Item — HN Reader

That's silly. The fact that it is toxic makes it a concern, and the fact that it is a concern means that if you're selling it you should find out yourself about the specifics.

It's like saying that you're not responsible for stealing a wallet because you didn't know exactly how much was in it.

2 comments

A lot of things are toxic at high doses, yet have essentially no effect at low doses. The linear no-threshold model is a simplification that rarely matches reality.

Silly? There are plenty of substances that are toxic at high dose and innocuous, or even necessary, at low dose. Examples of the latter are vitamins A and B6.

The question of responsibility is of course not what we were talking about, but rather whether the statement "PFAS were known to cause issues" was in fact true. Too often we see possibility of harm being deliberately conflated with actually causing harm. Is it too much to ask for some honesty here?

For most people, if you're taking any position with nuance, your not actually serious about the problem and therefore part of the problem.

The chemical differences between PFAS and vitamin A and B6 are beyond vast.

Comparing them betrays a complete ignorance of the molecular properties that, in combination with biological system processes, make A and B6 healthy at small doses and poisonous at large doses on one hand, and those that makes PFAS linearly poisonous at any given doses on the other. (And yes, you can be exposed to small amounts of toxins and be fine. That doesn’t change the toxicity of a given substance.)

Struggling to see how this could be anything but a bad faith argument.

It really feels along the lines of "prove lead is actually harmful rather than potentially harmful" with all the knowledge and evidence we currently have.