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Comment by flakeoil | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what does that quote really mean? I can attempt to draw a few conclusions, but I'm not quite sure of either and they can also almost be the opposite of each other.

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Most verses aren't intended to be read alone, they weren't written that way originally. The indexes were added later. The whole section (25-34) is about not worrying. With the summary being "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

I don't know that I know what it means, but I'll tell you a thought it brought to mind.

A while ago I was having a discussion, and someone asserted that synthetic fertilizers are necessary because composting doesn't scale.

And my reaction was, surely composting scales to an entire biosphere - like, empirically we know this, right? There was a massive biosphere long before there was a Fritz Haber. Surely it's that we don't have the required technology and wisdom to create supply chains that can run as closed loops and accept inputs that aren't so rich and concentrated?

I don't want to argue this point, there are definitely good counterarguments that could be made, but I'm just trying to illustrate the shift in perspective I think the commenter may have been going for rather than change the topic.

The argument doesn't quite work imo because farmers are actively working against the normal ecosystem - we don't want the normal plants to grow there, we want our desired crops. With enough production for us to feed the world and to give farmers a living wage.

I still think it's doable (but not if we also want to feed many times our mass in lifestock), but it's not easy.

Farmers also want to have a large swaths of a monoculture plant, because it is easy then to mechanize. That goes, as you say, against the normal ecosystem. Permaculture gardens look much different, but you can't easily mechanize that.

Yes, and the more manual labor it needs, the more time intensive it is, the harder it is for someone to make a living.

I don't want to argue the point (but I also am not dismissing your points, the position I put forward is definitely not unassailable), but I think there's an opportunity to make my original point better here, which is; sometimes we get trapped in the logic of our own systems and fail to think outside the box. Is it monoculture or low-N culture really required? Or is it a local optimum we lack the imagination to see beyond?

What got you here might not get you there. You can go really far with a monolithic web app running on top of a relational database. But if you scale far enough, you'll need to pull some pieces out and hook them up to databases with relaxed constraints.

There are good engineering reasons for us to do things the way we do them, and maybe it was the only feasible way for us to get to this point. But presumably if we continue to grow, we will enter a different phase with a different set of tradeoffs. That phase will probably involve exerting less control, it will probably also involve worse unit economics, but may also scale further with fewer externalities.

> surely composting scales to an entire biosphere

By definition, yes.

> There was a massive biosphere long before there was a Fritz Haber.

There are about five times more humans today than there were when Fritz Haber invented his process.

The question is not “will there be an ecosystem”. Of course there will be. The question is are you ok with 4 out of 5 person potentially starving to death.

> Surely it's that we don't have the required technology and wisdom…

Synthetic fertilizers is the required technology and accepting that is the wisdom.

> Synthetic fertilizers is the required technology and accepting that is the wisdom.

Again, I don't want to get into a debate about agriculture, I'm trying to discuss the quote, but these are the types of assumptions I'm suggesting are worth questioning.

The question is, are there ways to exert less control and get better outcomes? I'm not suggesting we let 80% of people starve. I'm suggesting we not be obsequious to the logic of the technology we've already built, when deciding on what to build next. (I elaborate in a cousin comment.)

Consider that in the extreme, if you have a linear supply chain with Haber-Bosch on one end and a landfill on the other - when you scale to enough people, you will also have mass starvation. Haber-Bosch isn't a "wisdom we accept" or "the" definitive technology. It has tremendous application, but it isn't magic. We're not simply done innovating in this area.

It's interesting how people come and mock without having any framework of understanding the thing. It's almost like a lost language. Consider air - it is immaterial, the spirit/principle/reason/meaning/pattern of things. It's also the vehicle for speech, and when we stop breathing it we die. I don't think the quote (or the broader text) means a single concrete thing - it's saying something about how the world works, and should be applicable in multiple ways. Under appreciated rabbit hole!

A purpose of a religious text is to control people. They do that through well-known ways. It says “blah-blah, but look at this fallacy you aren’t aware of, so believe in god”, at different zoom levels. Every one of these is trivially deconstructible cause their main target was uneducated masses which had no scrutiny. Those who had it were religiously “educated” and accounted for. Religions that didn’t do that didn’t survive. That’s the framework of understanding. This thing wasn’t written by “god”, it’s a work of a few scammers, sadly the biggest in our history.

It seems to me that your stand is analogous to anarchists' about law and government. Sure, there's a tyrannical aspect that can get out of hand, but it's far from the whole story.

I don’t think this is a good analogy, since laws and government don’t tell you how the world works, it’s either observable without explanation or left unexplained. In religion there’s no whole story, it all made up. It may contain some real life parts, but it could do so without religious parts. Real life stories doesn’t make it more credible in sentences containing “god”. In fact, the quote of this subthread is wrong, false, debunked. There’s no need to look at it in context, cause whatever role it plays in it can’t make it look good. Looking at falsehoods “in context” and referring to “deeper knowledge and proper understanding” is a beloved theme of religious manipulation.

I think the disconnect is that you seem to consider religious texts as a dry statements of fact. That doesn't make any sense, they're clearly not that.

Would you say the same about great works of fiction, or old fairy tales that for some reason keep grabbing our attention and we repeat them for generations? That they're just falsehoods because duh, frogs obviously can't talk? Or can they have some deeper meaning? Stating facts is not the only way to describe the world.

> Would you say the same about great works of fiction, or old fairy tales

Do you thing religious followers, such as Matthew, see god/heaven/etc as being merely a metaphor?

> That they're just falsehoods because duh

per previous poster: "laws and government don’t tell you how the world works"

works of fiction doesn't purport to either. They might have morals, or subtexts, as much of the contents of the Bible does - but some things in there are meant to be at least partially literal, such as the existence of a divine being that created the world.

What's the greater message behind "God takes care of lesser creatures" when there's no proof of such a thing? That things will generally turn out alright if you don't plan ahead (demonstratably bad advice)..

> Do you thing religious followers, such as Matthew, see god/heaven/etc as being merely a metaphor?

No, I'm not suggesting that. The alternatives to just reporting facts are more than "merely a metaphor".

> works of fiction doesn't purport to either. They might have morals, or subtexts

Disagree - I think they distill patterns from the factual and present them in the form of stories, encoded in the structure of the story. If you're a materialist you might say that the story is less true than the factual manifestations of the patterns, I'd say it's more true; and that it's telling something about the world.

> What's the greater message

We're debating if zero even exists, don't ask me about analysis ;)

Actually the purpose of that whole chapter is about not being a hypocrite, being authentic, not being greedy, and having faith. It's a quick < 5-minute read.

Yeah, a bunch of dudes created a book (which costed a fortune or two before typewriter age) to tell everyone to be good just for the sake of it. As plausible as it can get. /s

It’s a medieval gaslightenment and it would be great if people kept it private at least.

PS. purpose is different from meaning, the latter is just a medium for purpose and may be arbitrary.

I feel the same sometimes about people's opinions. Alas, people can say what they want.

Maybe they do have a framework, allowing them to mock it? There must be a reason why there are so many holy writings on this remote little planet.

It has been taken in a variety of ways. See the "Analysis" section on the Wikipedia page [1] for it for a few examples.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_6:26

What “real” meaning do you think here? It says look, birds live somehow and you’re a man, much more important being to the guy in the sky. So don’t worry and continue to pay, he’s on it.

You have to bust your ass to live while the bird just lives freely with helpings from God, despite man supposedly being made in God's image and stuff.

I think it's a misguided sentiment of its time, we know today that birds also bust ass in their own birdy ways to live. We all bust ass.

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