I’m pretty sure that this worry is more about passing herbicide resistance to weeds, for example, canola and mustard are closely related, wild mustard can be viewed as a weed. This was the first result in a google search for “canola mustard hybrid”. If, for example, they handle highway medians by spraying herbicide, and all of the sudden, the wild mustard can thrive in round-up, then they would have to use a more costly method for median maintenance.
My biggest objection to GMO’s and the reason I strongly avoid them, is that I don’t feel there has been enough research into the long term affects of eating them, ie what happens to a human who eats GMO corn three times a day for 50 years and I am not getting paid to participate in the study. If I was starving and GMO corn was the only thing to eat, then yeah I’m down, but I’m not, so I’ll pass.
Hello all, it seems like it is a common enough occurrence that it no longer seem embarrassing, but I too found LW via HPMOR, which was referred to me by a friend; my eyes and neck hurt for at least a week after spending far too much time reading from a laptop. I have a BS and an MS in mechanical engineering, I have spent some time as a researcher, a high school teacher and I am currently being an actual engineer at a biodiesel plant.
Growing up everyone told me I was going to become an engineer (I was one of those kids that took apart my toys to see how they worked or try to make them better). I have been cursed, as I am sure is common at LW, that most things (at least mentally tasking things) I try are pretty easy, so I have learned not to work all that hard at anything: high school, undergrad, grad school, work. One of the best parts about LW is that this is really hard stuff, especial for one who is accustom to not having to put forth much mental effort. Yesterday I failed Wason’s selection task miserably (thank you, LW, for striking me!) and it took me nearly a year of half-hearted, sporatic readings of Bayes’s Theorem to finally be able to say I have moved up on Bloom’s Taxonomy to at least understanding (there was a huge lack of statistics in my curricula).
After a year of lurking I decided to start posting because there are so many questions I have that I think should be asked or ideas about which I would love to hear the input from higher level rationalists and this is the obvious starting place.