primroot

I'd go even further in the speculation. Have you seen how some Greeks today get upset at the thought the language of Homer did not sound like theirs? I think there is a similar phenomenon with many Chinese (I'm hoping the phenomenon is less general among scholars), where they think their ancient philosopher were all Confucianists. The ambiguity of the grammar does not help. Words can also be ambiguous sometimes, but that is less of a problem. There are ancient dictionaries. But have then a Chinese amateur interpreter tell you that door means family or that ghost means ancestor with disregard to both the context and the dictionaries, completely distorting the meaning of the text in favor of some bland conformist platitude, and you will soon start rethinking the meaning of Cultural Appropriation.

Ancient Greek and Sanskrit both have complex detailed grammars that leave little room for ambiguity. The language of the Dao De Jing has a minimalistic grammar, where more has to be inferred from context.

Or get people to eat local as much as possible. The only people at risk from being more malnourished due to a scarcity of Cavendish bananas are those whose land has been plagued by the monoculture.

And by the way https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/monkeys-bann... [Monkeys banned from eating bananas at Devon zoo]. I assume those were all Cavendish bananas.

Mass-surveillance makes impossible to have any honest cold-minded debate on the subject unless one is an important person, but here is some relevant material. https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/...

Here in Panama, many years ago Nestle became the main customer of tomato growers, and then through aggressive PR managed to make their canned tomato sauce into some sort of staple ingredient. There are at least three teams in this game, the farmers, the consumers and the intermediaries. One of them won.

I think this shows how there is some naivete combined with economic need that makes it easy for corporations to drive farmers against their own interests. Commoditization and systemic effects are completely ignored by people who desperately want economic certainty, no matter the precedent. In this free market, one day peppers are scarce and expensive, then the next season peppers are rotting because not enough people buy them. And land continues to steadily degrade under monoculture and animal husbandry.

When the free trade agreement with the US was signed cattle farmers thought they would be exporting meat to the US. Nature be damned. Meat is more expensive, there is meat from the US in the supermarket shelves, drought after drought makes it hard for small cattle farmers to subsist (unless they get into money laundry), and the Darien rain forest is being destroyed.

But listen to the economists. Nordhaus got the Nobel prize telling us how 3.5 degrees by 2100 is OK. Silly physicists and ecologists can't understand the magic of money.

It'd be more accurate to say 'commoditization favoring economies of scale for the sake of anti-competitive oligopolization demands X.' It then takes some PR money to make people 'demand' all the crap.

Addded: the mindless commoditization is abetted by subsidies, including the subsidy of not having to price in negative externalities.

Heartbreaking, but at this point it does not really surprise that people of highly regarded intellect and achievement indulge in such horrible practices while most people around them turn a blind eye. On the other hand we should be wondering if our black and white view of the subject and all the rhetoric about "monsters" only helps promote silence. I believe humanizing the evildoers keeps the rest of humans aware that they too can be evildoers and perhaps backtrack and speak out more easily when they are on the fence.

Edit: Added "and perhaps ..." at the end.

"A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC506782/

Society tends to underestimate the power of inefficiencies and shortcomings to keep us in the right track by making it difficult to attain our immediate aspirations. The exception is in the case of the underclasses. In this case most people just find it obvious that if they have too much too easily then the entrepreneurial spirit would collapse and along with it society.

> “But isn’t the point to taste the chicken?” Furious and foreign, I replied: “No! It’s just the opposite! Cooking is about messing with the chicken! Cooking is about adding flavour!”

One cannot blame people for wanting to add flavor to the meat of a sick animal. I feel sad for her never having had the chance to taste a happy chicken. No amount of cooking can compensate for the lack of good ingredients. Natural ruin can be fertile soil for human creativity.

No diet, no lifestyle, and not even history https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24811552

I share your position, but it is unfortunate that the word personal is prompt to such semantic abuse nowadays. It is not personal liberty that is being preached, it is property liberty. Liberty bestowed not based on the unchanging measure of human personhood, but upon the measure of property ownership. The richer, the "liberior." A cult of the status quo in traditional service of the powerful, hiding its old age by dispensing the righteous aspiration among underdogs of becoming a great owner. And great property depends on a greatly powerful government (as Adam Smith claims when talking about the tasks of government in Wealth of Nations). Hence it is ultimately tyranny what they preach.

Governments punishing people, who try to save the lives of those fleeing from climate meltdown, is the current state of things (in Italy and the US at least).

Yes, sadly. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/31/european...

Let alone the fact that around 40% of the current population is sustained by synthetic fertilizers. The Haber-Bosch process represents 1% of the world's energy consumption.

"Intellectuals don't make studies about themselves." - Noam Chomsky (probably paraphrased because I can't find the source, although I'm sure I've heard him plenty of times say this.)

I think intellectuals (including the ones that do honestly try to answer questions about the world rather finding ways to convince people about how important their field is) should be compared to the priestly castes of older societies. That is one way to make sense of their behavior.

I think the technologies we need in order to change culture are in the realm of creative destruction, as in creatively destroying certain structures that keep the economy from working in a coherent way. Three things that come to mind are:

1. Knowledge. Making sure the intellectual richness of humanity is accessible to everyone. The technology is already there but the rent-seekers keep subverting progress through technology, law, and (pseudo-)morality. To address the issue of morality, we should promote the distinction between property and possession, and make sure property is seen as something that is subjected to the interest of society. Hence, why we need limits on intellectual property and other forms of property.

2. Commoditization. This goes back to knowledge from the previous point, but also to complexity in general. The idea is that certain products get turned into commodities (products with uniform standard characteristics that don't require much consumer choice) while others get turned away from being commodities. The process is currently too driven by ignorance/incompetence and greed, and I don't think it is easy to say where one ends and the other starts. So people end up needing three different computers (laptop, TV, cellphone) instead of one that can be adapted to different situations. Or they end up having to buy the entire computer instead of fixing one replacing one part of it. Technology sometimes does not integrate well. The need for choice ends up being created where it should not be. Capital ends up rewarding the unproductive, and the producers find ways to escape the effects of competition. Advertisement very much cultivates the element of ignorance that is behind this process. All the fake choices of food in the supermarket made out of different combinations of the same low quality commoditized ingredients. Meanwhile crops are becoming all the same (3/4 loss of diversity according to the FAO), at the expense of nutrition and adaptability. Life is becoming uniform in order to adapt to the machine. It's a long subject, if anyone knows of a good author that treats it I'd be interested in reading her.

3. Debt. The debt based economy introduces a paradox, by which too little scarcity is dangerous, because it means that products cannot be converted into enough money to pay the banks. This is clearly a big obstacle to progress. In practice it makes us act as if employment and economic growth are more important that health and soil. We need to come up with ways that allow people exchange the fruits of their work without relying on debt or on so-called liquidity. The availability of goods and service should be enough to allow their exchange not some abstract concept of "health" of the financial system. I think digital currencies can move us in this direction.

In summary let us make the economy work by taking into account the ecosystem, rewarding work and creativity above capital ownership. In the last two points, I see a lot of opportunity for promoting closer human and ecologic relations at the local level.

The Haber-Bosch process consumes around 1% of energy the world generates.

"Industrial farming is tapping underground aquifers faster than they can be replenished, threatening global water supplies. Nitrates from fertilizers contaminate drinking water. Agricultural runoff rich in nitrogen and phosphorus has created hundreds of dead zones in coastal waters around the world. And then there's the toll taken on the Earth from the sheer number of human beings we can now feed." https://phys.org/news/2014-06-humans-derailed-nitrogen-track...

"He concluded that 40 percent of the global population in 2000 were dependent on food production from synthetic fertilizers." https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fe...

I don't think telling the poor to have less children is very appropriate since the rich are the ones who pollute the most, even when they are environmentally-conscious. However, we should be aware that it is technology that is sustaining population growth, and that technology is emitting entropy into the systems life on earth depends on. It should be scaled back.

Thanks, I stand corrected. I abused the term. I meant to say civilization as a society where humans depend primarily on agriculture for their survival, as the appearance of such a society coincides with the start of the Holocene.

I can't upvote this enough. The way I see it, the Holocene is over, no more neolithic civilization, unless we keep powering the machines with lots of energy in order to cling to the past (which is a big part of the use we have been giving to machines, and the reason why Modernity is a sham) as mythified by our collective amnesia. We need to integrate our lives with the ecosystem in order to create virtuous cycles of soil restoration, reconsider ways of living that would make us more resilient in the face of modern technology being unavailable, and start questioning the institutions of civilization such as marriage and private property. When collapse arrives the latter too are just unavoidable, the Earth will ruthlessly desecrate our myths and idols, so it's better if we ourselves do it in a more orderly fashion, waking up from the dreams for which we have abused technology as a sort of hallucinogenic soporific.

I am now remembering that book by W. Heisenberg "Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik," which talks about how Physics and Mathematics overcame the Cartesian mindset. I think that Cartesian mindset needs to be questioned more than ever now that we need to come up with unprecedented measures against all odds. For example, I see modernity as being predicated on this platonic notion that we humans have our minds separate from the material world, and from these minds ideas emerge, including the ideas about what we should aspire to. There is little regard for the way in which technology tends to be a tool for us to indulge in our more basic impulses (unless, I think, one works in PR). I refuse to say primitive because the impulses I am thinking of are more of the nature mentioned by Veblen when he talks about conspicuous waste. So as a result of this tendency, we are in this paradox, in which technology actually seems to be shrinking our possibilities (I think David Graeber mentions this in another context), and the world is turning into a monoculture both literally and metaphorically. The result is less resilience in the face catastrophe and less capacity to adapt in the face of energy shortages, because the complexities that allowed for adaptation (different ways of living, biodiversity, crop diversity) have been steadily eliminated. There are also economic impulses behind this, related to the process of commoditization, and the reliance on debt. The first is seen as good because allows creating economies of scale. The latter makes scarcity be a good thing, because if things are not scarce enough then they cannot be converted into enough money to pay debts. Hence, people worry about employment and growth. Environmental degradation never subtracts from growth, and neither do chronic diseases.

I think a new normal, in the sense of a new steady (less favorable) state of the climate, is not something that is being suggested by the science. Just to point out one relevant fact, consider that the current CO2 levels were present at least going as far back to Pliocene geological epoch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliocene_climate. I think it is reasonable to expect at least plenty of instability as the Earth gets closer to the temperature and sea level of that time.

Well said. And here's some reference https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/1/1671884...

And the ones that realize it too well tend to get killed in the name of progress. The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Juan Manuel Santos even joked in one of his videos that "the difference between terrorists and environmentalists is that, with terrorists, one can negotiate." This is the former president of Colombia, a country where hundreds of activists (including environmentalists) get murdered per year before the complicit inaction of their government and the smears of their corporate media.

I am from a third world country and I have seen the poorest risks their lives in defense of the environment in ways the more educated do not even come close to considering. The rest are being "educated" on a day to day basis on the wonders of consumerism.

Maybe they are thinking about such things as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox , or https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... . Or perhaps they feel the modern lifestyle is not delivering happiness. Or, to be more specific, they may be noting as J.S. Mill did that paradoxically technology was improving and at the same time people were working more.

I would add ... and other current life, including life on which humans depend, for which humans have already contributed to their extinction independently of climate change (see 75% loss of crop diversity in a century as posited by the FAO).

This makes me think of premature optimization. There is such thing as energy homeostasis in biology. Most things about diet are going to be imprecise, and the target system is adapted to imprecision.

I should cite from that Harvard link:

"Generations of Americans are accustomed to the food pyramid design, and it’s not going away. In fact, the Healthy Eating Pyramid and the Healthy Eating Plate complement each other."

I agree with that. But are cheese, butter, lard, and panela (dried sugarcane juice) unhealthy? Should you buy cheese that is unsalted but contains other less studied food preservatives or just eat less cheese?

A few years ago I was talking to friend who lives in Peru. He was finishing his studies in something similar to a Computer Science degree. Despite being a well educated person he did not understand that refined sugar was basically nutritionally superfluous, that it was this pure chemical substance that one regularly obtains (in some sufficiently equivalent form) from all sorts of food. It is hard for people to wrap their head around the fact that a whole powerful industry can exist to produce something so harmful and superfluous (and at the very same time destroy the environment).

I can't agree more with this. I'm in Chile right now, and they have put warning labels on all sorts of food here, saying things like high sugar, high fat, high sodium, and so on. Well, now it seems all food is unhealthy, so you might as well eat whatever you want. Yes, there is such thing as reductionism, losing sight of the forest for focusing on the trees. Sugar from fruits is not the same as refined sugar, despite them being the same molecule. The world is built out of interrelations not of platonic essences.