My point being that knowledge of where something comes from doesn’t tell you if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I could have rephrased “what it’s used for” to be “laxative”. A true statement which doesn’t expose the fact that ricin is a pretty powerful poison.
People are biased to think “chemical name bad, common name good” and that’s the problem I’m exposing. You can pull out a lot of toxic stuff from things that sound harmless.
The calculus here isn’t strictly whether it’s “healthy” or not. There are quite a few ingredients that can be derived from both plants and petroleum, for example, and I would choose the one derived from plants every time
My point being that knowledge of where something comes from doesn’t tell you if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I could have rephrased “what it’s used for” to be “laxative”. A true statement which doesn’t expose the fact that ricin is a pretty powerful poison.
People are biased to think “chemical name bad, common name good” and that’s the problem I’m exposing. You can pull out a lot of toxic stuff from things that sound harmless.
The calculus here isn’t strictly whether it’s “healthy” or not. There are quite a few ingredients that can be derived from both plants and petroleum, for example, and I would choose the one derived from plants every time
This is still an improvement, let’s leave it at that.