[theptip]

Anyone know of a QUALY-based analysis of the costs and benefits of using these fertilizers?

The headline is quite hard to argue with ("think of the children!") but it would be interesting to know how much it would cost to use alternatives, and how much harm is being done by the current level of use.

[ip26]

You reference the logical fallacy of "think of the children", but in this case it doesn't really seem like a logical fallacy, if we are literally poisoning the children.

For comparative example, lead abatement is not a fallacious "think of the children" argument- actual children are routinely poisoned by lead.

[theptip]

In the case of lead poisoning, it's widely believed to have been the cause of a significant and measurable increase in homicide rates in the second half of last century. There's a lot of data supporting that hypothesis, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis has:

> between 1992 and 2002 the phase-out of lead from gasoline in the U.S. "was responsible for approximately a 56% decline in violent crime".

In the case of organophosphates, I am open to the idea that that there could be a big win by changing regulations. But without knowing the magnitude of the harm and cost, we really have no basis for prioritization. For example perhaps the time and money we'd spend changing these laws in the US would be better spent on removing lead to prevent even more poisoning of children. Or perhaps we should stop what we're doing and redirect all of our resources to removing organophosphates. Depending on even the order of magnitude of the effect, I hope you'd accept that different magnitudes of responses would be warranted.

> in this case it doesn't really seem like a logical fallacy, if we are literally poisoning the children.

This is precisely the "think of the children" fallacy. The fallacy doesn't refer to claiming children will be harmed when in reality they won't; that would be a factual error, not a logical fallacy. (And to be clear, I'm not making the claim that children won't be harmed by this family of chemicals). The fallacy refers to making an emotional argument based imagery of harm to children, instead of making a logical argument.