From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 15:43:53 MDT
gts wrote:
> "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"
> http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html
>
> This is an excellent article by Jared Diamond that appeared in Discovery
> Magazine in 5/87. According to Diamond, agriculture is the worst mistake in
> the history of the human race.
>
> Diamond acknowledges that the pre-agricultural diet was a healthier diet,
> and lists variations on this theme as the first and second of three reasons
> for the poor health of early farmers. The third of his three reasons is
> indeed increased disease from over-crowding, but he adds parenthetically
> that arguments of archeologists who claim this as the only reason are really
> just chicken-and-egg arguments, because "crowding encourages agriculture and
> vice versa."
>
> Excerpt from the article:
> "There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that
> agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
> diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
> starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
> nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants-wheat, rice, and
> corn-provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet
> each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.)
> Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the
> risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that
> agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many
> of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the
> spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it
> was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this
> is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and
> vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in
> small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease
> had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance
> of large cities."
Let's not forget standing armies. Agriculture enabled people to produce
more food than they needed to feed themselves alone, enabling the rise of
a ruling class that subsisted off other people's work and could force them
to work 16-hour days to feed as many boss-class individuals as possible.
And of course, the transition to agriculture marks the transition from
work to which we are adapted, and which we presumably found fulfilling or
at least tolerable, to "work" in the sense of mental-energy-sapping,
life-force-draining labor.
Is it really worth it to be able to read the Feynman Lectures? I would
say yes; your own mileage may vary. Fortunately the dilemna is a
temporary one.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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