“Natural is better” is a valuable heuristic
tl;dr Until we understand how complex and chaotic systems[1] in nature work, “natural is better” is a valuable heuristic. It applies wherever science does not understand things well enough, especially when the stakes are high.
If you throw a stick into a forest it will biodegrade quickly and not affect the forest much; this is because forests are used to sticks.[2] Throw a piece of plastic in the forest and you will affect the forest a lot more. Not because plastic is inherently bad; but because the forest has not evolved to deal with plastic and will thus have a harder time breaking it down. There’s nothing inherently unhealthy or destructive about plastic, in the same way that there is nothing inherently unhealthy or destructive about sticks: natural systems in the forest are just not used to coping with the former.
Some other things natural biological systems tend to not be used to: nuclear radiation, the vacuum of space, some pesticides, some GMOs, some fertilizers, a global rising of temperatures, asteroid impacts, supernovae, acidification of the oceans, sudden changes in atmospheric composition, etc. The status quo of life on Earth has faced all these things at various moments throughout history. They are examples of perturbations in a very complex system, but, like plastic, they are not inherently bad; they are just things biology has to adapt to.
I feel like this is a fact that both “natural is always better!” types and “I’ll roll my eyes at that” types forget. Here’s how I see it:
Science is a cool new trick the monkeys figured out which lets them make maps of reality that are so accurate that they know where the levers are, and can pull them in a way that makes the universe behave a certain way. Structure atoms right and the universe will, among many other things, do math for you, generate photons, detect an atom, establish probabilities, store information, land you on the moon, change states of matter, …
Sometimes, however, science doesn’t know where all the levers are: sometimes systems, like forests, are so complex and chaotic that pressing one lever might set off a cascade and bring about a whole slew of unintended consequences. In principle, give science enough time and it will figure out how to press the right levers safely. But science is a rather new thing and the amount of unknowns in nature is vast.
Science has the potential to be much better than nature. We know what levers to pull for a person to be immune to malaria, and pulling those levers on a human puts them in a healthier state than they would be naturally. At the end of the day, understanding the universe well enough not to mess it up when you pull its levers makes the artificial better and healthier than the natural. Science triumphs over nature in the long run. But in the meantime, “natural is better” is often a valuable heuristic.
Earth is under siege: science is still blind to most things and the road is long to find all the levers. Here are a few excessively complicated natural systems scientists are trying to figure out right now: cancer (biology), alignment (programming), particle behavior (quantum dynamics), protein folding (chemistry), aging (biology), the brain (neuroscience), the mind (psychology), the Riemann hypothesis (math), the Fermi Paradox (a whole slew of disciplines), …
“Natural is better” as a heuristic
Medical trials can take decades because there is a lot at stake in medicine; namely, the health of a human being. Similarly, there are other natural systems that we do not understand and that we should be very careful with. Making the universe do the type of math which runs artificial general intelligence, for example, sounds like something with a lot of interconnected levers that we should understand perfectly before pulling. The universe is a ridiculously dangerous booby trap and we should avoid rash moves.
When the stakes are high and you don’t understand how a forest works, it’s safer to throw a stick in than it is to throw plastic. This is why I sympathise with ludites and other cave-dwellers: it’s very easy to catch a glimpse at what we don’t know and come to the conclusion that frankly we’re just monkeys who, through a strange cascade of curious circumstances, found themselves knee-deep in gasoline with nothing but Prometheus matches in our hands.[3] Toby Ord was right when he described our current position as being a precipice, and I don’t blame the people who want us to turn back on our tracks.
Where this heuristic applies in practice
We know how to make safe nuclear energy. It takes decades of careful research, but we also know how to make safe medicine and GMOs. Where would this heuristic actually apply? The heuristic mostly works, I think, in how we structure our lives. There’s a general consensus on LessWrong and elsewhere that a whole plethora of problems are caused today, mostly due to an overabundance of superstimuli. As much as the line might be overused, technology has supplied us with a whole lot of “cookies”: things that are unhealthy but that we consume anyway because they are specifically designed to cater to our evolution-derived inputs. “Natural is better” would mean structuring your life, at least in part, based on how your body is designed to live its life; don’t fragment your mind by paying attention to byte-sized content; don’t get riled up in the carefully designed polarized world of “reality TV politics”[4]; don’t eat unhealthily or avoid sports. In a way the entire mission of rationality is just that: patching the parts of our mind that are not well-suited for the modern world. I don’t know how helpful it would be for you to read up on how our ancestors lived, but there sure is a lot of content on LessWrong to explain where your mind is misguiding you for the only reason that the environment it had adapted to has drastically changed. How similar is your life to that of a homo sapiens from 12,000 years ago? If you made it more similar, would that help you? This is a case where “natural is better” makes sense.
Thanks to Matthew Barnett for pointing out that I hadn’t supplied a useful-enough example of this heuristic in practice.
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Google:
A complex system is an arrangement of a great number of related but various elements with intricate relationships and interconnections.
A chaotic system is distinguished by sensitive dependence on initial conditions and by having an evolution through phase space that appears to be quite random.
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[Citation needed]
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“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five”—Carl Sagan
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This idea is from Tim Urban in his book What’s our Problem? Here’s how he puts it:
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I do not endorse Cixin Liu’s dark forest hypothesis.
You gave the example that throwing plastic into a forest could be worse than throwing a stick into the forest. Do you have any other clear examples where this heuristic applies? (Where the example itself is not speculative.)
In practice, I think this heuristic tells us that we should be very slow to adopt medical treatments, that we should reject GMOs, reject nuclear energy, and stop building new infrastructure on unsettled land. Do you think these recommendations should be followed? If not, presumably you think we have good reasons not to trust the heuristic in these cases; but if that’s the case, then it seems like the heuristic can be relatively easily overturned. I’m not convinced it should be our guiding consideration for something like AI alignment.
Thanks for the feedback! The most useful arena I can think for this heuristic would be in how well your life aligns with the life your mind and body was adapted to live. There are a lot of places, probably, where making it align better will advantage you.
I would agree with the body of this post to an extent, but the main problem is that nearly every instance of the heuristic I see actually in use are in situations where it is inapplicable.
Examples:
Expecting small fragments of natural systems to be better in an artificial environment such as plants in enclosed office spaces. There are benefits from some plants in general, but a few can produce unnaturally high concentrations of allergens or toxic insecticidal chemicals in such cases, in close proximity to people sharing the same space for an unnaturally large fraction of every day.
Applying “natural is better” to cases like medicine where typical natural outcomes are to die or suffer lasting injury.
Continuing to treat some substances as “natural” when they have been artificially processed and concentrated to an extent that never occurs in nature (such as herbal essences).
With that in mind I think that it is a heuristic that is heavily overused, and should be treated with extreme suspicion.
Thanks! I’m a big fan of the “Biases are actually heuristics” genre and this is a nice clean example.
The whole concept of a sport is not very natural.
It’s closer to natural than not moving is. Simulations of the natural work too, it’s not hard to trick your limbic system.
“natural is better”
I disagree with your proposed heuristic for two reasons,
I think it is to poorly defined to be a good decision-making guide (Heuristic)
By my definition I think it would guide you to worse decisions not better
To poorly defined:
Natural—existing in or derived from nature; not made or caused by humankind
Better—more desirable, satisfactory, or effective
There are two issues in definition, the first, more minor, issue is in “Natural”.
It’s far too broad, for example where does the line stop for an herbal remedy? At the wild herb, the cultivated variety, a dried leaf, an extract or tea from the leaves or a pill manufactured from the identified active ingredient?
The second more serious issue is in “Better”. Better requires a direction, the question must be asked better for who or what? In your wooden stick verses plastic object example, its true a wooden stick is better at decomposing in a woodland. However, if we didn’t want it to decompose, for example if it were a fencepost we were talking about a plastic version would be preferable (all other factors being equal).
Actually, a bad heuristic:
My understanding of what you meant by your heuristic would be
“The closer your choice matches what would be found or happen with the minimum of human intervention the better for your health / wealth”.
There are no criteria given for when to apply this heuristic, making it a poor heuristic, however using your own examples and applying the above heuristic to all of them:
Media consumption – avoid anything not mouth to mouth – Result: Happy and ignorant 😊
Fuel choice – Use wood or animal power not nuclear – Result: significantly more poverty, health issues and animal cruelty
No GMOs – Only eat the non-bred ancestral variety of plants / animals (Aegilops tauschii, Bos primigenius) – Result: Very very expensive food.
No pesticides – Result: Very expensive food
No artificial fertilizers – Result: Very expensive food
Weapon choice – Clubs and slings only – Result: killed immediately by non-complying competitors, great tv.
Technology use – No computers / cars / internet or anything dependant on that etc – Result: Ostracism and eventual starvation.
Food consumption – eat as much as you can as often as you can – Result: Obesity
Type of foods to eat – Pottage only (ideally with self-caught wild game, many wild herbs gathered and grain you grew organically) – Boredom, Poverty, good health 😊
That’s not the natural heuristic. By nature, humans have hunger as a guiding emotion to tell them when to eat.
You are quite right. I was thinking of the behaviour of humans while food is scarce and the human permanently hungry, not in the modern context.
The heuristic applies whenever you have good reason to think science does not understand a natural system (not human, as you said) well enough to control it safely (and thereby make it artificial, human.) We know how to make everything you mentioned, safely.
I am not at all skeptical of technology; I’m only pointing out that there are many things that remain too complex for us to affect with certainty we won’t set off an unexpected cascade. The point would be to boost science so that we eventually do understand those things well enough to make (better) artificial versions of them. In the meantime, don’t be surprised when nature backfires on you.
Do you see what I mean?
Okay, I think I see your point. Could I summarise your heuristic as “Don’t tear down Chesterton’s fence until you are absolutely sure you know why it was there”?
A defence of “tradition” rather than of “nature”?
Why pick that arbitrary point in our evolution? My ancestors 12k years ago could have been subsistence farmers who toiled all day but ate a lot of calories. Could be cold climate hunter-gatherers who fasted intermittently between giant feasts, and burned most of these calories to zero, trying to secure a next big kill. Could have been tropical climate hunter-gatherers who did light hunting and gathering 2-3 hours a day, ate small meals, and played lazily all day.
And this only takes into account the ancestors from exactly 12k years ago. What about ancestors from 6k years ago? What about 200 k years ago?
To make matters more complex, different ancestries would call for different lifestyle and diet. Our natural metabolism, lactose tolerance, muscularity, fat % and countless other factors vary wildly between ancestries. A lifestyle/diet fit for a descendant of the Innuit would not be fit for a descenant of the X!hosa and vice-versa.
Human evolution is an ongoing process that takes different populations into wildly different directions, so it is not obvious what is the “natural environment” for each human, unless they are literally living a stone-age life right now, in absolute genetic and technological isolation.
12,000 years ago is the approximate date for the appearance of agriculture. I mean that our lifestyle fundamentally changed with agriculture, and evolution did not have much time to adapt.
“To make matters more complex, different ancestries would call for different lifestyle and diet. Our natural metabolism, lactose tolerance, muscularity, fat % and countless other factors vary wildly between ancestries.”—That may be true but that’s not the point. The lifestyle of an Innuit ancestor was probably much more similar to that of an Ethiopian ancestor than either of them are to our own lifestyle. The 21rst century is really weird, that’s my point.
what Im getting at, is that while the evidence for oldest agriculture is from around 12k-10k, this is not the same as saying that your particular ancestors come from a line that used agriculture for solid 10k years straight (unless you are from very specific Anatolian or Iraq genetic lines).
It could easily be the case that your ancestors had been eating grain and dairy for 500 generations, or maybe just 10 generations or less.
One example of what Im talking about is lactose tolerance which allows one to consume dairy. It is a mutation that is only roughly 8k years old, and thats only if you are of Anatolian/Turkish ancestry.
Another would be protein madness, which rarely happens among Sub-Polar people, but affects Europeans who moved North.
Similarly, our genetic predisposition towards certain reactions to gluten, high-protein diet, high fructose diet, even alcohol vary wildly.
In most cases, when we think of “modern” diet and lifestyle, we are basically thinking of the industrialized, grain and dairy Anglo-Saxon diet and a life of small caloric surplus over a relatively modest caloric expenditure. Which affects you different if you indeed are of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and your ancestors had been eating cheese and bread for at least 6k years, while slowly reducing the amount of labor needed to create it.
Its going to hit you differently if your ancestors were Sub-Polar peoples who subsisted on high-fat/zero carb diet, or came from a tropical jungle where they subsisted on high-sugar fruit, low fat meat and minimum labor to procure it.
Humans are 99.9% genetically similar. I don’t care about the specifics. That’s not the point.
Feedback much appreciated! Also I have no idea how to tag this.