Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication

Personally, I suspect that many people who present as wheat/gluten sensitive may in fact be reacting to the herbicides present in the wheat.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

And glyphosate is also used for burndown and/or dessication on a number of non-glyphosate tolerant crops such as wheat, oats, beans, potatoes, etc that go directly to the grocery store

Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?

Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.

> "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an actionor policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans",unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence"

I didn’t say glyphosate definitively causes cancer, I didn’t say Dr. Oz was right, and I’m certainly not arguing that 'all chemicals are bad.' My point was about the credibility of the evidence around glyphosate -- specifically the ghostwritten papers, the regulatory capture, the marketing practices and how that stuff shaped industry and academic attitudes.

That’s a critique of how scientific consensus gets constructed and how it trickles down to sites like HN. It is absolutely not some anti-chemical crusade like you're making it out to be.

If you want to disagree with that argument that would be great but engage with what I actually said, not this Dr. Oz strawman.

That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including farmers, scientists, regulators, journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.

My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but one example of that. So the question isn't about your personal motives but how you came to believe what you believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain from you believing those things and expressing them on social media.

Maybe I'm a little sensitive to this since I've rotated HN screen names a couple times after someone tried to track me down off-site to argue a (rather benign) comment I made about something.

A few of them seem to be pretty active in GrapheneOS related threads here. strcat for example.

I don't see why you're focussing on the manufacturing process rather than the products (final product and waste produced) although there are issues with the Haber process (e.g. high energy use and dumping nitrogen which can produce algal blooms).

There is a lot of distance between "we must never use any artificial process that hasn't been tested for x years" and "we must use every means of improving agricultural yields even if it means poisoning our children etc".

I feel like you're being disingenuous and not really evaluating whether poisonous chemicals should require a level of safety testing or not.

In all these discussions, if I could ask for one more data point to be pulled into the context, it's what the other herbicides look like (my understanding: much worse). I think these discussions look different when it's "late 20th century SOTA agriculture writ large vs. modern ideal agriculture with no chemical supplementation" than when it's "Monsanto vs. the world".

A very annoying part of the backstory of the "Monsanto vs. the world" framing are people who care about glyphosate not because they have very fine-grained preferences about specific herbicide risks (glyphosate is probably the only herbicide many of these people know by name), but rather because of glyphosate's relevance to genetically modified crops. I'm automatically allergic to bank-shot appeals to the naturalist fallacy; GM crops are likely to save millions of lives globally.

In mice models, Alzheimer’s is transferrable via gut microbiota. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02216-7?fromPaywa...).

So to say it messes with the gut is no small thing.

I agree but if they're flat earthers they've already rejected established science, so what's that appeal to authority going to do?

This is why "trust the science" is so memeable, it's a lazy appeal to authority the other party has already told you they don't trust and yet people are shocked when this argument doesn't work.

Trust the science was a shorthand for “you, or even I, may not understand this thing in perfect detail, but the people working on it do, and they GENERALLY aren’t making catastrophic mistakes that you can detect as an amateur. And when these people collectively stand behind a conclusion the odds of it being completely wrong are exceptionally low. We don’t have a more accurate alternative regardless. Please stop JAQing off about it”

But writing all of that over and over again is annoying. And a lot of “”””critical thinkers”””” can’t be bothered to read it. So the shorthand emerges. Sometimes used incorrectly? Definitely.

> Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege [0]

> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

> Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.

> Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Edit: it was discussed here a few days ago [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817

Sadly: no consumer model yet.

Wrong.

See, e.g., https://www.fda.gov/food/chemical-contaminants-pesticides/pe...

“Pesticides are used in agriculture to protect crops from insects, fungi, weeds, and other pests.”

Glyphosate is already out there.

We have large papers that look into occupational and dietary exposures of real world cohorts, and they don't converge on much of anything that should make us concerned about our dietary exposure.

Yet you have some sort of "testing protocol" in mind that would somehow be more robust than the analyses already being done on real world populations that were inconclusive?

At least pitch a rough idea of what these experiments look like.

Fair, the word pesticide is technically accurate - simply not used where I am from to describe herbicides.

> would you advocate for dishonest research to be acceptable as evidence that a pesticide is ready for widespread human field trials?

I don't see where anyone is advocating this. I see a lot of attacks against the most tested and studied herbicide on the planet - many such studies and tests set about with a pre-determined agenda (by either side). If there was strong evidence of this chemical being widespread harmful to human health, I feel it'd have come out by now.

What it means is that instead of using glysophate, agriculture simply switches to less tested and newer chemicals that may end up actually being more harmful. Certainly more expensive. Using nothing is not an option for modern agriculture if we're going to feed the number of humans on the planet.

There are plenty of "bad actors" in this field (no pun intended) - but if used as directed and in conjunction with GMO crops engineered to reduce herbicide applications it's likely one of the best ag inventions of our lifetime. Why so many people are willing to die on this hill is beyond me. I see otherwise very intelligent people in my life who as they have aged went down the youtube conspiracy theory rabbit hole and now preach about how it's the devil.

If Monsanto (or others) conducted research or scientific fraud they should absolutely be punished for it. To be blunt - especially the scientists - since it is absolutely deleterious to public trust.