Talk:2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid/Archive 4

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

edits by RockMtnGuy

For the second time user:RockyMtnguy pushes sourcing to 24d.org.(an industrial source) First here calling an industry ref "a more useful reference with more application information", then here with editsummary "noncontroversial information and 24d.org is the info aggregator. I'll just delete the 1 citation and find 13 other sources for it." However, he didnt provide any ref.Re-everting is editwarring, absent discussion it is WP:disruptive Adding unsourced info with a pseudoreference (TBA) is inappropriate; this is an encyclopedia no stompground no playground I find this immature and unserious editing behavior.

Of note this editor applied 2 tags for "disputed factual inaccuracy of the article" and "neutrality of this article's introduction is disputed."--Wuerzele (talk) 01:46, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

My point in saying that I will find 13 other sources for the information is that I CAN find 13 other sources for it, but I shouldn't have to. Under NPOV criteria, the chemical industry deserves its day in court in the interest of fairness - you should not assume that chemical companies are THE FORCES OF EVIL and anything they say is AN EVIL LIE, which apparently you do. OTOH, the onus should be on you to find sources that prove information entered by other editors wrong before deleting or changing it. Good luck with that since the information I entered is not wrong. It is just facts.

The main problem is that you have systematically introduced an anti-industry bias into the article by 1) misquoting non-industry sources to put 2,4-D into a darker light than was intended, and 2) refusing to accept any industry sources for any kind of information whatever, whether controversial or not. This is not good encyclopedic writing. Let me quote from the Wikipedia standard: Wikipedia:Neutral point of view

Achieving neutrality

As a general rule, do not remove sourced information from the encyclopedia solely on the grounds that it seems biased. Instead, try to rewrite the passage or section to achieve a more neutral tone. Biased information can usually be balanced with material cited to other sources to produce a more neutral perspective, so such problems should be fixed when possible through the normal editing process. Remove material only where you have a good reason to believe it misinforms or misleads readers in ways that cannot be addressed by rewriting the passage.

Due and undue weight

Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources.

In this case, you are preventing one viewpoint - the industry viewpoint - from being heard at all, while systematically misrepresenting the government viewpoint by quoting only negative information while ignoring positive information. In addition to removing positive information, you are also removing a lot of useful, non-controversial information, resulting in a largely fact-free article with little useful information at all. So I'll re-revert, and you can re-re-revert, and we can go off to arbitration about it. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 22:09, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

Sadly, I see you keep

butchering the article, reverted here,

using Wikipedia:Rhetoric language ("Adding one of the threatened "13 other sources"). Or rhetoric like "In this case from the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture. Who knows more about grain than Saskatchewan? Nobody.") this is totally unserious.

pushing statements into paragraphs history here where they do not belong!

You disrupt the page not seeking consensus: YOu find UNILATERALLY that 24d.org is okay for example: "24d.org vetted and found to be a legitimate chemical industry web site". I told you to see archive, even jytdog recognised it wasnt okay !

Stop reverting and pushing controversial edits. The next step is WP:dispute resolution, my friend. --Wuerzele (talk) 23:43, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't use rhetoric, I use rigorous logic in my editing, hence the lessons in logic I previously put here to point out the obvious logical fallacies in the article. I also tend to inject some humor into my comments but not the article itself. You have a narrow definition of what a consensus is. I don't see that there is a consensus here, what I see is that you are acting as a Mindguard, censoring the article to prevent the inclusion of any information that does not fit into your own particular Worldview. Unfortunately for the reader, there is a lot of useful information that doesn't fit into your apparently narrow worldview. I checked 24d.org and found that it is a registered lobby group in Canada - a legitimate industry trade organization. It originally had 13 members, but has shrunk because 2,4-D manufacturing isn't very profitable. Lobby groups in Canada operate under very strict rules - see: Ten Things You Should Know About Lobbying In particular, if a group claims to do research, the Canadian government will actually check to make sure it does legitimate research (not so much in the US). In addition, I wasn't really kidding about finding "13 other sources" because the information I added is generic information that is available from numerous other sources. If you insist on more sources, I can find more sources. So far I have used the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture (Saskatchewan grows twice as much wheat as Kansas), the University of California at Berkeley, and Wessels Living History Farm. I have fine tuned the text somewhat based on what they said, but it doesn't differ significantly from what 24d.org said. I also found some interesting history that indicates 2,4-D was developed during WWII by four independent groups who neither patented nor published their research under wartime secrecy laws. That accounts for some of the confusion about its origins. If I get a chance (i.e. you don't revert it because it doesn't fit into your worldview), I'll put it in the article.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 22:07, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Looking deeper into the references for this article, it becomes apparent that editors have been starting from sources like this one from the Natural Resources Defense Council and then trying to find references to back them up:

What You Should Know About 2,4-D - Widely Used Lawn Pesticide Contaminates Air and Water

Despite dozens of scientific studies that link the toxic pesticide 2,4-D (2,4-dichlorophenoxy acetic acid) to cancer and other health risks such as cell damage, hormonal interference, and reproductive problems, 46 million pounds of 2,4-D are applied to U.S. lawns, playgrounds, golf courses, and millions of acres of agricultural land every year. This toxic pesticide contaminates our air and water, finds its way into our homes where it poses a higher risk to children, and the use of 2,4-D could be on the rise if new genetically modified corn and soybean crops are approved. To protect the health of thousands of Americans, NRDC recommends that the Environmental Protection Agency restrict use of 2,4-D and that the U.S. Department of Agriculture not allow new 2,4-D Ready crops on the market.

and then they go looking for sources to back that up. Unfortunately, they aren't going to find any because the NRDC article consists of hyperbole and urban myths, rather than actual facts. Technically, these are known as Factoids - statements which look like facts but in fact are not real facts. If you check them against what they claim are the sources, you will find that they are misquoting them and their facts are false, which is why the EPA rejected NRDC petition, and the courts rejected the NRDC lawsuit about the EPA rejection of their petition. This sort of thing is why the NRDC is on my list of unreliable sources. Please don't quote what they say, and then try to cite some more reliable authority as a reference, because that reference will usually contract them. The use of factoids from unreliable sources but citing different WP:Reliable sources which don't actually support the factoids is a serious problem with this article. See also Harvard Guide to Using Sources: What's Wrong with Wikipedia?, The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely On Wikipedia, and Why You Shouldn't Use Wikipedia for Research for more things you need to do better or not do at all to make Wikipedia better and more encyclopedic.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 22:57, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

See also the Woozle effect for information about how factoids and urban myths find their way into articles like this one. Check your sources, check your sources, check your sources, and watch out for woozles.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 23:06, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

The Woozle effect

In editing this article I became of another Wikipedia article on the Woozle effect which I think is relevant to this discussion and helps explain how this article got to this state. According to the Wkipedia article:

The Woozle effect, also known as evidence by citation,[1] or a woozle, occurs when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads individuals, groups and the public into thinking or believing there is evidence, and nonfacts become urban myths and factoids.

An example in this article would be the statement:

Where municipal lawn pesticide bylaws exist, such as in Canada,[15] alternatives must be used.

The implication is that 2,4-D is banned in Canada. Now, since I live in Canada, this was easy for me to verify. I just went to my local Canadian Tire store and bought a litre of 2,4-D. No problem. Then I checked the relevant laws. The Government of Canada has approved the use of 2,4-D in Canada, the last two provinces I lived in, Alberta and B.C. only ban some forms of 2,4-D (i.e. not the ones I wanted to buy), and none of the local bylaws in places where I lived prohibited using it. Looking at the reference, http://www.flora.org/healthyottawa/BylawList.pdf it turns out that it only lists the places in Canada which have pesticide bylaws, and doesn't actually evaluate the bylaws to see whether they ban 2,4-D. The ones I lived in didn't. There was an urban myth in some of those places that 2,4-D was banned, which turned out to be untrue when I checked the local laws. It is probably banned in some places in Canada, e.g. Quebec, but not in the places where I have lived. This puts the statement into the urban myth category. This article is not helping dispel or clarify that urban myth.

The Woozle effect can also work its way into much more important documents. As a classic case, there was the claim by the IPCC that

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

Now, unlike most people, I have spent a lot of time travelling on and near glaciers, notably in the Himalayas, and the claim was obviously false. The Himalayan glaciers are absolutely massive and robust, and they not going to disappear in this century or the next one. Other glaciers I have seen might disappear, e.g. the ones in the U.S. Glacier National Park, the ones in Peru, but definitely not the ones in the Himalayas. Unfortunately, despite the protests of the Government of India which owns a lot of those glaciers, the IPCC stuck to its original conclusions and refused to admit it was wrong until it was proven conclusively wrong by numerous outside experts. See http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-himalayan-glaciers-mistake for details. Despite the IPCC's claim that they were the authoritative experts on climate change, they relied on the World Wide Fund for Nature as their source, and the WWF had quoted somebody else without checking the source, and so on ad-infinitum. Nobody checked their sources, and they all turned out to be wrong. The moral of this story - check your sources.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 23:23, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Developments around Enlist Duo

There have been many recent developments surrounding the approval of Enlist Duo by the U.S. EPA. This article goes into it:

• EPA tosses aside safety data, says Dow pesticide for GMOs won't harm people

SageRad (talk) 16:33, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

The article is behind a pay wall, but it is easy enough to hack it, so was able to read it. It is full of red herrings and I don't know that it is very exciting. Enlist Duo is just a mixture of 2,4-D and glyphosate (Roundup) with an emulsifier to prevent them from interacting and clogging up the sprayer. There is no reason to think that it would be more toxic than 2,4-D and glyphosate sprayed separately. The LD50 of 2,4-D is around 375 to 666 mg/kg, which is to say that it is less toxic than Aspirin, so the EPA has difficulty justifying classifying it as "highly toxic". A more interesting development was DOW's patent on "stacking" genetic traits, which allowed it to create plants that were tolerant of both 2,4-D and glyphosate. In theory they could make plants tolerant to whatever they wanted using this method.

If you really want something to worry about, try checking out the new developments in CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology. The Chinese are already using it to genetically engineer human embryos (see China shocks world by genetically engineering human embryos), and the Koreans are trying to engineer the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth. Making a species immune to two different herbicides at once? Pah! That's nothing. Some companies are starting to sell CRISPR kits to let you do genetic modifications in your own home. Welcome to the Brave New World of DIY genetic engineering. 22:08, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't need something to really worry about. That's off topic. I think this article is relevant and situates Enlist Duo in the current moment in terms of regulatory history and current hurdles. That is why i posted it here. It wasn't behind a paywall for me. In the article was mention of kidney damage that seemed an interesting thread to me. Please note, LD50 is not the only mode of toxicity, and in fact with pesticides like this, it's generally not the thing that deserves most concern. It's longer term exposure effects that are often more significant. LD50 is not then only reason for an EPA classification of toxic. That is only significant in regard to acute toxicity. Please hold in mind that what is interesting to one editor may be different from what is interesting to another editor, and that we must work together to discuss how to edit the article, while hearing each other's points of view. SageRad (talk) 22:25, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I just thought that advances in human genome editing were more interesting than mixtures of antique herbicides. Reading the background info, it looks like marketing gone bad. It seems that Dow advertising claimed that Enlist Duo was more effective than the two herbicides used separately. That appears to be pure marketing based on no evidence. Dow thinks they can sort it out by the 2016 crop year by for instance proving that Enlist Duo is NOT more effective than 2,4-D and glyphosate sprayed separately. We'll see. Doesn't apply to Canada, Enlist Duo still approved.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 21:37, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

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Disputed

The basis of my criticisms have been mostly swept under the carpet by somebody since my last edit, so let me revive them. They consist of point of view biasing, logical fallacies, and misquoting sources.

First paragraph:

2,4-D is a possible carcinogen per WHO,[4]

Reference [4] is hidden behind a pay wall, and doesn't say much about 2,4-D anyway, so let me summarize: Mentioning the WHO introduces an appeal to authority fallacy. The WHO rates 2,4-D in group 2B, "possibly carcinogenic" to human beings. To put it in context, the WHO also rates red meat and coffee in Group 2B, but processed meat in Group 1, so a more neutral POV would be, "The WHO rates 2,4-D about as likely to be carcinogenic as red meat or coffee, but much less likely to be carcinogenic than bacon or hot dogs". Or you could just not mention the WHO ratings at all since they are highly misleading to the layman. The obvious intention of the lead paragraph in this article is to mislead the layman.

and some ester forms are highly toxic to fish and other aquatic life.[5]

but to quote reference [5] further, "The salt forms may be only slightly toxic to aquatic animals." which is why the ester forms are generally prohibited and the salt forms generally approved. From a NPOV standpoint, both should be mentioned since laymen will usually only be able to buy the safe forms.

Second paragraph:

2,4-D was one of the ingredients in Agent Orange, a herbicide widely used during the Vietnam War,.[5] However, another ingredient in Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T (since banned in the United States), and its contaminant dioxin, were the cause of the adverse health effects associated with Agent Orange.[6][7]

Mentioning Agent Orange introduces a red herring fallacy which is irrelevant because 2,4-D was not the cause of the problems with Agent Orange. Agent Orange was used (along with other chemical agents) because it was a mix of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T and both were believed to be non-toxic to humans. Not being poisonous they would be allowed under the law of war (a dubious legal claim). However, the other ingredient 2,4,5-T turned out to have been contaminated with dioxin, which is a known carcinogen. This was accidental, and they quickly stopped using it when they found out. Also, I'd like to point out, nobody actually knows if Agent Orange was toxic or not because they never tested it, and nobody has done studies of the effects on people. They are just guessing. Although the lead does allude to the fact that 2,4-D was not the problem, mentioning it in the lead is just confusing and better placed in the history section. The obvious intention of mentioning it in the lead paragraphs is to drag in some negative urban myths to confuse the layman, again.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 23:31, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

A google search found a lot of sites publicizing the connection between 2,4-D and Agent Orange. If you're worried about rhetorical games being played here, I think that telling readers the whole truth up front actually makes it a lot harder for activists to lie with half truths later. Geogene (talk) 21:39, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, the trouble is that there appears to be a conspiracy to confuse people and demonize the relatively innocuous herbicide 2,4-D involved here. There definitely are conspiracies on Wikipedia - but these guys can get caught. Nuff said.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 07:50, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

1)The International Agency For Cancer research also classifies it as a possible carcinogen. It's probably safe to leave that statement be. 3) 2,4-D was a component of Agent Orange but I'm not sure it's relevance anywhere but in the history section as suggested. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DocTox (talk • contribs) 00:54, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

I believe these issues have now been addressed and I have removed the Maintenance tag from the article Michael D. Turnbull (talk) 16:37, 22 January 2020 (UTC)