Skepticism, Science & Pseudoscience

http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/15032-expert-who-predicted-global-economic-crash-thinks-risks-from-gmos-too-great

Expert who predicted global economic crash thinks risks from GMOs too great
September 4, 2013

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Last week the maverick biologist and billionaire entrepreneur Craig Venter tweeted: "Golden rice vitamin A could prevent blindness in 250000 children/year. Anti GMO people check your morals."

READ HERE: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/372779980230369280

The global risk expert and the Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, responded on Twitter:

"Pro GMO people, check your understanding of 1) Risk & probability and 2) invoking 'morals' as a tactic while endangering people."

"Point 2: There are other alternatives with controlled & known side effects."

He also told Venter, a synthetic biologist with massive vested interests in the acceptance of genetic engineering and no background in risk (nor toxicology for that matter!):

"@JCVenter In other words it is not rigorous to make something with fat-tailed risks look like the 'only' alternative to [blindness] when it is not."

"Fat-tailed risks" means that when things go bad, they can go catastrophically bad.

Taleb has outlined his strong concerns about GM before. Below is what he wrote a couple of months ago. There are graphs in the original text, which are available at the link.

EXTRACT: Now, for mathematical reasons (a mechanism called the "Lindy Effect&quot , linked to the relationship between time and fragility, mother nature is vastly "wiser" so to speak than humans, as time has a lot of value in detecting what is breakable and what is not. Time is also a bullshit detector. Nothing humans have introduced in modern times has made us unconditionally better without unpredictable side effects, and ones that are usually detected with considerable delays (transfats, steroids, tobacco, Thalidomide, etc.)

...GMOs... their risk is not local. Invoking the risk of "famine" is a poor strategy, no different from urging people to play Russian roulette in order to get out of poverty. And calling the GMO approach "scientific" betrays a very poor — indeed warped — understanding of probabilistic payoffs and risk management.