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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31031 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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If you like lobster, you already eat "bugs".

Non-central fallacy. Eating lobster is not a central example of eating bugs (aside from the question of whether it counts at all, if you're not Taylor Hebert).

The WEF has posted some stories about the business opportunity in vegan meat substitutes, much as it posts articles about every other kind of possible business innovation.

How often does it post about a clearly inconsistent with the left business innovation?

Non-central fallacy. Eating lobster is not a central example of eating bugs

... why, exactly though? The 'non-central fallacy' implies the example has an important difference from / doesn't share an important aspect of more 'central' examples. Lobsters certainly aren't as disgusting to us as cockroaches. But the reason for that example is that, aside from extremely socially-contingent food-disgust ideas, insects aren't fundamentally unhealthier or disgusting than mammal meat or vegetables - some hunter-gatherers have various insects as a large part of their diet due to contingency of their natural environment. While I don't eat the cockroach-chips because they probably aren't produced very naturally, they're probably more nutritious, including in the trad holistic sense, than 'soy protein isolate' or white wheat flour.

The keratin of insect shells is much harder for humans to digest than mammal or vegetable matter

Vegetables have plenty of indigestible parts too (cellulose), you'd be getting nutrition from the non-keratin parts. Missing nutrients aren't a problem, most individual foods poorly satisfy all human nutrient needs, which is why we eat a variety of them - it has to have some useful stuff, but nobody's going exclusively insectivore. I don't think anyone's actually evaluated the nutritional quality of the bugs during this whole discourse - which I'd expect would vary significantly depending on the species and diet of bug.

I can’t figure out where exactly the WEF is “posting some stories,” but I’d imagine they cover all sorts of fintech.

As for lobsters, I think it’s closer to the common conception of eating bugs than grasshopper flour. Neither is really what the memes are implying, though.

I can’t figure out where exactly the WEF is “posting some stories,” but I’d imagine they cover all sorts of fintech.

I don't think it does post as an organization, directly; most of these seem to be members submitting to papers: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better is part of this series, for example.

And... yeah, they're mostly a mix of generic progressive spiel and generic upper-management business paradigmamamgam crap.

It may not have hard power, but to the extent that it influences the thinking of people who do, that seems like an important kind of soft power.

Is the WEF powerless? The org itself may lack formal powers but it’s attended by the top business executives in the world. This isn’t some random Vegas lawyer conference.

I’d argue that being able to attract top talent and set the conference agenda is certainly a type of power.

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