[amarant]

I feel like this is a trend in online writing lately, and it's leading me to more and more withdraw from online discourse. Whenever someone introduces something that greatly helps with something, there are a bunch of people who start pointing out that, while the new solution is waay better than anything before it, it's not 100% perfect, and therefore "it's benefits are exaggerated" or similar. If the new thing is in the public eye for long enough, those "exaggerated" complaints start morphing into "it's a scam", and shortly after that the new solution to yesterday's problem is the villain that must be stopped.

It's really confusing, and quite tiring.

[psychlops]

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

[smaudet]

I think the bigger issue is not whether it has some efficacy, even if limited (which could be interpreted as a good thing), it's the potential for the bacterium to create a mono-culture, which would be objectively bad (remember, diversity is critical in populations, and for our oral health perhaps even necessary).

So not so much perfect being the enemy of the good, fluoride isn't perfect either, but it is good. This is potentially extremely harmful, and possibly even a source of something like a new AIDS pandemic...

[lannisterstark]

I'm sorry but the last claim seems extremely exaggerated.

[hatenberg]

Well literally any change removes money from some to give it to others. Side effect may be that people are better off (see Ozempic) but oh boy are the people losing money going to muddle the water / for investors as well as to fight the change.

[cubefox]

A similar thing happened when the media learned about Ozempic (semaglutide) a while ago. Multiple progressive outlets, especially the Guardian, published articles stating the drug was overhyped, playing down its value, citing overweight women from "fat studies" academia (basically activists against the stigma of being overweight saying that being overweight itself is not the problem), emphasizing all its downsides etc. Of course they couldn't stop the hype, because the drug actually works.

Yet another example: In early 2020, for a few weeks many news sites claimed that face masks don't help against coronavirus transmission because there was "no evidence" that they did. Of course this wasn't true (the evidence was just limited, and the protection wasn't optimal), and they changed their tone quickly once multiple non-Asian countries started to introduce mask mandates for visiting public places.

[abracadaniel]

See also effectiveness vs efficacy. If condoms are 100% effective but used incorrectly 20% of the time, they have 80% efficacy. It’s a useful stat when determining where to best allocate funds, but not for individual healthcare decisions.