Putting aside the accusation: Are they wrong, here? If so, how?
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I found a really great blog post with some excellent infographics when following up on some of the points made in this comment thread:
The upshot of that post is that there’s no clear-cut answer. For some kinds of crops, organic is better in terms of GHG emissions and energy use; for almost all types, it uses more land and has more eutrophication potential (because natural fertilizers are harder to match to the specific nutritional needs of the crops being grown).
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The point of discussing the question is to figure out whether they’re right or wrong. If we already knew whether they were right or wrong we wouldn’t need to even consider consulting them in the first place.
My point is that we should assume their expert takes are cherry-picked because they have a clear bias instead of assuming they are correct because they like to throw the word “expert” around.
ETA: that said, having actually read it now I see that the experts in question presented fair and balanced takes on the study and @david_aked who provided the link actually did the cherry-picking.
And of course, one study is never demonstrative of much of anything, especially a preliminary low-N study like this one.
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You have independent access to thousands of dollars in equipment and funding? Then I look forward to your publication, because that is the only way to know. There is no “figuring out.” We can’t reason our way to a conclusion about this. We need to prove it with evidence. Discussion has value, but it decides nothing. Not even discussion by experts.
Exactly, even biased sources can offer valuable perspectives. Their bias, does not in itself, make their position invalid. In fact, bias is inescapable. It’s worth keeping in mind, but there’s no sense in being a bigot (in the sense of the word that is gradually being lost.)
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This seems to be based on a nonsensical interpretation of the phrase “figuring out.”
Even the best evidence can’t “prove” anything positively. The best we can ever do is assess the current state of evidence through the lens of expert analysis (because only a handful of people are ever going to have a real handle on the state of evidence in any given topic.
Discussion is the best way to do that assessment of the current state of evidence. (And we need to dmake these assessments, because we need to e.g. decide whether or not to buy organic to avoid glyphosphate-treated crops.)
Biased sources can only offer valuable perspectives if they’re balanced against sources biased towards other conclusions if our goal is to draw conclusions based on the current state of evidence. This is intrinsic to the meaning of the word “bias”. It’s not only worth keeping a source’s bias in mind – it’s entirely necessary if you want to improve your understanding of any given topic.
For all intents and purposes, linguistic drift has already changed the connotation of the word “bigot” to refer to intolerant opinions about groups of people rather than opinions in general.
I strongly suggest that if you want to communicate effectively and convince people of your opinions that you not go around accusing people of being “bigots” because they hold opinions different from your own. It’s unlikely to get your ideas a fair hearing – and quite a bit more likely to have the opposite result.
In this particular instance, I’m not really a fan of having the word “bigot” thrown at me for pointing out that it makes sense to be skeptical of biased sources.
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But now it’s Bayer’s RoundUp. No mo Monsanto.
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I’m sorry, but that’s how science is done. Science is the act of figuring out these things. Just because it’s difficult and inaccessible, it doesn’t mean that discussion functions as a substitute.
You’re confusing a higher standard of evidence for complete philosophical skepticism on my part.
We might need to make decisions on imperfect evidence, but it does not mean we need to ascribe more certitude to that evidence than it merits.
That is simply not true. Biased sources can incidentally be the only correct sources. There is no logical reason that they cannot be. As a scientist, I’m biased in thinking that scientists are better than average at understanding science, even outside their own discipline. You don’t have to take other sources into account to test it, or even to evaluate what I’m saying, and I could turn out to be right by shear dumb luck. Bias is not inherently invalidating.
Skepticism and cynicism are distinct, and if you don’t like the word bigot, you’re free to disregard it at leisure.l, just like anything else I have to say.
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Oh I agree. Even if you go to a farmers market, you might see some more unusual shapes, but most of them still conform to what we visualize as ideal. The weird looking ones still get sold, but made into other things. i.e. tomatoes into tomato sauce. But man, it can be funny some of the mutants you breed.
Yep. This has to be the only reason left that Red “Delicious” still sells. Also, if there is only a few left of something they are less likely to be picked. Our cognitive biases are stupid.
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Their patent expired years ago anyway, so anyone can make it now.
Sounds like a fun new science fair project!
Bayer’s still got the trademark…
We’ll have to call it “StraightDown” or something like that.
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And a scientific paper funded by Monsanto disputes this in. . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1. . .
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Well no, this is not a very good explanation of how science works and how we use it to draw conclusions.
Even in the best cases where there are lots of high-N studies with great statistical controls, robust peer review, and various other mechanisms for generating more robust evidence the scientific process pretty much inevitably produces conflicting evidence, or perhaps phrased more accurately: evidence that can be used to support conflicting conclusions.
Science is not in the business of giving us cut-and-dried answers to questions like “should I buy organic?” Accumulating scientific evidence almost always makes such questions more complicated rather than simpler.
That’s where discussion comes in. Experts in the field draw different – usually conflicting – conclusions based on the evidence produced through scientific studies. By discussing these conflicting conclusions, they find caveats and reasons for skepticism about various interpretations of the evidence at hand. Non-experts can then draw conclusions about how to act in the world around them by discussing those discussions.
That’s how you get blog posts like the one I linked earlier that suggests that buying organic is better for the environment in some ways and worse than others. “Science” can’t give a definite answer to the question of “should I buy organic?” but it can provide quantification of the relative harms and benefits of doing so. The decision of how to interpret and use that evidence is always part of a discussion and never something “science” can decide by fiat. Science just doesn’t work that way.
This only makes sense if you assume there is an envelope somewhere with the correct answer in it, and that after we have done all the science we can go back and check which sources are correct by looking in the envelope.
In reality, there is no envelope. There is no way to know whether a biased source is correct or not. The only way to determine whether or not to believe something is to accumulate evidence, interpret it, and then discuss the interpretations in light of conflicting evidence and interpretations.
Bias is fine when it is one part of that discussion – it’s especially useful for finding reasons to be skeptical of the other biases that arise in the discussion. But if one bias dominates the discussion, then all it does is drown out other potentially valid interpretations of the data, and that does not help anyone draw better conclusions.
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I don’t see where you’re disagreeing with me here. I’m the one you accused of extreme skepticism earlier, remember? I can’t be both in the camp of “you can’t prove anything” and “science gives us clear cut answers.” I’m not sure you’ve decided what my argument is.
I’ll nutshell it for you: Science is not decided by experts. It is the body of evidence, and the method for obtaining that evidence. There are other valid definitions, but that’s what I tend to go with. From there, society can do what it wants with the evidence, but this study does not decide anything about the relative benefits of going organic. Scientists make a series of very narrow claims and do a fairly good job of supporting them. Science cannot answer whether organic gardening is good or bad. These are value judgments. Science can tell us all kinds of things about glyphosate, and about organic gardening, but the tussle over what to do with these things is not scientific. Evidence does not directly conflict in science, it only indicates deficiencies in the models or deficiencies in the experiments. Often at the root of controversies like glyphosate are conflicting values that have nothing to do with science. The value of the precautionary principle versus the value of innovation, for instance. Mook et al. did nothing to resolve the essential tension there. They gave us some evidence we can use to ask more questions, and that’s about it. They proved that if you take a bunch of bees and subject them to this method, you get the results they got. Cool. The argument about what this means for society is not scientific.
No, it makes sense whether or not there’s an envelope somewhere. I don’t think you respect this central element of bias: It is unavoidable. Scientists working in an obscure field are the most likely to have correct interpretations of results, but are tremendously biased by their specific training and the smallness of their specialty. They’re often siloed by lack of popular work in their fields. Whether or not there is “a correct” answer, it doesn’t change the fact that bias itself does not necessarily drive bad conclusions or invalid perspectives. And sometimes, an opposingly biased perspective simply does not exist to create the benefit of comparison. Which is my point. I’m not going to get dragged into arguing other tangents. A source can be correct despite its bias, and cannot be analyzed in terms of its bias–as was your first inclination before you read the substance of the information provided.
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Most of the world’s food production - that in developing countries, produced by subsistence farmers - is effectively organic, because those farmers do not have the capital for mechanised equipment, hebicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilizer.
Most of that “mainstream agricultural output” you seem to speak of, from developed countries, is used to feed livestock, or to make ethanol and corn syrup. Which is done on the present scale only because the produce is so damn cheap. Whose prices do not reflect all sorts of negative externalities. The industrialised agriculture in developed countries pollutes and destroys our natural resources.
It is neither necessary nor desirable that non-industrialised agriculture has the same yields or “scalability” than current industrialized agriculture.
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Source on that? That may be true of certain crops, but not agriculture at a whole.
These “organic farmers” as you call them have all also seen significant crop yield increases in developing nations thanks to hybrids tailored for the environment, adoption and availability of fertilizers, irrigation programs, and other factors.
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This guy would argue that we can, and also that we need to change because a lot of the ag practices we’ve adopted over the last 50 years or so have other major problems.
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This is utter nonsense, subsistence farming does not provide anywhere close to the majority of food-calories in developing countries. Modern mechanised industrial farming is widespread across the developing world (with the least success of it’s spread in Africa, hence continued occurrences of famine there, but it’s still responsible for a significant increase in yields there, and famines would have been far more frequent and deadly without the modest success there has been).
The planet was facing a serious food shortage due to rapid population growth post industrial revolution (only temporarily alleviated by mass emigration from Europe to the Americas and Australia), it was only the development of new strains (via lab-based hybridization, which is essentially just low-tech genetic engineering), new synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, new mechanisation and irrigation techniques, which prevented famine in the US and Mexico from the 40s on and then was then spread to India, Asia and Africa from the 60s on. The green revolution which created modern farming practices has saved countless millions of lives, there is no chance organic farming could have achieved the same results.
We’re currently facing a 2nd tipping point in regards to agricultural output, with the problems this time being exacerbated by climate change in addition to continued population growth. The idea that organic farming has any serious role to play in meeting those challenges is laughable, and frankly the opposition to genetic engineering is highly immoral considering the almost certain requirement for new drought and poor-soil tolerant crops that will be needed in the future, in addition to strains suited to growing indoors in vertical farms and lab grown protein.
Most of that “mainstream agricultural output” you seem to speak of, from developed countries, is used to feed livestock, or to make ethanol and corn syrup.
This is only true in the most developed countries, but like I said, the other countries where food calories are still the majority are mostly using modern industrialised methods too, they’re just not quite as advanced as in the US or Brazil, and also because those countries have the world’s largest livestock output. Feeding livestock is still creating food calories btw, and healthier food calories than wheat or corn. Livestock might be more damaging to the environment than other crops (in terms of land use, deforestation and methane output in particular), but the only way to solve those problems is with continued technological development (there’s been good research into engineering cows to produce less methane for example), not with magical thinking.
The industrialised agriculture in developed countries pollutes and destroys our natural resources.
To a far far lesser degree than what would be required to feed the world population using solely organic methods (which not only would require higher quantities of fertilizer and herbicides in many cases, but also significantly more land use), if anyone actually tried to implement this it would probably lead to hundreds of millions of people dying.
Modern ‘environmental’ activism is little more than genocidal lunacy tbh.
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…only kills the weak bees…!
I see you’re new here. Welcome to BoingBoing.
There is a problem with this … several, actually:
- Is there glyphosate in nectar or pollen honeybees forage on, and how much of it?
- How does force feeding glyphosate (5 and 10 mg/l) model any kind of bee exposure to glyphosate in their environment?
- They were feeding sterile sucrose, which lacks the nutrients found in honey and pollen.
- No one has studied the gut bacteria of honeybees enough to know what the national and seasonal variation among the species is.
The whole problem with this “gut biome” approach is that no one has done enough baselines. If you don’t know how variable something normally is, you can’t point at a variation as evidence of a problem.
Before I would consider testing whether something affects the sacred biome, I would want to see a full year of data from bees taken from several hives from several locations, perhaps once a week. And some of the hives would be the ones that are trucked around, some from local only hives.
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