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legalcorrection | 3 years ago

In your world, disease and famine would be much more common than they are now.

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t_mann|3 years ago

If you are referring to fertilizers, a lack of those definitely wasn't the main reason for mass deaths in the years following their discovery - and I'm only asking that safe products are delayed for a bit until we are reasonably sure they're safe. I don't know what you mean by diseases, because we are already doing exactly that for pharma products.

It's mainly a change of mindset - leaded fuel is such a good example, it was known to be toxic right from its invention (almost killed its inventor), yet it took us decades of arguing before we were ready to act on that knowledge - because said inventor and his cronies always managed to cast a shadow of doubt, and we seemed to act like as long as we weren't 100% sure we couldn't ban anything (so basically 'safe-until-proven-otherwise').

Things haven't really changed, not even in the EU that purportedly already acts under this principle, if you look at the current debates like on glyphosate.

feet|3 years ago

It is, it has just been subtle and normalized over numerous generations

learn-forever|3 years ago

what is the amount of normalization that makes something more common than it is?