Comment by pfannkuchen
21 days ago
I am much less confident than you appear to be that we are able to detect a significant percentage of negative health traits.
Let’s say that hypothetically there is a 3rd order effect on the excretion pattern of some neurotransmitter. Can we detect that? Could it negatively affect mood regulation? There are a million things like that.
I guess the question is why your priors are so far weighted to the side of negative outcomes. If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive. Aspirin is a pretty good example of this where we keep discovering more positive effects. And I can understand somewhat the bias toward the state of nature but there's lots of examples where our deviations were positive, the biggest one being the cognitive effects of cooking food.
> If we're talking about yet undiscovered effects of something it seems equally plausible for those effects to be positive.
Where do you get this from? If you ingest a random chemical (or imagine licking random objects...), do you really expect the chances of it being beneficial vs. detrimental to your health to be remotely close to 50/50?