This is not a bad thing. Food is so abundant that globally, more people are obese than underweight. This is pretty remarkable considering that for all of human history, up until recently, periods of mass starvation was the norm.
Don't get me wrong; I'm thankful that we possess this technology from the perspectives of advancement of knowledge and having more tools to avert food crises. But these technologies were all developed recently enough that while our understanding of the directly attributable outcomes is fairly good, our understanding of long-term and systemic effects on society is anything but complete.
I lost multiple dress sizes while making zero effort to lose weight by working on improving my nutritional status.
Or at least while working on it.
(Insert some XKCD comic about cause and correlation.) ;)
I did a lot of research into what kinds of nutrients I was likely short on.
I started with supplements because they are far easier to deal with. This comment by me might cast a little light on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20714419
Some things I found useful:
Celtic sea salt is the single best sea salt. But any sea salt, kosher salt or canning and pickling salt is better than table salt.
If you are on any medication whatsoever, research "nutrient depletions" for that drug. So, for example, if you take Ibuprofen a lot, it depletes a specific B vitamin. This helps you determine specific nutrients you probably need.
Keep a food journal.
Look up super foods. So, for example, when I decided to work on my selenium deficiency, I ate one or more Brazil nuts most days for about six months until I was sick of them and apparently no longer deficient because they are crazy high in selenium.
(Quick and dirty answer. Not to be mistaken for a comprehensive answer.)
What makes Celtic sea salt the best?
Our economic system optimizes for exactly this.
Would we grow food for eachother differently? Would we be compensated differently for doing so?
You’d think that if the point of life was selflessness and love, this would be more obvious.
Also, what do you think of the people whose medicine comes from the coca plant, who have direct experience that the point of life is greed and self-satisfaction?
I have experience of both, especially psychedelics, and I am familiar with and have been involved in research on the topic.
Secondly, your reasoning is clearly impaired because you drew a conclusion for which you obviously don’t have any facts to support.
Thirdly, you lept to defend an ungrounded claim that a particular drug experience gives access to spiritual truth. Temporary distortions of experience can be valuable but to quote from a famous drug culture movie, “why trust one drug and not another?”.
This is an extraordinary claim that requires serious examination.
Your reflexive defense suggests that you have lost sight of this.
These kinds of failures of reasoning are attributed to psychedelics by even the most optimistic of researchers.
See this article by one of the world’s leading researcher in the field: http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316?fbclid=Iw...
The section ‘what about the woo’ in particular talks about the problem.
I think psychedelics can be very positive, but they can also damage your ability to reason.
As a temporary tradeoff this may well be a reasonable price to pay for relief from trauma.
It’s a red flag when you start proclaiming that psychedelics are the door to experienced of fundamental truth and you are unable to reason about it.
This kind of thinking is a symptom that you haven’t addressed the side effects the psychedelics have had on you.
Here is another extremely respected commentator who expresses skepticism: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relax...
Do you dismiss Scott Alexander as a false skeptic also?
Also - that dude in your video is presenting a false dichotomy and no true Scotsman fallacy in order to market himself an authority on personal development. I’d be careful with that stuff because it’s classic cult leader behavior. Having a ready dismissal for threatening ideas generally does not make us smarter.
Having looked at your bio I feel compassion for you, since I think you are sincere, and it seems like your desire for enlightenment and healing are being exploited.
Can you not consider the possibility that I have done so, and I have examined the implicit metaphysics and have come to the conclusion that the experience offers a valuable perspective but not one which is privileged in its truth?
You seem unable to consider this possibility, instead only being able to imagine that because my view is not what you think it should be, I must be ignorant.
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind"
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
God be our Nature/Universe as space, soil, water air, plants, life.
Our economic system refuses to account for these things, and refuses any attempt at being held accountable for them, as well. It optimizes for a supply chain that depletes soil, replaces robust ecosystems with fragile monocultures, forgoes sustainability, and enjoys the luxury of not having to account for the negative externalities of turning a profit.
Food and consumer products will have to change greatly when hand-held tricorders let you compare nutritional value of two foods, or the amount of harmful chemicals on the surface of an item.
It seems to be a facet of globalization in particular. When all your food came from a dozen local farmers whose names you knew, they each had to worry about reputational damage for doing things like this.
Today the decision is made by a mid-level manager whose name you'll never know and who doesn't even work for the same company by the time the public discovers the issue. Even the company itself generally isn't known to the customers. Do you know if the food at your grocery store is from Cargill or Conagra or someone else? What does a company have to fear about reputational damage if you don't even know who they are?
Capitalism requires informed customers whereas globalism smushes different quality products from different quality producers into the same pipeline based on broad categories that don't fully capture what customers actually need out of the products.
But we also can't expect everyone to have to grow their own food just so they know what went into it. It takes some middle ground where farming has enough size to get reasonable economies of scale and specialization but not so much that nobody has any idea where their food actually comes from.