[tptacek]

Our chemically chaste pre-industrial food supply did a fine job of killing without much help from us.

[gooseus]

Right, and those people looked back in horror and dismay at all the famine that did a fine job of killing their predecessors.

Must any criticism of modern practices equate to an endorsement of dialing back to ancient ones?

Is anybody building AI to catch these sorts of obvious fallacies? Now that would be pretty damn impressive for an AGI skeptic such as myself.

[saint_fiasco]

Not necessarily, but in this case it did. The grandparent comment talks approvingly of nature's intention.

[tptacek]

You take the good with the bad, is I guess all I'm saying.

[code_duck]

But why? How about intelligently assessing the situation and doing away with The Bad?

[tptacek]

By invoking the naturalist fallacy ("as nature intended"), I read the original comment on this thread as suggesting we throw the good away with the bad. My point is: that would be a bad trade. The pre-modern food supply was far more dangerous than the one we have now.

[eivarv]

That's not the naturalist[ic] fallacy, but an appeal to nature. But you're right.