You're going to need to define what 'rational' is. Optimizing a certain kind of metric beyond all reason is going to destroy whatever economic engine that is currently providing people their livelihood.

I agree. The general trend of optimizing only for shareholder value has destroyed the livelihood of countless workers. Heck, it's destroyed legacy companies like kmart and sears. It's all but killed off manufacturing in the US. And, were the quality better, it'd kill off the jobs of most HN commenters as businesses would love nothing more than to offshore everything to the cheapest location possible.

The economy is a giant prisoner's dilemma. It'd be far healthier if wealth was better distributed yet individual companies and shareholders can make a boatload of money by taking shortcuts and keeping things running at barebones levels.

I don’t follow, can you explain how religiosity relates to food quality?

That said, I also admire the Quakers for their values.

There's something about simple design that you can appreciate without being in any way religious. Christopher Alexander tries to get at it.

I don’t recall chick-fil-a sandwiches being offerings to god, I’m pretty sure they’re sold to consumers.

This theory also doesn’t really explain why a lot of Christian products are very low quality.

The eggs at Aldi with the Bible verses are downright terrible compared to a pasture raised product from a brand like Vital Farms.

MyPillow pillows are bottom of the barrel.

Tyson Foods is certainly not known for quality.

Saying "some people associate quality workmanship with their belief in God" doesn't mean:

1. all religious folks care about quality workmanship

2. all people who care about quality workmanship are religious

They’re giving religion way more credit than it’s due.

Food quality, perhaps. But art, music, architecture, definitely.

Not all religious people do great things, not all great things are done for religious reasons.

Your logic directionality is failing you badly here.

It is possible to say nice things about someone without implying condemnation of another.

> If you are building something for whatever god you happen to believe in, you are going to want to build something of high quality to honor that.

That’s a very broad generalization and pro-religion statement. I provided a number of counter-examples of products whose religious ownership hasn’t motivated them to produce great quality products with ethical practices.

I would present the hypothesis that based on the demographics of US citizens that, statistically, most publicly traded companies are likely majority owned by Christian shareholders. After all, a commanding majority of Americans (70%). So this idea that a non-dollars-and-cents higher calling motivating Christian business owners to make better quality products seems like complete bunk.

Seems to me that the Christians get to cherry pick one company that focuses on product quality and give credit to religious thought despite the fact that most US companies including the shitty ones that dump toxic chemicals into rivers are also owned by Christians.

For what it's worth, I am not a Christian and I was not thinking of Christians or "Christian products" in my original comment you quoted.

It is a opportunity to emphasize with those in poverty. It is a way to truly appreciate every meal - saying grace before a meal take on a real significance. And it is an opportunity to be truly thoughtful about the food you are putting into your body - particularly as the fasts are often "no meat" or something else specific.

She is also not surprisingly a very good cook and cooks most things from scratch. If she were to start a food company, I'm sure she'd use the same values.

Some religious diets are perpetual, like "no pork ever". Orthodox fasting is "eat everything half of the year" and then practice self control by abstaining from the meat/wine/oil/dairy the other half.

"I think atheists actually empathize with the poor even more"

I think both this statement and the one you are responding to are getting to general/stereotypical. Fasting can be some meaningless ego/status religious thing. Just as some atheists might be more empathetic.

In my limited experience, the religious fasters seem mostly to be doing it because their community (church) does it and they want to belong, not for the exercise in self control or empathy. Although i msure both exist. It's also been my experience that atheists aren't any more empathetic towards the poor than the average person, religious or not.

It's hard to be in prayer all day. If you're hungry however, you are perpetually reminded and thinking of God.

You are not supposed to go hungry, just be strict on what you consume.

Most lay orthodox christians only "truly" fast before taking communion and around a few particularly important holidays. So when they talk about fasting they are not normally talking about something that resembles intermittent fasting in practice.

Again, growing up without religion, I always wondered what the deal was with rules like "kosher" and "Halal". To me, it seemed like people were following old rules that didn't make sense in the modern world (though thankfully I never really voiced these opinions).

Now, you can argue about the details of these rules, but the point is that there actually have to be rules beyond "rationality", as I said.

---

The "rational" thing is to adulterate food, and this has been a big problem throughout history.

For example, here's a picture of stamped bread from the first century AD in Pompeii - https://ridiculouslyinteresting.com/2013/07/22/preserved-loa...

The stamp apparently being required to identify the baker in case of fraud.

One way you can get a sense of the incentive to adulterate food is to look at all the colorful punishments for doing so - http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2011/09/bakers-dozen.html

In Vienna, bakers caught selling underweight bread were put in the baeckerschupfen – a sort of cage which was then plunged into the river several times.

In Turkey, a bad baker was stretched out on his own kneading table and the bastinado (foot-beating with a stick) was administered.

Perhaps the most public and painful punishment was in ancient Egypt, were an offending baker could be nailed by the ear to the door of his shop, where no doubt his customers gave him even more abuse.

More - https://musingsonfoodhistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/death-...

A law in Britain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_of_Bread_Act_1757

---

So the "rational" thing is to adulterate food, just like the "rational" thing is to spray ads all over web content, and add dark patterns to iOS apps. It makes money, in the short term.

But the cultures that survived and took over the world had rules beyond what's "rational". Christians, Jews, and Muslims all have extra rules you have to follow with regarding food. You don't really question why, but the act of compliance is a virtue.

So now I no longer think the arbitrary rules are so strange. You can argue with the details, the high level bit is that you don't just optimize for your own business. You have a higher duty.

---

If a society has 10,000 food producers, and all of them are doing the bare minumum, then eventually the health of the citizens is going to be the bare minimum too.

The neighboring clan with stricter rules - and yes MORALS - will overtake them.

---

And my point is that we're back in this situation NOW. Corporations have optimized the production of food for profit, while remaining technically legal.

America’s packaged food supply is ultra-processed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20551847 - https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/07/us-packaged-fo...

America exported this problem to countries like Brazil, which started the recent research on ultra-processed foods:

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-proce...

Stories on Hacker News - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ultra+processed+food

(People who don't think this is real have to answer the question of why men and women weigh 30 or 50 pounds more on average than they did in 1960, etc.)

---

Similar line of thought with respect to gambling and crypto - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910537. A younger me would have thought that gambling is each person's choice. It's a free country.

But if you have a society of 10,000 people where 50% of people are playing negative sum games, then pretty soon that society is not competitive anymore. They're not producing anything. The societies that simply banned gambling are the ones that survived. (And even now I don't necessarily agree with banning gambling, just saying there is a a group selection phenomenon there.)

Likewise, imposing burdensome and arbitrary rules on food is probably good in the long term. That has to be a bigger reason for doing things other than making money tomorrow. We might want to bring back some of the colorful punishments, rather than letting corporations make the rules.

In tech, we have poisoned our own information supply, which is profitable in the short term, but obviously bad in the long term.

The job of society is to set the rules within which they can do so.

Our ruleset is thousands of years old and is rooted in religion, myth, tradition, and millennia of practical compromises. The evolution of this ruleset should not be taken lightly, nor should old rules be discarded out of hand because they stem from now-unfashionable traditions.

> In tech, we have poisoned our own information supply

Curious to know more about what you mean by this, if you have the time... poisoned how? cheers!

The counterargument is that they both provide a ton of value, they didn't take anything away, and you don't have to use them. (defense of Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39054621 )

There's some truth to that, but it seems like we could be past peak social media (?) It feels like people are kinda treating it like smoking -- it was a poisonous fad that went too far, and it's wise to dial it back.

Or maybe the town faces hard times and the baker might want to cut costs by reducing the weight of their bread to help their own family. That might be rational under those circumstances.

From the perspective of efficiency for the ownership, yes. However, every laid off staff member still needs to eat, house themselves, and pay their other bills.

It seems to me that the long run effect, apart from good or bad intent, is that the people in society who don't have access to capital wind up having to manage at a subsistence level.

Real entrepreneurs only go into business because they believe they know something that otherwise efficient markets do not. So that means you have to be a contrarian and believe in secrets or undiscovered principles.

Some of the more interesting data points he includes is the decline in cult membership and belief in secrets. We as a society are generating less iconoclasts, so all that's left in business is an efficiency puzzle.

Back in the day, conspiracies were kind of unique and interesting and you could talk to a believer about it for hours about all the details and complications. People put a lot of thinking into it.

Today, conspiracies are like everything else - as shallow as the first page of google search.

Another funny thing is to learn about "principles" of Ray Dalio. Man has a cult but tries to proof otherwise.

Was that written before QAnon, etc.?

1. Max profit for a small group of shareholders

2. A cool place to work with people you like.

Try explaining #2 to a PE group.

[edit: typos]

I am top mod on a few large ("top 1% by size") subreddits and am always interested in those sorts of perspectives.