301–310 of 318 posts
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Which "civilization diseases"?
Diseases of civilization usually refers to things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer. I'm not 100% sure but I think the common threads are metabolic and inflammatory.
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I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that the workings of the human brain are still far more complex than that of our digestive system. If the amount of effort that has been put into trying to emulate the former with software had been put instead into trying to emulate the latter, I reckon we'd pretty much have it cracked by now (as in, you could feed some tool info corresponding to all the inputs into our dig…
The brain and digestive system are very closely linked. I think to make an "AI" on par with simulating the brain, you would need to simulate the gut first. And probably vice versa!
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Can you point exactly which part was "over-the-top" or "aggressive"? Or is calling out that factually incorrect things are, well, factually incorrect somehow unacceptable nowadays? The world needs less pseudoscience misinfo, not more.
> The world needs less pseudoscience misinfo, not more. Fully agreed. I appreciate the stern yet information-laden correction. It's certainly much better than hearing specious claims based on conjecture/misinformation that only seems plausible to the uninformed. Also, IMO it did not sound "over-the-top" or "aggressive" at all. Some people are just so absurdly oversensitive that a simply direct method of speaking (or…
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> several health issues with milk consumption, unlike quinoa consumption. Are you claiming that most people who consume milk as a major part of their diet suffer health problems from it? Or that grain-based diets do not cause health issues? > That is because we've evolved for a orders of magnitude longer to eat plant material. Evolution has no telos. Evolutionary leaps into new niches are the norm, and hunting had fo…
Dairy isn't nutritionally necessary for anyone. Perhaps it was in the past, but not now. You won't find evidence for that. Not sure what you mean about telos. Evolution informs us about why we eat what we eat and how we might be affected by various foods, but it does not control us. We can choose what we want to eat.
Assuming alternative sources of the same essential nutrients, I agree – no single food is nutritionally necessary or ever was. In the real world, meanwhile, dairy products are a key source of protein etc. for people in at least some regions where sufficient alternative sources are not widely affordable or available. Certainly, milk was crucial to the survival of many populations as recently as a century ago (not "aeons ago during some ancient famine").
> Evolution informs us about why we eat what we eat and how we might be affected by various foods
Evolution is an open-ended history of accidents, with much to say about what works for us (as opposed to what cannot).
> but it does not control us.
Indeed. Not only does it not control us, we cannot even conclude based on it that a novel environment or resource will not be advantageous. In the case of ungulate milk consumption, it turns out it was.
> Not sure what you mean about telos.
Evolutionary adaptations are in the nature of accidents, not guided by any purpose or implying any optimal "natural" state. Populations taking advantage of accidental fitness for new niches is a defining pattern in the evolution of life on earth, and consumption of milk by some human populations fits that pattern. Drawing conclusions about the suitability of drinking milk because "we didn't evolve to drink it" is fallacious (in contrast to, say, explaining most people's lack of lactase persistence by their ancestors' non-consumption of milk, which is sound, non-teleological reasoning).
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People moved to cities for economic opportunities.
"People moved to cities for economic opportunities" and "people can't financially afford to leave the cities" seem like just the glass half full / glass half empty versions of the same thing. Put it one way it's bad, put it one way its good. It's a choice with tradeoffs - I'm just pointing out that those tradeoffs aren't some uniquely new "collapse of our society" thing.
"People can't afford leaving city" suggest there is active price to be paid for ability to be somewhere - transport, house elsewhere being too expensive or some such. It does not even suggets opportunity cost.
Otherwise said, first sentence means people move to city because it is better for them economically. Second does not say anything about whether it is good for you, just that moving away would cost too much. Also, some people stayed in economicaly bad places, because they could not afford to move to the better place. Transport and initial housing pay was too much.
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"People moved to cities for economic opportunities" and "people can't financially afford to leave the cities" seem like just the glass half full / glass half empty versions of the same thing. Put it one way it's bad, put it one way its good. It's a choice with tradeoffs - I'm just pointing out that those tradeoffs aren't some uniquely new "collapse of our society" thing.
This is an interesting revelation. Thanks for framing it this way. Riffing: I think there’s a middle phrasing similar to “cities are the most efficient allocation of resources we have yet invented.” Similar to the “democracy is the least bad system of government yet invented.” There’s some corollary to survivorship bias at play here as well. Cities are an apparently natural consequence of human civilization so we kno…
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This is not true. An average adult lives longer still just not by that much. Whole bunch of deadly diseases or injuries are not deadly anymore. The work got safer and injuries happen significantly less often. What did not changed is maximum longevity people have assuming they don't get sick or injured.
> The work got safer and injuries happen significantly less often. For this kind of statement about lifespan i assume that we remove all accidental deaths since they are just causing noise versus the actual lifespan
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> don't think that's necessarily the case. >There is much more that we know than just "Vegetables are good" and we know why they're good. Nutrient dense, packed with fiber to slow digestion, includes necessarily vitamins and minerals to not only absorb the nutrients of your food but to also provide you with the micronutrients you need. A lot to unpack here. Did deeper, do we really need those micronutrients which mak…
Micronutrients as vitamins and minerals from fruits and veg? Yes absolutely, they’re essential. The difference here is that we don’t need a lot of them, not like macronutrients so the majority of us are likely getting our vitamin and mineral intake okay. However deficiencies in certain vitamins can cause problems down the line, it just depends on how deficient you are. Some people also struggle to absorb particular v…
And, why are they essential? ( no, I'm not trying to be funny, or feigning ignorance). You can make your answer really short, if you do answer.
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Very likely. Almost all probiotics people take are transient. Meaning they just pass through and don't form long term colonies in our guts. There's a few exceptions with some soil-derived probiotics but those are also the least predictable It seems really likely to me that our bodies have likely adapted to an environment where exposure to certain types of bacteria is very common. For example, there's been a lot of re…
>Almost all probiotics people take are transient. Meaning they just pass through and don't form long term colonies in our guts. is this also the case for frequent ingestion? say you eat probiotic yoghurt on a regular basis, are you saying the good stuff is in a constant cycle of dying and being replaced?
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Diseases of civilization usually refers to things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer. I'm not 100% sure but I think the common threads are metabolic and inflammatory.
cancer has nothing to do with civilisation. it was already recorded way before we had modern and industrial societies
This doesn't falsify the claim at all. Diabetes was first recorded 3500 years ago, and none of the other diseases on the list were literally invented by industrialization. Diseases of civilization refers (essentially) to diseases whose casualty rates dominate in societies of abundance and industrialization, by contrast to the predominance of (eg) infectious diseases in pre-industrial societies.
I do agree that it stands slightly apart from the rest of the examples, in that (eg) a contemporary hunter-gatherer still has a fair chance of getting cancer while they have a very low chance of diabetes/obesity. But it's pedantry to claim flatly that it doesn't qualify, especially given plenty of scientific usage[1][2][3] that contradicts the claim.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362881/#:~:tex.... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00933491 [3] https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/323926