That guy is way more entertaining than he has any right to be. His voice, the way he waves his hands around when he's talking; his love for ancient Toyotas; He just has a great personality for that kind of thing.
You have to give Dr. Greger credit for the sheer volume of material he goes through and how jam-packed his videos are with citations. He does a better job at performing credibility than any other diet doctor out there.
I suspect that it's cultural and derives from our economic relationship to animals. I remember seeing a film as a child that depicted a native hunter killing a deer and profusely thanking the spirit of the deer; attributing intelligence and identity to the deer would predispose a hunter to pay close attention to the animal's behaviour and give him an edge in hunting it. In cultures with domestcated animals bred for compliance with human will, it is less advantageous to view the animal as another mind. Instead, we see them as tools to be used and discarded. To do otherwise would compromise our ability to extract maximum economic advantage from use of the animal.
The issue (today) is not whether animals have cognition, but the extent and nature of that cognition.
In the present case, the research question is whether animals have a conception of self. This is necessarily a fuzzy concept.
The test that has been used many times and with many variations basically involves providing a mirror and a condition that is only noticeable as applying to oneself by relating the image in the mirror as representing one's own body.
However, the test probe is merely an instrument used to measure an underlying construct. That is, there is an assumption that to solve the test particular cognitive processes are invoked.
But a test probe may be solved using processes or strategies other than those for which the probe was designed to measure.
Cleaner Wrasse fish have many instincts that reflect school behaviors, especially in young fish. School like behavior: One fish turns, then it turns, suggest strong control over behavior by the sight of other fish..including those seen in a mirror.
I suspect this mirroring system is having an influence on the fish's behavior here. It sees another fish with a skin condition (a mark), which may have activated cleaning behavior in itself.
I’m not so sure that’s the case though, as for example Talmudic law prohibits castrating animals. A gelded oxen is much calmer and easier to work with than a bull. I think it certainly varies from society to society, but ancient agrarian traditions also respect animals in ways you might not expect.
What is interesting is that Talmudic law goes to the trouble. There's no point prohibiting something that people wouldn't do anyway. There must have been considerable pressure to castrate animals, and some corresponding spiritual dismay at the lack of respect for them this entailed. So I wonder if it doesn't confirm the premise, rather than refute it - the Talmudic authorities may have been trying to preserve earlier value systems against a changing society.
Humans aren't perfect economic machines. A single example doesn't necessarily refute the claim. And even then there might be some other advantage to not castrating oxen that isn't being considered.
> And even then there might be some other advantage to not castrating oxen that isn't being considered.
I supposed you could come up with one. Your OP basically gave you a really knowledgeable counterexample, rooted in a rich field of study in anthropology (treatment of animals), in societies that long predated capitalism.
This is actually a pretty common pattern in HN.
When the HNers hear something like: "According to this book that the recipient of the information (the HNers) didn't read, here's an illustrative example of how rich the study is."
They respond: "But capitalism."
You've adopted a world-explaining model (capitalism) that works most of the time (that "single examples don't necessarily refute") not because it's powerful, but because it requires extremely little knowledge. That's really why derivatives of this line of thinking (think LessWrong/singularity/Paul Graham worship) are so widely adopted. Not because the ideas are right. It's that the ideas work for people who don't read, or are just really god damned rich, or who don't really know anything, or think they 'know enough,' like true hacks would say.
The downside is that when someone tells you this fascinating tidbit of Talmudic law, instead of typing in "anthropology of the treatment of animals in historic societies," the reaction is, "Well fuck this guy's knowledge."
One name for this phenomenon is "first principles." A great, positive spin on knowing nothing! This forum's discourse has declined exactly because of first principles, and others have observed the same (characterizing their criticism as a criticism of "first principles thinking.")
How is it you equate the assertion that "Humans aren't perfect economic machines" with "But capitalism."?
The usual criticism of acolytes of capitalism is that they do (unjustifiably) think humans are "perfect economic machines". You seem to be inverting the normal attack and I can't make sense of it.
If I understand it right (it's 4:30am so my ability to phrase this might also be shoddy):
You removed the context from the thread. The context was that humans have an capitalist-economic focus (as in, distinguished from other economic systems like gift economies, marxist economies, etc.) on animals-as-use, and thus this influences your ability to reason about them as animals. The viewpoint is inherently capitalistic because it assumes that animals have become a good to be sold, and that it was more advantageous for humans to see it as such. Your (or whomevers') assertion "humans aren't perfect economic machines" was inherently an argument for the arguments for the capitalist viewpoint, which the person you were responding to was calling unfounded.
> You seem to be inverting the normal attack and I can't make sense of it
Capitalism doesn't assume that humans are perfect economic machines, indeed, it relies on them not being that. Otherwise, accumulation of capital would probably either be impossible for any single person to do, or it would be much more evenly distributed than it currently is. Indeed, the entire industry of stock-trading assumes that you can 'beat the average', which under the axioms laid out, is not what a logical, perfectly rational machine would do.
Well, Mike Pence denounced china on October 3 while speaking at the Hudson Institute[0]. He specifically mentioned the million people in detention in Xinjiang. I've provided a link to the video in case you want to watch.
> Its just meant to pacify us commoners? Am I wrong to think so?
I think so, but only because I think governments know how little "us commoners" actually care, beyond wanting to virtue signal and wanting to see politicians raise a stink about things.
No fan of the current administration, but there’s a massive difference between locking up and torturing millions of Muslims, and denying travel entry to citizens from certain majority-Muslim countries. Comparisons to the Japanese interment camps set up by FDR during WW2 would make more sense.
You're right, but it's still hypocritical to morally condemn a prejudicial action against a people while you're acting out of prejudice against the same people. Especially since this moral condemnation seems conveniently timed and aligned with an active trade war.
This Muslim ban came before the immigrant camps and migrant child detention centers, which Pence also supported. If we don't hold him accountable for hypocrisy, then who will?
Considering a formal apology was issued by the state department to the surviving Saint Louis passengers, are we destined to keep repeating history's mistakes?
Trump demonizes both China and Islam. So I'm not sure what the best play for the Republican party is here. If you praise the Chinese government then that's going too far. But if you criticize them then you have to soften your own Islamophobia.
Is he ready to offer the affected Uyghurs (Or even some large percentage of them) asylum in the US? I'm sure that if he made that offer, China would gladly exile them.
A paranoid person might conclude that there's an industrial scale effort to distract the population from any issue that might be even tangentially related to their real interests; e.g. their survival and that of their children.
A more paranoid person might conclude humans are easy to be distracted by short-term entertainment/profit and handle long-term threats very poorly. It's not like climate change, mass extinctions, and environmental damage are unheard of - the vast majority of people have heard, but just don't care in ways that would make a significant difference. I'm doubtless among them even as I complain about it.
What would such a person consider to be the motivation of the people involved in such "an industrial scale effort"? Are the deceiver's real interests somehow not threatened? Are they literally not human? Or are they protected somehow from the issues that will kill everyone else?
There's something about the acidity of coffee and tea that makes most veggie milks curdle; the result tastes something like cardboard. There were some soy-based (So Good or So Nice branded) coffee creamers that my first-year residence cafeteria offered years ago which stood up nicely in coffee, but I haven't seen them for sale since.
I’ve never had problems with almond milk, cashew milk, coconut milk, or soy milk not being able to stand up to coffee, which usually has a lot more acidity than tea.
For me, it’s been more about the taste of the non-bovine milk itself. And almond milk is by far the best thing I’ve found so far. I also like when it is mixed with other non-bovine milks, like cashew and coconut.
If you use cold-brewed coffee, that has a lot less acidity than hot-brewed coffee. So, it works even better with non-bovine milks.
Just FYI, Go Veggie isn't vegan or dairy free (at least last time I checked), it's lactose free.
Also, Daiya isn't the state of the art by a long shot. If you're adventurous and have a large grocery budget, Chao (served cold) is the most cheese-like cheeze that I've had so far.
