Hm I'm glad this story made it to the top. I'll indulge this train of thought some more, since it's something I've been thinking about. (But still in honor of

Hm I'm glad this story made it to the top. I'll indulge this train of thought some more, since it's something I've been thinking about. (But still in honor of the person who this article is about) 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-loaf-of-bread-discovered-at-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 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-in-the-loaf/ https://musingsonfoodhistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/death-... A law in Britain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_of_Bread_Act_1757 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.ycombinator.com/item?id=20551847 - https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/07/us-packaged-food-supply-is-ultra-processed/ 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-processed-food-took-over-your-shopping-basket-brazil-carlos-monteiro https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-proce... Stories on Hacker News - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ultra+processed+food 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 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.