Re: OT: Nuclear Waste (Was Re-Marketing Ada)

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote:
: 
:  The response to GM plants is exactly like the response
: to nuclear energy. The "anti" stance is formed on the basis of some
: irrational belief, and is unshakable.

It is not in this particular case; I should have added that this
scientist claimed that there is no risk as long as there is no
proof of a risk. Strange interpretation of the word risk.
And then some not at all
: pseudoscientific claims
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
that we do not yet know enough about the effects of man-made
nature in nature-made nature just get wiped away by this
kind of logic.
(think of middle Asian rice crisis due to the Just One Kind of rice
campaign, or sheephogs that look like what they are: experiments.
Should we wait for the proof that just one rice grown on half a
continent (incestuous, so to speak) prooves to be a risk?
Are the corresponding warnings necessarily pseudoscientific,
or are there just some pseudoscientific warnings?)

The "anti" stance is not unshakable on several accounts. For example,
empirically it is fairly normal in the statistical sense
that people change attitudes as time goes by.
There are some that stay "anti" but from the opposite side.
How does science help here? Scienctific reports make assumptions.
And these assumptions haven't always been unshakable so there
is room for beeing sceptic.


: The proper way to deal with new technology is to give it some minimal
: amount of testing, looking for obvious problems, and if none are present,
: go off and use it. If it turns out that problems appear subsequently,
: clean them up.

O.K, how clean them up? I don't think it is a sign of suffering from
neophobia if in a society the sorcerer's aprrentices have to face some
criticism. If society decides to take the risk,
then I think it is not because people agree or disagree with the opinions of
extreme "anti"-people or of extreme anti-"anti"-people, for that matter.



Georg