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.
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The "rational" thing is to adulterate food, and this has been a big problem throughout history.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
(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.)
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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 corporations is to optimize for profit.
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.
Greed and Corruption! And blame Milton Friedman for the corrupt economic philosophy. He foolishly believed and preached that shareholders would never act irrationally such that they would harm the company. Alan Greenspan believed that too but at least admitted that he was wrong, post 2008 bank meltdowns.
I mostly mean the common criticisms of Google for incentivizing web spam, and Facebook for pushing low quality / addictive / political content into people's feeds. (Though if you ask people outside the tech industry, they might not agree on these problems!)
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.
i can't imagine many people would agree with how you're using the term "rational". short-term thinking is not an automatic outcome of rationality... you seem to be describing some of the negative effects of capitalism instead.
"Short-term" is also relative. Reading what the original author wrote, I interpreted it as them working backwards from the severe punishments for underweighting bread and what might cause them. Perhaps it's not the original baker underweighting bread, but their son or their grandson who doesn't have the right context for not doing so. Maybe they are trying to get more out of the family bakery, try something new, shake things up. It might be rational in the sense of game theory and the expected outcome of multiple generations of bakers. So over 100 years time you might find half your bakeries have reduced the size of their bread while the competing town has not and they overtake you.
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.
To some extent, I think that the problem comes down to communities. If you feel like your work is your contribution to your community, and especially to specific people, your goal isn't to make money. It's to contribute. You're incentivized to make good things that people like and help people. But when it's a massive crowd of people that you don't even know, ordering your stuff from afar because it's cheaper than whatever local source, you're not really of them. You have no responsibilities towards them. It makes sense that, as a society grows, it needs either stronger ways to tie people to each other (religion, nationalism, war), or some other form of control (laws, stamps, inspectors, baeckerschupfen).
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
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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.