I agree, but I try to be pragmatic. Everyone is looking for the twitter killer that will destroy it in a blaze of glory, but I am fine with it slowly bleeding users and value as Threads and Mastodon (and Bluesky?) get better and gains more users.
Absolutely insane. We have serious dysfunction in our civilization that great concepts like this 15min city is being poisoned by social media with the help of algorithms trying to optimize for profit. This is the real conspiracy, that our systems of power are utterly rudderless and irrational.
I’m sad that this comic is still needed. I thought we figured this out a while ago. I remember being super weirded out at a colleague saying he worshipped women. That moment and probably things I read around the time solidified in my kind to treat women and other genders the same as I’d men.
On a tad bit related note I remember reading that it was common for people to be buried with all of their possessions and that women occasionally had hunting equipment buried with them.
I’m just adding it here because I feel it’s connected to the idea that eating lots of meat is naturally manly. Apparently it’s just an exaggerated fantasy that’s part of our own modern culture and the reality seems to be that we were effectively ‘flexitarians’ and that women to some extent hunted too.
Both the title and the text of this article are painting with far too broad of a brush.
The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle.
This was one study done on the remains of 24 people from one place. It’s only towards the last paragraphs that the author points that out, and even then it’s both soft-pedaled and linked in with western male biases.
While we still have a lot to learn about the vast varieties of human civilizations from 10k years ago, and while there are always massive cultural biases that need to be criticized and overcome, this is an example of the worst of scientific journalism. They take what’s an interesting study in a very narrow niche field, and instead of communicating it as such or saying how the work could be expanded, they write about it as if the author has managed to flip archeology on its head.
Just for starters, there’s almost never a single paper that changes everything. Science is a process of incremental progress with plenty of false starts and which undergoes constant revision. There’s a reason why it takes decades for a Nobel prize to be awarded - and those researchers are the ones who define and revolutionize their fields. The first author on this paper is a PhD student. I have no reason to question the soundness of their work, but the enthusiasm of the Guardian author (and the student’s advisor) is in excess of the meaningfulness of the study in a way that is frankly gravely concerning.
Some societies were primarily hunters. Some were gatherers. Many never became agricultural societies. Many did. Rather than throwing out every anthropology textbook because of a single paper written by a student from the University of Wyoming based on an analysis of 24 remains from a specific region of the Andes, it would be better to say “Hmm, that’s interesting - I wonder if that applied more broadly to the region,” or even “I wonder how many other regions depended largely on wild tubers.”
For better and for worse, humans (and I mean that term to be inclusive of species other than H sapiens as well) populated almost every ecosystem across the planet. They hunted and gathered and planted and raised livestock. There are fascinating interactions between the modes of subsistence of a culture and cultural norms from family relations to trade and war. In many cases the ecosystems they lived in don’t resemble what we see in those regions today, from weather patterns to flora and fauna. There’s less than no reason to think that populations living in wildly different ecosystems would resemble one another - they simply did not.
I’m very happy that these folks ate a lot of potatoes, and I agree with the more general observation that conventional wisdom is mostly wrong about many things, ranging from evolutionary biology to theoretical physics. I just wouldn’t ride too far on this particular horse.
Came here to say this but you beat me to it. I bet some of it is because people were skimping on heating last winter. Now that the prices are back to normal I think people will heat (and cool) more again. I know I have not watched my heating as scrupulously as last winter (even though I use very little energy 😇)
Detaching yourself from the reality of what’s happening in the world is certainly one way of coping, but IMO unless you’re doing it to protect your mental health (in which case I highly recommend reducing your news consumption), it is just a form of isolationism at best, and an abdication of our shared human responsibility to protect and help each other at worst.
Let me reiterate: if you are seeing your mental health decline as a result of news consumption, you should reduce that consumption, or at least make changes to which news sources you consume.
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
I strongly disagree with the person in this article’s recommendation of detachment for the average person. This is akin to advocating for political non-participation, because how can you intelligently assess who is best to represent you in the world if you don’t know the state of the world?
We on the Left (rightfully) criticize people who cannot seem to care about an issue unless or until it personally affects them… well guess how they got there; not being informed about anything external to their own immediate lives.
It’s quite the privilege to be able to cut off externalities and be happy; many people do not have the luxury of being able to do that, because those externalities will intrude into their lives whether they like it or not, like Roe being overturned.
/rant
Since you asked for recommendations, I only really have one that worked for me, which was to cut off social media news (i.e. ditching Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit).
All 3 of those were news… combined with some of the worst takes on that news by the horrible people on those sites. I don’t need to hear a bunch of conservatives and white nationalists and misogynists and racists (apologies for the redundancy) give their takes on the news, especially because we know that they gain an outsize representation on social media due to ‘interaction’ being rewarded, good or bad.
i don’t drive often, maybe once or twice a week, and the car always has NPR on. other than that, i’ll skim headlines, but don’t tend to read them unless it’s something positive or local.
i do read up on the candidates nearing election day.
theguardian.com
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