From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Jul 04 2002 - 15:10:15 MDT
Harvey recently wrote for labeling GM foods.
Most people know I've argued in the past against that.
So I'll comment a little on Harvey's comments because
he almost had me convinced. Then lets see if we can
come up with creative solutions.
Harvey wrote:
> This whole controversy is an interesting question of individual
> freedom. [snip]
> Should we hide the truth from them because their fear
> is unjustified?
Hmmm... should our choice to allow "individual freedom" outweigh
our desire to promote "rational thought"? We know that "irrational
thought" can cause all kinds of problems (its presumably unextropic
since it probably leads to chaos much more often than greater order).
Can someone who is terribly ill-informed about the "current best
known scientific facts" even be capable of "rational thought"?
Or do we need to invent an entirely new category of "false-premise
based 'rational thought'?". E.g. "your thinking pattern is completely
reasonable but you don't know what the f*** you are talking about".
> Do we trick them into making what we consider the correct decision
> instead of giving them full disclosure and letting them make their
> own decision?
How about requiring that allowing people to make their own decision
requires that they must make an *informed* decision? We try not to
allow children to make their own decisions in situations where
they may be ill-informed about the information needed to make
such decisions. Parents generally act as proxy-agents until
informedness can be demonstrated. (In fact we short-cut this
principle royally in society by allowing, in most cases,
age to serve as a surrogate for demonstration of informedness.)
U.S. born individuals get to vote when you are 18, but you get
to drive a car (a potential weapon of destruction) only when you
demonstrate some "reasonable" competency. I'd propose that immigrants
who actually have to pass the exams for citizenship may be more
qualified to vote than the average individual graduating from the
average American school. (But I digress....)
> I personally side with truth, full disclosure and personal freedom,
> although this is certain to slow public acceptance. No matter how
> good our intentions are, something definitely seems unextropian
> about hiding information from people to trick them into making better
> choices because we know they will make worse choices if they are
> fully informed.
Ah-ha! However, what if by providing people with information they
are not qualified to properly evaluate (beyond the marketing messages
they have been programmed with by people with "agendas"), they choose
to act on that information and it limits the freedoms of people who
*are* fully informed and qualified?!?
I happen to do most of my food shopping at one of the local neighborhood
grocery stores rather than one of the like Larry's (small scale chain,
much nicer than Safeway or the other typical large multi-state chains)
or the *really* "green/organic" Puget Sound Consumer Coop. One of the
primary reasons is that I can walk to the local store (good exercise)
and not have to launch my global warming contributing automobile onto
the streets of Seattle to go to the other stores (which are much more
distant).
Well one day I walk into the store and find that the Romaine lettuce,
*all* of it, had suddenly gone organic. And so had the price.
Well I let the checkout people know on *multiple* occasions that
this was not acceptable. Eventually the market went back to non-organic
lettuce, but I have no idea whether this was due to a "market test"
or changing lettuce prices (non-organic lettuce was in short supply
this winter, so the price differential between non-organic and
organic was lower than it would normally be so maybe they decided
to test the "organic" waters (normally controlled by PSCC)).
Now, in a small grocery store, or even in a large grocery store, how
are you going to support "full choice" for both the "cheapest food"
and the "organic produce" consumers? Will this further segment into
the "cheapest food", cheapest-non-GM food, "organic produce
GM food", "organic produce-non-GM food"?
In short, due to the realities of marketing limitations
(shelf-space), informed people, if they are living in
an area where uninformed people predominate, *will* lose
choice and will be forced to consume products they would
rather not consume. Or they will be forced to pay more
(travel further, order through the mail, etc.) for the
"opportunity" to consume products than they would should
a rational and informed basis predominate.
This doesn't seem to be a very good strategy at all.
Either I can pay to eat or I can pay to promote extropic memes.
But if I'm paying more to eat due to supporting the freedom
to choose of people with unextropic memes, that means the
extropic meme support will suffer.
I would suspect the problem would be worse in Europe or Japan
because to the best of my knowledge there are fewer of the larger
"chain" grocery stores of the type found in the U.S. and therefore
the "tyranny" of the larger, local, ill-informed (more green?)
population may be greater. The bottom line is that stores will
sell what people buy (what do you think data-mining is all about?)
and if people are making the majority of purchasing decisions *are*
poorly informed those who *are* informed may have to bear the burden
of that.
> I think the extropian position would be to try to educate the
> public, although this is certainly a less efficient method
> than just making the decisions for them.
True. There may be a middle ground -- does one try to "out"
the "green" mentality. That the only true "green" mentality
is to remove humanity and technology from the natural
development of the Earth and to do so effectively one
needs molecular nanotechnology. Only then can you
efficiently remove humanity from the natural evolution
of the planet.
And of course it doesn't hurt to point out the natural
development toasts the oceans within a few billion years
and the the planet within a few billion more -- so letting
the natural course of evolution continue virtually destroys
what they are trying to save.
The "greens" have a dead-end solution and we should force
them to defend that.
Now, with regards to quotes by James:
> In animals that have been fed GM food, the scenario is slightly different.
> Here, contamination of meat and dairy produce by foreign DNA is highly
> unlikely but not impossible.
The emphasis here is on "highly". There seem to have been demonstrations
of bacterial transfer of DNA into eukaryotic cells and there are bacterial
genes in the mammalian proto-genome (e.g. they are present in the human
genome and it isn't clear how far back they go) [there is still a debate
whether these transfers went from bacteria to mammals or mammals to bacteria].
So, the emphasis here should be that "Nature" cross-pollinates *everything*
at some point in time. (This shouldn't be surprising given the "selfish gene"
concept!) The point being that sooner or later, you will eat a "non-GM"
product that contains "Nature" modified genes which could be virtually
*identical* to those that humans would engineer. Gadzooks that would
certainly shock the populace wouldn't it Batman?
But the probability of the "natural" transfer of foreign DNA into all
the cells of an adult animal is, as they say, "highly" unlikely.
More likely would be selfish genes that target sperm or egg cell
transfer of genes that could be passed on to offspring of the animals
fed GM food. But those offspring might be fed entirely "natural" foods
but carry the modified DNA of their parents. I suspect that slips
under the regulatory guidelines: "Contains GM-products or the products
of agricutural produce that may have been GM-products who might have been
the produce of ....".
So Harvey, how do you explain recursion to the average person on the
in your local grocery store?
:-)
Robert
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