Thread

1. mattmaroon · 1790561684 · focus · HN ↗

   “Linked to” is a keyword indicating pseudoscience. Everything is “linked to cancer”.

   1. rdiddly · 1790562707 · focus · HN ↗

      "Linked to" by having been studied and shown to increase tumor rates in rodent testing. That not good enough for ya? Too pseudo-sciencey?

      1. timr · 1790562881 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes, that’s not good enough. Rodents are not humans. Then you have to deal with the dose, the setting, the difference in healthy lifespan, and a million other factors that differ from actual people in the real world.

         On top of all of that, this paper did no actual research - it just mined existing literature for any chemicals with at least one paper saying that it did something cancer-related in mice or other assays.

         Based on prior experience, almost certainly a substantial proportion of these papers are crap, but they don’t make any effort to figure that out (because that would be science, and therefore hard.)

         1. abisheakp197 · 1790562893 · focus · HN ↗

            You are right
         2. Madmallard · 1790563133 · focus · HN ↗

            This problem with things like this is that the real science is extremely costly to do and the usage of chemicals across the entirety of our environment is exploding borderline exponentially with time and obviously these things we didn't evolve to tolerate and low and behold so many new health issues are just skyrocketing in incidence.

            So what do?

            Just sit around and nitpick? Honk honk

            1. timr · 1790563598 · focus · HN ↗

               > Just sit around and nitpick? Honk honk

               The alternative is just making things up because it makes you feel better, so I’ll take actual science.

               1. Madmallard · 1790563846 · focus · HN ↗

                  It's not really making anything up, it's just not high on the tier list of evidence.
               2. rdiddly · 1790565043 · focus · HN ↗

                  That's the other extreme, not "the alternative." Science is knowing fewer things, but knowing them well (to a high degree of certainty). Making stuff up is "knowing" more things but being uncertain and/or wrong. In between the two, there's a whole spectrum. I'm willing to "know" a few more things, but know them less well. Like being pretty sure pesticide exposure is not decreasing my risk of cancer for example.

                  The other thing is, I would be willing to be presumptively wrong about something like this, for the sake of safety. If someone wants to add a chemical to "the environment" (a commons) then I think the burden of proving it's safe falls on them.

                  1. timr · 1790566275 · focus · HN ↗

                     > Making stuff up is "knowing" more things but being uncertain and/or wrong.

                     No, making stuff up is making stuff up. Uncertainty is what we get when we run an experiment and have some level of doubt about the outcome. What the OP proposes is to instead just do stuff to solve problems that haven’t been demonstrated, by doing things that haven’t been shown to have any effect. That’s not science - it’s religion.

                     Attempts to get around this by invoking the “precautionary principle”, or using broadly negative Bayesian priors, are basically just religion dressed in a lab coat. For example:

                     > Like being pretty sure pesticide exposure is not decreasing my risk of cancer

                     Completely made up. Even if you wanted to point to this paper (however bad), as evidence, it doesn't defend your specific claim.

                     1. rdiddly · 1790567944 · focus · HN ↗

                        That's fine.
                     2. Madmallard · 1790568095 · focus · HN ↗

                        WHAAAAAAAAAT?
            2. mattmaroon · 1790728609 · focus · HN ↗

               I know what not to do: accept pseudoscience.

               All “A is linked to B” tells you, and science has shown this time and time again, is that enough academics believe A is linked to B to do a number of hokum studies and show you the ones that came up with any correlation at all while burying all the ones that didn’t.

         3. Insanity · 1790572546 · focus · HN ↗

            +1. On the opposite side of cancer research - We're already pretty good at eliminating cancer in rodents, it just doesn't translate well to humans. Animal testing might have done more harm than good for human healthcare in the long run. People stick to animal models out of a "we've done it this way forever" way of thinking, not because it still makes sense.
      2. anon48293 · 1790574823 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes. Rodents are extremely susceptible to cancers.

         Might be as high as 57% of all rats developing cancers.

         <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aacrjournals.org&#x2F;cancerres&#x2F;article&#x2F;16&#x2F;3&#x2F;194&#x2F;473297&#x2F;Tumor-Incidence-in-Normal-Sprague-Dawley-Female" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aacrjournals.org&#x2F;cancerres&#x2F;article&#x2F;16&#x2F;3&#x2F;194&#x2F;473297&#x2F;T...

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.