Knowledge from small number of debates outperforms wisdom of large crowds (2017)

Citation please.

> We also consume vast quantities of industrial waste products now like "vegetable oil", HFCS and soybean by-products.

Naturalistic fallacy. "Industrial waste" isn't necessarily harmful.

> Famine wasn't as common as you seem to think it was, unless you include impoverished states, in which case famine is killing more people now than it was back then.

"More people" is an irrelevant metric, what matters is the percentage of people relative to the total. That's a meaningful measure of progress.

> We suffer plenty of nutritional deficiencies

Such as?

> and we suffer huge amounts of diet caused diseases like "type 2 diabetes" and osteoporosis.

The latter of which was either common back then also, or uncommon because they didn't live long enough to develop it. As for type II diabetes, it's a disease of abundance, which proves my point. You can't overeat if you don't have enough to eat.

> They were producing significant surpluses of food, enough to feed massive armies.

That often starved during campaigns.

> And while they worked hard in spring and fall, they essentially had summer and winter as vacation time. They had more holidays/vacation time than modern Americans do.

During which they had to ration food, developed nutritional deficiencies, and died of exposure. Some vacation. You're awfully selective about how you compare "like to like".

> We literally have hundreds of thousands of people killing themselves entirely because they have no social bonds.

Citation please.

Also, there is very little real data on historical suicide rates [1,2]. It consists mainly of conjecture from the writings of artists at the time, like Dante speaking about hell and suicide. So your claims that modern rates are higher are also pure conjecture.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...

[2] http://psychiatry.queensu.ca/assets/Synergy/synergyfall12.pd...

https://www.google.com/search?q=co2%20plant%20nutrition

>Naturalistic fallacy. "Industrial waste" isn't necessarily harmful.

It is not a naturalistic fallacy. The things I mentioned are harmful. Industrial waste may not be necessarily harmful, but it is also not necessarily food. We consume it because it is industrial waste, not because it is food. It is harmful, we consume it in vast quantities, it did not even exist before the early 1900s.

>"More people" is an irrelevant metric, what matters is the percentage of people relative to the total. That's a meaningful measure of progress.

It is more as a percentage.

>Such as?

Do you think nutritional deficiencies don't exist any more? Common deficiencies include iron, B12, D, calcium, A, iodine, magnesium, zinc and folate. People now eat fewer vegetables, which contain fewer micronutrients, and we have almost completely removed organ meat from our diets altogether.

>The latter of which was either common back then also, or uncommon because they didn't live long enough to develop it.

Those are conflicting explanations. You can't dismiss a problem by throwing out random conflicting excuses. No, osteoporosis was not common then. "Type 2 diabetes" and heart disease both didn't even exist, and now are so widespread that they are top killers.

>As for type II diabetes, it's a disease of abundance, which proves my point.

No, it is a disease of consumption of toxic omega 6 polyunsaturated fats. Fat people existed in medieval times. They did not get "type 2 diabetes". And it still would not prove your point, as overeating is not the same as healthy. I said people ate healthier. People eating high calorie low nutrient food and getting morbidly obese now supports my point, it does not contradict it.

>That often starved during campaigns.

Only if you have an unusual definition of "often". And those incidents were due to being cut off from supplies. Another army preventing your food from getting to you is not an indication that you are unable to grow enough food and thus "everyone is spending all day trying to stave off starvation".

>During which they had to ration food, developed nutritional deficiencies, and died of exposure

Except none of those things. Those are the times they spent feasting. We still have several of the same traditional feasts, just renamed to pretend they are christian.

>So your claims that modern rates are higher are also pure conjecture.

Modern rates are higher than any other point in recorded history. We have poorer data from ancient times, but we do still have data. You even linked to some. And it indicates that suicide was rare, and when it did happen it was mainly out of shame or a sense of honor having done something wrong. There is no reason to assume suicide rates were higher in medieval times just because you want to believe the iron age was some horrific time. Again, the people who still live in the stone age today and are healthier and happier than us right now, and have essentially no modern "mental illnesses" like depression or social anxiety and no modern dietary diseases like "type 2 diabetes", even the ones with BMI scores in the "morbidly obese" category. Because they do not possess the technology to create petrochemical solvents necessary to extract toxic seed oils. We are just supposed to ignore that because they inconveniently point to modern society being harmful?

No, this is absurdly false.

If you visit different nations, you find different kinds of cultures.

This is obvious.

The very words 'culture' and 'ethnicity' exist in every language to describe such a thing.

That they are 'fluid', of course, does not deny their existence.

I understand that we want to be wary of ethnocentrism, and hyper-nationalism, but the denial that there is such a thing as ethnic groups that constitute 'people' who have a shared culture and history is just as repulsive.

"People are free to be xenophobes and bigots if they wish"

This is childish, anti-intellectual rhetoric.

The mere observance that there is such a thing as different groups of people on the planet does not constitute any, even remote form of negative connotation.

Finally - the position that 'those with less exposure to migrants in the UK voted for Brexit, ergo, ignorance' is not necessarily true. Those in highly cosmopolitan areas tend to identify less with the groups around them, whereas those in areas with lower rates of migration, are more likely to identify as part of an ethnic group to which they belong.

I live as a tiny English speaking minority in a fully Quebecois part of Quebec. I'm only one of a handful of people in my area that speaks English as a first language - moreover, the area is not multicultural at all: it's very much Quebecois. The coherence of this community is obvious and palpable to anyone. My family members (English) notice it immediately when they visit. In fact - we 'English Canadians' have a very globalized culture, much less affinity for one another to the point wherein the level of social cohesion among the Quebecois seems strange to us. Sadly - this also implies that it's 'harder to break into' this culture, and that they are less successful with integration.

Whatever the Quebecois are, for better or worse - they are absolutely 'a people' of some kind. Because it's so gloriously obvious to anyone without an ideological bone to pick, one might have to consider how one could possibly arrive at the conclusion that the sky is not blue when it obviously is? That's the interesting question.

A mere 10km drive from my home to the English speaking area yields obvious, quantifiable and measurable differences. A child would see the difference. That's literally what 'diversity' is.

There are nations of people in the world. It doesn't make some better than others and it doesn't deny our common humanity. Of course there are nary any 'hard boundaries' between cultures, and as you say - it's all fluid. But they still exist, and it absolutely must be part of the equation as we move forward, otherwise there'll be calamity.

Stanford has an amazing collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin, including his iconic "The Thinker". If you have business or just visiting the Silicon Valley area, it's worth exploring the Stanford campus and its Rodin museum.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Rodin