Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've come to believe that the unabomber, though horribly misguided in terms of tactics and conclusion, was right about one thing:

Maybe one day things will be different, but for now, humans are not designed to live in the manner that they do. We were meant to climb and run. Maybe even to work the soil and to create wine. But evolution isn't fast enough to keep up with the rate of change of technology. We're in cars and looking at computers. We're comparing ourselves to the best people on the planet. We're pulling out the fibre from our food and loading it up with sugar and trans fats.

I've come to view drugs and alcohol as symptoms. We've probably co-evolved with alcohol, since it's correlated both to genetics and with intelligence. Maybe it's the method that evolution allows people to be honest enough for social cooperation, while being dishonest enough to cheat on a spouse occasionally.

But when it comes to drugs like opioids, I tend to think it's people filling a void from a lack of self worth. Overweight, stressed financially due to easy credit, depressed, usually sick in some way.

Banning opioids isn't going to help any more than banning cocaine has helped.

So how to get out of it? Make use more similar to how we used to live and take away or tax the things that we haven't adapted to yet.

Opioids should be taxed, highly regulated, and we should start working on mental health and education, but we also need redesigned cities with more reliance on self-propulsion (bikes, skiing, walking, running).

We need redesigned food laws that focus on consequences not on arbitrary labelling requirements. We should outright ban foods for children that we're sure destroy their lives, like soft drinks or fruit juice. (Yes, fruit juice. Without fibre it's just empty sugar. Kids get enough Vit C in a single apple. One in four children in the US has pre-diabetes and one in four seniors have full blown diabetes, we need to start treating refined sugar as a poison.)

I'm sure a certain part of the epidemic is people not knowing that these were hyper-addictive and then getting addicted, but I don't really think it's the primary cause.

Also, we should start using safer drugs that we've evolved around for pain management and therapy. Magic mushrooms, cannabis, etc.

>> We're in cars and looking at computers.

We had opium problems since morphine/heroin have been around. Plenty of people were using in the late 1800's and it wasn't banned until the early part of last century.

200 years in the grand scheme of human evolution is nothing.

My understanding is that opium became a problem once tobacco, and its method of consumption (i.e. smoking), became a global commodity in the 16th century. Opium was previously orally ingested, but when smoking it became the norm, the near-instant gratification caused an epidemic (mostly in China; see the Opium Wars/ British East India Company).

>I've come to view drugs and alcohol as symptoms. We've probably co-evolved with alcohol, since it's both genetic and correlated with intelligence. Maybe it's the method that evolution allows people to be honest enough for social cooperation, while being dishonest enough to cheat on a spouse occasionally.

Maybe humans simply evolved to seek pleasure and the associated activation of reward circuitry, the same way they find it in food, leisure, sex, etc. Except the pleasantness is significantly stronger with drugs. Its unlikely that humans evolved to use any particular drug, since there are so many exogenous substances which mimic human neurotransmitters and/or interact with the brain.

There is no complex explanation for why humans use and abuse drugs. They feel good and many humans are notoriously irresponsible with regards to over indulgence.

Feeling good is an evolved trait. We feel good when we have sex because it propagates genes. If we could hold technological growth static, the drugs that lead to dependence, depression, and suicide would eventually become less addictive. We do this with food through our tongue and through throwing up when we ingest poison. I'd imagine it'd be something similar for harmful drugs. Although it may be something else, like evolving out the negative consequences. Perhaps that's why alcohol dependence is correlated with intelligence: Smart people can think of ways of avoiding over drinking so there was less selective pressure on anti-alcohol dependence genes.

You can't just advocate the sale of marijuana and in the same post suggest soft drinks should be banned. When I'm stoned a nice cold Coca Cola really hits the spot.

Happy holidays, by the way.

In all seriousness, banning something doesn't mean that we will learn to deal with it better in the future. Imagine if we'd banned cars back when speculators thought humans would go insane if their bodies exceeded 30 miles per hour!

Taxes are a great way to deal with a problem without banning it, which usually opens a black market anyway.

After all, before Prohibition, one of if not the biggest sole contributor to the U.S. Federal Government was the booze tax that dates all the way back to Alexander Hamilton.

As a proponent of liberty, I agree with you. But, I have also come to see raw sugar as a poison (no matter how much it seems to hit the spot).

There isn't any raw sugar in coke (in the States).

Sure there is. They call them "Mexican Cokes" and they come in bottles (12 oz.). I used to buy them by the case at Costco for ~18.

Also, I was using 'sugar' generically, and perhaps I should've said 'sugars' (i.e. mono- and di-saccharides)[0]. Fructose counts as a sugar in my mind. Maybe the naturally occurring substances we desire should not be extracted, and the other constituents that occur alongside our desired constituent has an evolutionary reason for being there.

[0] Sucrose is glucose + fructose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose

I was thinking of cane sugar, which is more common in Asia (and elsewhere, I guess, but not in NA).

Cane sugar was, second only to cotton, responsible for continuing the slave trade here in the Americas. Cane sugar is sucrose, and I had made guess based on your previous comments that you were referring to cane sugar.

Edit: I should've just written"

cane_sugar==sucrose

sucrose==glucose+fructose

corn==fructose //(subsidized feed stock for ethanol used in fuel in the US)

I agree on a lot of levels, but I have a slightly different take. I would argue that, fundamentally, we are still pursuit predators. It's a deeply engrained cognitive trait to chase a goal over long periods of time, methodically fighting against things that are far larger than ourselves. We can adapt to any circumstances as long as our lives are framed in the context of a greater goal.

To that end, I posit that our ills of today ultimately boil down to two root causes: A lack of a national vision, and our weak public education system.

A national vision is key to strong social cohesion, it's a collective dream gives value to our work and builds a common sense of brotherhood. We overthrew the shackles of an empire chasing our dreams of democracy and freedom, and grew into an empire of our own while chasing manifest destiny. Immigrants flooded in riding industrialization to fulfill their dreams of upward mobility, and fostering a sense of inevitable progress. World War 2 ripped us out of the Great Depression, sending us back to Europe as liberators and defenders of democracy, while we fought back imperialism on the Pacific front. We were liberators and defenders of democracy, a free people united against tyranny. The Cold War coupled our social identity to economic implementations, but it also sent us to the final frontier of space and inspired an entire generation.

It doesn't matter that we were never really united. There was always a sense of direction, movement towards some end, and that was enough to give us something to fight for or against. The fight put our lives in context and gave us meaning, it united us as comrades in that greater fight.

That ended with the USSR collapse. Our imperial democracy suddenly found itself a hegemony that it was culturally unprepared to defend. As many here have experienced in business, the culture of expansion is radically different than the culture of an organization that's holding ground and focused on internal improvements... maintaining position requires greater maturity, a sense of collective ownership and sustainable long-term thinking. The Cold War socioeconomic coupling hindered our ability to transition towards the stability mindset, and, if anything, stigmatized ideas of collectivism just when we needed them the most.

We're left framing our lives in the context of post-Cold War capitalism: Faceless gears in a machine, an inward-facing culture of selfishness and greed that enables the gutting of our nation and our principles. Capitalism is an economic implementation, it is not a socioeconomic system.

I would argue that there are only two things required to put America back on track. Many things are broken, but they are symptoms of much simpler root causes.

* We need an expansive national vision to unite us behind a distant challenge: A new Space Race. Shift billions from defense spending to growing new industries, building a vision around settling the final frontier, and raising the next generation to look upwards in awe. Frame our culture around building the future and leading all of humanity into the great unknown.

* Reform and reinvest in public education as a foundational cultural institution. Focus K-12 on developing strong citizens that embody our democratic ideals of critical thought and cognitive independence. Instill students with principles and skills to navigate the modern world, rather than relying on short-term rote memorization against standardized tests. Work to refactor some careers out of college and into new trade schools, and change the high school narrative to put more emphasis on non-college education paths like tradeschools or civics.

That's all we need. A vision to inspire and put our lives in a greater context, public education to give our citizens the tools to be an educated electorate, and together they foster a culture that's capable of focusing inward and upwards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com