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. 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. 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.

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