Comment on We poisoned the whole planet so our eggs wouldn't stick to the pan đ
pixxelkick@lemmy.world â¨3⊠â¨weeks⊠agoYou clearly didnât read it, itâs just a giant metastudy gathering up tonnes of research but itâs basically just a shotgun paper covering all the âmaybesâ that have been highlighted
It cites dozens and dozens of papers, most of which highlight âmaybe possibly potentially PFAS levels corrolate with (insert health effect here)â
However it also glosses over tonnes of other studies that havent found links to be statistically significant.
I want you to read this XKCD comic and try and understand how it relates to the discussion
Coreidan@lemmy.world â¨3⊠â¨weeks⊠ago
You sound like the people that will argue that climate change is made up by China or some silly bullshit like that. Rejecting all data with claims that itâs fake.
People like you arenât worth the time.
pixxelkick@lemmy.world â¨3⊠â¨weeks⊠ago
No.
Thereâs a huge difference between rejecting data and just pointing out that nearly every single study is too small and underfunded and nearly every one of them is preliminary.
Thereâs a reason all these papers are careful to say stuff like âmore research is neededâ
The goal of science is to try and prove the negative
You never actually can sufficiently prove your goal, but you can disprove other possibilities to narrow alternative reasons down until you get as close as possible to your outcome being the only remaining reason left.
This has not been achieved with PFAS studies yet simply due to a lack of time and quantity. Most of these studies are either too small, or too specific to do anything more than conclude âwell, this definitely is interesting and should be investigated moreâ
Because proving it actually for sure does something is incredibly challenging, because thereâs thousands of other variables at play, and many of the studied symptoms donât display massive magnitudes in change.
Not enough to be very certain that they arenât being caused by some other factor that pairs up with PFAS exposure.
For example, PFAS exposure also will correlate with other possible exposures to pollutants simultaneously for the same reason you got exposed to PFAS.
Air pollution levels also correlate, once again, same reason.
Itâs devilishly challenging when the people with above average PFAS exposure also are getting exposed to other pollutants to then narrow down to just PFAS being the cause. It could be the wrong chemical causing issues⌠or ot could be 100% the cause.
Itâs not like Asbestos where we could find villages with clean drinking water and air quality with zero other concerns that had huge issues due to being downwind of a mine.
If they managed to find a large group of people downstream of a plant that only dumped PFAS in the water and not other pollutants too, youâd be in business.
But that isnât a thing, they dump all manner of shit in there with the PFAS, so can you see how that fucks up the numbers?