One thing I didn’t take precaution against was my own stupidity. A marvelous and constant, menacing thing you would think that, if anybody, I would have been ready for. You would have been wrong.
In the interview below, I had forgot to record Jaap’s audio, only my own. Yet his words still came through my speakers and were picked up by my mic; his voice was barely there, down so many dBs in the mud that when I told an audio engineer about what had happened, he fainted. Yet through various manipulations, tricks, and lots of hand work, I managed to produce a file that merely sounds horrendous, not to say unlistenable.
And when I tried matching the “restored” audio with the video, the lips didn’t match. Nevertheless, I’m posting the audio for those who enjoy aural torture, and who prefer their content to sound like a distant AM radio station received during a raging thunderstorm.
For everybody else, I made this transcript from the “restored” (ho ho) audio.
Interview
Briggs: Welcome, everybody. This is William M. Briggs, a statistician to the stars. I’m here with my friend, Jaap Hanekamp, the world’s most precautionary person alive. And we’re going to discuss the precautionary principle. What is the precautionary principle? And are there, in fact, different versions of the precautionary principle?
Hanekamp: Because people think, “Yeah, it’s a bit boring topic, and why should we discuss this?”
The first thing we have to explain is what the difference is between prevention and precaution. Very few people know what that is.
Well, prevention we have known since the dawn of time. We have to prevent certain things from happening because we know if we step from a high rock, we might fall to the ground and die. Those are the things we try to prevent, usually.
Even the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, has a statement on if you build a house with a flat roof, you have to build a railing in order to prevent someone from falling from your house.
So the idea of prevention—basically an intervention in a causal chain of events you don’t want, which is known—that’s prevention. And we love prevention. Prevention is a good thing. I mean, it’s a smart thing. You want to prevent stuff from happening because it might damage you or me or anybody else, or a house, or whatever.
Okay, that’s the usual stuff, so to speak. But precaution is quite a few steps further. Because if you want to expand the idea of preventing bad stuff from happening, what do you need to do? Well, you would love to look into the future. You would love to think about scenarios that might or might not happen.
And the idea of precaution is, “Well, you know what? Loads of bad stuff can happen in the future. Let’s try to prevent them.” But not in the usual sense, but in the more advanced sense: “You know what? Let’s build scenarios. If this scenario comes out, we might not want that. So we might divert from that direction to another direction.” That you could regard as precaution.
Nowadays, we have shifted from prevention because we can prevent loads of stuff. Our life is relatively safe. We don’t have to worry about food or the roof over our heads.
Briggs: And that may be a problem in and of itself—too safe. We needlessly worry ourselves with distractions and hobgoblins and so forth.
Hanekamp: Indeed.
I mean, we might get worried about stuff which might happen in the distant future. Because in the old days—in Europe, anywhere else, I guess, hundreds of years ago—we worried about the direct stuff: food and drink and disease and safety, because every day was a challenge. Every day, something bad could happen.
Through the ages, we have prevented more and more of these things from happening because we have plenty of food. We have safe houses. We have disease prevention, vaccines, medication, antibiotics, and so on and so forth.
So what you see is a shift from the short-term things which impact us directly to the long-term stuff, which happens—or might not happen—in the distant future. We want to sort of grasp those things as much as we can.
And that’s where precaution seeps in. We want to be precautionary about the future, basically. So that’s the baseline we need to discuss. Prevention—that’s the easy stuff, so to speak, for now.
Briggs: Well, isn’t prevention taking threats that are probable based on evidence that all can more or less agree with?
Hanekamp: Yes.
Briggs: And it has certain risks and certain costs for protection against these things. There’s a balance for prevention and risk.
But precaution seems to me a lot more fanciful. Anything that is not logically impossible can happen. We could say that. And the cost of anything that logically can happen can be anywhere from zero to infinity. So the idea that you could protect against absolutely anything that can happen—that’s the kind of mental state that I think we have talked ourselves into.
Hanekamp: Yeah. No, that’s true.
You pointed out correctly that we can prevent loads of stuff in the classical sense, but some things might be cost prohibitive. That means that it’s way too expensive to actually do. Then we decide, “You know what? We accept some damages.”
A famous example is cars. We know cars are great. It’s great stuff to drive around on your own accord. But there is a downside to driving a car: accidents and injury and maybe death. We cannot prevent those everywhere at all times. So we have to strike a balance between what it delivers us and what the dangers are, and how much we can prevent those dangers.
Some things go too far. They’re too expensive and won’t work. So we strike a balance between the risk of driving a car and the dangers of getting into an accident. So prevention has a baseline characteristic beyond which we simply can’t go because it’s too expensive.
But precaution, on the other hand, seems to invoke an endless amount of money required to do something for future generations, even though it might or might not happen.
Briggs: Well, the critic might say, “Well, it might or might not happen. That’s true. But we’re taking measures to mitigate whatever this thing is in case it does happen. Because if it does happen, it’ll be disastrous in some horrific or apocalyptic way.”
And that’s true. But that’s the point. It’s the evidence that gives us the probability—or the chance—of the thing happening. And that’s where we disagree. Just because a thing can happen doesn’t mean there’s any causal path for it to happen in any real foreseeable way. Instead, people terrorize themselves with all kinds of imaginary threats.
I’ll give one example, and then I want to ask you about what you’ve done in this. The one example that got me blocked by that Nassim Taleb guy is this. He wrote a book, you know, The Black Swan and everything like this.
So I wrote a piece called Black Swans from Outer Space, taking H. G. Wells’s story seriously—that these Martians were on their way, they were going to destroy us all. They were just going to wipe out humanity and take over the Earth. Maximum possible damage. There’s no question about it. The damage would be beyond anything we could even conceive.
Therefore, anything we could do to stop this event from happening, anything we could do to prevent this or mitigate against this, we should spend any amount of money to protect ourselves if you accept these precautionary arguments.
Of course, his answer was to block me, which he does on everything. But the point of it is—the flip side of it—and here’s what I want you to talk about. The flip side is this: suppose we agree that the Martians are a possibility, which they are. It’s a logical possibility. They could be living in underground tunnels we’ve never plumbed before or something like this, and they could be on their way to terrorize us all.
We decide then to implement these measures to protect against them. What the precautionary people don’t do is they never see that the measures they want to implement themselves have risks—not just costs, but risks.
They seem to substitute the idea that “my heart is in the right place,” and that should cover up any potential risks of my solution to this particular problem.
Hanekamp: That’s the politics of doing good, which is always a terrible idea anyway.
You’re right. Precaution, in a sense, is boundless. The famous sociologist Frank Furedi called this possibilistic thinking: the idea that if you ask yourself what could go wrong within the precautionary framework, you could say, “Anything can go wrong.”
Okay, if you accept that, what do you do?
Well, indeed, what do you do? Protect yourself against the Martians? It’s possible. So, within the framework of possibilistic thinking, yes, it is. Of course, the one thing—and this is actually a fight I have with the judiciary in the Netherlands, where precaution is highly favored among many different lawyers and judges—is this:
What are the costs of precaution itself? Because here’s the kicker. Precaution tries to prevent something from happening.
So suppose that precaution itself might create all sorts of uncertainties, because that’s where precaution shines—in the uncertain realm of risks and hazards and whatnot. Suppose that precaution itself is in that same arena of uncertainty. Would not precaution apply to precaution itself?
That is actually a logical philosophical argument which has been made by—not many—but a few very smart philosophers.
Briggs: And we’re making it now, even if we’re not as smart.
Hanekamp: That’s right. And they poin ted this out not as a sort of “I use precaution, so I use precaution against you.” No, no, no. It’s an actual argument.
Because if you deal in uncertainty, where precaution actually is at the center of this whole debate, then precaution itself will undoubtedly generate uncertainty with respect to the risks and hazards of implementing the thing. Now what?
Then, of course, you get an infinite loop of policies that reflect upon themselves. You go on and on and on. But, of course, the thing is—and we are asking judges specifically on this problem—never, ever did I see any judiciary reflect on that particular problem.
Which is weird. Because if you think that uncertainty is so important, what about the uncertainty you engender by implementing precaution itself? People don’t want to think about that. But it’s a serious problem with serious consequences.
And again, if it’s serious, then precaution might apply.
Briggs: Incidentally, on this channel, we call the tu quoque argument the So’s Your Old Man Fallacy. Nobody knows the Latin anymore, so I switched all these.
Now, you have written about this. You have written about this precautionary principle in use. I think your first efforts were writing about it in food—in food regulations, food preparation, and chemicals.
“My God, this food contains chemicals!”
Now, I should tell everybody, because I forgot to mention at the beginning, Jaap is, of course, a chemist, among other things, and a theologian. So tell us about these nasty chemicals that are everywhere surrounding us, that the government is doing nothing about.
Hanekamp: Well, yeah. Okay.
I always make the example that if you drink a glass of wine, apart from alcohol and water and some other elements, how many different chemicals are in an average glass of wine? Well, roughly about 25,000 different chemicals.
On the whole, we consume about 200,000 to 300,000 different chemicals every day. Those chemicals are food-endogenous chemicals. So we’re not talking about pesticides added, or colorants, or whatnot. We are talking about the chemicals that food itself brings to the table.
We know almost nothing about all these different chemicals, apart from a few big ones like protein and sugars and stuff like that. All the other chemicals we know very little about.
I’m not even talking about cooking, because cooking is itself chemistry. The moment you start cooking, you start to add chemicals of all sorts of qualities that we know even less about. Now, here precaution seeps in.
The moment we think of pesticides or veterinary medication, we start to worry about the effects on human health, which is a justified idea because you add stuff to food and you would like to know what you’re adding, which is a good instinct, I guess.
But the problem starts the moment you start to analyze food for trace amounts of certain chemicals we’ve added in the whole process—from farmer to the processing industry and so on and so forth. Now we’ve come back to chemistry.
People can analyze chemicals at extremely low levels. We’re talking about picograms, which is 10 to the minus 12 grams, which is an incredibly small amount of chemicals. What about those detections of these chemicals at those levels? Here’s the thing. What we found from the literature is that the moment you detect something, people start to worry. “Oh, we found this chemical.”
Briggs: There you go.
Hanekamp: Whatever. We start to worry. And should not precaution then enter the fray because, hey, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when you’re exposed to these chemicals at those doses. So we might actually involve precaution again and say, “No, we don’t want that.”
Briggs: But then the problem is that we’re going to be able to do that.
The problem there, though, isn’t it, that they don’t necessarily even know what the untoward event, the damage, the ill event might even be? They don’t even know what it is. It’s just that we have invented a new machine that now increases our detectability levels by 100%, 200%. This happens in medicine all the time, too.
Now we can measure this. Now we need to worry about this. But what’s the bad thing that can happen? It’s not really defined. It’s not even defined.
Hanekamp: Immunosuppression, so our vaccines don’t work as well as they used to do. There are a few, and it’s usually also a lot of children involved.
Briggs: Naturally.
Hanekamp: Children are involved. We sort of start really panicking, basically.
But the interesting thing for me is that, as a chemist, all chemicals are toxic. Every single one of them, including water. If you drink too much water, you die. It’s a well-known phenomenon. There’s nothing unusual about that.
Briggs: That’s why I stick to wine.
Hanekamp: Exactly. Very good one.
So if you find anything at extremely low concentrations, what does that mean in terms of toxicity? And what kind of toxicity are we talking about, if at all?
Well, we usually don’t know, because we don’t know. We have literally no idea. We can’t test animals with these concentrations because that will take millennia to figure out.
So we simply assume, without any knowledge or evidence, that, yeah, well, it’s possibilistic thinking again. “Well, you never know what’s going to happen,” which, in a sense, is true, but also vapid. It doesn’t mean very much.
In that sense, progress in analytical chemistry has generated a problem. We usually like progress. “Oh, now we can measure extremely low concentrations.” But that has sort of enhanced fear of the chemical, which, in terms of food, doesn’t make any sense.
Because food is chemistry. We eat chemicals of all sorts. Hopefully it tastes well, which is nice. But it’s all chemistry. So what do we do? Well, in fact, the answer is we don’t know, other than, “You know what? Let’s be precautionary.”
But that’s only the start of the problem. Because when is a certain chemical undetected? Does it mean it’s not there? Well, chemistry proved that’s not the case. If you sort of tune down the level of detection to much lower levels, you’ll find it again and again and again. So now what?
Well, we don’t know. We have no answer to that other than the classical sense: the dose makes the poison. If the dose is very, very low, the quality of that dose is probably uninteresting.
Briggs: Or how about hormesis? How about that effect?
Hanekamp: Well, that’s another thing.
Because I had a discussion with many toxicologists about this. Usually the idea of toxicity is linear. The lower the dose, the less toxic effect, which, on average, on a daily basis, makes perfect sense.
But now we’re going into the realm of the chemist and saying, “You know what? Let’s go to a microgram, or a nanogram, or a picogram, or a femtogram,” which are incredibly small amounts.
Briggs: We’re down to the atom level here.
Hanekamp: Yeah. At the molecular level.
What does that mean? Well, the answer is we don’t know. We have no knowledge of that other than, “You know what? Let’s continue the linear line down to zero. And if it’s zero, it’s all fine.” But here’s the weird thing.
We need certain chemicals to sustain our healthy living, like vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats. What does that mean? Should we think linearly about that as well? Everyone would say, “No, no, no, no. That’s not how it works.”
Hang on a minute. So you have these types of chemicals that behave in a linear fashion and those types of chemicals that behave in a so-called U-shaped fashion. Too little is bad, and too much is too bad. There’s an optimum of exposure.
Well, our good friend [Ed] Calabrese has already pointed out that that accounts for simply every single molecule out there. That is, if you go below a very low level, nothing’s happening. If you go to the middle range, things might actually improve, or vice versa.
We point this out with cytostatics, the medication to cure cancer—yep, treat cancer. A high dose is good for the cancer patient, bad for the cancer. But a low dose is actually good for the cancer and bad for the patient, which is the inverse at low dose.
So low dose has nothing to do with healthy or anything. It has to do with the fact that it has a different effect on us, which actually makes perfect sense. I always love to bring up the oxygen example. Oxygen is extremely toxic to us, really. We all die from it. We age from it, and so on and so forth. So what is the best defense against oxygen?
Well, sports. Sports, to a certain level. I’m not talking about a weekly marathon, but I’m talking about a bit of exhaustion. Exhaustion is actually pretty good for you. Why?
Because you increase your resistance against oxygen damage. Again, you don’t overdo it. And the sedentary lifestyle is not healthy as well. So there’s sort of an optimum somewhere.
If you think about it, that is weird, in a sense, because oxygen is absolutely lethal to us. But, on the other hand, we all know that a bit of sports, a bit of a workout every week once or twice, is actually pretty good for you. But it has to do with oxygen and how we defend ourselves against oxygen. It’s actually getting more oxygen.
Briggs: But there are big fights, though—political fights—about any changes in food availability, production methods, GMOs, all this kind of stuff, relying on the precautionary principle as a basis for doing nothing in many cases. Or, of course, to find people to sue because they have money.
Hanekamp: Sure. Well, I mean, in a sense, it might be very precautionary to do very little, do nothing, just to stay away from any kind of policy because you don’t know what you’re doing. You might sort of intervene in such a massive way that it actually is bad for public health or bad for the environment or whatnot.
It’s rarely brought to the table that sometimes you simply don’t do anything about anything because it simply doesn’t work. It’s too much. It will cost society too much in terms of money or brainpower or changes in society, which is simply not going to be conducive to anybody, basically.
Funny enough, precautionary doing nothing is almost… it’s rarely on the table, if at all. I think mostly we don’t think like that. We think that we need to do something.
Briggs: The Do Something Fallacy, yes. We need to do something.
Hanekamp: Which is strange. It’s a very strange idea. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, because it’s not broken.
Briggs: That’s a whole other subject. It’s part of our expertocracy, I call it. We’ll talk about that another time.
People become experts. They get in charge of this growing massive bureaucracy, worldwide bureaucracy—not in any kind of secret cabal or anything. It’s just the way it naturally comes out because everybody’s taking the same education, the same science. Science is the same wherever you go. So it just forms this way.
Then they’re in these positions. They have to do something to justify their existence. So they come up with all of these new regulations. They latch on to the precautionary principle, I think, in part because it’s so fecund.
I mean, you could use this to argue yourself into any kind of monitoring position, at the very least, or at least writing reports once a year. You have a budget now. You have a staff. Then you can menace people with these kinds of things.
Hanekamp: It also rides on the confusion between prevention and precaution. Prevention is the usual stuff to do. Yeah.
If you’re unclear about the clear distinction, then, of course, precaution sounds very preventive. Sort of, “Oh, yeah, good idea. It’s very precautionary to do that,” not really thinking about it. It has nothing to do with prevention. It’s literally an expression of possibilistic thinking. This might go wrong. Yeah, that’s possible. So, you know what? Let’s do something.
I always use the example of the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013. Oh, yeah. Which, of course, is actually not in the precautionary realm. In fact, it’s actually in the preventive realm because we know they’re there. We know they’re dangerous, and we decide to do nothing about it.
That sort of hikes back to what you said earlier. It’s simply unproductive, too expensive to do anything about it. It would be cost prohibitive to do anything about it, although they’re pretty dangerous things.
Briggs: Oh, yes. For my regular viewers, I have a video on the probability of large rocks from space, so I’ll link that down below. The probability is not small, I mean, conditional on all the observations that NASA makes and the tracking of these large things.
Every year we hear about one that’s going to come within a closer and closer number of miles. Again, we’re running up against increased detectability. We pester ourselves because we can now see these things better or map where they are. Therefore, they become more an object of worry.
It’s the same with food, food additives, all this kind of thing. It’s the same in medicine. Obviously, in medicine, the better we get at detecting things and measuring things, the more that we can find somebody who’s suspicious or abnormal, out of the range that we have seen so far. Then that becomes something to treat.
But that’s not quite precaution. That’s a separate sort of argument.
Hanekamp: Increasing worry about something is not entirely nonsensical.
Briggs: Right.
Hanekamp: But we nevertheless decide, I think rightly so, not to do anything about it.
That actually should apply to many different precautionary rules as well because, in the prevention arena, we simply decide not to do anything about it. Because, yes, we can detect more of these stones whipping past our Earth, but there’s very little we can do about it. Very little, if at all.
So we decide not to do anything about it, although we know about them.
In the precautionary field—and I think that’s because of the possibilistic thinking—you can fantasize about the worry of the day. If you can get money from it in terms of research and stuff, you can actually sort of bring some worry of much more obscure and eclectic quality to the forefront and say, “Do we need to do something about this?”
Despite the fact that even in the prevention arena, we decide simply not to do anything about something because it doesn’t work. But in precaution, you have more leeway to sort of fantasize about stuff. You’re not really, in terms of the causal chain of events, no one’s going to sort of check you on whether or not the precautionary model actually works because you don’t know.
That’s why I think precaution is, politically speaking, really… people can have a field day with precaution because there are no checks and balances involved.
Briggs: That’s right.
Hanekamp: You don’t have them. They are not there.
Briggs: The limit is your imagination.
Hanekamp: It’s imagination, exactly.
Briggs: Now, before we wrap up here, I want to know, because you and I have done quite a lot of work in nitrogen, which is the crisis of the hour, the manufactured crisis of the hour in the Netherlands, which sort of flowed from global cooling, which became global warming, which became climate change, and because of that is nitrogen.
Some of that’s not precautionary, but they do use precautionary arguments from time to time in some of this nitrogen discussion.
Hanekamp: Oh, yeah. I mean, nitrogen, of course, is something about biodiversity. In the old days, in the 1970s and ’80s and ’90s, it was all acid rain and dying forests and stuff. Of course, that didn’t prove to be right because you could actually see forests not dying.
So that was actually a warning to the expertocracy: don’t choose subjects people can actually see.
Briggs: Good point.
Hanekamp: So nitrogen is more about biodiversity. Biodiversity is a very obscure topic in the sense of trying to figure out what biodiversity actually is and how much we have or have not of that stuff. It’s a much harder topic to address.
So nitrogen is more in that field. But the problem there is: what time frame are we talking about? Ten years? A hundred years? A thousand years?
That’s another aspect of precaution. Even if we do know that nitrogen influences ecosystems—that’s why farmers use manure, actually…
Briggs: Without it, we’d be dead. Without it, we’d be dead.
Hanekamp: Exactly.
So it’s pretty useful to have a nutrient like nitrogen. But, of course, in certain ecosystems, nitrogen might have detrimental effects on biodiversity. The problem there, of course, is what time frame are we talking about? That’s where precaution, of course, shines because it’s all about the distant future.
What might happen to our ecosystems in the Netherlands if we don’t do anything about nitrogen? So that precaution is more of a time thing and the nitty-gritty of impact on ecosystems. How much nitrogen? Can we measure nitrogen? No, we can’t. So we have to model it.
Briggs: Well, we’ll hit nitrogen another time, but I just wanted to mention it because we’re out of time now.
To people who are looking at this, we have not even come close to exploring all the topics in precaution. I think maybe we could meet again and talk about this in more detail. I mean, get into some technical details for those who want to know more in depth on a particular topic.
We can also talk about nitrogen. We can talk about the food stuff. We can talk about the theology of all this. That’s a lot.
But I think we’ve hit our half hour here, so I want to thank you for this, Jaap.
Jaap and I will be back, menacing you guys. So the best precaution you can do is destroy your devices. Melt down your computers and phones and everything so you don’t even have the possibility of hearing from us again.
Hanekamp: Exactly.
Briggs: Thank you for listening, everybody.
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