What Plants Are Saying About Us | Hacker News Reader

What Plants Are Saying About Us

worldsensorium.com

54 pointsdnetesn23 comments

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Cf the work of Michael Levin et. al.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Michael+Levin

Plants are saying:

Eat Mor Chikin

Hahaha

You laugh - but my earlier comment was flagged, presumably because of its comic nature. Which is fair enough, but I don't get why some comic comments are a problem (mine) and others not.

Comedy is tricky, fleeting and there is great variance in tolerance to it among HN voters.

This place is much more for pedantic gotchas and devs showing really cool stuff off.

The only jokes tolerated are the humans who post really stupid stuff.

Actual jokes like from the ad campaign from Chick-Fil-A aren't really funny, either.

My own attitude is that I can appreciate the humor, but I want top comments to be informative, not comedy. I'll downvote jokes near the top to help bring informative posts up, but I don't downvote when they aren't at the top, or when there are no competing comments.

Oh man, it is so difficult to please you.

Thank you for helping to keep HN focused on intellect over wisdom

Can you elaborate on that?

> user: RcouF1uZ4gsC -- created: March 26, 2013 -- karma: 16601

> user: verisimi -- created: August 29, 2021 -- karma: 519

I would posit the flagging had something to do with this, plus other data intrinsic to the words used.

The above comment isn't just silly, but a reference to an ancient advertising campaign. Anyone over a certain age -old like me- will recognize that campaign.

Large karma pools allow for more 'trust' on HN, and more leeway and access to special features.

Only the Mods/Devs could answer your question succinctly, however.

Did you delete it? I see a questionably flagged dead comment at the bottom but it’s not from you and it’s not humorous

It's the same reason comments criticizing journalists or mega media corporation is flagged now. Most social media are propaganda platforms.

The only logical explanation I can think of is that either these other comments managed to fly under the radar, or more people found them genuinely funny.

I don't know - I avoid attempts at humour because more often than not people don't find it funny and it doesn't add to the discussion.

I mean, this is my best result this year(7 points):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36577360

There is a (bro science, so you will love it or hate it) theory I recently heard from Carnivore Aurelius that unlike fruits which evolved to be eaten, many vegetables have natural “pesticides” (believe he was using this term much more broadly than things you may have heard of like caffeine, nicotine etc) and pro-inflammatory compounds that cause our guts a lot of heartache when you eat them, because they don’t want to be eaten

I’d be concerned about this but pretty much all studies I’ve seen show health benefits the more vegetables are included in the diet. We’ve been evolving with plants a long time and can deal with the secondary metabolites in edible vegetables. It’s likely these exact compounds are responsible for many of the health benefits like cancer prevention, etc.

There is some truth in that theory.

Because the fruits have evolved to be eaten, most of them are tasty, but they have a very low content of nutritive substances, so the plants do not lose much by giving them away.

On the other hand, the parts of the plants that are the richest in nutritive substances are the seeds (this includes the edible parts of nuts).

A human could easily live by eating only some combinations of seeds, without eating any other plant-based or animal-based food. On the other hand, it would be quite difficult for a human to live by eating only other parts of the plants, because those have low levels of nutritive substances, like proteins and fat, so they have to be eaten in very large quantities to provide enough.

Because the seeds are the most valuable, most of them contain various harmful substances, attempting to discourage the animals that would eat them. Due to that, many kinds of seeds and nuts require special preparation methods in order to be used for human consumption, in order to remove or decompose the undesirable substances.

Taleb in “Antifragile” talks about this as well. However he derives a different conclusion; he speaks of a phenomenon called “hormesis” which refers to a biological response where a low dose of a harmful stressor can have positive benefits on an organism.

Biology is all about survival and multiplying the species. Seeds are plants babies, the biological response is to make your babies aren't eaten! I think there's a book about this, probably Grain Brain, but I 'm not sure.

That eating a plant's babies is bad is easily false if my 6th grade education serves me: plants bear delicious energy rich fruit so animals eat them and spread the seeds via digestive system. poop.

Seeds are the babies, not the flesh. Nobody consumes fruits for seeds. Grains don’t need this mechanism, they are fine spreading by wind.

If that were true then how come plants improve human health outcomes every time we put them to the test especially when swapped from, say, red meat?

It’s a fun theory for people who don’t demand evidence.

Plants slogan: 'The only good vegan is a dead vegan'.

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