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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Others will describe this better, but the author of this article, Vaclav Smil, is a Czech-Canadian academic known for hard-nosed data analysis on social and environmental issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil

You can like or dislike it, but please respond to the arguments in the article, not the baity title or the provocative topic. Otherwise we'll just end up with a bunch of shallow-indignant comments and that's not an interesting thread.

Past mentions of Smil on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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This article does not read like it came from someone who was doing a thoughtful analysis. It lacks a concrete point and makes contradictory arguments.

Is meat eating our evolutionary destiny or a recent trend driven by wealth? Is it something we are "built" to do or something that literally at least a fifth of the entire species does without?

Never mind correlating health outcomes with broad trends in meat eating while also pointing out increasing wealth and pretending that's not likely to be a confounding factor in itself.

Like, the conclusion could be right here but this article is a mess.

Yes, that's why I posted my comment - one needs to consider this in the context of his larger body of work (edit: sorry, that's not really what I meant to say - see downthread). This isn't an internet flamethrower, or at least not just that.

It's a good test for HN. Must the community have a headless chicken reaction to every provocation, or can we sometimes remain organized enough for an interesting conversation?

Edit: I don't think your description of the article is fair. It may be right or wrong but it is far from vapid. If you've found fallacies in it, showing how they are fallacies would be a better contribution to an HN thread. You've done that with your point about wealth being a possibly confounding factor (good), but you broke the HN guidelines with your first and last sentences (bad). Your reaction to Smil as not-a-person-who-does-any-kind-of-serious-analysis is a classic shallow dismissal. That's something the HN guidelines ask commenters to avoid:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Also: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ad hominem cuts both ways. If he wants to make a good argument here he should do so, but there's basically nothing in this article to talk about except how much of a mess it is.

How often are you in a controversial post's comments advocating for people to read the author's other work to justify the poor quality of the posted article? I've been around a long time and I've literally never seen you do this before. Have you considered the possibility that you're the one with the wrong read here?

I don't agree with that description of the article. I think both it, and Smil, deserve better than shallow dismissals and name-calling. He's writing about a particular prediction that is commonly made, and showing reasons to doubt whether that particular prediction is true. I don't see anything wrong with that, although the underlying topic is a hot one.

You're the one bringing his reputation into this though? Until you started interjecting, everything was about the article. That it was about how poor the article is doesn't make it ad hominem, it's a product of the lack of substance and direction of the article itself. Sometimes things people write aren't very good.

And I said in a fair amount of detail why I can't find anything in this article to argue about other than its quality: I can't reconcile those questions to find a point to argue with. If I argue against the evolution-is-destiny part then the counterargument is wealth and vice-versa.

I really suggest you re-read this article with a more critical eye because I honestly can't see what you see in it, and I don't think you really believe "people should read the author's other work" is a sustainable basis for submission quality.

> Until you started interjecting, everything was about the article

Until then, everything was about the headline.

(And mostly still is, considering that few commenters so far have been talking about the specific points in the article body.)

> one needs to consider this in the context of his larger body of work.

That seems odd and it feels like you are defending it out of agreement with the author.

If this is a poor article, why can't it be criticized as such? If Shakespeare, who for this analogy is considered a great respected author, wrote a lazy and uninspired play, one should just endure just because it's Shakespeare and "one needs to consider this in the context of his larger body of work"? That's unnecessary and fallacious.

No, you're right - I didn't put that well. (I've been posting hastily trying to prevent this thread from devolving into a tedious flamewar and haste is bad for precision!)

On HN we definitely try to go by article quality (past explanations from a slightly different angle: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

I guess what I meant to say was more like: don't judge this article (or any article) by just the headline! and also, if you're pattern-matching this article to garden-variety flamebait, it would be good to know who the author is, because the priors here are totally different than how they appear.

I read through the article and is it cutoff? It ends for me with “chorizo…” and then a reference to the print article this was published as.

If that’s the whole article what was the argument they were making? They showed that meat consumption went up a lot in poorer countries and down a little in some rich countries, and consistent in rich meat loving countries.

If the only argument is that, no the world is not about to become vegan, then ok they showed evidence for that, but it doesn’t seem like a long enough article to have much of a discussion over.

I’m not sure this couldn’t become flame bait when there’s so little to discuss

> one needs to consider this in the context of his larger body of work.

No, actually, one doesn't. That's the same underlying error as ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority. If he has a point, he can actually make that point, and if he doesn't, a larger body of work doesn't change that.

Yes. Sorry. I didn't put that properly and I agree with you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32288733

Anyways, regardless of the rest of this I edited the first sentence to more directly state my thesis and not make claims about him (though I think you should consider your role in bringing his personality into this discussion). That said, I stand by everything I've said about the quality of this article.

A running list of some fallacies for those interested:

1) Natural selection is the description of a process that happens spontaneously. Natural selection does not actively “form” us. Life forms itself via natural selection and the entire point is adaptability in the face of environmental constraints (i.e. earth’s carrying capacity for livestock)

2) Chimpanzees may be our closest relatives, but so what? They’re hirsute and have complex grooming rituals to remove parasites; we do not, among many other differences. Using chimps as a “natural model” of human behavior is not grounded in scientific thought. (EDIT: there’s also the “closest extant relative” fallacy. There were plenty of great apes closer to us than modern chimps, they just died out. If in 100 years we cause the extinction of chimps and bonobos [highly likely on current trajectory], then is the natural model for humans the Gorilla, who mostly eats plants and very rarely will also eat invertebrates?)

3) The author states that increasing meat consumption has led to no negative health effects (by only focusing on heart disease), but the countries with the two largest increases (US and China) have myriad health problems mostly related to rising obesity rates. Heart disease is a poor measure of meat-related health because a) it’s highly correlated with smoking b) we’ve gotten way better at treating it.

Overall, it’s the classic “trap” for HN. A solid (usually) publication, a highly charged topic, and loose data interpretation.

My problem with this article is that there aren't many arguments used in the first place. It's mostly a loosely connected set of facts, with not much of a unifying thesis.

If the thesis is "meat consumption is growing", what's the relevance of chimpanzee's diet or health outcomes?

Those two side-points make me think the thesis is actually "it is normal and okay that meat consumption is growing", but if that is the case it is woefully underargued. I think the issues with comparing the diet of a different species is obvious, and another commenter already mentionned the correlation between wealth and health. But crucially the article itself doesn't engage at all with issues of climate change or animal rights.

I don't know who Smil is. I'm just responding to this article.

I thought about adding the author wikipedia link with the article link to the email to my carnivore/omnivore friends but removed it because it does not matter, data don't lie.

It reminds me of the transition of eminence based medicine to evidence based medicine. Even the latter has had its troubles, just look at science publishing and questioning of the peer review framework.

Being vegan is a choice not a religion or cult. However much benefit I get from eating plants over animals and their products, I don't expect others to easily 'see the light'. Thankfully my eating behavior was influenced by others, slowly and with patience waay before the hype and this article.

Vegan promoters really need to work on their PR.

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