> The disavowal comes 25 years after publication and eight years after thousands of internal Monsanto documents were made public during US court proceedings (the "Monsanto Papers"), revealing that the actual authors of the article were not the listed scientists – Gary M. Williams (New York Medical College), Robert Kroes (Ritox, Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ian C. Munro (Intertek Cantox, Canada) – but rather Monsanto employees.
Trust the science. The World Health Organization on glyphosate in 2016:
"The only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level"
"Glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures"
"Glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet"
"The Meeting concluded that it was not necessary to establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of its low acute toxicity"
"There are no credible studies indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals. Meanwhile, many of the herbicides that glyphosate displace, plenty of which remain in use, are known human carcinogens. The most widely reported declaration of glyphosate's carcinogenicity, by IARC, was disavowed by the WHO, IARC's parent organization...The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans"
When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate, ten prominent physicians wrote a letter to Columbia University in demanding his removal from the faculty for an "egregious lack of integrity" and for his "disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine." He replied "I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves" and provides "multiple points of view, including mine, which is offered without conflict of interest."
Here is Reuters with a 3000-word Special Inverstigative Report filed under "Glyphosate Battle" carrying water for Monsanto, after IARC declared the chemical 2A (probably carcinogenic):
It's been awhile since I've done any reading on glyphosate, which I mostly paid attention to because of a wave of bullshit stories about how Monsanto was suing people over seeds that blew onto their land (that basically never happened). Nothing in the intervening years, including this specific retraction, changes what I think about glyphosate, which is that it's probably safer than the herbicides that are used when glyphosate isn't.
I don't know why you think bringing me into this discussion is useful. If you were thinking that some regulatory agency made decisions based on the persuasiveness of my HN comments, probably no.
I'm generally comfortable being on the other side of whatever Mehmet Oz is talking about.
Very US-centric POV. The herbicides that would be used in the US to replace glyphosate, that are potentially worse (paraquat/diquat, atrazine, and 2,4-D), are are already banned in the EU.
If the EU were to officially ban glyphosate, their food supply would increase in quality as a result, since these worse pesticides are not available.
The US needs to catch up. Eliminating glyphosate is not a one-shot kill for human health and never meant to imply that
Sounds like you might be confused as to which crops use glyphosate as an herbicide, it’s not being used on vegetables and fruits being sold in the produce section, so it would do nothing for the quality of European produce. It’s possible that glyphosate overspray touches some human foods crops, but I wash my produce before eating it, I hope you do too.
Here is a list of plants that have glyphosate tolerant varieties: soybeans, alfalfa, corn, canola, sugar beets, and cotton. There is no glyphosate tolerant wheat plant.
These plants are used to make ethanol, sugar, soy animal feed, canola oil, cotton fabric, and feed corn. Humans consume canola oil and sugar, both of which are refined in a distillation process. Possibly some of the corn ends up as cornmeal or corn flour. All of the soy and alfalfa are sold as animal feed.
I’m not afraid of glyphosate or microplastics until the evidence shows otherwise.
Edit: I am out of replies, I hadn’t considered either of those routes for glyphosate to enter the human food supply. The concentration of glyphosate in a cow that eats feed grown with glyphosate has to be much more concentrated as well. Thanks for replying, my apologies for making a bad assumption.
While there isn't a commercially grown glyphosate tolerant wheat; there is a significant pathway for glyphosate into the wheat you eat through the process of desiccation[1]. It is common practice to kill the plant with an herbicide shortly before harvest, which helps to maximize yield.
Personally, I suspect that many people who present as wheat/gluten sensitive may in fact be reacting to the herbicides present in the wheat.
Thanks for the additional information, I wasn’t aware of glyphosate being used for burndown/crop desiccation on wheat fields until CGMthrowaway mentioned it. Makes perfect sense, given no wheat is glyphosate tolerant, but it’s a (seemingly) more direct pathway to human glyphosate consumption than say, eating sugar derived from sugar beets grown using glyphosate.
But we eat very little wheat as is.
Most of the wheat is eaten in transformed products made with wheat flour.
How much glyphosate realistically end up in those products. It can't be a very large amount considering how refined/processed the flours are.
Do you know of any study that is able to detect glyphosate in the flour or end product ?
If they can't find it, it's probably a nothingburger.
Confused where you think I said fruits and vegetables. There is glyphosate in beef and other meat, just because an animal eats it does not wash it away.
And glyphosate is also used for burndown and/or dessication on a number of non-glyphosate tolerant crops such as wheat, oats, beans, potatoes, etc that go directly to the grocery store
By the logic you're using here, the epidemiological impact of glyphosate should be widely observed across the population (you're going so far as to look at traces of it left in the meat supply). And yet the correlations we have all tend to focus on agricultural workers dealing with it in large volumes directly. Can you square that circle?
Ahhh, of course. Nobody in academia studying herbicide toxicity can get the funding to investigate whether one of the most famous and widely used modern herbicides has human health impacts. After all, there must only be a couple people in the world working on this, and not a couple people in every R1 and R2 research institution in the world, all of whom would become famous if they published a dispositive connection on this.
Unfortunately science just isn't as glamorous as you portray it. Many researchers at many institutions have demonstrated the toxicity in question but it turns out that this does not make you rich and famous. It is quite difficult to become famous by conducting scientific research carefully and responsibly (much to my chagrin). It is the popularizers who receive notoriety, and those are a mixed bag. Few scientists care to enter that field.
"The doses of glyphosate that produce these neurotoxic effects vary widely but are lower than the limits set by regulatory agencies. Although there are important discrepancies between the analyzed findings, it is unequivocal that exposure to glyphosate produces important alterations in the structure and function of the nervous system of humans, rodents, fish, and invertebrates."
Costas-Ferreira C, Durán R, Faro LRF. Toxic Effects of Glyphosate on the Nervous System: A Systematic Review. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2022; 23(9):4605. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms23094605
"Today, a growing body of literature shows in vitro, in vivo, and epidemiological evidence for the toxicity of glyphosate across animal species."
Rachel Lacroix, Deborah M Kurrasch, Glyphosate toxicity: in vivo, in vitro, and epidemiological evidence, Toxicological Sciences, Volume 192, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 131–140, https://doi.org/10.1093/toxsci/kfad018
"Utilizing shotgun metagenomic sequencing of fecal samples from C57BL/6 J mice, we show that glyphosate exposure at doses approximating the U.S. ADI significantly impacts gut microbiota composition. These gut microbial alterations were associated with effects on gut homeostasis characterized by increased proinflammatory CD4+IL17A+ T cells and Lipocalin-2, a known marker of intestinal inflammation."
I quickly checked the first study linked and it's a meta analysis.
It relies on studies in rodent that get exposed to amounts of glyphosate that are absurdly high. Equivalent human absorption would be in the gram range, to the point where someone eating 250g of bread everyday would have 1% of this mass ingested as glyphosate.
By this standard, things like vitamins and minerals are toxic as well.
It makes no sense, to me it looks like bad science.
You have not assessed the facts critically. The argument in favor of glyphosate's safety is that, as the herbicidal action is the result of disrupting an amino acid synthesis pathway that in animals does not exist, it is therefore harmless to animals. This argument is already fallacious: all it does is establish the mechanism by which it is harmful to plants. These studies evidence that glyphosate is harmful to animals and investigate the mechanisms underlying the harm. The fact that these experimental conditions are not the same conditions under which glyphosate is consumed in the food chain does not make it bad science, because science is concerned with knowledge that generalizes (e.g. biological mechanisms and pathways) and these mechanisms cannot be gleaned by reproducing the conditions already in place.
The comparison with vitamins is not relevant, and to bring it up suggests you are not thinking clearly.
To me it is you who is clearly confused.
The vitamin parallel is very relevant; at the concentration used in the studies, vitamins would be toxic as well.
The poison is the dose.
Using dosages far above what could realistically be ingested makes the studies irrelevant.
By the same logic I could prove that salt actually kills you.
On the pathway argument, you are just rambling; I'm clearly not talking about that.
Whether there is a pathway is largely irrelevant if you cannot prove that it is toxic at expected ingestion levels.
You are just fearmongering and grasping at straws.
Same bullshit as the anti-vax that would have you believe vaccines are toxic because they use aluminum (yes, in amounts completely benign).
I thought that from reading the first part of the first meta sample too, but in that same paragraph is mention of a second study that apparently did find relevant issues at low doses in vitro of human cells at environmentally relevant concentration levels.
In fact the purpose of meta analysis is to compare and contrast the conflicting research and results on a topic. It's very useful when forming a scientific view.
I'm not against meta-analysis, but if those analyses rely on studies that have flawed methodologies, it is just an exercise in statistical hacking.
With enough massaging, you will find something eventually.
I don't have time to check in detail; can you link the study finding issues at relevant doses?
Anyway, my thinking is that if there was such a big problem, we would have found it already. It affects the food supply of so many; it seems unlikely that there are significant issues that wouldn't show up in the population at large.
The real concern is environmental impact and, particularly, effects on insects. But since they are going to use something else that may or may not be worse, it's probably better to not ban the stuff until it can be proved that the damage is worse than the benefits…
Glyphosate is used prior to harvesting oats to desiccate the plants to make them more uniform for harvesting as they ripen at different times, desiccating the plants makes threshing the grain easier, as the greener plants will dry out from desiccation.
I'm not offended, it's just weird. And thank you! We've got fun stuff coming out. If anybody knows someone involved in GrapheneOS, we'd really like to get their perspective on modern mobile platform hardening. I will repay them in Monsanto Roundup-Ready(tm) gift certificates.
> If anybody knows someone involved in GrapheneOS, we'd really like to get their perspective on modern mobile platform hardening. I will repay them in Monsanto Roundup-Ready(tm) gift certificates.
I agree. It's weird to see HN comments turn into cheap shots (albeit fallacious ones from someone who isn't making a logical argument) against other HN users.
Maybe I'm a little sensitive to this since I've rotated HN screen names a couple times after someone tried to track me down off-site to argue a (rather benign) comment I made about something.
The precautionary principle clearly states that if you have a chemical that kills living things and you have a company who stands to make a lot of money off of this chemical as long as it's safe for humans, that you should be very very careful about it. Probably should be avoided until there is not just proof from a lab or from paid off scientists.
Kind of crazy that this isn't just obvious to everybody.
It's not obvious to everybody because it's false. The Precautionary Principle is deeply problematic. For instance: it is generally interpreted to favor existing fossil fuel power sources over nuclear, despite the fact that fossil fuel power generation and extraction kills enormous numbers of people every year. Precautionary Principle thinking is extremely vulnerable to narrative capture. A closer-to-home example: Precautionary Principle thinking cautions against adoption of genetically modified crops. The status quo agriculture it favors instead have both lower yields (and thus greater ecological impact) and more pesticide/herbicide use.
Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face, would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead. Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that stood to profit from the right decision there!
You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree with me about this", expect pushback.
Are we even talking about the same thing? The precautionary principle, at least as far as I understand it, is to emphasize caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations with potential for causing extreme harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. As risk increases, the threshold for certainty rises as well.
Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?
Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.
> "The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an actionor policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of "black swans",unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence"
We are obviously talking about the same thing, and nothing I said about the PP is novel.
I very specifically did not say that PP analyses were dead on arrival, or that problems with PP thinking were dispositive. I said rather that it is not enough to simply invoke the PP in policy debates; that rhetorical habit has bad outcomes. Again: the idea is not that "precaution" is bad. It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default --- you have to make that argument on the merits.
There's a good Cass Sunstein thing about the PP if you're interested in understanding critiques of it:
> It's that you can't mechanically shift the burden of proof to anything "new" and assign a lower risk to the status quo by default
Not quite - it is true that you cannot assign a lower risk to the status quo by default, but the burden of proof is on the new intervention to prove that it's safe, not on detractors to prove that it isn't.
In other words, if the world is functioning today, you need to prove that your intervention won't cause ruin, no matter how small the chance or how big the upside.
How do you make that calculation when there is a small possibility of infinite risk? That is why the PP exists, otherwise you either ignore the possibility of total disaster events, or you cannot choose to act.
We are reasonably confident that no likely gamma ray bursters are pointed at us and within lethal range. We know dinosaur killers are out there--a failure to map every such object in the solar system is a small probability of an infinite risk. Why are there no ICBMs fitted for point defense against a city killer asteroid? You have the rocket, you have the boom. You need a seeker that can guide it to impact (there are other radars that could illuminate, it just needs to home on the reflection) and a standoff fuse that will fire it at the last possible millisecond.
No because it wasn't mandatory in most places, so there was no systemic risk. People were free to take it, in the same way people are free to drink alcohol, and the precautionary principle doesn't apply to individual risk.
I still think we are talking about two different things here.
I'm not saying you opposed the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. That would have been a batshit position to take (though: many did). I'm saying that the Precautionary Principle calls for exactly that position, and, moreover, the Extended Precautionary Principle proposed upthread --- the one where we look especially askance at risks where a party involved stands to profit --- opposes it even moreso.
I can't say enough that this is not random message-board dorm-room logic, and that lots has been written about this flaw in the simplistic application of the Precautionary Principle. I already gave a link upthread; I feel like I've done my due diligence at this point.
We're talking about the same thing. I wonder if you've just never read anything deeper about the Precautionary Principle than activists weaponizing it to make points about glyphosate (or vaccines or nuclear power).
> I'm saying that the Precautionary Principle calls for exactly that position
Not necessarily. The PP is interpreted so many different ways, it was actually invoked by people like Nassim Talib to not only justify the vaccine rollout but to call for strict lockdowns among other measures.
There are many arguments made against the precautionary principle, just like there were many arguments made in favour of leaded gasoline. We all know who ended up on the right side of history on that one, and I expect it will be the same for roundup.
In the context of this article, we are discussing the PP as relevant to regulatory agencies. The EU employs the PP while the USA takes something called the Scientific Approach - in other words, the EU requires evidence that an intervention carries no risk, whereas the US requires proof that an intervention has significant risk in order to ban it. Idk about you, but I feel a lot better eating food grown in Europe.
Your position isn't unique, there are many very intelligent people who nonetheless overestimate their capacity for understanding the world and predicting the future.
In the real world you should not be looking at the risk of X. Rather, you should be looking at where X stands amongst the competing options.
Nuclear power is an extreme example of this going wrong. The US effectively legislated it out of existence by decreeing that reactors should be as safe as reasonably possible. The problem is "reasonably" is fundamentally fluid. In theory at least you can always make things safer by throwing more safety systems at it. And if nuclear power is cheap enough you can afford to throw more safety systems at it. Thus nuclear power is by definition too expensive. And that's before the NIMBYs abuse the regulatory system to drive the costs way up.
Look at the reality: Depending on your yardstick nuclear is either safer than any other large scale power source, or nearly as safe as anything else and far safer than where most of our power comes from.
(The yardstick problem comes down to Fukushima. That's more than half of the "nuclear power" deaths right there--entirely because the politicians messed with things. Listen to the engineers, there would have been an expected death toll of zero. But nuclear power is blamed for the political decisions that killed hundreds.
And the yardstick comes down to a dam failure in China--ascribe the deaths from their hydro power dam failure to hydro and it's out of the running.)
But in the real world natural gas has about 10x the risk of nuclear before looking at climate effects. And oil has about 10x the risk of natural gas, plus a bit more in climate effects (a greater percentage of an oil molecule is carbon.) And coal has about 10x the risk of oil, plus considerably more climate effects.
We don't have the power, civilization (and virtually everyone in it) dies. The plants must run, the question is what runs them. Society would be safest if we took the existing rulebook and threw it in the trash can, replace it with a standard that expects a given risk per terawatt-hour, it's the job of the regulators to devise rules that accomplish this and any company is allowed to present evidence that a different approach is better. (If we focus less on risk X and more on risk Y we can get more safety for less cost.)
That's at least half a million American deaths in the last three decades on the altar of the precautionary principle.
Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.
This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.
Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.
The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.
> Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:
> Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.
And that argument was a fallacy in itself. The retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying that glyphosate is dangerous, that it causes cancer, or that Dr. Oz was right.
These threads are frustrating because a small number of people are trying to share real papers and talk about the subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't interested in discussing science at all. They've made up their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push that narrative regardless of what the content of the linked article actually says.
You’re accusing me of a motte-and-bailey by inventing a bailey I never argued.
I didn’t say glyphosate definitively causes cancer, I didn’t say Dr. Oz was right, and I’m certainly not arguing that 'all chemicals are bad.' My point was about the credibility of the evidence around glyphosate -- specifically the ghostwritten papers, the regulatory capture, the marketing practices and how that stuff shaped industry and academic attitudes.
That’s a critique of how scientific consensus gets constructed and how it trickles down to sites like HN. It is absolutely not some anti-chemical crusade like you're making it out to be.
If you want to disagree with that argument that would be great but engage with what I actually said, not this Dr. Oz strawman.
I don't know what you're talking about. None of my opinions about glyphosate have anything to do with some stunt where somebody drank glyphosate. I wouldn't drink glyphosate. Nothing has happened between 2018 and 2025 that has changed my (not very strongly held) beliefs that glyphosate is broadly safer than the herbicides that get used when it isn't. I also don't give a shit how Monsanto is promoting glyphosate; Monsanto's success or failure as an enterprise simply doesn't factor into my thinking at all.
I'm not saying your views came from some professor drinking glyphosate. I'm saying the social and regulatory environment around glyphosate was distorted by decades of industry driven messaging, ghostwritten research, and normalization of reckless demonstrations.
That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including farmers, scientists, regulators, journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.
My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but one example of that. So the question isn't about your personal motives but how you came to believe what you believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain from you believing those things and expressing them on social media.
Has he retracted his claim that “raspberry ketones” are a miracle for burning fat in a jar?
Idiots look at people who never admit they were wrong and think those are the people to follow.
People with the slightest bit of intelligence look at the people (or process in this matter) who are constantly checking themselves and willing to admit they were wrong (or in this case misled by frauds) when they find the truth.
Meanwhile, the real issue here is not the science. The real issue here is the American GRAS system, because Europe didn’t allow glyphosates because their political system requires stuff going into your food to be proven safe, whereas the American system simply requires it to not be proven harmful.
Would be more effective to simply ask for a point to be clearly made rather than grandstanding about what stupid people vs people with even slight intelligence believe as a way to try to indirectly insult other posts.
Retracting a paper showing it's safety isn't the same as proving it is unsafe. I don't see anything here that does that.
The IARC says the 2A designation was "based on “limited” evidence of cancer in humans (from real-world exposures that actually
occurred) and “sufficient” evidence of cancer in experimental animals (from studies of “pure” glyphosatese"*
There needs to be some kind of evaluation of products being safe to use before they're wildly used and even sprayed onto food.
For studies to prove that there is harm, there typically needs to be widespread use of it to make it easier to use population studies and certainly long-term studies. Simply relying on "there's no definitive proof that it's harmful to humans when used in a specific way" is naive and a sure-fire way to get large corporations to get away with harming people in the name of profits.
Proving a negative is often impossible. The rate of change in society would fall to near zero.
Given that technological improvements in farming are the only reason we haven't all starved to death and that society continues to grow while the amount of farmland stays the same I oppose anything that might impede our ability to produce food.
Did you know that 80% of the nitrogen in human tissues now originated with the Haber-Bosch process? If we were still waiting around for someone to prove that Haber-Bosch, or Ammonia in general, couldn't possibly harm humans then most humans would have long ago starved to death or never have been born.
I don't see why you're focussing on the manufacturing process rather than the products (final product and waste produced) although there are issues with the Haber process (e.g. high energy use and dumping nitrogen which can produce algal blooms).
There is a lot of distance between "we must never use any artificial process that hasn't been tested for x years" and "we must use every means of improving agricultural yields even if it means poisoning our children etc".
I feel like you're being disingenuous and not really evaluating whether poisonous chemicals should require a level of safety testing or not.
Its possible I misunderstood your perspective. To me it seemed that you were saying that agricultural products must be proved to be safe before usage. That would essentially be the opposite of today's requirements which are better stated as proving them not to be harmful. It would of course result in extremely negative outcomes, like starvation and death.
Others in this thread state that this is what they want directly, so i may have inadvertently strawmaned you.
Certainly we can find middle ground between the two approaches, and probably should.
Again, its possible I misunderstood your stance. If so mea culpa.
Agricultural products that are not new products can be shown to not be expected to have negative effects (e.g. fertilisers made from food waste). However, there does need to be some evaluation if it's a known toxic product - is it detectable in food produced with it etc.
There's also the problem of companies being short-sighted - they'll happily push a product if they know that it'll make money, but is likely to cause issues further down the line, or in other locations (e.g. run-off polluting waterways).
However, there can be significant environmental harm caused by traditional farming methods too if they're scaled up massively, so I'd say that it's often about trying to find the products that produce the best benefits with the least harm. I'm of the opinion that glyphosate is probably too harmful, but then I'm not a farmer or chemist.
The problem is nature throws far more in the way of hazardous stuff at us than what we add. And there's basically zero acknowledgement of it, let alone any attempt to regulate it.
And the basic reason to think glyphosphates are safe is the attack mechanism doesn't apply to our metabolism and environmental persistence was believed to be very short. (Turns out there are edge cases in the latter.) And it still comes down to how does it compare to the natural risk?
Did you read the paper? I just did. There's no data in it. It's a broad statement about research directions in glyphosate accompanied by concerns that all chemical agricultural supplements are objects of concern, epidemiologically, with Parkinsonism.
I think the point about the microbiome is well taken, for what it's worth. It's a good response to "humans lack a shikemic acid pathway, which is where glyphosate is active".
Rotenone Mouse Oral gavage ↓ Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio, ↑ Rikenellaceae and Allobaculum; ↓ Bifidobacterium in both the caecal mucosa-associated and luminal microbiota community structure [169]
I'm definitely not going to go crate digging through the cites in this paper! I think for the level of discourse we keep here on HN, it's more than enough to note (1) glyphosate targets metabolic pathways animals don't have, but (2) bacteria do have those pathways, which could implicate the gut microbiome. Point taken!
In all these discussions, if I could ask for one more data point to be pulled into the context, it's what the other herbicides look like (my understanding: much worse). I think these discussions look different when it's "late 20th century SOTA agriculture writ large vs. modern ideal agriculture with no chemical supplementation" than when it's "Monsanto vs. the world".
A very annoying part of the backstory of the "Monsanto vs. the world" framing are people who care about glyphosate not because they have very fine-grained preferences about specific herbicide risks (glyphosate is probably the only herbicide many of these people know by name), but rather because of glyphosate's relevance to genetically modified crops. I'm automatically allergic to bank-shot appeals to the naturalist fallacy; GM crops are likely to save millions of lives globally.
to build on this further, glyphosate disproportionally targets bifidobacterium and lactobacillus (PMC10330715). It mimics what happens to the gut as people age (PMC4990546) and increasing bifidobacterium, in research, improves dementia symptoms. In the guts of people with allergies, ibs, asthma, and cystic fibrosis there are decreased amounts of certain strains of bifidobacterium.
Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...
Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.
> Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.
He was obviously poking fun at people who say "trust the science" when what they really mean is "trust these scientits" or, even better, "trust this one study".
Undoubtedly "trust the science" is little more than an appeal to authority when used in a casual debate, not some appeal to skepticism, peer review and testability.
“Trust the science” … always when talking to a flat-earther or similar huckster.
There definitely needs to be more nuance to the phrase in the general case. Eg: “trust established science” Let’s be honest though, it’s a lack of nuance in some world views that need science as an authority the most.
> Let’s be honest though, it’s a lack of nuance in some world views that need science as an authority the most.
I agree but if they're flat earthers they've already rejected established science, so what's that appeal to authority going to do?
This is why "trust the science" is so memeable, it's a lazy appeal to authority the other party has already told you they don't trust and yet people are shocked when this argument doesn't work.
“Trust x,y” will also basically never mean “trust, completely, always, equally, and blindly”.
Trust the science was a shorthand for “you, or even I, may not understand this thing in perfect detail, but the people working on it do, and they GENERALLY aren’t making catastrophic mistakes that you can detect as an amateur. And when these people collectively stand behind a conclusion the odds of it being completely wrong are exceptionally low. We don’t have a more accurate alternative regardless. Please stop JAQing off about it”
But writing all of that over and over again is annoying. And a lot of “”””critical thinkers”””” can’t be bothered to read it. So the shorthand emerges. Sometimes used incorrectly? Definitely.
> even a broken clock can be right every now and then
But a broken clock isn't a reliable indicator of time: You don't know when it's right unless you have another, known-good indicator — in which case just use that other one.
I wouldn't really trust either one. Plenty of big companies have known how horrible their own products are, like cigarette companies, or fossil fuels. We'll probably learn about social media companies in a few years.
That said, just because a product comes from a big company doesn't mean it's bad either. I want to see independent research.
We already know about social media companies (allegedly, at least):
> Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege [0]
> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
> Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.
> Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”
Is this sarcasm or are you seriously saying you trust Monsanto on a thread about them committing scientific fraud to influence our perception of their product?
On what basis should we blindly trust this fao.org study as conclusive? If Monsanto ghost-wrote one paper, how many other studies did it put its finger on the scale for?
I haven't kept up with research. Do you have any actual science showing that glyphosate is a carcinogen?
Retraction of a paper doesn't automatically mean the opposite is true. It doesn't make Dr. Oz's methods right.
Using the retraction of a paper to elevate a known pseudoscience pusher who constantly makes claims without scientific basis is intellectually dishonest. It's a common tactic among pseudoscience and alternative medicine peddlers who think that any loss for the other side is validation for their beliefs.
The subject of the article is about how one of the widely cited papers on the subject was ghost written by Monsanto, the company that produces Glyphosate. That was the accepted science everyone was trusting which we now know is flat out academic fraud.
So how do we know the assessments from organizations like the WHO weren't also based on this same faulty and fraudulent 'science' that was, at the time, widely accepted in academia? We would have to logically assume that any scientific conclusions based on fraudulent scientific studies and false data can not be provably true.
What is the probability that Monsanto has managed to pay everyone to say it safe.
Proving everyone else wrong is quite the incentive for a researcher. To me it's sound unlikely that no one else would jump on the opportunity of fame for proving that it's actually harmful. Money is something but that's not the primary motivator of researchers, otherwise they would be doing way more lucrative work with their intelligence.
Did they turn out to be right? Maybe, I'm not familiar with the research here, but no evidence for that has actually been posted. This study being untrustworthy doesn't make it prove its opposite instead.
It kills stuff...let's consider a poison that has killed the majority of life on Earth. I can't find any LD50 numbers for it but prolonged exposure to more than 30 kilopascals of it is considered unsafe. Oxygen.
Speaking of luddites, I've recently stumbled on posts that point out that the framing of "luddites" was intentionally misleading and that it was never being against technology but how it was wielded.
While it's not great I vastly prefer that sort of not great behavior to achieving the same results by being one of those people who has crappy opinions and then just cherry picks links to back them up when called out on it.
Can someone explain why OpenAI is buying DDR5 RAM specifically? I thought LLMs typically ran on GPUs with specialised VRAM, not on main system memory. Have they figured out how to scale using regular RAM?
OK, fair enough, but what are OpenAI doing buying production capacity rather than, say, paying NVIDIA to do it? OpenAI aren’t the ones making the hardware?
Just because Nvidia happily sells people discrete GPU's, DGX systems, etc., doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs; or, let OpenAI provide their own DRAM supply for production on an existing line.
If you have a potentially multi-billion dollar contract, most businesses will do things outside of their standard product offerings to take in that revenue.
> doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs
FWIW, this was the standard state of affairs of the GPU market for a long while. nVidia and AMD sold the chips they paid someone to produce to integrators like EVGA, PNY, MSI, ZOTAC, GIGABYTE, etc. Cards sold under the AMD or nVidia name directly were usually partnered with one of these companies to actually build the board, place the RAM, design the cooling, etc. From a big picture perspective, it's a pretty recent thing for nVidia to only really deliver finished boards.
On top of this, OpenAI/Sam Altman have been pretty open about making their own AI chips and what not. This might point to them getting closer to actually delivering on that (pure speculation) and wanting to ensure they have other needed supplies like RAM.
> Schooling and mass media are expensive things to control
Expensive to run, sure. But I don't see why they'd be expensive to control. Most UK are required to support collective worship of a "wholly or mainly of a broadly christian character"[0], and used to have Section 28[1] which was interpreted defensively in most places and made it difficult even discuss the topic in sex ed lessons or defend against homophobic bullying.
USA had the Hays Code[2], the FCC Song[3] is Eric Idle's response to being fined for swearing on radio. Here in Europe we keep hearing about US schools banning books for various reasons.
[0] seems to be dated 1994–is it still current? I’m curious how it’s evolved (or not) through the rather dramatic demographic shifts there over the intervening 30 years
Distribution isn’t controlled by elites; half of their meetings are seething about the “problem” people trust podcasts and community information dissemination rather than elite broadcast networks.
We no longer live in the age of broadcast media, but of social networked media.
- elites already engage in mass persuasion, from media consensus to astroturfed thinktanks to controlling grants in academia
- total information capacity is capped, ie, people only have so much time and interest
- AI massively lowers the cost of content, allowing more people to produce it
Therefore, AI is likely to displace mass persuasion from current elites — particularly given public antipathy and the ability of AI to, eg, rapidly respond across the full spectrum to existing influence networks.
In much the same way podcasters displaced traditional mass media pundits.
Not only that - I think OpenAI and all those other AI blobs must pay compensation damage to The People for inflating the prices here and skyrocketing costs.
I get generally good results from prompts asking for something I know definitely exists or is definitely possible, like an ffmpeg command I know I’ve used in the past but can’t remember. Recently I asked how to something in Imagemagick which I’d not done before but felt like the kind of thing Imagemagick should be able to do. It made up a feature that doesn’t exist.
Maybe I should have asked it to write a patch that implements that feature.
The article seems heavy on blame but it seems the people involved are just trying to do the best they can for patients who are in an extremely grave situation where good outcomes are unlikely.
Seems a stretch to use this as the basis of any radical change like raising the voting age to 32 (although maybe it supports reducing the minimum presidential age from 35 to 32!), but it does perhaps suggest looking at what kind of soft-paternalistic structures might help “adolescents” make better life choices. It is a little absurd that we expect an 18 year old to navigate the world with the same competence as a 40 year old.
I think it's weird having an arbitrary minimum age to be president. I would probably never vote for someone in their 20s anyway, but I don't think there should be a legal barrier. In my country (Brazil) it's the same age, but we usually just copy US in think kind of policy. I wonder how common it's in the rest of the world.
I'm more bothered by the geriatric politicians in various democracies than I am that you're missing out on some amazing politician in their twenties.
The UK has a practical minimum of 18 for Prime Minister (technically there is no minimum but practically there is) but realistically never elects a PM under 40.
For British Sovereign there is also no limit, any particularly young Sovereign has effectively delegated to a council of regents historically. In practice this is also unlikely - although in theory of course we are two untimely deaths from a 12 year old taking the throne.
> It is a little absurd that we expect an 18 year old to navigate the world with the same competence as a 40 year old.
I don't think it is. 18 year olds are smarter than most people give them credit for. They probably know math better than most 40 year olds just given their adjacency to math practice in school.
Life skills and wise decision making are very hard to judge and most people will disagree on them though. I don't think 18 year olds make all the worst life choices and 40 year olds make far better ones, but I also can't really prove my statement, nor could you prove a counterfactual statement. It's hard to prove what life skills are valuable and who is good at them.
Math is at least important in many life skills most would consider important imo. Like budgeting, financial planning, retirement planning, investing, etc.
I've become an advocate of restricting the voting age to 25-54. It's basically a reversion to the property holder rule, but shifted to production. The people paying for everything would get to make the decisions.
I'm not in favor of restricting at all the people they can vote for. Let them elect an Iraqi toddler to be US president for all I care; if they're the ones taking care of us, they probably have a good reason.
> The people paying for everything would get to make the decisions.
Just as a thought experiment: what if the threshold for having a vote was tied to paying a positive amount of personal income tax, and the weight of each vote was proportional to the amount paid? How skewed might such a system be? My first reaction is that in countries with high inequality, the wealthy would disproportionately influence the outcome. However, on the other hand, if people avoid or minimize paying taxes, they would lose the power of a weighted vote, which theoretically could incentivize paying taxes in full.
I think tying it to pension age would make a very interesting dynamic. I can see a lot of incentives and alignments around the issue would instantly shift around, and I think for the healthier and will incentivize finding the true ideal pension age.
Nice, that means the latest Ubuntu LTS release (24.04) can be supported beyond the date of the Year 2038 Problem. Although theoretically now solved using 64-bit time_t, I wonder how robustly it’s been tested in real world deployments.
Just this year I ran into the year 2038 limit in MariaDB where converting between Unix timestamps and ISO dates (don't remember the direction). By the time this happened, a new version was already out that had that limit lifted, but the version I ran still had it. Cannot have been more than two years old.
On the plus side, businesses and administrations work with dates in the future a lot (think contract life times, leases, maintenance schedules etc.), so hopefully that flushes out many of the bugs ahead of time.
Why wasn’t the paper retracted 8 years ago?
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