> just because someone is 
> wrong on one point does 
> not make another point wrong also.

I think it is reasonable to divide generally reliable sources from generally
unreliable ones.

Murray Gell-Mann, a physicist, has often mentioned a form of "Amnesia" we
have all named after him, which may earn him more fame than his all work
with elementary particles.  (He was one of the discoverers of quarks, and
still re-tells my worst joke ever: "How do you hold 3 quarks together?  With
a quarkscrew.")

Here's Murray's Amnesia - you read a newspaper article about a subject area
in which you are well-versed.  You see that the reporter got the basic facts
wrong, perhaps to the point of reversing basic cause and effect, as in "wet
sidewalks cause rain".  You get angry or you laugh at the many errors in the
story.  But then, you turn the page, and read another article about a
subject with which you are not familiar.  You unquestioningly accept THAT
article as factual.  Somehow the act of turning the page of the newspaper
causes a form of "Amnesia".  No one every admits to themselves that most of
news and publically-available information is, at best, slightly misleading,
and at worst, completely wrong.  Yes, even the BBC.

Here on Bee-L, a lot of the disagreements, at their core, involve risk.
Sadly, the biggest gap in the knowledge base among our most prolific
contributors is in math and statistics, which have a big impact on one's
view of risk.  Humans unconsciously gauge the risks and benefits of any
choice, and if a particular course of action seems to provide little or no
benefit to them, the risk automatically seems higher to them. 

Humans also are more willing to accept the massive risk inherent in their
own choices than they are willing to accept the tiny risks they experience
as a result of the actions of others, moreso when they don't think that they
personally benefit from those actions.

Vaccinations are a striking example for the current crop of parents, who
have grown up in a vaccinated "1st World" nation, and have not traveled
enough to see the impact of disease on the "3rd World" nations.   Recently
someone paid me the backhanded compliment of thanking me for a short lesson
"on statistics", but then hand-waived the entire subject of confidence in
knowledge itself away with "I gladly defer it to you".   Deliberate and
willful dismissal of one of the pillars of epistemology itself in the
context of scientific results.  No one batted an eye.

So, one is more likely to be an unreliable source of information if one's
viewpoint is not backed by both a multi-day dive into the recent literature,
a minimum of 15 to 30 mins with SAS, MathCad, Mathematica, or some other
serious data-analysis package, and some subject-matter insight from
first-hand experience.  

Given that beekeeping is nothing but a series of ethical choices and
decisions made when no one else is looking, I am fascinated by the wide
range of risk tolerances expressed here.

So, here's a basic choice - would you rather go back to taking a 10% to 20%
forager loss due to the highly toxic pesticides of old, but have no fear of
your core colony health, or have far fewer, perhaps no forager losses, but
worry that the new pesticides will turn out to be a newer "Pencap-M", where
the toxicity turns out to be both unexpected, and not toxic enough to kill
foragers, yet toxic enough to harm the core hive.

You may argue that this is an over-simplified false choice, but realize that
if foragers are quickly killed by a pesticide, this PROTECTS the hive, which
can recover fairly quickly from even a "100% forager loss" among those
foragers unlucky enough to encounter a highly toxic food source.

It may be that they best way to deal with the risks of highly complex modern
pesticides would be to overtly design them to kill on contact, rather than
deal with the collateral damage of a less-than perfectly harmless pesticide
that protects the individual forager, and allows her to bring home the
toxicity to the brood.

I know that this is counter-intuitive, so the Koan here would be "Is the
greater harm to the hive a loss of foragers, or a loss of brood?"  (If you
like, assume a future pest and disease-free environment, or one where we
have all selected as well as Greg Hunt has for things like "chewed varroa
percentage" in our sticky-board drops.)

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