdowns.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/from-the-barrel-to...

Now you're saying that as a back peddle, but that isn't what you actually said.

There is unfortunately no magic crystal ball that delivers absolute truth and filters out all lies, mistakes, and misunderstandings. There is no substitute for thinking.

In the case of global warming I used to be a skeptic but was brought around as I saw more evidence of actual physical effects instead of just models. With COVID we are still under a bit of a fog of war, and it won’t be totally clear which statistics were right or which mixes of approaches were best until 10 years from now.

Yes, you're right and I wish your thoughtful approach was the norm. But what I see is mob like behaviour where "the science" is presented as irrefutable fact with heaps of scorn piled on anyone who dares question the orthodoxy. I just wish there was more general acknowledgement of our limitations and vulnerability with regard to the scientific process and its current conclusions.

As for global warming, your acceptance of it makes sense. We do have to proceed in life without 100% clarity in anything at all. We can only make our best assessment and then proceed in good faith.

But i'm reminded of a story about ancient astronomers who held closely guarded knowledge not known by the masses -- such as being able to accurately predict eclipses. Unscrupulous actors of the time could perform miracles by telling everyone that they were going to shut the sun off in the middle of the day. Witnesses to such an event might start off as a skeptic, but be brought around as they saw evidence of this miracle man's ability to control the sun. The moral of the story being that even when we see evidence for ourselves, the explanation we're given about why it is happening should not necessarily be accepted without skepticism.

I like Elon’s take on climate change: (paraphrasing) no we do not have absolute proof that our fossil fuel burning will result in disaster, but is it really a good idea to do a massive uncontrolled experiment with our biosphere to “see what happens” when we do have at least some evidence the effects will be negative and we do have alternatives (and are therefore not forced to do the experiment).

For a long time the global warming skeptics argued that the only alternative was to shut down modern civilization and let billions starve. France, Ontario, and California getting almost 50% of its power from solar show that this is bollocks.

> For a long time the global warming skeptics argued that the only alternative was to shut down modern civilization and let billions starve.

Some did for sure, and I agree that they were wrong. But that instinct to imagine the worst was just working in the opposite direction to those that believe there is no chance to stop global warming and humanity is doomed.

But that's really a separate discussion. What we're really discussing is how we come to know truth, and how much we can trust our conclusions. And more importantly how we treat each other in the face of the unavoidable ambiguity and uncertainty.

If people argued with less conviction in the absolute truth of their positions, i believe they would actually be more convincing and get more people willing to start pulling together in one direction.

Is skepticism really fair without understanding even the basics of said science? It’s not like statements like “global warming” and “COVID is not a hoax” exist in a vacuum, they sit on top of multi-century efforts on understanding a world vs a long-forgotten 8-years of primary school on geology/biology (with a bit of a hyperbole). Would you trust the opinion of someone without any programming knowledge about architectural decisions? Just because the end premise is easy to understand in the case of eg. global warming, the decision behind it is similarly (or even more) convoluted.

Thinking is impossible in our society.. and we naturally rely on stats and trust.

I didn't want to sound pessimistic, I wish we had a better way to share knowledge, will power, man power to make everybody's life nicer, leaner and cleanr.

Everything that people believed in the past is not wrong. They were right about a lot of stuff, some of which we consider common sense that isn't worth talking about (car accidents are bad for your health) and others of which are now considered controversial (skeumorphic buttons are a good way to distinguish clickable from nonclickable UI).

I expect that a lot of things that I now believe will be proven wrong. I have no idea which of those things it will be.

Are you doubting COVID19 is real? How do you explain the unusual few extra millions of deads this past year?

Or do you not even have friends and friends of friends that have lost someone and you doubt those deads are real?

I don't really have a strong opinion, other than I do think the response to it is disproportionate. But to answer your question directly, I don't know a single person who has gotten sick, or even a friend of a friend. Although I follow a few people online who did get sick, and my sister is a nurse so knows of cases in the hospital. But she tells me that the facts on the ground, like reports that the ICU was overwhelmed with cases is misleading at best. That because of budgetary measures the ICU always runs at close to max capacity and it doesn't take much of a bump at all to fill it up. Also, we had other cities around us transfer their overflow to use up our extra capacity.

Anyway, the point wasn't really Covid in particular, just that it's a contemporary example where most of us believe something that might very well turn out to not be an accurate appraisal with 50 years time in the rear view mirror. Most of us just take what we're told on faith, and have no direct way to verify that it is the whole truth. That is the lesson from all the cases of scientific corruption listed above.

A good indicator is that other rich people are losing tons of money, for example the cruise industry.

That's an interesting thought. But there are many examples in history where one group of rich people profited while others suffered -- it's not like they're all one cohesive group. Like in this article, any rich person who had an interest in and ability to make money off of fats, lost tons of money because the rich people who controlled sugar wanted to get richer instead. Just because science is being corrupted for money and power, doesn't mean that it will benefit every rich person and hurt none of them.

All of these have a common issue which is that organizations were lying based on their incentives yet people took them at their word anyway.

Because science.

I'm not sure if you meant that sarcastically? The very point of the examples given above is that "the science" isn't a fixed beacon of shining truth. It is an idealized process overseen by flawed and biased humans with their own personal agendas. We often fall short of the ideal, and are led astray by those claiming to have the truth supporting their demands.

How do we know today is any different than those examples above?

Because lobbying and abrupt, agenda-driven changes of policy and numbers (e.g., what counts as a "case" or "infection", and what number over what time period is reported) are easy to detect and collate when everything is in the open today.

The practice of science, which is not an end unto itself, is possible to indulge in because we each have a chance at examining data and methods. When those are restricted or changed without reason, that is another data point. We no longer need to, nor do we, rely on lobbyists who write legislation and policy.

Why does anything have to be abrupt? Perhaps Sars was a test run to get everything in place re the data, policy, and propaganda required to make it work? How exactly do you personally verify the veracity of the data and methods used?

Why do you think things are so much different today than they were just a few decades ago when the science in regard to sugar was corrupted? The corruption was successful then, and things aren't that much different today. Do you honestly believe that in 50 years time we wont look back and see at least one thing that was purported to be scientifically proven true, subsequently falsified?

I didn't believe the anti-fat propaganda, but I had precious few tools to convince others. Now we have an embarrassment of useful information, and most people pay attention to shoddy analysis to support anti-science ad-hoc statutes, instead. But at least I can satisfy myself on the facts.

Nothing has changed at all, really.

> Nothing has changed at all, really.

That's exactly right. So we're equally vulnerable to corrupted science as all the people before us who fell victim to the examples listed above.

Pretty sure it was stated sarcastically. It's an exact example of what you said the problem is, so I'd be quite amused if it was meant literally.

The issue is in the structure of organized production (business/finance/economy). This device has a deep cost.. and will taint peoples knowledge, effort, goals. All for the sake of high throughput I guess. But we should spend a bit of time thinking of alternative ways..

Lol

Being able to prognosticate about a comments fate doesn't in any way make the comment itself more legitimate.

Fair enough. Edited.

There is more than one way react to this paper. The top comment illustrates one way: "Everything is a lie. Distrust everything."

Obviously this approach could put the paper itself in question. How do we know it is not funded by "Big Fat". OK, that's silly but honestly where does the skepticism end and the truth begin.

Another way to look at this paper is that science is biased. It is biased in that people choose what to study. They decide what is "interesting". Given that resources to do research are limited, this has consequences. If they choose to focus on studying fat, then that may mean not studying something lese, like sugar.

Generally, scientists tend to be followers more than leaders. It makes sense to build on the work of others instead of striking out on a new path. New discoveries do not come easy. If the majority of labs are studying fat, then to a majority of people, including those funding research, studying sugar makes less sense.

This sort of herd mentality is certainly seen amongst programmers. I think it is even more extreme. As a programmer running with the herd, one lesson you could take from this is that whatever it is you are focused on right now might seem like the "right" choice of what to focus on that will lead you to the truth. If more or less everyone else is focused on it, too, how could the majority be wrong. The truth, however, which may not be recognised until some time in the distant future, is that you may be chasing the wrong thing.

I am very skeptical about the programming trends and areas of focus I read about every day on HN. I sense that is a minority viewpoint.

People are biased but proper use of the scientific method and statistics is not. Of course there will always be a n=5 study on some stupid shit against the “mainstream” facts with bad methodology, but that doesn’t make the multiple independent n=insert big number proper studies’ findings bad. And thus, while there are definitely areas that are not yet well mapped, it doesn’t make the already well-known untrue.

The history of leaded gasoline and how it was believed to be incredibly safe for decades is easily my favorite example of buying credibility as a corporation (it's a long story, but I bet this will be the most interesting thing you read this week).

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-sc...

NYC cleaned up shortly after gas stations stopped selling leaded gas. Crime was significantly less in a short period of time. "it’s not just New York that has seen a big drop in crime. In city after city, violent crime peaked in the early ’90s and then began a steady and spectacular decline. Washington, DC, didn’t have either Giuliani or Bratton, but its violent crime rate has dropped 58 percent since its peak. Dallas’ has fallen 70 percent. Newark: 74 percent. Los Angeles: 78 percent." https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

- Oil industry denying climate change [0] [1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/13/climate-cha...

[1] original source of Guardian article: https://www.smokeandfumes.org/documents/document16

edit: add original source

Consider adding to your list the normalization of pseudoscience for profit, especially practices like Chiropractic that are allowed to masquerade as a legitimate profession. A lot of lobbying had to happen to make this our reality.

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/19/archives/7-years-of-lobby...

I've got one: "employment is the opiate of the masses"

We don't really need everyone working. Look at California with a $25B budget surplus this year despite record unemployment. With the right tax system cough land value tax cough we should be able to eliminate poverty and fund basic income.

But when people aren't working they get together and get ideas. Like storming the capitol or defunding the police. Plus they have time to execute on them. Keeping everyone surviving paycheck to paycheck with the threat of homelessness in plain sight is a good way to keep everyone calm.

I think you're getting at a bigger issue of personal freedom vs rigid social structure. Personally, I don't think there's any simple right answer to where that balance lies. If nobody had to work, they'd enjoy some benefits of freedom but suffer psychological problems due to feeling useless and become violent like you say. At the other extreme, if we were all slaves, it would be unpleasant too. This extends into many areas - e.g.

Religious rituals - compelled or optional? If optional, self-excluding people lose the support and feeling of being part of something bigger and also lose the opportunity to join if they can't make themselves believe.

Education - compulsory to train children to grow into productive workers or freedom for children to enjoy their childhood even if it means lacking usefulness and discipline as an adult who then becomes useless and suffers emotionally?

Clearly separated gender roles - too separate is bad for people who don't fit well into either but too ambiguous may have consequences for family stability and thus the emotional wellbeing of children and stability of the society.

One culture or multiculturism - a common culture helps people function cooperatively and multiple cultures divides people and creates conflict. But a single culture can be harmful to people who it treats badly and they have no other option. I should clarify here that multiculturism in the west seems fairly harmless because it's neutered - minority cultures still have to bend to the laws of the dominant culture. If they had their own laws, the division would be greater but so would the benefits to misfits.

There doesn't have to be a conspiracy theory or derogatory label for these things. Societies try to figure out ways to operate that balance the tradeoffs.

Don't forget alcohol. There was a period where every single movie had the main characters sipping big round glasses of red wine every day. And of course all the studies and articles about red wine being good for you. This became so normal we don't even think about it.

The first three are 3 events over nearly 100 years. That's not very common.

The last one, I'd argue isn't new but the internet's ability to provide direct-from-the-source accounts of events and access to opposition sources allows the media to be fact checked in real time (or at least to notice incongruities with other stories). I'd be surprised if the situation is at all new. In fact, I'd argue that the media are the root cause of the previous three phenomenon you describe.

I think fact-checking is still in its infancy, and is currently nearly worthless, due to a lack of any ability to verify who is doing the fact-checking. It's just more noise in the same system. Once you can attach web-of-trust or a similar provable system, then fact-checking will have some value.

It seems like "fact checking" in the snopes sense is just another vector for propaganda. The truth of what happened in the past is only knowable as fact by those who witnessed it, and by what can be proven with evidence. I don't think that's a modern problem.

The problem itself is not new: you can only trust what you have seen with your own eyes. And, to a lesser extent, you can trust something a trusted party has seen with their own eyes.

However, the cost of lying on a large scale has dropped to almost nothing. While the cost of truth verification has remained about the same. (One could argue that with lockdown, it has actually increased.)

There is a ray of hope, however, and it's called web of trust. If I can trace my trusted parties to their trusted parties, to their trusted parties, and so on, all the way to the original information source, I'm able to ascertain, with strong mathematical certainty, that the original source of information is reasonably trustworthy. That is, of course, if I assigned my trust correctly, and so on. On the other hand, if the original source cannot be traced, then their information is worthless.

The challenge now, for us hackers like no one else, is to build this web-of-trust information system. When it's done, it will usher in a new age of clarity and light, truly a new Age of Enlightenment, and our old way will seem as old and archaic as unsanitary surgery and X-ray shoe fitters.

The good news is that all of the technology, mathematical proofs, etc., has already been done. We can build this resilient, trustworthy information system today, with today's technology. Actually, we could have built it 20 years ago. And I think it is inevitable that it will be built.

> The lies [...] The only defense seems [...] strong analytical skills [...] skepticism

Those skills seem unaffordable to many. Suggesting this defense unpacks as belief in conspiracies. Which does seem a widespread strategy in low-trust societies, but doesn't seem helpful.

But I'm reminded of recycling's misdirection, encouraging people to act as an individuals to mitigate damage, rather than collectively through representative government to prevent it.

Perhaps the most impactful recent measure to increase truthfulness in US society, was making corporate officers personally liable for misleading statements? How might that be improved upon?

And there seem divergences between self image and actions, with respect to honesty, in many US subcultures. Potentially providing leverage for change?

> cigarettes

Everybody knew cigarettes were unhealthy long before the 1960s. My dad was in high school in the 1930s and the kids called cigarettes "coffin nails". Doctors routinely advised patients to quit smoking. Any doctor who dissected a cadaver in medical school knew it was bad for you. A microscope or a scientific study wasn't necessary to notice the black, ruined lungs of a smoker.

The disheartening thing, at least for me, is that there are always plenty of people who disagree with the lie. But their voices are discredited/downvoted/etc.

Just try calling anything commonly considered to be "science" or "truth" into question and watch the attacks roll in. At its worst, it can end careers and livelihoods.

> It seems that the truth can be purchased at the right price from the right organizations.

Yes, this is an instruction manual.

I would get behind a pre-vote cognitive competency test. Nothing fancy, just some reading comprehension, basic syllogisms, common fallacies, common rhetorical dirty tricks, and so on. Something anyone who's actually passed the US citizenship test would solve with ease, I would imagine.

There is only so much analyrics a person can do. I can do my research when it comes to my immediate proffession, and my interests. But there are only so many hours in the day, rely on the rest of society to get it right when it comes to other aspects of my life.

I cannot question everything i was ever taught in school. I have to assume that the basics physics is correct, that the fire safety and contruction people do their job, and that the doctor doing ths blood test knows what he is doing, etc.

What makes you think academia is not part of the list you just outlined? Part of the academic program is to shape the big lie too. It just happens that along the way, some are able to develop critical thinking and reasoning in greater depth to make the important questions, but "history is written by victors"... Academia is primarely shaping corporate slaves.

> Big Media and the apparent massive degradation in truthfulness of the 2010

The "degradation of truthfulness" has been going on since the times of William Randolph Hearst.

Each time...

- ...a news anchor has an opinion about what is being reported...

- ...a political analyst or book author is interviewed in a news show...

- ...a news outlet follows a partisan editorial line, tells you who to vote for...

... that's when journalistic integrity is lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...

True journalism is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's about describing events, not forming an opinion about them. That's your job.

In this regard, most mainstream American journalism sucks. CNN and Fox News. Both indulge in the same behavior.

No news outlet is a replacement for your own critical thinking.

I really do believe this, and the project of classical liberalism as a whole. However, I've found myself without a good response to:

> But everyone is biased, including journalists. So the best we can do is to get rid of the false narrative that journalism can be descriptive, and simply embrace the prescriptivist journalism-with-a-slant.

My gut tells me there's something wrong with this, but I can't spot what. I'd be enlightened if you can point out the problem with the above perspective

> Big Auto and seat belts, they fought mandatory seat belts for decades

The linked article doesn't mention any lie. It was mostly some people saying that it should be up to the person to decide whether or not he wants to wear a belt.

The main problem is we can't blame any kind of conspiracy theorist anymore when there is so much BS science in the things we eat and nobody in power seems to care.

I would argue even that those in power have setup the system to produce BS science. Maybe inadvertently...

Research output is in the end one main criterias that we measure. Actual quality of it not so much. Thus science is driven to deliver publications. Now how valid these are is open to questions. And how many of them actually prove the mechanisms behind the findings? Probably comparatively fewer to those describing some correlation.

And most of the time when you point it out on social media, you get downvoted and censored!

Missing:

Big tech and the end of privacy plus firing people up with fear and hate using the maximal amount of lies they will individually tolerate and believe.

Alright, so now I'm left wondering: What about big agriculture?

There's a popular YouTube channel [1] with advocates for a plant based diet, low in fat, yet suspiciously says almost nothing about hydrogenated vegetable oils (canola, soy bean, sunflower, etc).

These oils - according to many studies - are THE leading source of heart disease, right up there with sugar. They're a highly unnatural food, heavily processed, never before in nature were you able to consume the oil extracted from a f*cking sunflower like you can today.

And yet? NutritionFacts.org almost never, and I mean 99.9% of the time never mentions how bad these oils are for you.

Coincidence? I mean really, what CAN you believe these days? There's a study for this, and a study for that. Everything is bad for you.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/NutritionFactsOrg

Hydrogenated vegetable oils are mostly outlawed in the US now. (They are on labels as "trans fats".) They were supposed to be entirely eliminated by 2018, but corporations have got FDA waivers to continue selling poison.

Fred Kummerow spent his whole career, from 1957 until he was 98, getting trans fats out of stuff sold as food. In India and Brazil people are still trying to stop it.

"Nobody cares about privacy"

Except if there was a button asking you to opt-in, literally nobody would press it.

there are few articles about this because this is biting the hand that feeds.

The article you linked on seat belts says that people fought against seatbelts _despite_ research, and there's no mention of big auto.

>Teaching analytical skepticism needs to become a core curriculum for our schools.

Won't work. Half of the world has an IQ of under 100. To question scientific dogma you would at least need an IQ of 110 I would think.

Don't forget Big Oil: CO2 is good for plants.

Add to that -

1) Red wine is good for health is consumed little daily.

2) WHO preaching at the start of the pandemic that everyone doesn’t need to wear masks.

I think the WHO wasn't intentionally lying here - the other examples appear to be cases where a truth was hidden in order to promote/protect a product (lobbying for sugar to be considered a health food for example).

We do need to be critical of what's told as truth in social or personal circumstances, for sure. I just sincerely doubt the WHO intended to harm people by making that claim.

Well, Spaniards drink a lot of it, and coincidentally they have one of the lowest heart disease rate in the world. Also a factor their laid-back culture and olive (oil) consumption.

Not to mention the whole copyright mess...

Wonder what the lie is today?

5G? Millimeter wave radiation? EMF of electric cars? I'm no crazy man, but we have no reason to believe these are safe (yet). Just as Marie Curie thought nuclear radiation is safe or asbesthos was the great novel insulating back in the day.

Big pharma and mass produced pointless medications without liability.

Since Fourier suggested sun light is likely trapped within the Earth’s atmosphere back in the 1820s others began digging into it. John Tyndall showed in the 1860s C02 from coal was especially good at trapping heat.

Fears of MSG were started in a food lab as a racist bet/joke.

Propaganda research during wars was gifted to University rather than let the spending “go to waste”. We’ve been indoctrinated by advertising, marketing, as the move from fear of sky wizards to fear of national economic collapse became the new cudgel.

The Greeks wrote about hoping the masses never tried to check the top of Olympus. It was easy enough to keep the non-technical masses in check over C02 and the rest.

Let’s build more data centers for our start ups. Surely that has no environmental impact!

I’m hopeful now that our fear based flock management has shifted from complete nonsense to at least economic nonsense, making it tangible, we’ll start to collectively accept reality. All that energy doesn’t vanish it just goes elsewhere. All that debt isn’t real; it’s what we’ve been told to believe by the latest system of social control.

MSG is harmless, chinese food syndrome is a hoax. https://news.colgate.edu/magazine/2019/02/06/the-strange-cas...

Yes, exactly.

My reply was to a post highlighting when we’ve been lied to. I was just piling wood on the fire.

Saturated fat turns out to be entirely harmless; it turns out that ills blamed on sat fat are caused by sugar and by ... something else ... that is in American-farmed meat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Think of sugar (the fructose in sugar) as a poison. Your liver can neutralize any of myriad poisons at a strictly limited rate, fructose among them. So, choose consciously how much of each poison you want to eat, according to the load on your liver. Fructose and alcohol use the same pathway, so choose wisely.

Americans eat way more fructose than their livers can neutralize, and are dying from it in numbers that make COVID-19 look like the common cold. The autopsies don't say "died of sugar poisoning". Instead, they say heart disease, stroke, obesity, complications from diabetes, metabolic syndrome, hypertension... But it's mostly the sugar.

Something else?

Research into what about meat consumption in the US causes heart trouble, on top of the known sugar problem, has just started. About all we are sure of, so far, is that the sat fat isn't it.

The lies go on because the establishment media is paid to do propaganda for establishment big business.

Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post. The biggest companies own the media distribution channels, Disney, google, facebook, etc.

Think about that fact when you see all the people being censored and deplatformed.

Think about why the establishment media shouts out racism 24/7, when using anti trust to break up big companies will help all races by improving their economic status?

Why is establishment media fermenting animosity amongst the lower classes, while the establishment people are getting richer by the second?