I don't think it's remotely inevitable. I think that's an outrageous mindset.
Think of it like an engineer. We try to test products before deploying them to production (e.g. make all of humanity ingest it). If our tests are wrong some significant portion of the time, or if being wrong is much more damaging than we realized, then absolutely it's time to start the conversation of "How do we get better test coverage?"
I bet if you put some paltry amount of money, say 100B (compare this to a bailout) into devising tests around the long-term safety of various chemicals some creative solutions would come up. For example, off the top of my head, if reproductive health is a concern, perhaps do a study where some animal that reproduces frequently is exposed to it for 10+ generations. We can validate if this is a viable way of testing by taking some known endocrine-disruptors and validating this test catches them effectively.
For whatever reason, some people don't seem to see engineering chemicals that are safe for humanity to be a worthy enterprise, but I think it's as important as any tech company and we should make the financial incentives to reflect that and get the right minds on this problem.
Those tests exist already, but no ethical tests can determine the full truth.
Also, tests where minute traces of anything, like coffee, are purified to extreme amounts and injected into animals to cause cancer only add confusion, especially when California considers adding cancer warnings to coffee.
Do you actually know which tests the EPA runs and if so could you cite your source?
> no ethical tests can determine the full truth.
That's an all-or-nothing fallacy.
Also you didn't respond to the core of my remark, which is about increasing the financial incentives by an order of magnitude. Lastly I take your complaint about coffee as support my argument that the current testing mechanisms are likely too simple.
No. Ethical tests cannot determine the full truth - that is just a simple fact.
How can anything be tested on on enough humans ethically? We can use animal models to detect some negatives. But if animal tests show a substance is "safe", doubt would still remain until tested on humans. It is normal that humanity creates new technology without knowing the future impact. Some people think that we shouldn't introduce new technology since we can't afford the risks. But technology has ethically positive outcomes - not only negative risk. Doing nothing has risks too.
I guess that it's a fallacy because we don't need to determine the "full truth", just as much of it as we can if doing so would prevent mass poisonings.
I'm sorry but that is nothing but a gross oversimplification of the topic.
There is neither lack of effort nor lack of incentive for human-analog testing ( which would lead to curing cancer, weightloss, hairloss, vaccines, etc. etc. etc.). You can't just write unit tests for the real world. Please do some reading before you try and hand-wave away a whole field as trivial.
Not inevitable at all. It's entirely feasible to specify categories of chemicals. E.g. see the german law on novel psychoactive substances[0] that lumps substituted molecules together with their primitive variants.
One could even go a step further and mandate outcomes instead of means, that substances must be proven to either have a low environmental half-life or to not bio-accumulate.
My understanding is that in a lot of countries, the perspective is backwards from what we have in the US. We have, "prove it's harmful." They have "prove it's safe".
You can still progress technologically without being reckless.
You have to prove that the benefits is worth the potential harm.
Vaccines are known to be harmful to very few persons, yet we vaccine because the benefits outweigh the very small potential of harm.
No, especially with vaccines in the US (and some other places) science doesn’t have to meet that burden because they are indemnified for product liability by the government by law.
The EU uses a whitelist approach for food additives, vs the US's blacklist approach:
> Europe has chosen a precautionary approach in regulating, while the U.S. governing bodies tend to be more reactive. In other words, in the United States, food additives are innocent until proven guilty, while in Europe, only those additives proven not to be harmful are approved for use.
There are a ton of contaminants in our drinking water that the EPA recommends you remove and we know they are harmful but they are not mandated to do so. Get yourself a water filter because they're not going to filter it for you.
If you live in California you likely have an enormous amount of chloroform in your water (I tested my water, was horrified, and bought a whole-house water filter; apparently this is just generally true in the Bay Area, and I suspect SoCal as well since we pipe our water down there).
Yeah, I had a bit of a brain fart, the E in EPA made me think Europe, despite me actually knowing what it stands for. I luckily have nothing like that in my water.
No we overcomplicate it with overly complex regulations. It’s pretty simple, don’t dump chemicals in water or on land period. Assuming chemicals are totally fine until proven otherwise is backwards as hell and clearly corrupt.
> It’s pretty simple, don’t dump chemicals in water or on land period.
Everything is chemicals. You just described 2/3 of all industrial activity and proposed we should stop them. Are you willing to take the consequences which follow from that proposal? (And somehow forgot the 1/3 “dump chemicals in air”)
Chemicals are shorthand for synthetic chemicals. We co-evolved with natural chemicals which means that they're usually not too harmful to us and get easily biodegraded.
In this case it's about PFAS, a subgroup of organofluorine compounds. There's only 5 known organofluorine compounds produced by organisms.
Notice the word usually I used. It's about probabilities, and with vastly different probabilities come different burdens of proof.
If you had the choice to put something random from the forest in your mouth or something from a chemistry lab?
> This is a thought terminating cliche and pedantically destroys the conversation.
It is not. Quite contrary. The thought it provokes is "what chemicals do you want to ban?" Do you want to ban water? Should we throw anyone in a prison who transports it? It is a chemical after all. One which is quite dangerous in many circumstances.
But surely that is not what edgyquant meant. Should we prohibit people selling soap? It is a chemical! But that is silly. We would probably lose more by banning that than by not banning it.
Should we ban plastics? Maybe? Which types? All types? All uses?
Should we sell hydrazine in grocery stores? Oh, we better not. Can we use hydrazine in special applications like fuelling satellites? If so what do we require from people who handle/store/dispose of it?
So many thoughts provoked by that simple observation.
What is the difference between lye (dangerous), sand (not dangerous unless it suffocates things or gets crushed and inhaled), water (can cause flooding or drowning, otherwise harmless), and sodium bicarbonate (quite basic, generally harmless), and hydrazine (mutagenic, highly toxic, highly flammable)?
All of these have hazards in specific circumstances, and huge benefits in others. All are chemicals.
All are well known and characterized. Many other compounds are too new for that level of knowledge and characterization. They are chemicals too.
If we allow someone to make new chemicals (it’s hard to stop, frankly!), either we say ‘no, not until they are fully understood and characterized’, or ‘yes, unless we learn it’s too hazardous’.
Saying no first is a bit of a catch-22 since how are you going learn anything and characterize the dangers if you don’t make and use it a bunch?
If you say ‘yes, unless we learn it’s too dangerous’ then we learn a huge amount quite quickly - but inevitably have something too dangerous causing problems.
It’s a fundamentally conservative vs liberal development strategy debate.
>What is the difference between lye (dangerous), sand (not dangerous unless it suffocates things or gets crushed and inhaled), water (can cause flooding or drowning, otherwise harmless), and sodium bicarbonate (quite basic, generally harmless), and hydrazine (mutagenic, highly toxic, highly flammable)?
The MSDSes will elaborate on this and you probably know that.
This thread chain has gotten impressively disingenuous very fast. We aren't arguing the colloquial definition of chemicals which if we're not being pedantic, we know brings up ideas of substances damaging to other substances or life itself.
Which is fairly obviously the line that you're giving a good traditional "but where would we POSSIBLY STOP?!" gambit that comes out of paid lobbyist's mouths more often than hello or goodbye.
The line to be crossed is obviously at least a few blocks up the way from "what is the difference between water and hydrazine though".
And also, anything cumulative becomes "too hazardous" within years. But by then profits are made, and war chests are filled to keep the spice flowing.
The world got by for thousands of years sustainably without a lot of these "huge benefits" and I'm willing to take a hit or two within my lifetime to ensure there's still lifetimes at all down the road.
No you’re being pedantic and proving my point. Everyone, every single person, knows when you’re doing something that could potentially devastate an environment and if you have to ask if it could don’t be dumping. Why should anyone be allowed to dump anything at all into the local environment?
We do need to be a bit more specific than that, or we're not gonna get anywhere.
Also, once we've specified which chemicals shouldn't be dumped, I'd like to include the atmosphere in the list of places where one shouldn't dump them. Seems to be a very popular place to dump really harmful stuff, we should stop that.
This intentional nitpicking of the colloquial usage of the word chemicals is a favorite of both, disingenuous conversationalists who like to take a chance to feel correct rather than participate earnestly, and lobbyists.
Its hardly a nitpick, you're being so vauge that its impossible to understand what you are actually proposing.
Why not just use more specific language? If indeed everyone is acting in bad faith, using clear language would shut them up. If instead they are being ernest and cannot understand you because of the "colloquial" language, then being rigorous would further your stated goal of ernest participation. Either way seems like a win-win for you.
I didn't propose anything, I'm just nitpicking HN's nitpicking of attempts to have a real conversation.
Which, since HN is a place for technically minded people, has resulted in people arguing that chemical contamination of PFAS is categorically the same as watering my lawn.
You are technically correct, but this is called a "gotcha": it's not about continuing the conversation in earnest, if anything, it shuts down conversation about the important details by, in the writing of mike judge, "playing lawyerball" instead.
In reality we all know that none of us are writing the technical legislation, so any of us becoming enamored with defending for profit entities against hazardous chemical classification through technical usage of language is...basically the core spirit of corporate lobbyism.
This intentional nitpicking is necessary for anyone who has taken a first course in chemistry.
You do not appear to have done that. That's why you are arguing with the colloquial usage of the word. Because you can't offer a useful and precise definition.