[afarrell]

Right. We share the opinion in your first paragraph. The second paragraph is because people who believe in science are still humans and therefore still have an in-group out-group instinct; You probably already know this. We also have a strong pattern-matching instinct: "You said $statement? You've probably from $ideological_group."

I'm totally willing to believe that golden rice was over-engineering and was imprudent allocation of resources, but I thought we didn't yet know enough because it was still in testing. Has it actually been deployed?

Science based aid is great if you can choose your metrics successfully.

I think we are in broad agreement.