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I think you could make the same argument about.... everything? Farming and selective breeding vs. hunting and gathering? Inventing modern materials rather than

I think you could make the same argument about.... everything? Farming and selective breeding vs. hunting and gathering? Inventing modern materials rather than using wood and stone and animal parts? Pretty much everything. "Mistakes from the past?" Which specific ones are you speaking of? I don't doubt there have been many, but if you are talking about choosing not to simply take things as nature gives them to us, well, I guess you want to return to the stone age or something, but the world doesn't support 7 billion people doing things that way.

mikeg8 7y ago
Some examples that come to mind are pesticides/herbicides/synthetic fertilizers. The farming example is very on-point actually. Production agriculture has become synonomous with monocultures (growing one species) to maximize "yield", and it's having devastating consequences. We're killing micro organisms in the soil, which are necessary for nutrient exchange to the crops. Modern vegetables have 50-80% less nutrients than those of 50 years ago. The lack of diversity in plant species means a single predator/pest will not have any natural repellents, thus requiring pesticides. The soils, losing nutrients rapidly, now require additives in the form of synthetic fertilizers: nitrogen, prosperous, and potassium. We took a system that worked, tried to over engineer it, and created a whole mess of problems and additonal work/cost. Another: We took cows, which have a special organ called a rumen that is specifically designed to extract nutrients from grasses, an abundant resource that many animals cannot use as a food source, and instead began feeding them diets of corn. The corn heavy diets is worse for the cows overall immune system, requiring the addition of antibiotics. Farmers who raise cows in balance with their natural state of a grass based diet will need little to no antibiotics. Wood is making a massive comeback in the commercial construction industry because we realized it has some properties that we were too willing to dismiss, including it's flexibility and amazing strength-to-weight in relation to it's cost to produce. I'm not anti-technology or anti-innovation, but I think it's also important to ask ourselves whether all this extra work we create for ourselves is actually necessary/beneficial. In the case of psilocybin synthesis/extracts, I'm a bit skeptical. I think we're trying to re-invent the wheel.

mikeg8 7y ago

Some examples that come to mind are pesticides/herbicides/synthetic fertilizers. The farming example is very on-point actually. Production agriculture has become synonomous with monocultures (growing one species) to maximize "yield", and it's having devastating consequences. We're killing micro organisms in the soil, which are necessary for nutrient exchange to the crops. Modern vegetables have 50-80% less nutrients than those of 50 years ago. The lack of diversity in plant species means a single predator/pest will not have any natural repellents, thus requiring pesticides. The soils, losing nutrients rapidly, now require additives in the form of synthetic fertilizers: nitrogen, prosperous, and potassium. We took a system that worked, tried to over engineer it, and created a whole mess of problems and additonal work/cost. Another: We took cows, which have a special organ called a rumen that is specifically designed to extract nutrients from grasses, an abundant resource that many animals cannot use as a food source, and instead began feeding them diets of corn. The corn heavy diets is worse for the cows overall immune system, requiring the addition of antibiotics. Farmers who raise cows in balance with their natural state of a grass based diet will need little to no antibiotics. Wood is making a massive comeback in the commercial construction industry because we realized it has some properties that we were too willing to dismiss, including it's flexibility and amazing strength-to-weight in relation to it's cost to produce. I'm not anti-technology or anti-innovation, but I think it's also important to ask ourselves whether all this extra work we create for ourselves is actually necessary/beneficial. In the case of psilocybin synthesis/extracts, I'm a bit skeptical. I think we're trying to re-invent the wheel.