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Comment by purist33 | Hacker News Reader

I love how the guy is getting punished for misusing a math term.

'Asien' didn't misuse any math terms. I don't know why they're being downvoted.

'Shaburn' made some claims that sounded like they want to be math, but didn't make any sense as math. Hence my confusion.

I recognise that people use terms colloquially, like 'exponential', but given all the (pseudo?) sophisticated, math-y language in the comment

> Given the rate of mutation and transmission in bugs with natural gestation and migration, the probability of catastrophic outcomes is exponential without a similar dataset in other human food sources.

I had hoped that Shaburn actually had a more concrete model in mind that they could explain.

1. Number of people eating bug(driven by mimesis pushed through a media narrative and thus typically viral(often exponential). 2. Number of variety of bugs being eaten(regionality and entrepreneurialism((often referred to as Cambrian explosions in perfectly competitive markets, thus exhibiting exponential growth functions)). 3. Number of geographies bugs for consumption being grown in. 4. Number of production methods and processes. 5. New combinations of genetics of peoples and insects/infectious organisms being consumed. Think Montezuma's revenge or lactose intolerance in certain regions of the world except possibly contagious and deadly Multiply all that by orders of magnitude faster gestation cycle and thus the chance for mutation, aside from technology developed to support existing food chain, Number of mutations per lifecycle, increasing the chances of deadly DNA combination by 12x, so order of magnitude.

Average lifespan of... A. Bacteria: 12 hours B. Insect: 12 months C. Mammal: 12 years (shortest being the primary disease harbinger, the rat).

Could you please point to any source for your claim that the number of people eating insects has grown dramatically?

I could find this study from 2015 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552653/ which says:

> At least 2 billion people globally eat insects in over 113 entomophageous countries though this habit is regarded negatively or as revolting by others [4–6]. More than 1900 species are consumed by local populations globally but insect consumption (entomophagy) shows an unequal distribution.

There's roughly 8 billion people on the globe. Between 2 billion to 8 billion, there's not much room left for exponential growth.

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