What to Eat After the Apocalypse

http://nautil.us/issue/101/in-our-nature/what-to-eat-after-the-apocalypse

by pmcpinto • 12 years ago

104 155 12 years ago

nautil.us

subbz• 12 years ago

Some dark force made me read "Where to Eat After the Apocalypse".

staz• 12 years ago

Still better than "Who to Eat After the Apocalypse"

fit2rule• 12 years ago

I heard from some dude in a black jacket that there's a nice burger place run by a guy with a brain the size of the planet, just near the restaurant at the end of the universe.. ;)

Seriously though, it does seem like we ought to be switching over to mycoremediation as quickly as possible, in order to prevent the apocalypse, not just survive it.

Also, the last paragraph of this article .. the feels .. seems like there should be ways to deliver survival shroom-kits to the poor and needy. If only it weren't all being used, instead, for war.

crpatino2• 12 years ago

Slimy yet satisfying.

yabs4• 12 years ago

hornworms, you mean?

crpatino2• 12 years ago

I don't think the article mentions specific species of insects, but...

I have tasted maguey worm and crickets, and they are both quite good. So, unless it is poisonous, I think hornworm would do, too.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

This person ought to understand ocean ecology better. If there's not enough sunlight for agriculture, fishing is unlikely to be more productive than it already is now with normal sunlight.

Semiapies2• 12 years ago

I think they have a general problem with ecology in general. Knock out the plants, and you can't sit pretty by eating bugs and rats, either.

Zarkonnen• 12 years ago

So this is "what to eat after an apocalypse that is not the one we're actually facing". I would be far more interested in knowing how we deal with a "soft apocalypse" of fossil fuel depletion, drinking water scarcity, high ocean acidity, etc.

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

Store food, medicine a few guns and then enjoy the good life while it last.

As our "leaders" are blind or don't want to see what's coming, I don't have anythin better than this advice.

proveanegative2• 12 years ago

I imagine people with children, among others, would have a hard time agreeing with this advice.

happyscrappy• 12 years ago

People have been screaming "The end is near" for as long as I can remember, but no one ever comes back and says "We were wrong, sorry for the inconvenience".

yabs4• 12 years ago

that's a great point. i bet some insects would still be on the menu...

IndianAstronaut4• 12 years ago

Fossil fuels will not run out anytime soon. Depleting all the deep gas and coal deposits will take centuries.

sbierwagen• 12 years ago

Yes, that's not the point. We haven't run out of gold, either, but if you invented an engine that could burn gold it sure wouldn't be too useful for powering cars. Oil doesn't need to run out to be economically useless for powering the world economy.

hawleyal2• 12 years ago

Let's burn more coal.

cbr• 12 years ago

In the case of drinking water, desalination is already cheap enough that we're talking pennies a day. Even a typical American usage of 100 gal/day is around $0.15 at market energy rates [1] and is still under $0.50/day with solar.

[1] http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/water/gamechangers/... gives $489 per acre-foot.

minthd• 12 years ago

Total fossil fuel depletion is a bit extreme, but let's talk about oil depletion:

First of course, we'll rapidly turn to a conservation economy where energy(and critical commodities) are used only for necessities , probably under some kind of martial law. And of course we have some huge reserves for a case like that.

But , we have such a huge redundancy in food. If we go to the basics, people can live on a big bowl of rice/wheat a day. That comes down 100-200g per person per day. that's tiny.

We also have some amount of fuel diversity - some vehicles models can run on pure ethanol, some can easily converted to natural gas(LNG), and we already have 40K LNG based trucks in the u.s. .

Also there is at least one plant that can make fertilizer from LNG, and others can be built.

As for drugs, which are usually made using precursors from oil derivatives, there are new methods to make those precursors from other means. And some drugs are'nt manufactured locally , but it's possible to import using fuel reserves,or by converting ships to lng.

And since it's under martial law, i assume we will work on rapidly converting our economy to LNG, so as to not be dependent on reserves and increase the living standards .

musername• 12 years ago

100 to 200 g of wheat is not a big bowl, especially if grown to use bigger ammounts.

TheCoelacanth• 12 years ago

Drinking water scarcity is simply not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future. The amount of water we need for drinking is just far too small. The much more imminent danger is a shortage of water for irrigation leading to a food shortage.

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

What kinds of disasters do you think about?
Let me take the most likely one: the nuclear winter case.

The nuclear winter is pretty low in my list. Financial meltdown and climate change are at the top.

wanda• 12 years ago

Yeah I can't take this article seriously. It reads as though written by some nutrition/health food fanatic who distorts reality to suit their conclusions. There's just something not quite sane in the writing.

    The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually.

I mean this is nitpicky, but what?

Ntrails3• 12 years ago

He's decided that nuclear winter involves a very very small nuclear war hitting a few large cities. Which means the vast majority of humans live.

If US and Russia unload, say, 75% of their arsenals I'm pretty sure that is inaccurate. Not to mention there seems to be no consideration of the radiation levels in various foods?

chiph• 12 years ago

A pandemic should be in there somewhere. The CDC gamed their response to one a few years ago, and results were mixed for North America.

IndianAstronaut4• 12 years ago

Remote learning and remote working could drastically cut down on pandemic spreads.

lultimouomo• 12 years ago

You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty. It’s all the same! It’s just the spices.

We should really stop with this BS. There are a lot of delicious ways to cook vegetables; but a veggie patty does NOT taste like a sausage one. I'd bet the second part of the sentence applies to insect as well. I'm not sure I'm ready to find out about the first part.

hcarvalhoalves3• 12 years ago

Some insects are delicious. Tarantulas taste like shrimp or lobster, without all the shell [1]. Ants taste great with flour [2]. You can't tell the difference after cooking and spicing.

[1] http://www.thedailymeal.com/deep-fried-tarantula

[2] http://flavorsofbrazil.blogspot.com.br/2011/11/recipe-ica-fa...

ceejayoz2• 12 years ago

Congratulations, you've contested the point by completely ignoring it.

lisper5• 12 years ago

The Typhoon restaurant (http://typhoon.biz/) serves insects. They have a whole insect section on their menu. I tried the Taiwanese crickets once. They were quite tasty: crunchy and nutty. I highly recommend giving it a whirl if you're in Santa Monica.

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 12 years ago

Tarantulas aren't insects.

pawn• 12 years ago

I'm amazed at how often I hear "you can't taste the difference" with something that obviously tastes different. Its like a color blind person saying "you can't tell the difference between red and green" instead of "I can't tell the difference". I can taste the difference between and specify about a dozen types of animals. How in the world does anyone think I won't be able to tell a veggie patty or insect patty from any of them?

sanderjd5• 12 years ago

I always think this about the soda taste tests, where people say they prefer Coca-Cola, but then prefer Pepsi in the blind taste tests, as if they couldn't taste the difference. They don't taste the same at all...

pmoriarty5• 12 years ago

There's a difference between thinking you can tell the difference or convincing others that you can tell the difference, and actually being able to tell the difference.

Nowhere is this difference more strikingly demonstrated than in the studies that have been done on wine tasting.[1]

An example from the article:

  Hodgson isn't alone in questioning the science of
  wine-tasting. French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of
  labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57
  volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a
  table wine, the other for a grand cru.

  The tasters were fooled.

  When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more
  positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When
  the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely
  to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.

[1] - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tas...

jobu• 12 years ago

Every different brand of sausage patty tastes a little different regardless of the meat(s) used. The real difference with meat and veggie is the texture. Sometimes veggie patties lack umami, but many newer brands have even been able to fix that too.

Based on my experience, it can be hard to tell if a patty is meat or veg if the quantities are small (too small to feel the texture difference).

pavel_lishin5• 12 years ago

I agree; it would be much more accurate to say that they both taste equally good, not that they taste the same.

Boca Burger patties taste absolutely nothing like meat, but I still like the taste.

Alex3917• 12 years ago

While mushrooms haven't been plants since the early 80s, if you were to use chicken-of-the-woods the right way then you'd be hard pressed to notice the difference. Especially if you mixed it with something like tempeh in the right proportions.

IndianAstronaut4• 12 years ago

The quorn line of products made with mushrooms is very similar in taste to chicken. Best imitation meat I have tasted.

mathattack• 12 years ago

I think it's all a matter of context.

Right now? I can taste the difference between a garden burger and a beef cheeseburger. If there is a global food shortage, the difference matters less.

hawleyal2• 12 years ago

That's what you pick out as objectionable in the story?

wahsd• 12 years ago

"...an invasive water mold ... reached Ireland, where, '... four out of ten Irish ate no solid food except potatoes, and … the rest were heavily dependent on them.'

Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop . http://ensia.com/voices/its-time-to-rethink-americas-corn-sy...

Retric• 12 years ago

(roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens. So, a 50% drop in corn production would not have nearly the impact you might think.

Also, during the potato famine Ireland was forced to export a lot of food which made everything far worse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#mediavie...

Note: Yield per acer does not stay down for that long but acerage under production does.

qwerta• 12 years ago

Imagine if something were to arise that took out the corn crop

There would still be plenty of food to go around. Problem was that British did not allowed people to eat corn.

Wildgoose• 12 years ago

Rubbish. There was famine across the whole of Europe. The government imported millet to feed people and militant Irish Nationalists called it "Peel's Brimstone" (it's yellow, remember) and claimed that those eating it would put their immortal souls in danger.

Yes, they could have done more. But that doesn't mean they actively plotted to starve people as modern Irish Nationalists like to claim.

yabs4• 12 years ago

maybe we'd be better off? so much corn (and byproducts) not a good things for us.

yabs4• 12 years ago

sorry, i meant, "so much corn--not a good thing for us"

aikah• 12 years ago

Apocalypse means "revelation".

I hate when people use that word like it means "the end of society as we know it",or like it's "madmax time" or something.

Apocalypse is of religious nature.It has nothing to do with a "global catastrophe.".

Aren't scientists supposed to be smarter than the rest of us?How can they continue to spread that non-sense?

PS:I'm not religious.But the word Apocalypse has a specific meaning.

umsm• 12 years ago

The meaning of words evolve and are adapted. It clearly refers to "an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale"

jtreminio• 12 years ago

a great disaster : a sudden and very bad event that causes much fear, loss, or destruction

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apocalypse

sanderjd5• 12 years ago

Is there another word that better (or even similarly) captures what "apocalypse" has come to mean? I don't know of one, and I think it is a useful thing to have a word for. It is almost never worth fighting a word's widely-understood meaning. (Although I was definitely disappointed when dictionaries added an alternate definition of "literally" as meaning "figuratively"...)

defen• 12 years ago

The technically correct term is "eschaton", but no one uses that and everyone uses "apocalypse". I don't think this is a battle worth fighting.

Jongseong2• 12 years ago

Language is a slippery thing, and meanings of words change over time. Here's a short story illustrating how absurd it would be if we insisted all the words were used in their original sense: http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/blog/2014/08/quest-pos... "The lord, the bishop, and the harlot: an etymological fallacy"

pmoriarty5• 12 years ago

While we're on the subject of pet-peeves, I hate it when people speak of an "existential threat". That has absolutely nothing to do with Existentialism.[1] What people probably mean when they use that term is "a threat to ___'s existence". "existence" != "existential".

I also hate it when people say "hackers" when the proper term for what they mean is "crackers".[2]

And I hate it when people say "Linux" when they should properly say "GNU/Linux".

But I rarely complain about these pet-peeves of mine, since I recognize that language is a living, changing, growing thing, out of the control of any one person or small group of people, though the French language police[3] and dictionary publishers may disagree.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

[2] http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/cracker.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_of_Culture_%28France%...

cowardlydragon3• 12 years ago

Go ahead, submit the last 10,000 posts you've placed on the internet, and then subject them to a group of anal literalists.

To use proper terminology in all domains at all time as all domains rapidly evolve is an impossibility.

If you're smart enough to be anal about these distinctions, you're smart enough to develop an error correction and handling layer.

Jongseong2• 12 years ago

The word "existential" (attested since the late 17th century) was used as an adjective relating to existence long before the birth of Existentialism. In the phrase "existential threat", there is no cause of confusion (unless there is cause to speak of threats relating to Existentialism). So I don't have a problem with this usage.

swamp402• 12 years ago

Most of the advice in the article is a bit silly; however, the question is vitally important.

Most large cities only have 2-3 days worth of food available. If the daily deliveries stop for whatever reason, things will go bad fast.

The best three pieces of advice I ever heard: 1) Get out of the cities. 2) Get out of the cities. 3) Get out of the cities.

personlurking• 12 years ago

It was just yesterday that I was discussing this question with some friends, ie, what do you do if shit hits the fan? Most said 'get out of the city' first so that's reassuring. But the scary part is I don't know how to build a house, cultivate food, nor do I have the property to do so.

pavel_lishin5• 12 years ago

Same here. I live in New York; if shit hit the fan in an hour, I'm not sure how much there is to be gained by leaving. At least here, I know the area, I can expect to stay reasonably warm in the current weather inside my building, I can work together with the neighbors that I know. We have enough food in our kitchen to last us a week, and we could immediately begin to stockpile water. We even have some medical supplies. Hell, there are always rats I could trap and eat if I were willing to risk bioaccumulating some poison.

If I set out for New Jersey, or Connecticut, or even Long Island, I immediately lose shelter, I am limited to the food I can carry on my person, I don't know where the nearest stores or houses are, and I don't know anyone there at all.

The only immediate advantage I can think of is that there would be less people around willing to kill me for my stuff.

Nzen• 12 years ago

James Burke's 1978 TV series, Connections, starts with just that quandry. He starts with the question [what do we do if all the electricity goes out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw) and uses that zombie escape as a path to our bedrock tool: the plow.

The article reminds me a lot of Randall Monroe's What If? site when he answers questions like, [What if all the water disappeared](http://what-if.xkcd.com/103/).

And finally, I have lots of sympathy for the bug eating movement. I would totes eat cricket mcnuggets. But, when I went to buy some insects to make some, all I found was fish bait (unless I rear my own). I felt a bit dizzy and questioned my motives a while, before I remembered that those suppliers are targeting their predominant market.

nate_meurer3• 12 years ago

Yep, just-in-time logistics are highly efficient, at the expense of low inventories.

The oft-repeated advice to vacate cities is complete bullshit. No matter what "countryside" means, there's less food there in almost every case. Go to any small town and what do you find? Smaller grocery stores, with inventories just as tight as in the cities. Same suburban-style communities of people just as unprepared as anyone else.

Emergency provision of supplies is made efficient by the same things as normal delivery logistics: densely clustered populations and major infrastructure, exactly the things that make cities what they are.

Just look that the slow-motion SHTF scenario of the Great Depression of the '30s, when the American countryside was drained of its population, never to recover.

hga10• 12 years ago

While I agree with your general point, outside of course grain growing regions, there were too many things going in the '30s to ascribe the rural depopulation you note to just this.

Biggest example would be the federal government suppressing food production and trying to keep prices high, at the same time the same Department of Agriculture estimated 1/4 of the population was malnourished. As was confirmed by the WWII draft, and I've read that was one of the inputs into the Truman school lunch law.

As an extreme example, see Wickard v. Filburn where in 1942 the Supreme Court ruled the Federal government could prevent you from growing wheat on your own property for your own consumption.

Get back to the price supports, a big problem was an inability for all farmers/farms to make a living on what they could produce. Specialization meant it was much harder to try to provide for yourself everything you needed, and people responded to these incentives and opportunities in more urban areas, real ones at least once WWII production got started and the draft drained the manpower pool.

And of course a large part of this was increased mechanization, which pretty much never stopped replacing farm labor with machines. My parents are from farms and the Silent Generation, so they experienced the tail end of this. And they made very sure to "get off the farm", the work is brutal, a lot more so back then.

swamp402• 12 years ago

I agree food will be a problem anywhere.

I think the advice to get out of the cities stems from the fact that there are about to be tens of thousands of starving people going from house to house looking for food.

And their leaders will have guns, and it will be violent.

In the country, that can be avoided for a time - so you can at least starve in peace.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

Cities often have large elevators full of grain. Much of it is meant to be fed to animals which would no longer make sense in a disaster.

This article is more concerned with the long term. What do we do when the grain runs out?

blisterpeanuts2• 12 years ago

Why wait until after a world apocalypse? Insects are plentiful and nutritious and we should be eating more of them now.

There's plenty of evidence that insects are high quality protein with low fat. In many traditional societies around the world, termites, grubs, grasshoppers, and other creepy crawly things play an important nutritional role.

Years ago, my wife and I read a beautifully illustrated travelogue "Man Eating Bugs" written by a husband-and-wife team who traveled the world to see (and sample) insect cuisine in many cultures. Fascinating stuff.

It's a generally well supported view among paleontologists that primitive humans ate lots of bugs. We were opportunistic foragers from way back. It's only in recent centuries, in "civilized" places, that we have regarded bugs as a repulsive thing to eat.

I would imagine that in and after a nuclear winter, animal and vegetable life would dwindle to a tiny population that would take hundreds if not thousands of years to replenish. Probably we should be caching genetic material, sperm, and seeds of every species in some safe, underground arkology, so that two hundred years after the meltdown, whoever's left can restore some biodiversity.

pmoriarty5• 12 years ago

I have sympathy for insects, and I do not want to harm more of them.

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

There are many seed (and other types of genetic material) banks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

Is a famous one.

chris_va• 12 years ago

In fact, it is happening: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/08/15/340653853/startu...

wyager• 12 years ago

If a major restaurant started using insect based meat products, the irrational public backlash would be tremendous.

IvyMike• 12 years ago

I supported a kickstarter to get these cricket protein energy bars manufactured. You can order a box now.

https://www.exoprotein.com/

To me, they pretty much taste like any other energy bar--in fact, it's kind of a letdown since you want something more exotic.

logfromblammo2• 12 years ago

I raise Tenebrio molitor in a 5-gal plastic bucket, as pet food. I haven't tried cooking them, but eating the live larvae or pupae isn't altogether horrible. With the adults, bits of the exoskeleton, especially the legs and wing covers, get stuck in your teeth, just like with popcorn.

But they aren't very flavorful, either. I'm not sure what I was expecting, really. I think if I blended the suckers, the resulting bland protein paste could be added to practically any recipe, like tofu or ground chicken.

But there is a big problem. The other people in the household have a contagious, irrational prejudice against not only eating beetles, but also knowing that I might be eating them, using the same dishes and utensils that they might be using later. Bugs will only ever be post-catastrophe food for them, because they literally will not even entertain the notion until they are actually facing starvation.

That's why wait.

The only likely path for getting more insect protein into the US food supply is by feeding them to premium organic poultry fowl or egg-layers. So there may be an opportunity there for industrial-scale insect breeders, but I expect any attempts to go a more direct route will generate a backlash bigger than "pink slime".

HeyLaughingBoy4• 12 years ago

by feeding them to premium organic poultry fowl or egg-layers

Which leads me to an anecdote I find interesting. I raise chickens. My older child can immediately tell the taste difference between an egg from one of our chickens that have a varied diet and one from the store. And that's without even seeing them. As soon as you break the eggs open, it's obvious which is which: ours have deep orange yolks vs the pale yellow store bought ones.

tl;dr: eggs from chickens eating bugs and grass taste far different than from chickens raised on cheap feed.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

You need look no further than the folks pushing "Cricket Flour"[1] (which is a weird juxtaposition for me) to see folks eating bugs today, and there was restaurant selling grasshopper tacos in San Francisco but that was stopped when they were unable to get FDA 'food safe' approval for the grasshoppers they were importing.

[1] http://chapul.com/

alecco2• 12 years ago

Soy and other vegetable proteins are the most resource efficient to make. You have to feed insects something, they don't make all aminoacids.

Now bacteria and in particular cyanobacteria, that is the future. That is a 10x performance over current crops.

jschwartzi• 12 years ago

Remind me to kill myself when we're hard up enough as a species that we're eating bacterial slime to survive.

cowardlydragon3• 12 years ago

The degree of cooperation the article assumes is untenable on a global scale. Perhaps more isolated countries could coordinate, or maybe after the initial chaos some coordination could develop...

He ignores that the most plentiful source of food will be other people after a month or so...

vorg• 12 years ago

Yes, based on the litmus test of the recent lack of global cooperation in managing climate change, we can expect developed countries to look after their own citizens only, using their militaries to steal all available food from less developed countries. Immigration-based countries such as the U.S. will be better positioned to convince their citizen base that they owe nothing to other countries peoples by presenting their own population as "representative of the world's ethnic balance", and even as "the subset of the world that God wants to save". Expect to hear "the United States is the Ark of Noah for this day and age" broadcast on U.S. televisions as drone robots march through the Brahmaputra harvesting rice for loading onto ships destined for the U.S. as the local population starve. The leaders of developing nations with nukes such as Russia and India will be given U.S. citizenship en mass, Roman Empire style, in return for control over those weapons. English-language testing will be canceled for Chinese students wanting to study in the U.S., who'll be distributed around colleges in cities all over the U.S. to discourage their parents launching Chinese nukes at them.

Semiapies2• 12 years ago

Well, where "cooperation" is "people kindly send us mushrooms out of the goodness of their collective heart", sure.

North America and Europe paying elevated prices for food from the tropics, now, that could actually work. At least until someone decides it sounds more fun to just invade some of those countries (and ends up spending even more for the privilege).

escape_goat2• 12 years ago

I am going to try to divert your minds away towards some questions that you might not be interested in, but nonetheless could be more productive than the game of hole-poking that this essay invites.

I think many readers will have arrived at a similar set of conclusions, based on whatever assertions or citations may have inspired doubt; for me, it was Pearce's surprise that the world was unable to feed everyone despite having full agricultural production. Perhaps I have greatly misunderstood the matter, but I had believed that problems of famine and chronic hunger were entirely due localized logistic and political problems, and that the world was in fact handily capable of feeding everyone, even with the current (very inefficient) distribution and scale of agricultural production.

This suggests to me that either I am very wrong --- something that does happen --- or that Pearce and Denkenburger might not have done a lot of what one could term 'peripheral' research on the topic they were interested in. This is a situation where two engineers are attempting to problem solve in a domain that might require, at any given turn, significant expertise in chemical or biological processes; or manufacturing processes, for that matter, or logistics, or economics, or international commerce.

Consequently, this comes across as what one might term a 'Dunning-Krueger Study': facile, misinformed "solutions" to misunderstood problems in which the progenitor has an erroneous confidence. Given my own lack of knowledge, it would be hypocritical to label it thusly; the deposition of their suggestions should be placed in the hands of the various relevant domains.

My question is regarding this type of research in general. I imagine the defence of it would be that it (at least) initiates investigation and problem solving, and that it (at least) arrives at useful suggestions, preliminary analyses, and approximate solutions. Does the Dunning-Kruger phase of knowledge have a discernible utility or application? Is there in fact a use or place for such investigations? Are they a form of deceptive mimesis, imitating research in pursuit of resources? Does ignorance of the domain of knowledge ever have a value? If so, how does one identify that one is in a Dunning-Krueger situation, and how should one proceed from there? Can one have knowledge about the meta-domain of Dunning-Krueger situations that allows one to limit or avoid the negative consequences of misjudgement?

It strikes me that perhaps situations analogous to the one in which a hypothetical Peirce and Denkenburger are required to figure out how to feed the entire world after an apocalyptic event are not in fact rare, but actually occur all the time, and that it is a routine problem in design and engineering that one needs to find solutions in a problem domain that one understands poorly or not at all. I have no expertise to support this notion; there is a question mark hanging on the end of the assertion. But one could regard this as occurring in the course of ordinary life as well. How does one systematically make the best possible decisions on the basis of incomplete and possibly erroneous information, given that computation is itself a cost? In that context, a Dunning-Krueger epistemology starts to look like a reasonable strategy.

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

You are over-interpreting the Dunning-Krueger paper.

I also think "mimesis" is the wrong word. They aren't imitating research, they are applying their real actual research and analytical skills in pursuit of resources.

escape_goat2• 12 years ago

You are over-interpreting the Dunning-Krueger paper.

Almost certainly true, as I've never read the actual paper; I've encountered the concept and phenomena in the wild. I take your word for it. If you have a better term for what I am describing, I will be happy to learn it.

Their research seems to lack introspection and fundamental rigor. Did you get a different impression than that, from the essay? My contention (if mimesis was my thesis) is that it is research insofar as it carries out the activity of research, but that it carries out that activity without being truly informed by the material of the research; process disassociated from content. However, it was a question, not an assertion; I've no opinion.

hga10• 12 years ago

Let me elevate a comment in a subtread to the top level: nuclear winter is bunk, real effects would be on the scale of historical volcanic eruptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8768412

BUT, if you want a disaster of that scale, nature will be happy to provide! Just have a big meteorite hit an ocean; hitting a big and deep body of water is critical, because otherwise "too much" of the heat radiates back into space. That's a big reason the vast majority of fielded nuclear weapons never got very big, there effects doesn't scale well.

There's some good science fiction that covers this and how to respond, email me at my contact address if you want a recommendation that is necessarily a spoiler.

lbenes2• 12 years ago

So the article inspired me to try some white pine tea for the first time. I'm sipping it right now, and it tastes quite good. If you live in the north try it out.

Here's the recipe that I followed: http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-Safe-Healthy-Pine-Needle...

rglover• 12 years ago

Good lord:

Ponderosa Pine; also known as Blackjack, Western Yellow, Yellow, and Bull Pine. This pine contains isocupressic acid, which is known to cause abortions in cattle.

lbenes2• 12 years ago

Nope, definitely was White Pine, 5 needles on each sprig and black bark. Ponderosa Pine doesn't grow natively in the North-East. Oddly, people do make tea out of Yellow Pine too! Give you an idea, this stuff is pretty good. Going help myself to a second glass once I'm sure I don't have any weird reactions.

[1] http://rockymountainbushcraft.blogspot.com/2012/11/rocky-mou...

carsonreinke• 12 years ago

Nice to see Michigan Tech!

Adam503• 12 years ago

Braiiiiins, of course. Jeez.

crabhapple• 12 years ago

The Great Famine, as it came to be known, could have been avoided in any number of ways, not least by ceasing the export of food from Ireland to Britain. But the British government failed to take effective action.

"...the British government failed to take effective action"

That's one way of putting it!

What to Eat After the Apocalypse

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