He then throws in salacious and irrelevant intimations about race and class ("Because the outdoor recreation community is far whiter, wealthier, and better educated than the U.S. population at large, it’s an interesting case study in how misinformation propagates through privileged communities.")
It's clickbait, exactly the sort of garbage published on the front page of every newsprint weekly - taxi drivers without medallions: scandalous! Boat owners profit from people fishing: another scandal! The real scandal is how any of this passes as journalism.
He's not totally wrong about those things (though I think it's class that matters orders of magnitude more than race). In enthusiast communities where the bar to entry is low (most outdoor recreation is cheap to do at a basic level) there's a class segregation effect. I can't quite put my finger on it or describe the details but there's definitely community/social pressure to make things needlessly expensive and develop an attitude of "if your wallet can't support going all out don't go at all" as a bar to entry.
There is some misconception that “old ways” were healthier and they weren’t.
Burning wood is bad bad for you not having access to clean water is bad for you etc.
The fact that it’s natural means nothing nature is a cunt.
- eating fresh foods instead of processed starches
- no factories and industrial agriculture producing greenhouse gasses
- social organization based on communal resources and personal autonomy (hunter-gatherers) instead of authoritarianism and hierarchy (settled agricultural governments)
You can walk today, and it’s likely much safer.
You can eat fresh food and the food today is overall much safer even the processed food. People in the past didn’t had fresh food this didn’t last long they ate processed food which would be preserved. Fresh food was an occasional luxury and even then it would be much less safe than it is today.
Greenhouse gases have no direct impact on health, smoke and pollution does and even London’s historic smog wasn’t nearly as bad as the average cave lung.
Social organization... how exactly does this relates to health again?
Even the worse life style today (health wise) is better than anything you could do in antiquity.
An average life style is considerably healthier.
And if you selectively choose to live the healthiest life style possible in any period nothing in the past beats today.
- default lifestyle (for economic reasons) is living in the city / suburbs where walking is often aesthetically unpleasant; humans have an aesthetic response to being in nature.
- again for economic reasons, processed food like bread is the default choice; it's hard for some to afford (in time and money) to get all their calories from fresh vegetables and meats. Again the past is a model (I'm talking about humans' natural diet in the days before food preservation / grain agriculture).
- let's shoot for no smog and no cave lung
- social stratification led directly to mass starvation and poverty (poorest segment of society experiences stress-related declines in longevity)
If we assume that every change that's ever happened is for the better in every way, it blinds us as to how to make improvements.
Regardless of how far back you go life was harsh, miserable and unforgiving and the further you go the worse it gets.
Fresh food was never a staple diet, hunting wasn’t done on a daily basis it was seasonal meat would be smoked and salted to be preserved.
Fat would be fermented and preserved.
Plants as well would be fermented or dried to be preserved for later consumption.
Famine and starvation was abound whole populations were wiped out due to famine multiple times even before we started to live in large cities.
Living in caves and huts burning wood would result in lung damage even before counting things like cavers lung. The smallest of injuries could be fatal and it often was.
There was essentially no period in which we were healthier than we are today even if you are an alcoholic coal miner who’s living only on KFC.
Anything is safer today even walking.
Natural means, what a human body has been accustomed to, over the course of its evolution. That is what is natural. Not something coming directly from nature. Often both are same since most of the things that we were exposed to during the long course of evolution came directly from nature.
Also, from your other comments, you have a skewed definition of health. You seem to consider a human being healthy even if they can only survive with the help of medicines or modern health care..which is quite stupid...
For me, that's quite distinct from the naturalistic fallacy, which is really related to the is-ought distinction (often attributed to Hume). The fallacy consists of going from a descriptive statement (this is how things are) to a normative statement (thus, this is how things should be). A (fallacious) example would be that strong animals devour weaker animals, thus it's good and proper also in our society that the strong exploit the weak. For me, that's an illicit move from "is" to "ought", and quite distinct from the "untreated water is natural and thus must be healthy", "vaccines are chemical and unnatural and thus must be bad" fallacy.
However, from the Wikipedia page it seems that some people also use "naturalistic fallacy" in the former sense ("appeal to nature").
(Note that Sam Harris and others are arguing (convincingly, in my view) that ultimately, our "oughts" must be informed and even follow from "is", from descriptive statements, rejecting the whole strict is/ought distinction.)
For me, it tends to germinate with that one fallacy.
prions. not sure if you consider them "bugs" though.
Nope. Protein generally denatures at lower than 100C / boiling point.
That's the principle of Sous Vide, not that you should use Sous Vide to sterilise anything, but the protein in egg white denatures at 60-80C.
http://www.scienceofcooking.com/eggs/eggs_sous_vide.htm
And in meat it's similar, 50-70C http://www.mpip-mainz.mpg.de/Sous_vide_cooking
If you doubt it, stick your hand in water at 80C and see what happens.
I grew up in the mountains, around Apache, Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi people, who I have learned a great deal from, and they recognize the vast quality of life improvements modern science, medicine and technology have brough, and embrace it. The fact they understand that though doesn't stop them from admonishing us in how most Americans treat the land and live out of symbiosis. They aren't calling for a naive luddite-esque return to the old ways, they are calling on us to use our technology to augment the benefits the old ways have, and that is a huge distinction.
Of course there are some hippy groups that naively take that position, such as the Rainbows, and then after they've destroyed a section of forest during a party they still put on their suit and tie and drive their BMW back to California or wherever. Nobody from the forest has respect for them because their views are immature and superficial, but it is a large mistake to extrapolate that type of position to all those calling for a review of how we live in relationship to the land. There is a lot of good discussion and knowledge to be had if you can get past that.
I could ramble on with some stories that illustrate what I mean, but let me summarize the position most of the native American culture from my old stomping grounds take: value community, but also value self-sufficiency within that community, because those two things make a person and a people strong and able to weather storms.
Personally, when I think about thinks like space exploration, I think that approach has much wisdom in it, and given my experience of the Internet, I think decentralization is a key strength of that viewpoint as well.
You know, most of them pretty much expect us to destroy ourselves because we don't listen to their wisdom. They say stuff like "We were here before America and unless they change we will be here after America."
The Ancient Greeks were pretty much clueless on medicine still viewing things through the lens of miasma theory, yet go search for any name you're familiar with and you'll find the distribution of ages to not be as low as you'd expect. Granted there is a bias in that people that died earlier in adulthood might not have had a chance to make their mark to the point that you'd know their name today, but I don't think that's the predominant issue. The names we know we'd still know even had they died much earlier. Aristotle was an outlier living to be only 61, yet he certainly made his name even well before that. Socrates - 71 (death by execution), Plato - 80, Eratosthenes - 82, Pythagorus - 75, Hippocrates - 90, etc, etc.
Modern medicine should certainly have enabled ancient civilizations to extend their lives substantially. What if it were possible to live the lifestyle of one such as the Ancient Greeks, yet given the availability of modern medicine in case of urgent need? And it's there that I completely agree with you. I think the goal should be to use modern medicine to supplement, not supplant, traditional life values.
There's certainly a concern of being a luddite, yet on the other hand I think people are at times too quick to forget that our level of understanding of things like human physiology is still quite superficial. We have no real causal understanding and while correlations can and do enable enormously beneficial breakthroughs, they are also subject to a never ending stream of unforeseen consequences. Decisions our species made for hundreds of thousands of years to survive were obviously not always optimal or ideal, but they did prove to be, if nothing else, sustainable and deterministic.
So I was targeting it towards the idiocy of the original author, not of those on every side that realize nuance and balance are just as important.
I think the general sentiments motivating and bolstering particular piece of BS are "I wish things were simpler", "I don't trust big organizations", "I want people to pay attention to me", "I don't care about the consequences of what I say."
On the other hand, I suppose there is a general populist trend which encourages a site like slate to give thoughtless immature authors a platform for their stupid ideas as long as they stroke populist themes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Ganges#Huma...
Let's all get back to the Earth and live the way many of our ancestors did: dying off in our youth or dealing with either preventable and crippling diseases or even just wandering around with weird diseases that just make life far less enjoyable.
On the one hand, if we were to take this approach, it would speed up natural selection for us and whatever germs develop to kill us. But for chemicals and things we do for purification of water supplies, we can at least control the chemicals and how often we use them, and I have yet heard of a any really serious bugs that can survive chlorine or just pure heat.
I guess I just can't grok the way people claim to wish to live in the past, but what they're really describing often is similar to how we would describe living in a third world. Unless you really believe our feces is cleaner than most, that unfiltered water your drinking could very well contain the feces of someone ignorant enough (or a pranking trollish person) to drop a deuce into the local stream.
And I have a great appreciation for just how blunder headed we can be, so it wouldn't shock me if and when that'd happen.
And ultimately, what's the real goal of the original article? Is it to make sure people increase their risk? Or to provide some confirmation bias to those who will do it either way?