Monsanto also pays shills to comment positively about pesticide use and try to brow beat anyone who is has a negative opinion their products. It's crazy how aggressive it is. Basically any thread on Twitter or Reddit the same users will defend Monsanto. You see the same thing about other controversial products, such as BPAs. It seems like some tactic they learned from Big Tobacco and Big Oil to just push as much doubt/skepticism as possible to make the public nihilistic/cynical. Meanwhile, most of these products don't even need to be used. We're just letting a few companies pollute the earth and get rich for a minor gain of convenience to the public.
Credit must also go to mass purely for max profit agribusiness who just don't care and are too big to fight so responsibility to stuart falls to the enlightened citizens knowing government is toothless
What strategy do you think they should use instead to correct people spreading misinformation about their company and products. Being a popular brand to hate is not a good pr image.
I’m sorry are you arguing that this is a reasonable course for Monsanto to take? How about they just disclose when products are shown to cause cancer and try to make ones that don’t?
Do you have an argument ready that people who do not already agree with you about the evils of Monsanto might find persuasive? Your response here is pretty conclusory.
There's an actual controversy over whether Monsanto's best known products are actually harmful to people, especially on balance vs. their substitutes. Your response for how Monsanto should handle this situation seems to be that they should dispose of the controversy and just concede your side of it. That's only persuasive to people that already agree with your side of the argument. Do you have a better one?
Sure I'll believe there's an "actual controversy" I don't know any better.
What conclusion can be drawn from a company ghostwriting studies and pretending they are not the source of them that support propositions that are convenient to them? Is doing such a thing going to "add to the controversy?" Does the increase in controversy help them in any way? "There are other studies so it is unclear if on balance..."
When they are caught out doing so, should we update whatever prior we have about the truth of the proposition that is controversial? Does it make you trust what they say more, or less? Are there any similarities at all to the "smoking causes cancer, heart disease, strokes etc" controversies of the past you can see? Like for example tobacco companies hiring Berkeley's best statisticians to cast doubt on all the studies showing tobacco smoking is quite unhealthy. New statistical techniques were developed to do so and they're good ones still in use! Of course smoking is no longer controversial at all anymore, is it? They did get decades more sales out of "the controversy" and it really was one!
Once you catch an organization of any kind with a very, very large ulterior motive in influencing "the controversy" doing so dishonestly, where do you think your prior should be before you see solid evidence to update it for claims that such an organization is making?
So the issue here is if Monsanto's products were safe, they wouldn't have to pay people to attach their name to company-written articles claiming they are. If you have to buy your support (looking at Google Public Policy team here hard), you probably are not a good company.
In short, if Roundup was safe, it's likely there would be studies proving so from scientists not paid by Monsanto to do so. The fact that they have to ghostwrite them means there isn't any legitimate science supporting their position.
> So the issue here is if Monsanto's products were safe, they wouldn't have to pay people to attach their name to company-written articles claiming they are.
That isn't how scientific evidence has been received by the public and that's blatantly obvious of the last few years.
There are plenty of "independent" roundup-is-safe whitepapers, which unsurprisingly, either use large amounts of Monsanto data or Monsanto facilities. Sifting through the details to discount them is quite laborious.
There are a scant few "roundup-causes-cancer", which is a consequence of Monsanto monopolizing, sabotaging, or restricting traceable data.
Actually no. Monsanto pays for studies to be done on just one of the active ingredients of RoundUp, not on RoundUp itself.
RoundUp has chemicals in it that exist solely to help the active ingredients permeate tissues. Test with only active ingredients and it can appear relatively safe. Test actual RoundUp and it is invariably toxic.
That is why there are countless studies showing RoundUp to be toxic and populations who have been negatively affected all while Monsanto publishes an avalanche of paid studies purposefully conducted on a select active ingredient instead of the product itself.
A couple years ago there was a reddit account that did nothing but pop up like clockwork whenever Mons.anto was mentioned. It cited these ghostwritten studies, claiming that they were proof Gl..ypho-sate was safe.
It was so obvious other commenters would poke fun at them and tell other redditors to go look at their comment history.
I'm a marketer, and when I see that sort of thing I have to question why nobody on their social team is seeing it be called out (for the crap that it is) and at the very least says "this is not performing well).
A large number of people probably just skim the top 5 comments. For them, seeing an astroturfed “actually X is great and here’s why” comment is enough for them. They’re not digging 8 levels deep into a thread until it’s finally shown that the person is decisively a shill.
It's this. Normal people might quickly read some comments on Reddit and then go on with their lives without digging into them, building a false consensus in their minds. They never really think to challenge what they read, not because they're dumb or anything like that, but because people only have so much time and energy to put towards critically analyzing what they see online.
They've probably subcontracted and outsourced some of their reputation management to shitty providers. You see this all the time with SEO and link building, for example.
I've defended Monsanto repeatedly on HN (there are some extraordinarily popular beliefs about Monsanto that turn out, from what I can tell, to be just completely false, and they used to wind up here a bunch). I'm not carrying any water for them. I'm pro-GMO just in principle, but neutral-to-skeptical about any company of Monsanto's size. I'm sure the company itself is perfectly amoral. I'm just calling actual issues like I see them.
Naturally, plenty of people on HN think I'm a paid shill (what makes this funnier is the company I founded and worked at for most of my time on HN was named "Matasano", which was so frequently confused for "Monsanto" that we put a sign on our window about it in our Mountain View office).
My point is just: your intuition for whether comments are paid shillage are likely to mislead you.
I’m a biochemist and while I’m not interested in sticking my neck out to defend any company, a lot of the criticism directed at Monsanto is unfair, uninformed and/or unintelligent.
This is particularly true of criticism levied against glyphosate (one of the least-bad herbicides I know of) and GMOs (which people are usually just super confused about).
Disclaimer: zero conflict of interest, I make all my money building software in the non-bio world.
There's no money in life science except at the very top. All the (dear) nutjobs that want to "follow the money" should look into software engineering haha.
It seems absurd to you that Monsanto would try to affect academics and the scientific world view? Did you not read even the headline of the OP article?
Oh that's standard fare. Institutional incentives are not always aligned with human needs. Not to reduce the severity of it all. It's really bad.
I'm more incredulous about academically trained domain experts being "brainwashed". Corruption and incompetence are simpler explanations that also make sense.
I have spent 12 years considering all aspects of the question (and for what it's worth, I will never be done learning), but thank you for checking. You have a very strange idea of what it's like to study and do science/research.
Am I wrong in saying there are plenty of academics who pursue a career primarily in acquiring grants and funding? What is the ratio of those people to those who are in it for the truth?
Uh... In many countries, almost all academics spend a significant portion of their time applying for funding, but I'm not clear on why you think these scientists don't have a genuine interest in the "truth" lol.
Lay down your tinfoil hat.
Scientists who discover new things, disprove some other thing, reshape human knowledge or otherwise change the status quo... these are rockstar-scientists, and everyone wants to be them and do exactly that. You can't just be a contrarian though: you have to be right.
In my experience, insinuations of brainwashing are applicable in both directions. We all hold assumptions about the world which lay upon foundational beliefs like a pile of bricks. The ones at the bottom are often invisible or taken for granted.
If you run "ad campaigns" like Monsanto I don't think you can really call it unfair at this point. Why demand fairness here?
If you are a biochemist you may have been either a victim or a participant in their campaigns. You should be angry at them if they damage scientific integrity apart from that because it will reflect on anyone working in that field.
Here is the multi billion dollar company trying to influence reporting but this comment from a random redditor is wrong and a bit unfair? I don't get the incentive to even mention that.
Even if Monsanto is trying to influence reporting, that doesn't mean that the criticism against GMO is automatically correct. That doesn't even make sense
The previous commenters are talking about the criticism of GMO in which GMO organisms are suddenly killing babies because there's corn making fish proteins. The criticisms literally don't make sense from a biochemical mechanism standpoint, and the previous commenters are pointing this out.
That means that the previous commenters are standing up for scientific integrity while you come along saying "big company bad, therefore everything big company says is lie"
A genetically modified mold is used to create citric acid for a hundred years now and it used in almost all types of food. Maybe better if people don't know but even there are still problems with intellectual property.
Still, not the point. The topic of the article is corporate propaganda and you hand wave criticism away by making fun of "big company bad" remarks. To feel better than some of the most stupid criticism? That doesn't elevate you that much higher.
Yes, big company is bad. It did influence reporting and research for its own interest. That is very, very bad. Much worse than a criticism not hitting the mark by miles.
Often an intuition as to whether a particular comment is a paid shill is inaccurate, but one cannot deny that there are clear trends that indicate that paid shilling is occurring in general for a particular topic or organization. There are swarms of posts and comments with the same talking points that you find on the company's website, small subreddits in support of them that have no real reason to exist other than as aggregators of talking points, and an exaggerated responses to seemingly non-controversial statements that go against the company.
It's not some lizard man conspiracy that bot nets and sock puppet accounts exist. In fact they are a pretty standard MO on the internet.
+1 same stuff happens in nuclear power. I spent 15 years getting trained in the field and every time I say something factual on the internet people scream shill. It's nuts.
The term has been in use since 80's Usenet - has it been that long? Wow. Fair enough that you just like sock puppets. Though I hope you do you see the humour in someone who defends big corporations like Monsanto on forums having an email ending in sockpuppet. It's so on the nose its almost painful. Anyways, enjoy your day.
FWIW, Monsanto isn't as much of a household name in my country (I don't think), so I'd heard of Matasano before I heard of Monsanto. And i'll probably be mixing the two up for the rest of my life :)
You've also stumbled over yourself to avoid any criticism of Monsanto for perfectly valid reasons, so that factors into whether people consider you to be a shill or not. You have set the precedent for how to defend imperialist monopolies, that's for sure. If you're not being paid, you probably should be ..
You say Bayer, I say Monsanto, the distinction is entirely irrelevant since they both have a history of aggressively buying/smothering any perceived competitors that threaten their "own all the foodz" business model.
Certainly could say something about how concentrating power in a few corporations is not a good thing but that is a result of capitalism under a lax anti-trust environment and all companies play under the same incentive. Not in terms of the technology though.
Bayer/Monsanto certainly have set the standard for corrupt control over the worlds food resources, though, and they're definitely playing evil games in Ukraine, for example ..
And Greenpeace and similar ilk wanted to block golden rice which could potentially saves many lives and prevent blindness in areas where vitamin A deficiency is common. They care about nothing but to demonize a technology for the purposes of their misguided ideology
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/26/gm-golde... . As far as I know Monsanto/Bayer do not own any IP around it.
One doesn't have to be a shill though - they can genuinely believe and spread what they read from shills and their "expert" "independent" arguments.
Wouldn't innocently reading and accepting as genuine science Monsanto's astroturfing and Monsanto-ghost-written "scientific" papers, "independent" experts defense, etc. play quite a role in making many people pro-GMO "in principle"?
It works because it is finely tuned to appeal to the target demographic. Low confidence users swallow anything that is classified as "privileged information" or painted as such.
There are some key topics where this won't work and where PR must lay low. At least for a while. But some sites are a very fruitful ground for that. It will be eaten up by some that too argue for it without having used more than 5 minutes looking into the topic itself.
I believe we also have seen this for nuclear power a lot lately.
At least defense contractors can argue they’re helping the “good guys”, people at Facebook know they’re part of the problem but they can’t turn down the money.
Huh, Monsanto employees can claim they are saving millions from hunger and death by providing GMO seeds. Also saving farmers from ruin by providing disease resistant seeds.
Now you can come claiming well that's bullshit. But that can again be said for most of the companies.
It genuinely scares me that so many adults think in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys".
One of the things that drove me nuts about the Qanon family of conspiracy theories, despite them being insane, was the rhetoric their followers used, calling the US government "the good guys". First of all, what conspiracy theory actually suggests that the government is on their side and not out to get them, and second, do Q followers think we're in a superhero movie with good guys and bad guys?
Google and Facebook sure, but after watching Russia attempt to roll over Ukraine in modern evil explore fashion, I am thankful for defense contractors like those in Turkey who created drones and the software required to smash Russian invasion.
What is wrong with working for Facebook or Google?
I'd expect most Facebook employees working on the main project feel like they are doing good in the world helping people connect with their friends and families, organizing events, etc...
For Google I'd expect most employees feel like their products (search, android, chrome, chrome os, maps, gmail, etc...) help billions of people in positive ways.
They made a profit building some of the most pervasive anti-privacy software in the world. Google continually attempts to ruin the web, and communication (email), and Facebook uses AI to make people miserable.
I'm pro-GMO in the sense of "woohoo, science!", but a lot of it seems to be about making herbicide/pesticide resistance and encouraging that seems like a bad idea.
I'm not sure what you're thinking GMO technology should be used for. Pest control is a large part of successful agriculture. BT is used in organic farming as well (mentioned in your linked article) but instead of it being made by the plant itself as a GMO does, it's applied to the plant which means more of it needs to be applied overall. Pesticide resistance is nothing new, GMO or otherwise. That's the nature of nature and the reason 99.99% of the pesticides you consume are made naturally by the plant itself.
RoundUp-ready crops allows for farmers to spray herbicide directly onto food. That means we are now eating the chemical in much higher than trace amounts. This is new, untested and seemingly bad (if you go by the non-Monsanto-funded studies).
My comment was in regards to Bt crops but regardless
I think your perception of how much glyphosate actually gets used is rather blown out of proportion - most likely due to all the anti-gmo propaganda that’s out there. It’s certainly not “new” as roundup ready crops have been around for quite some time at this point and we likely would have seen obvious health problems directly attributable to it by now if there are any. Here’s just one counterpoint from someone who actually farms for a living: https://thelifeofafarmer.com/2016/05/22/how-much-roundup-do-...
The whole “Roundup not glyphosate” reframing was just a convenient shifting of the goalposts after their initial claims about glyphosate were debunked. But I still contend that your assertion that we are eating non-trace amounts of Roundup or glyphosate or whatever your demon dou jour is is quite false.
>The whole “Roundup not glyphosate” reframing was just a convenient shifting of the goalposts...
Yes, you and Monsanto are shifting the goalposts. RoundUp is sprayed onto foods. Studies show that RoundUp is toxic. Monsanto funded a bunch of studies on glysophate in isolation to try and show that RoundUp is not toxic. RoundUp has chemicals that make it possible for Glysophate to permeate the cells.
Google is unfairly villainized. It provides a service to advertisers, and it give away many billions of dollars of free online services every year. They’ve done literally nothing to harm you nor 99.9999% of people on earth.
Many of us would argue that providing privacy-invasion-as-a-service, at scale, to people who want to sell us shit is harmful and villainous. Even if you set aside the dangerous aspects of some of the "free online services", like YouTube serving as a massive engagement-driven platform for propaganda and radicalization, you're still left with web services designed to hoover up all your data and sell your eyeballs to businesses. That is the behavior of a hostile actor, and vast swaths of people accepting this tradeoff doesn't make its existence any less objectionable to some of us.
Google is exactly villainized because of the many billions of dollars of free services they provide and use as a source of the data they funnel to the advertisers, while killing competition as a second order effect.
Philanthropy should be done by entities dedicated to it and ethically responsible, not as a camouflage for private data brokering.
I assume you are making a fine distinction between straight handing down user identifying private information, and providing special access to targeted users that will only hit the advertiser in full as they hit the ad.
Technically and legally both are different, but I still see both as funnelling data to advertisers.
Excuse me, but one of those things is actually providing data to advertisers, and one of them clearly, legally, and functionally is _not._ You don’t get your own set of facts just because you irrationally hate Google.
The bad things about Monsanto, like Facebook, are extremely over exaggerated by online panic porn. Monsanto Chemical did some genuinely bad things in the 80s with Vietnam, etc. But the modern company actually reduces pesticide use since RoundUp is more efficient.
> Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people.
Could you please quantify? I recall reading the exact opposite conclusion in behavioral and psychological science journals. It’s the reason why the military has to break people down to teach them to kill. Our natural reaction is to have compassion for each other and not to kill each other.
We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group. If we weren’t naturally compassionate, the human endeavor would have died out a long time ago. It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.
I also recall reading in specific cases where compassion seems to be lacking, that there are larger cultural, religious, tribal, criminal, and social pressures at work influencing the outcome of human behavior to limit compassion. Once these forces are controlled for (often with the help of changes to the legal system) compassion tends to return to normal, average levels. Examples might include Good Samaritan laws.
It is my experience that more people want to help than hurt, more people want to promote the general welfare of the group rather than a select few, and more people desire to see others happy and prosperous, rather than unhappy and suffering.
This enduring, popular myth that everyone is out for themselves and doesn’t care about anyone else is the product of larger, psychopathic forces at work wishing to control society for its own purposes. The masses of humanity wish to live peacefully and in harmony with others. It is a very tiny few that have chosen to take power and use it against others. They are the ones that lack compassion, not the whole of humanity.
Over many decades, I’ve personally made note of and observed a strange and unusual undercurrent to popular culture that seeks to make people more aggressive, violent, and unnecessarily competitive and war-like, while attempting to denigrate, decrease, and diminish our proclivity for sharing and cooperation. This behavioral system of control is obvious and omnipresent once you start looking for it. It is not natural and it only serves to increase inequality and give power to fewer and fewer people.
> We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group.
The dunbar number limits that cooperative inclination.
> It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.
This exists without the propaganda and misinformation. Tribes are an evolved social form.
I worked at Monsanto for a few years. I won't get into the ethics of the company on this forum, but as a software engineer it was a pretty great place to work. Good engineering culture, lots of very dedicated and smart people and some really fun challenges to work on.
Inside life is great and people are nice, and all of the evil is generated at the boundary between the inside and the outside. On top of that, information about the evil is very much suppressed within the organization, so that the people working on it are even more ignorant about it than external bystanders. For example, take the oil industry in 2006: everyone inside it was inundated by detailed climate change denial, so that they were worse off (in terms of the accuracy of their beliefs) than relatively uninformed outsiders who vaguely recalled hearing something about how climate change was a problem.
(Not to change the subject, but this always strikes me as funny when people debate misinformation; some of the most damaging misinformation of the past 50 years was disseminated first and most intensely through the internal channels of powerful institutions.)
The real evil is always in not asking and not thinking about the meaning of the work.
If you work at a company because it has a great engineering culture, but the work it happens to make it super efficient to turn babies into cowfeed, you’re still evil…for not thinking about the meaning of what you do.
If you work at a company because it has an awesome engineering culture, and the work is to make it really easy and efficient for other companies to do whatever they do, how do you assess (and take responsibility) for your work? Can you? If you can’t, what are you doing?
You have got to make some finer distinctions for what is or isn't evil than "the cloud." All you will accomplish with overbroad strokes is convincing people that ethical distinctions do not actually exist. As for what the distinctions actually are, for a start, how about products that harm parties which have not agreed to anything?
Ah. I wasn’t calling the cloud evil, I was showing that working in the cloud poses some difficult questions about how to identify the meaning of the work. It would be easy to defer such a task. (But what would it mean to spend your life working in such a way that the meaning of your work is always up to someone else?)
I was pretty clear in locating the root of evil in thoughtlessness.
They likely don't want to discuss ethics because the exact same arguments and insults get trotted out everytime. Especially because if his arguments don't align with the common narrative, several people will likely just dismiss him as a "paid shill." Why would anyone willingly wade into that mess with nothing to gain?
Maybe say so plainly rather than faking at playing dumb?
What you're assuming was meant wasn't actually said either. Make your case. Make well. Make it clearly and forcefully but please don't go in for those kind of hollywood-drama-style courtroom argument tricks, it's not helpful to any given discussion.
The intent you're claiming isn't anywhere in the person's posts. All they said was that they didn't want to get into the morality argument in this forum, which is a reasonable position to have given there are people like you chomping at the bit to "prove him wrong" or whatever. Chill out, guy.
This is like asking why census bureau employees work for the US government when they know the multiple genocides, wars, etc. it has perpetrated.
Not every position is responsible for the worst aspects of every decision made at a company/institution. No company is perfectly ethical, as people aren't perfectly ethical. Most of the work at Monsanto is for the greater good, and the world is a better place for it being around.
I think a more effective strategy might be shaming individuals who make up the company. Just start buying internet ads with a persons name and how they wrote reports to try and convince people something that caused cancer didn’t cause cancer.
I think "public figure" refers to how well known the person is. In this case, I'd guess that a way larger group of people read the journal than will read these comments.
Canadians generally (to a supermajority level) dislike the unvaccinated, shun them, and would see them pay a healthcare surtax. Employers don’t want them around.
You can certainly find those people in the crowd. I'd be wary of ever claiming that you couldn't find "literally anyone" who believes something.
The problem is that "antivax" means just about anything these days, from people who think vaccines cause autism to people who don't agree with vaccine mandates for Covid.
>Safer than what? How are current vaccines not safe?
Generally we consider medicines (and other things) to be "unsafe" until they are shown to be safe in studies. So a vaccine is "unsafe" if it contains stuff that has not been shown to be safe, in the way it is being used in the vaccine, in studies, or the studies that show something is safe are flawed in some ways. Like for example, vaccine uses it in one form, but the studies look at another variant and cites the results for safety of the vaccine.
Don't think naming or shaming those that write the algorithms for social media companies/search is gonna work either. They are numerous, and operate in an ecosystem where incentives will always make it an uphill battle. Regular folks are paid to pollute water and soil too after all. Money, especially in salary-sized amounts, have disproportiinal power.
This is produced by the Cochran which "is a British international charitable organisation formed to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving health professionals, patients and policy makers. It includes 53 review groups that are based at research institutions worldwide." (from Wikipedia).
Unless you are an expert in the field, you are not likely to do better than a Cochrane systematic review.
The review concludes "Thus, a causal relationship has not been established between glyphosate exposure and risk of any type of LHC." (LHC is lymphohematopoietic cancer).
I find there are a lot of parallels between anti-GMO and anti-vax: calling it "unnatural", saying it is for mainly for profits by multinational corporations, implying conspiracies to suppress evidence against.
Note that also, in the current environment, there is also a lot of money and fame to be gained by being contrarian (especially when you involve trial lawyers). So saying "follow the money" can cut both ways.
Wasn’t there a school groundskeeper who won a lawsuit whose decision was based on it being carcinogenic? If memory serves, he had a lawyer vs a huge team of high priced attorneys who, after a long lawsuit, failed to convince the court. I’m not an expert but courts are designed to adjudicate technical issues like this:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-glyphosate-lawsuit-...
Courts are not designed to adjudicate technical issues like this; the conventional wisdom in our separation of powers is that they're uniquely bad at it, which is part of why controversies in upper courts so often devolve to the question of whether fact-finding should be deferred to legislatures instead of court cases.
> controversies in upper courts so often devolve to the question of whether fact-finding should be deferred to legislatures instead of court cases
You might be right but not what I typically have observed. Usually if things are fuzzy higher courts kick it back to lower courts to work on it more. Deferring to the legislature is what I see when what the public seems to want is at odds with what the court can do based on the law as it's written, which is a different dynamic completely.
Well, in common law countries, it is the literal job of a first instance court or judge to play the role of “trier of fact”. These are however “legal facts”, and not necessarily “scientific facts” (I absolutely hate to call something a fact that is not a fact, but it is what it is: the law treats “facts” differently than science).
Due to courts being very poorly equipped to deal with science, and due to rules of evidence making it very difficult to introduce science into the courtroom, court decisions are very often wrong on the science, and sometimes ignore relevant science entirely. Science in the courtroom is a pretty important and difficult problem to solve.
Edit/addendum: counter-intuitively, there are also good reasons why courts will deliberately avoid getting into the weeds with science. Basically it all comes down to the fact that the court system recognizes that it is poorly equipped to deal with scientific evidence. Barriers exist to make the courts more time-efficient and also in an effort to make it harder for the court to be misled by legal advocates on either side. It’s very easy to find someone with a PhD to support either side, or to find seemingly contradictory papers to support either side, and it basically takes an expert in science to recognize a real subject matter expert… Anyway, it’s a mess of a problem.
> courts are designed to adjudicate technical issues like this
Since adjudicate just means to decide something judicially, that is tautological but technically correct. Beyond that narrow definition though, a jury trial is not the mechanism to decide a scientific and probabalistic question like whether spraying weed killer caused a particular case of lymphoma.
It's not tautological because of the end of the phrase "technical issues like this". In other words, courts in this case aren't a bunch of laymen sitting around guessing whether this chemical is harmful. They're reviewing the research straight out of the mouths of the most qualified experts both sides can bring to the table. The court's decision on this was the product of the science.
No. The court's decision was what a non-expert jury of peers was convinced of by lawyers. The lawyers' jobs are not to help the jury reach the truth, but to do anything legal to win for their clients, including torturing both facts and the often arbitrary rules of courtroom procedure. There may have been evidence presented that originated with the scientific process, but no, the court's decision was not 'the product of science'.
Courts do not make legal decisions based on technical information. A court/jury could find the exact opposite of what science said and it would still be considered legitimate legal determination.
Yes, but it doesn't follow from that that courts make determinations of law based on scientific evidence. Some SMEs simply lie and the court can't tell. IN other cases the SME testifies, but it doesn't affect the decision.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
You're wrong, and you cannot in fact accuse accounts of being shilled simply because their usernames are green. The guidelines are simple: if you think someone's actually a shill, mail hn@ycombinator.com and they'll look into it. The point is that these accusations burn down threads, and the guideline thus asks you to keep this shit off the threads.
Well first of all I don’t think it was just because the account was green, but because they use in their moniker “throwaway,” which indicates someone who doesn’t want their identity known.
Second, as a self proclaimed “glyphosate defender” it’s very convenient for you to advocate for disallowing the rampant spread of information against your position while advocating for a very slow resolution to the claims, one whose result wouldn’t manifest until long after this thread was forgotten.
"We do not accept commercial or conflicted funding. This is vital for us to generate authoritative and reliable information, working freely, unconstrained by commercial and financial interests." If your research is sponsored by Monsanto, the producer of RoundUp, I would argue that is considered conflicted funding.
I went to https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search (redirected from their cochrane.org site) to search for this review and it wasn't there when I searched for "glyphosate". This is starting to look a lot like they're purposefully trying to mislead people into thinking this is an official Cochrane review, I am surprised Cochrane allows this.
Never even heard of Cochrane Reviews until tonight, but am I understanding your argument here to be that there exist organizations that are somehow immune to bias and corruption and are perfect at editorial filtering?
well, from my googling around it seems Cochrane holds a high position in the health field when discussing research, sort of similar to the ACM or the IEEE, or maybe the CRA. But I think maybe more guarded of their reputation and the reputation of its publications.
I'm googling around as well, and they seem to be an umbrella for a large number of publications. I just can't believe that every iota of information under their purview is of perfect veracity, regardless of their level of rigor and process. No entity is that perfect.
I think people are suggesting not perfection, but a higher standard and thus increased likelihood of it being correct and requiring a higher standard for proving it incorrect or biased.
Do you have an organization that, if they publish something even if it runs counter to your own opinions, you assume that it is fair and likely to be correct?
Only those that I have immediate experience with do I trust to have the intention of being unbiased. Even then I would be hesitant to assign a label such as "likely correct" to such a complex topic, unless likely here just means > 50%.
>Only those that I have immediate experience with do I trust to have the intention of being unbiased.
sure, but as you said earlier you have no knowledge of this organization prior to this post. There seems to be two types of people in this post, those who know exactly who Cochrane is and who think knee-jerk accusations of bias are ridiculous and those who don't know who Cochrane is.
I'm betting the people who don't know who Cochrane is are not people who need to have lots of access to high quality health research, in other words not experts in any field where one should be expected to know who Cochrane was.
If a lawyer came out and told you that the latest ACM study on efficiency of parallel computation was part of a conspiracy by Apple how much weight would you place on their opinion?
I've worked in multiple fields, and I understand human nature. I would trust an org to have good intentions and generally put out good research, but I know that all humans and organizations are fallible, and including ACM. A bad study can get through any org. It doesn't have to be corruption either, just a miss. I never insisted that it must be corruption.
Funny thing about the Monsanto cancer case is that they know that the problem is in the Roundup formulation (including surfactants that are required to get the glyphosate across the waxy plant cell wall barrier) yet Monsanto financed studies on purified isolated glyphosate to demonstrate it didn't cause cancer. Sneaky and dishonest, isn't that? Why not just do the study with the Roundup formulation?
> Mike DeVito, acting chief of the National Toxicology Program Laboratory: “We see the formulations are much more toxic. The formulations were killing the cells. The glyphosate really didn’t do it".
As far as Monsanto and GMO, modifying certain crops to make them resistant to weedkiller just so you can dump more weedkiller on the field... might be good for weedkiller sales, but I don't think 'feeding the world' is the goal here, more like 'maximizing product sales'. Dumping all that weedkiller into lakes and rivers also destroys the base of ecosystems, which is unwise.
If you are not using roundup, you are still using something. "Organic" pesticides do not work better so you will generally be using more and that goes to the same places roundup does.
I use "Organic" pesticides in vineyard and I'm not using it more. I use even less. The thing with "organic" farming is not only that you just spray and it's done. You need to do also other work to manage the healthy environment in your plot. Most people around who use conventional pesticides have neglected vineyards. They are only pruning in spring then tile rows in between, spray and thats it. They do not care about lateral shoots etc. Some even use herbicides - which is completely unnecessary especially in this age of mechanization (there are even electrical hoes for small scale farming).
No. The type of pesticides we are talking about is herbicide which kills plants. RoundUp is sprayed directly onto the food. Alternatives are not because that would kill the crops.
It's sad that the "well you're just a paid shill" retort is used to heavily nowadays. Not just for GMO related discussions either. It's got to be the laziest, empty non-argument out there and I wish more people would call it out for what it is.
Personally, I blame the rise of paid shills for the rise of accusations of being a paid shill.
It's hard work imagining what mental gymnastics people do to rationalize a career spreading lies. Not so much the people who desperately take the job of repeating them, but the people who strategize around what they can get the public to believe.
"Cochrane is an international network with headquarters in the UK, a registered not-for-profit organization, and a member of the UK National Council for Voluntary Organizations."
"Human exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) is increasing rapidly worldwide. Most existing studies on health effects of glyphosate have focused on occupational settings and cancer outcomes and few have examined this common exposure in relation to the health of pregnant women and newborns in the general population. We investigated associations between prenatal glyphosate exposure and length of gestation in The Infant Development and the Environment Study (TIDES), a multi-center US pregnancy cohort...........Our results indicate widespread exposure to glyphosate in the general population which may impact reproductive health by shortening length of gestation. Given the increasing exposure to GBHs and the public health burden of preterm delivery, larger confirmatory studies are needed, especially in vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and newborns."
"Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."
Both authors appear squeaky clean though from prestigious institutions. They've published about several other carcinogens throughout their careers and have appear to have no trouble with funding. I'm not sure why they'd be incentivized to ruin their careers over a single publication.
Do you want to expound on this? "squeaky clean" is a subjective value judgement of little value, and I can list dozens of heavily corrupt individuals from "prestigious institutions".
>I find there are a lot of parallels between anti-GMO and anti-vax:
it is a Monsanto gospel
"Crowe (Monsanto) preached a scientific gospel of GMOs that went something like this: If you’re pro-science, you must be pro-GMO. If you’re anti-Monsanto, then you’re anti-GMO. Therefore, if you’re anti-Monsanto, you’re anti-science. His objective, it seemed, was to render opposition to GMOs as ridiculous as belief in Bigfoot, and to amass a movement that could be counted on to shout that message from the rooftops."
"Funding: This work was supported by Monsanto Company, the original producer and marketer of glyphosate formulations."
"Disclosure statement
The sponsors were provided the opportunity to review the manuscript prior to journal submission, but inclusion of their suggestions was left to the discretion of the authors, who retained sole control of the manuscript content and the findings. Statements in this paper are those of the authors and not those of the authors' employer or the sponsors. The authors are employed by Exponent, a scientific research and consulting firm that provides services for private and governmental clients, including on projects concerning glyphosate and other pesticides. In the past five years, Ellen Chang has provided consulting services through Exponent on behalf of Monsanto Company on other issues, and she also has provided consulting services on other pesticides and lymphohematopoietic cancers for other clients."
It's interesting to note that the author, Paul Thacker, is the one who writes about [Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial] (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635) at BMJ.
"Opinion: I Was Lured Into Monsanto’s GMO Crusade. Here’s What I Learned.
As a once-vocal supporter of the company’s GMO push, I learned that debates about science are never just about science."
"Crowe (Monsanto) preached a scientific gospel of GMOs that went something like this: If you’re pro-science, you must be pro-GMO. If you’re anti-Monsanto, then you’re anti-GMO. Therefore, if you’re anti-Monsanto, you’re anti-science. His objective, it seemed, was to render opposition to GMOs as ridiculous as belief in Bigfoot, and to amass a movement that could be counted on to shout that message from the rooftops."
191 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadWhat conclusion can be drawn from a company ghostwriting studies and pretending they are not the source of them that support propositions that are convenient to them? Is doing such a thing going to "add to the controversy?" Does the increase in controversy help them in any way? "There are other studies so it is unclear if on balance..."
When they are caught out doing so, should we update whatever prior we have about the truth of the proposition that is controversial? Does it make you trust what they say more, or less? Are there any similarities at all to the "smoking causes cancer, heart disease, strokes etc" controversies of the past you can see? Like for example tobacco companies hiring Berkeley's best statisticians to cast doubt on all the studies showing tobacco smoking is quite unhealthy. New statistical techniques were developed to do so and they're good ones still in use! Of course smoking is no longer controversial at all anymore, is it? They did get decades more sales out of "the controversy" and it really was one!
Once you catch an organization of any kind with a very, very large ulterior motive in influencing "the controversy" doing so dishonestly, where do you think your prior should be before you see solid evidence to update it for claims that such an organization is making?
Part of being on top of the pile is taking hits. Comes with the territory, and if can't staff up for it with all your earnings, then tough cookies.
In short, if Roundup was safe, it's likely there would be studies proving so from scientists not paid by Monsanto to do so. The fact that they have to ghostwrite them means there isn't any legitimate science supporting their position.
That isn't how scientific evidence has been received by the public and that's blatantly obvious of the last few years.
There are plenty of "independent" roundup-is-safe whitepapers, which unsurprisingly, either use large amounts of Monsanto data or Monsanto facilities. Sifting through the details to discount them is quite laborious.
There are a scant few "roundup-causes-cancer", which is a consequence of Monsanto monopolizing, sabotaging, or restricting traceable data.
RoundUp has chemicals in it that exist solely to help the active ingredients permeate tissues. Test with only active ingredients and it can appear relatively safe. Test actual RoundUp and it is invariably toxic.
That is why there are countless studies showing RoundUp to be toxic and populations who have been negatively affected all while Monsanto publishes an avalanche of paid studies purposefully conducted on a select active ingredient instead of the product itself.
It was so obvious other commenters would poke fun at them and tell other redditors to go look at their comment history.
Naturally, plenty of people on HN think I'm a paid shill (what makes this funnier is the company I founded and worked at for most of my time on HN was named "Matasano", which was so frequently confused for "Monsanto" that we put a sign on our window about it in our Mountain View office).
My point is just: your intuition for whether comments are paid shillage are likely to mislead you.
I’m a biochemist and while I’m not interested in sticking my neck out to defend any company, a lot of the criticism directed at Monsanto is unfair, uninformed and/or unintelligent.
This is particularly true of criticism levied against glyphosate (one of the least-bad herbicides I know of) and GMOs (which people are usually just super confused about).
Disclaimer: zero conflict of interest, I make all my money building software in the non-bio world.
I'm more incredulous about academically trained domain experts being "brainwashed". Corruption and incompetence are simpler explanations that also make sense.
Truth often doesn’t pay the bills.
Lay down your tinfoil hat.
Scientists who discover new things, disprove some other thing, reshape human knowledge or otherwise change the status quo... these are rockstar-scientists, and everyone wants to be them and do exactly that. You can't just be a contrarian though: you have to be right.
If you are a biochemist you may have been either a victim or a participant in their campaigns. You should be angry at them if they damage scientific integrity apart from that because it will reflect on anyone working in that field.
Here is the multi billion dollar company trying to influence reporting but this comment from a random redditor is wrong and a bit unfair? I don't get the incentive to even mention that.
The previous commenters are talking about the criticism of GMO in which GMO organisms are suddenly killing babies because there's corn making fish proteins. The criticisms literally don't make sense from a biochemical mechanism standpoint, and the previous commenters are pointing this out.
That means that the previous commenters are standing up for scientific integrity while you come along saying "big company bad, therefore everything big company says is lie"
Still, not the point. The topic of the article is corporate propaganda and you hand wave criticism away by making fun of "big company bad" remarks. To feel better than some of the most stupid criticism? That doesn't elevate you that much higher.
Yes, big company is bad. It did influence reporting and research for its own interest. That is very, very bad. Much worse than a criticism not hitting the mark by miles.
"The best way to damage a cause is to advocate for it badly."
If you allow bad anti-GMO/Monsanto arguments to proliferate, the good ones will have a harder time reaching the light.
It's not some lizard man conspiracy that bot nets and sock puppet accounts exist. In fact they are a pretty standard MO on the internet.
One doesn't have to be a shill though - they can genuinely believe and spread what they read from shills and their "expert" "independent" arguments.
Wouldn't innocently reading and accepting as genuine science Monsanto's astroturfing and Monsanto-ghost-written "scientific" papers, "independent" experts defense, etc. play quite a role in making many people pro-GMO "in principle"?
There are some key topics where this won't work and where PR must lay low. At least for a while. But some sites are a very fruitful ground for that. It will be eaten up by some that too argue for it without having used more than 5 minutes looking into the topic itself.
I believe we also have seen this for nuclear power a lot lately.
Now you can come claiming well that's bullshit. But that can again be said for most of the companies.
One of the things that drove me nuts about the Qanon family of conspiracy theories, despite them being insane, was the rhetoric their followers used, calling the US government "the good guys". First of all, what conspiracy theory actually suggests that the government is on their side and not out to get them, and second, do Q followers think we're in a superhero movie with good guys and bad guys?
Very rarely it backfires & we get things like this.
https://youtu.be/4fQcjmt2Q_o
Overwhelmingly, most people think this is fine.
I hate it here.
I'd expect most Facebook employees working on the main project feel like they are doing good in the world helping people connect with their friends and families, organizing events, etc...
For Google I'd expect most employees feel like their products (search, android, chrome, chrome os, maps, gmail, etc...) help billions of people in positive ways.
Case in point, BT GMOs have only trained the insect population for resistance to it: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/08/researchers-identif...
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/do-gmo-bt-insect-...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/13/9999-pesticides-we-eat-...
RoundUp. We are talking about RoundUp being sprayed onto foods. Not glyphosate. That is a tactic to avoid talking about the tests involving RoundUp.
Yes, you and Monsanto are shifting the goalposts. RoundUp is sprayed onto foods. Studies show that RoundUp is toxic. Monsanto funded a bunch of studies on glysophate in isolation to try and show that RoundUp is not toxic. RoundUp has chemicals that make it possible for Glysophate to permeate the cells.
By the way, we did see health problems. Farmers and farmhands successfully sued Monsanto for health problems caused by RoundUp.
Compassion doesn't pay and my second home won't pay for itself.
Philanthropy should be done by entities dedicated to it and ethically responsible, not as a camouflage for private data brokering.
Technically and legally both are different, but I still see both as funnelling data to advertisers.
Yes. Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people.
It's why Christianity was a thing - a non trivial percentage of the population will only pretend to be a human being out of fear.
Could you please quantify? I recall reading the exact opposite conclusion in behavioral and psychological science journals. It’s the reason why the military has to break people down to teach them to kill. Our natural reaction is to have compassion for each other and not to kill each other.
We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group. If we weren’t naturally compassionate, the human endeavor would have died out a long time ago. It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.
I also recall reading in specific cases where compassion seems to be lacking, that there are larger cultural, religious, tribal, criminal, and social pressures at work influencing the outcome of human behavior to limit compassion. Once these forces are controlled for (often with the help of changes to the legal system) compassion tends to return to normal, average levels. Examples might include Good Samaritan laws.
It is my experience that more people want to help than hurt, more people want to promote the general welfare of the group rather than a select few, and more people desire to see others happy and prosperous, rather than unhappy and suffering.
This enduring, popular myth that everyone is out for themselves and doesn’t care about anyone else is the product of larger, psychopathic forces at work wishing to control society for its own purposes. The masses of humanity wish to live peacefully and in harmony with others. It is a very tiny few that have chosen to take power and use it against others. They are the ones that lack compassion, not the whole of humanity.
Over many decades, I’ve personally made note of and observed a strange and unusual undercurrent to popular culture that seeks to make people more aggressive, violent, and unnecessarily competitive and war-like, while attempting to denigrate, decrease, and diminish our proclivity for sharing and cooperation. This behavioral system of control is obvious and omnipresent once you start looking for it. It is not natural and it only serves to increase inequality and give power to fewer and fewer people.
The dunbar number limits that cooperative inclination.
> It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.
This exists without the propaganda and misinformation. Tribes are an evolved social form.
If you are compassionate, surely your time is better spent trying to solve that problem, rather than posting on HackerNews?
(Not to change the subject, but this always strikes me as funny when people debate misinformation; some of the most damaging misinformation of the past 50 years was disseminated first and most intensely through the internal channels of powerful institutions.)
If you work at a company because it has a great engineering culture, but the work it happens to make it super efficient to turn babies into cowfeed, you’re still evil…for not thinking about the meaning of what you do.
If you work at a company because it has an awesome engineering culture, and the work is to make it really easy and efficient for other companies to do whatever they do, how do you assess (and take responsibility) for your work? Can you? If you can’t, what are you doing?
If you work in the cloud, this is you.
I was pretty clear in locating the root of evil in thoughtlessness.
1) Doesn't wish to discuss the ethics at all.
2) The working conditions are very good.
What you're assuming was meant wasn't actually said either. Make your case. Make well. Make it clearly and forcefully but please don't go in for those kind of hollywood-drama-style courtroom argument tricks, it's not helpful to any given discussion.
Not every position is responsible for the worst aspects of every decision made at a company/institution. No company is perfectly ethical, as people aren't perfectly ethical. Most of the work at Monsanto is for the greater good, and the world is a better place for it being around.
I can't decide if it's better explained by the power of corporate(/political) PR or simply that people don't actually care
https://nationalpost.com/news/tensions-high-between-vaccinat...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-poll-shows-...
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/01/12/canada-poll-unvaccina...
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/majority-of-canadian-small-busin...
The convoy was despised as well.
https://www.cp24.com/news/almost-2-3rds-of-canadians-oppose-...
The problem is that "antivax" means just about anything these days, from people who think vaccines cause autism to people who don't agree with vaccine mandates for Covid.
Funnily enough, Merriam-Webster infamously updated the definition recently to include people who oppose mandates: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer
Though I think mentioning this subject on HN risks it going off the rails.
Safer than what? How are current vaccines not safe?
> I don't think literally anyone from the so-called anti-vax crowd are opposed to the general idea of vaccines.
A 2016 article entitled "Exploring the Reasons Behind Parental Refusal of Vaccines":
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4869767/
Have we forgotten the 'vaccine autism' drama? From 2017, "Vaccination as a cause of autism—myths and controversies":
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5789217/
Generally we consider medicines (and other things) to be "unsafe" until they are shown to be safe in studies. So a vaccine is "unsafe" if it contains stuff that has not been shown to be safe, in the way it is being used in the vaccine, in studies, or the studies that show something is safe are flawed in some ways. Like for example, vaccine uses it in one form, but the studies look at another variant and cites the results for safety of the vaccine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866614/
This is produced by the Cochran which "is a British international charitable organisation formed to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving health professionals, patients and policy makers. It includes 53 review groups that are based at research institutions worldwide." (from Wikipedia).
Unless you are an expert in the field, you are not likely to do better than a Cochrane systematic review.
The review concludes "Thus, a causal relationship has not been established between glyphosate exposure and risk of any type of LHC." (LHC is lymphohematopoietic cancer).
I find there are a lot of parallels between anti-GMO and anti-vax: calling it "unnatural", saying it is for mainly for profits by multinational corporations, implying conspiracies to suppress evidence against.
Note that also, in the current environment, there is also a lot of money and fame to be gained by being contrarian (especially when you involve trial lawyers). So saying "follow the money" can cut both ways.
You might be right but not what I typically have observed. Usually if things are fuzzy higher courts kick it back to lower courts to work on it more. Deferring to the legislature is what I see when what the public seems to want is at odds with what the court can do based on the law as it's written, which is a different dynamic completely.
Due to courts being very poorly equipped to deal with science, and due to rules of evidence making it very difficult to introduce science into the courtroom, court decisions are very often wrong on the science, and sometimes ignore relevant science entirely. Science in the courtroom is a pretty important and difficult problem to solve.
Edit/addendum: counter-intuitively, there are also good reasons why courts will deliberately avoid getting into the weeds with science. Basically it all comes down to the fact that the court system recognizes that it is poorly equipped to deal with scientific evidence. Barriers exist to make the courts more time-efficient and also in an effort to make it harder for the court to be misled by legal advocates on either side. It’s very easy to find someone with a PhD to support either side, or to find seemingly contradictory papers to support either side, and it basically takes an expert in science to recognize a real subject matter expert… Anyway, it’s a mess of a problem.
Since adjudicate just means to decide something judicially, that is tautological but technically correct. Beyond that narrow definition though, a jury trial is not the mechanism to decide a scientific and probabalistic question like whether spraying weed killer caused a particular case of lymphoma.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Second, as a self proclaimed “glyphosate defender” it’s very convenient for you to advocate for disallowing the rampant spread of information against your position while advocating for a very slow resolution to the claims, one whose result wouldn’t manifest until long after this thread was forgotten.
> This work was supported by Monsanto Company, the original producer and marketer of glyphosate formulations.
I went to https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search (redirected from their cochrane.org site) to search for this review and it wasn't there when I searched for "glyphosate". This is starting to look a lot like they're purposefully trying to mislead people into thinking this is an official Cochrane review, I am surprised Cochrane allows this.
I think people are suggesting not perfection, but a higher standard and thus increased likelihood of it being correct and requiring a higher standard for proving it incorrect or biased.
Do you have an organization that, if they publish something even if it runs counter to your own opinions, you assume that it is fair and likely to be correct?
sure, but as you said earlier you have no knowledge of this organization prior to this post. There seems to be two types of people in this post, those who know exactly who Cochrane is and who think knee-jerk accusations of bias are ridiculous and those who don't know who Cochrane is.
I'm betting the people who don't know who Cochrane is are not people who need to have lots of access to high quality health research, in other words not experts in any field where one should be expected to know who Cochrane was.
If a lawyer came out and told you that the latest ACM study on efficiency of parallel computation was part of a conspiracy by Apple how much weight would you place on their opinion?
Cochrane is generally well-trusted. It's not perfect and it has been manipulated. They are better than nothing, though.
Anonymously
> Mike DeVito, acting chief of the National Toxicology Program Laboratory: “We see the formulations are much more toxic. The formulations were killing the cells. The glyphosate really didn’t do it".
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/08/weedkiller-t...
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/about_ntp/bsc/2017/december/pr...
As far as Monsanto and GMO, modifying certain crops to make them resistant to weedkiller just so you can dump more weedkiller on the field... might be good for weedkiller sales, but I don't think 'feeding the world' is the goal here, more like 'maximizing product sales'. Dumping all that weedkiller into lakes and rivers also destroys the base of ecosystems, which is unwise.
https://toxics.usgs.gov/highlights/glyphosate02.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26841519
It's hard work imagining what mental gymnastics people do to rationalize a career spreading lies. Not so much the people who desperately take the job of repeating them, but the people who strategize around what they can get the public to believe.
https://www.cochrane.org/search/site/glyphosate
your link just used the method ( ~ aggregation of Ghostwriting researches)
EDIT: check the https://www.cochrane.org/search/site/vaccine
"Cochrane is an international network with headquarters in the UK, a registered not-for-profit organization, and a member of the UK National Council for Voluntary Organizations."
Search
1. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search
2. type "glyphosate"
3. see the results.
Cochrane Reviews : 0 <------ ZERO
Cochrane Protocols : 0
Trials : 14
Editorials : 0
Special Collections :0
Clinical Answers : 0
1.) "Measurement of Agricultural and Dietary Glyphosate Exposure Among Pregnant Women" January 2022
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...
"Human exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) is increasing rapidly worldwide. Most existing studies on health effects of glyphosate have focused on occupational settings and cancer outcomes and few have examined this common exposure in relation to the health of pregnant women and newborns in the general population. We investigated associations between prenatal glyphosate exposure and length of gestation in The Infant Development and the Environment Study (TIDES), a multi-center US pregnancy cohort...........Our results indicate widespread exposure to glyphosate in the general population which may impact reproductive health by shortening length of gestation. Given the increasing exposure to GBHs and the public health burden of preterm delivery, larger confirmatory studies are needed, especially in vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and newborns."
"Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."
it is a Monsanto gospel
"Crowe (Monsanto) preached a scientific gospel of GMOs that went something like this: If you’re pro-science, you must be pro-GMO. If you’re anti-Monsanto, then you’re anti-GMO. Therefore, if you’re anti-Monsanto, you’re anti-science. His objective, it seemed, was to render opposition to GMOs as ridiculous as belief in Bigfoot, and to amass a movement that could be counted on to shout that message from the rooftops."
from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31310371
This is a Monsanto sponsored papers.
"Funding: This work was supported by Monsanto Company, the original producer and marketer of glyphosate formulations."
"Disclosure statement The sponsors were provided the opportunity to review the manuscript prior to journal submission, but inclusion of their suggestions was left to the discretion of the authors, who retained sole control of the manuscript content and the findings. Statements in this paper are those of the authors and not those of the authors' employer or the sponsors. The authors are employed by Exponent, a scientific research and consulting firm that provides services for private and governmental clients, including on projects concerning glyphosate and other pesticides. In the past five years, Ellen Chang has provided consulting services through Exponent on behalf of Monsanto Company on other issues, and she also has provided consulting services on other pesticides and lymphohematopoietic cancers for other clients."
[Here](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/53286/214) is a related question on skeptic SE that tries to verify the claim (which has been closed, unfortunately).
"Opinion: I Was Lured Into Monsanto’s GMO Crusade. Here’s What I Learned. As a once-vocal supporter of the company’s GMO push, I learned that debates about science are never just about science."
"Crowe (Monsanto) preached a scientific gospel of GMOs that went something like this: If you’re pro-science, you must be pro-GMO. If you’re anti-Monsanto, then you’re anti-GMO. Therefore, if you’re anti-Monsanto, you’re anti-science. His objective, it seemed, was to render opposition to GMOs as ridiculous as belief in Bigfoot, and to amass a movement that could be counted on to shout that message from the rooftops."
https://undark.org/2019/06/27/monsanto-gmo-crusade/