The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain

I'm not so sure. Some ancient societies had a pretty advanced idea of what makes a good diet. And people in any time period can tell that "if I eat this way, I feel better and if I eat that way, I feel worse".

One thing I find interesting with that is how tightly coupled mongol armies were to an animal based diet, and how they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies.

You'll often find many people not willing to wade into discussing food and exercise anymore because peiple treat it almost religiously. It makes discussion hard in the space because now food is so tightly coupled with society and culture.

We know the ancient greeks and romans exercised. Warriors of successful societies prioritized being fit of body. To have a discussion we'd have to get to common definitions of what exercise is.

> A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

Take the entirety of Chinese medicine, for example: there is a reason it's still popular, in that it works. It may not work how we think it "should" per Western standards in terms of direct methods of action of known compounds in the substances being ingested, but it still works: probably some combination of actual "healthy" compounds as well as a good dose of placebo.

Diets were likely similar for those of old: that guy over there only eats berries and rabbits and somehow he's been fine this whole time! He is strong like a bear, because he eats the things bears eat. This guy over here eats only foraged greens and is suffering from something we can't discern so we just say the forest spirits are mad at him.

Observational learning is present in many animals of much lower intelligence than humans even tens of thousands of years ago. Patronizing speculations of historical people only serves to obscure the notion of civilization's progress over these long time spans so what, we can pretend time began when writing started?

it creates a curiosity, which has a softkind of drawing gravitational pull. I know I'm vulnerable to this.

The mystery drives motivation, hence the connection to energy (the capacity to do work). the curiosity propels my own motivation (willingness to spend my energy) to investigate these things, and others like it.

edit: I am sorry that what I have had to think to make my own sense of this complex reality upsets some people.