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Comment by an_ko | Hacker News Reader

Beware of the "appeal to nature" fallacy [1]. You are right that exercising and going outside have been experimentally demonstrated to improve mood, but there is no such thing as "your natural state", and even if you arbitrarily pick some definition, there is nothing inherently good about it. Is agriculture "unnatural"?

The "we're not designed for the current speed of change" argument has also been made many times 2 centuries ago, for example with claims that the unnatural speed of train travel drives people insane. [2] Such claims are hilarious in retrospect. In 200 years, what will people think of your comment?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature [2]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/railway-madness-victor...

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To say that sitting in front of a screen is just as natural as foraging for mushrooms is nonsense from the perspective of what your body is optimized to do, on an evolutionary timescale.

The parent comment is pointless intellectualism.

I'm really quite sure that people can grasp that when you put a fish on dry land, it's not made for that. And that similarly, we're not made for social isolation, living indoors, extreme overstimulation of the senses, non-stop negativity, lack of cognitive breaks, etc.

I agree that the parent comment kinda misses the point that social isolation is bad for you. But "we're not designed to process the information avalanche of the modern age" does make me squint.

My intuition tells me that cavemen probably had worse quality of life (experience-wise) than modern humans.

Information input risen drastically long time ago, what was it, three thousand years from "here, this is a knife, you cut here" to a full blown education system?

I think our brain elasticity is good enough to handle much much more before it overloads (or whatever are the consequences of "unnatural" amount of information).

"My intuition tells me that cavemen probably had worse quality of life (experience-wise) than modern humans."

That's a very suggestive judgment. It's likely they felt incredibly more in line with their body, emotions and environment. They were probably experiencing states of "flow" for the majority of their active hours, and frequent genuine happiness and sadness. But then it's impossible to measure things like fulfillment and happiness from bone remnants and fragments of DNA, so we wouldn't know for sure.

Conflating working from home with social isolation is a pretty big reach though.

Maybe people actually just have social lives outside of work, and probably that's healthier for them.

Anecdotally, it doesn't seem to be the case. For those who have their spouse and children (if they've reached that point), and in a WFH situation it's possible not to encounter a single other person in the day during the week, until running errands.

If you're living alone, then it's trivially possible not to socialize at all for days at a time (and beyond) - you now have to rearrange your life to meet people in your leisure time. You have to join meetups, sports, clubs, after working all day because work is devoid of watercooler talk, of idle chit-chat. And so is your home. The precedence of having made friends in formative years and keeping them helps, but they're busy too - you won't see them every day.

So now you're looking at spending real $ just to meet an adequate threshold of social time every week.

> The parent comment is pointless intellectualism.

Someone posts a thoughtful and polite reply, with links to back up their statements, and this is your response? This isn't appropriate at all.

As to your argument in general — well, I'll just include this section from the Wikipedia article 'Criticism of Evolutionary Biology' because I think every one of the criticisms discussed below could be applied to your comments:

> Critics of evolutionary psychology accuse it of promoting genetic determinism, pan-adaptationism (the idea that all behaviors and anatomical features are adaptations), unfalsifiable hypotheses, distal or ultimate explanations of behavior when proximate explanations are superior, and malevolent political or moral ideas.

> In 200 years, what will people think of your comment?

Probably the same think I currently think of the typical Baptist warning that letting a municipality go wet will lead to an uptick in sinful fornication and fisticuffs. (And dancing!) The reasoning is almost certainly off. But as far as consequences, they're not wrong. :)

I'm more concerned about those who would hand wave problems that come from these specific pieces of social media technology in a growing number of studies of those specific social media services. Referring to train-induced insanity reveals OP's flawed reasoning, but it doesn't address at all what "the Phones" are probably doing to U.S. girls and young women.

> Is agriculture "unnatural"?

Many species modify their environment intentionally, and some go so far as to engage in a form of farming / animal husbandry. Various ants farm fungi, some species herd aphids for their "honeydew" secretions, pocket gophers cultivate tree roots, etc.

Humans are physical beings, and it is our nature to experience the world through our physical senses. The psychosomatic relationship between our brain and the rest of our nervous system is also well documented (i.e. effects of exercise, gut health and diet on mood, etc).

The digital world is a semi-shared fantasy. The longer you spend there, the more the neglected parts of you will suffer for it.

I don't think you'd find the claims of train madness hilarious after being on BART.

In general, I find the "someone made a similar claim in the past and they were wrong then so you're wrong now" argument not persuasive.

In general I'm annoyed by references to history.

Computing, internet, social media, smartphones...each of these jumps are unprecedented.

The appeal to nature definitely doesn't hold up, but I'm pretty sure that the historical consensus in 200 years will be that early 21st century social media was psychologically predatory.

Yeah. Virtually none of the suggestions OP is making are "natural" in any meaningful way. Even going for walks usually implies walking in a park, which is an invention of the past 100 years or so. It's also very Euro-centric. In many other cultures its considered strange to just walk around for no reason.

> In many other cultures its considered strange to just walk around for no reason

Name a single one.

Walking being natural, as is meant colloquially, is not contingent on whether the environment has been altered. It's contingent on being out-in-the-world.

I was referring to a book I read by a Brit who lived in Africa for 30 years. He wrote about an interaction where he moved to an African village and "went for a walk" through the village. The locals thought he was strange to walk for no reason and assumed he was looking for workers.

Only on HN can one debate the purpose of legs.

1. I was referring to walking as recreation, not walking in general (not sure how people missed this) 2. Body parts don't have a "purpose" unless you believe in a creator-god.

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