Today the thing I'm choosing to be overspecifically annoyed by is people who are obsessing about benzene in sunscreen but don't wear hazmat gear when fueling their car (gas is full of it). Benzene is pretty benign. Choose a career where you don't breathe it daily and chill out.
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Replying to @Pinboard
Genuine question: What to read for a balanced and rational perspective with strong evidence? And how to tell apart "no effect found because the study sucks" from "actually no effect is there", or what's the right way to ask the question?
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Replying to @Blaisorblade
I think this is a hard question. A lot of the evidence for toxicity/cancer comes from animal studies whose applicability to humans living in the world may not be great. A lot of it is also tradeoffs—what does it mean to increase lifetime cancer risk by 0.02%, for example?
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Replying to @Pinboard
Right, and there are ways to be rational about it, even if all of them are unsightly if you're unwilling to use QALY, or probably to be told human lives do have a price, or to compare risks with say that of crossing the street.
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Replying to @Blaisorblade @Pinboard
(not that I evaluate risks without cognitive biases, but I'd listen to those who do it for a job).
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Replying to @Blaisorblade @Pinboard
I'm also curious about the appropriate error bars: IIUC, macroeconomics or nutrition sciences are fine as scholarly disciplines, they're just not predictive, so "follow the science" has limited value. So "How good's toxicology today?" seems a legitimate question.
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The difficulty of low-dose toxicology is that everything interacts with everything else and the IRB won't let you raise kids to old age in a sterile bubble to do experiments on.
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