Comment by samdoesnothing
2 hours ago
The precautionary principle clearly states that if you have a chemical that kills living things and you have a company who stands to make a lot of money off of this chemical as long as it's safe for humans, that you should be very very careful about it. Probably should be avoided until there is not just proof from a lab or from paid off scientists.
Kind of crazy that this isn't just obvious to everybody.
It's not obvious to everybody because it's false. The Precautionary Principle is deeply problematic. For instance: it is generally interpreted to favor existing fossil fuel power sources over nuclear, despite the fact that fossil fuel power generation and extraction kills enormous numbers of people every year. Precautionary Principle thinking is extremely vulnerable to narrative capture. A closer-to-home example: Precautionary Principle thinking cautions against adoption of genetically modified crops. The status quo agriculture it favors instead have both lower yields (and thus greater ecological impact) and more pesticide/herbicide use.
Precautionary Principle thinking, taken on its face, would have immediately halted the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines (VAERS data almost immediately showed things like blot clots), because Precautionary thinking tends to fixate on individual risks rather than a global risk picture; fortunately, Precautionary thinking failed to win the day and vaccines saved millions of lives instead. Note that this example flunks your Extended Precautionary Principle logic: there were certainly big companies that stood to profit from the right decision there!
You can put together a coherent and persuasive defense of the Precautionary Principle, but if you just cite it in passing and say things like "crazy everyone doesn't agree with me about this", expect pushback.
Are we even talking about the same thing? The precautionary principle, at least as far as I understand it, is to emphasize caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations with potential for causing harm when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. As risk increases, the threshold for certainty rises as well.
Is that something you consider to be deeply problematic and false?
Of course you can dispute both the risk and amount of certainty present, but claiming that the principle is fallacious seems absurd to me.
And yes, the principle does mean that some positive innovations are delayed or suppressed when they could end up being beneficial. Just like how it's not a great idea to put your paycheque on red, even though the outcome could be life changing.