College Humor has a new video out, part of their ongoing "If Google was a guy" series. They have you imagine a pre-internet time where a guy in an office would answer people's questions. In the new one, there's a segment where an average American searches for information on vaccines.
It's even funnier in the longer form video, where he goes on to shout,
"JUST BECAUSE I HAVE IT, DOESN'T MEAN IT'S TRUE!"
Yeah. Funny, huh? Not so much. This is exactly what anti-GMO folks look like to those of us who have read the literature in the field.
And if you think I'm kidding about this list, I'm not. Here is my clip of Stephanie Seneff speaking at the last March Against Monsanto that I attended. It's my own vid, I saw her say these things myself, and I manage not to laugh.
Seneff is an author of one sheet of paper in this guy's hand. It's a vanity published paper of free-range associations and correlations that are actually laughable if you understand the science. She's done no work in the related biology of this field, she's been in computer science for decades. In fact, it should have all just be incorporated to Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations site.
The real question is: how do people want science-related policy decisions to be made? Do you want them done by this woman with a Google search? Or by the author of that one result?
What if it was about vaccines? Or on climate? Or maybe birth control--you want that call made by the HobbyLobby health team, or do you want it made by qualified practitioners in the field?
Turns out, we can ask that question. Jayson Lusk is an agricultural policy and consumer behavior researcher, and he's been running regular surveys called the Food Demand Survey (FooDS). In the new survey, he asked:
The first question asked: “Decisions about food policy should be based mainly on the views and advice of experts OR decisions about food policy should be based mainly on the views of the average American.”
Response (
PDF):
More than two-thirds of respondents wanted policy decisions related to use of growth hormones and GMO labeling to be based on expert advice.
So 71% of people say they want decisions about the labeling of genetically modified food made by the "views and advice of experts". And we have statements from all sorts of
scientific organizations around the world that have concluded that GMOs are safe.
Isn't it funny when the data doesn't seem to resemble reality at all? Or, maybe, not so much.