Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

No comment on the main topic, but the "unnatural or advantageous" binary in the title is a confusion that I really dislike. "Natural" and "good" are independent axes. No relationship should be assumed. Tuberculosis is natural, but not good. Brushing your teeth is unnatural, but I'm happy to call it good.

This can seem obvious, but the error crops up all the time in serious ways. E.g. women voting and joining the workforce was seen as unnatural, therefore wrong. People market all sorts of quack remedies as natural, and therefore good.

It goes the other way, too. Slavery was seen as right, and people decided it was therefore natural. (See the various declarations of secession of the US states for examples.) Violence is seen as wrong, so people decide it must be unnatural, ignoring our long history as predators, the amount of education we give children about not hitting, and our societal structures for limiting violence.

Is and ought: two entirely separate things.

Cyanide is also natural.

Organic farming permits organic pesticides, half of which are cancerous as well and may have worse environmental impacts [0]. The organic label doesn't guarantee that you're getting more ethical/better/safer products - and it is worth a lot of money.

[0] https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html

Funny, when I first saw your comment it was collecting negative votes, so I came in to lend it some support. Now it's on top!

A few thoughts: Does 'organic' regulation permit the use of paraffin coatings? I imagine the prolific use of paraffin in conventional produce could make rinsing away pesticides quite difficult.

Copper sulfate is one of the most common organic pesticides that I am aware of. It's certainly nothing to gorge on. However, when handled safely, it may be preferable to directly engineering a pesticide into the plant.

On the organic farms I tended, there was very minimal use of pesticides or herbicides. The inherent diversity of the farm allowed the temporary discontinuation (rather than synthetic maintenance) of problematic plants, and either experimentation with others, or the continuation of what was presently working. For weed control we relied on hay and profuse weeding by hand, some of the weeds being edible (amaranth) and providing snacks during the process, at least for me ;) Personally, I prefer this method to glyphosate.

The term "natural" may not be synonymous with "healthy and safe", but it does functionally delimit e.g. Roundup from acetic acid.

"For weed control we relied on hay and profuse weeding by hand,"

For a while I've said that "robotic fast food joints" are one of the touchstones I'm using to say that robotics has really arrived. I've been considering adding "robotic weeders" to my list. How much would our agriculture change if instead of pesticides, we physically weeded everything?

The robot may not even need to "remove things by their roots", which would be quite complicated; if it can sweep by reliably every two or three days just trimming everything that isn't desired crop would probably do fine.

Bushy plants low to the ground might take more work, but given the way corn grows it seems like we could robotically weed corn pretty effectively.

Of course, it would result in less hours/pay for some, but I'd still welcome effective robotic (solar-powered?) weeding anytime. Maybe it would work with corn, but the vegetables I'm accustomed to are delicate and I suspect it would be a great undertaking to duplicate the efficiency of the hand on a large scale. I'm honestly not sure if "trimming" would work or not. Seems frightfully difficult to me, but so is ingenuity. PS: I am not a professional farmer, so take my opinions accordingly.

Thank you for pointing this out! I glossed over it in the title, but it is bears special attention to avoid falling into any traps of rhetoric.

There definitely seems to be a trend in diet right now to search for the "natural" cure to all our ills. The Paleolitic Diet is probably the best example of this because it is explicitly named as being based on the past. There is an unfounded belief that primitive people were healthier, stronger and better in many ways. However, I don't know of any evidence to support those claims and most of the arguments don't hold together if you don't assume the correlation of natural and good.

I'm really curious what causes such as fixation in our modern culture on the "natural" as being healthy and good.

There's also an odd opposite assumption that anything that is "unnatural" is probably "bad". GMOs are a good example of this. Anything derived through selective breeding is good, but as soon as you directly modify the genes it's bad, despite more rigorous testing.

I agree with you that a "natural" diet is not necessarily better. And I think we could engineer better food for us than the stuff we used to eat. There's some of that going on with golden rice for example.

But the vast majority of food "innovations" in wealthy countries like the US are not engineered to improve health. Mostly the goal is to save money or improve taste, and these goals can make a diet less healthy.

Strictly speaking, the title just contains an "OR" clause and whether both operands of this clause are exclusive should not matter to the evaluation of the clause. Exclusivity is in this case assumed by the reader.

Your comment is rather unnatural, but quite good. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com