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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29605 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Sure, I'm laundry by hand all the way. For example, I've genuinely come around to thinking that penicillin was a mistake (because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).

But that won't stop a good chunk of people from saying they hate doing laundry already and 'fulfillment' is lame and for tryhards

Is the biological arms race not overstated? There are strains of a few diseases resistant to some common antibiotics, but there’s backup antibiotics, and backup to the backup antibiotics, and etc, and those strains are generally not dominant, anyways- they’re mostly found in hospitals(where they are indeed a problem) and the general public doesn’t have to worry about them much at all.

(because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).

I think this is in large part due to human mismanagement. If we used antibiotics sensibly and judiciously the superbug problem would not be an issue at all - but instead we decided to just dump them into all of our animal feed and hand them out like candy for incredibly trivial problems.

In an arms race, your enemy's tactics change to something more deadly, because you've left whatever Schelling point had let two sentient competitors settle on less-deadly weapons. The end state is some new equilibrium where war is more deadly to both sides.

In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, our enemies' tactics change to something equally or potentially less deadly, because optimal virulence decreases for a disease that risks eradication as soon as it's noticed and because constraining an optimization problem (especially with a constraint as extreme as "evade custom-targeted poisons and the human immune system at the same time) never makes the optimum higher. The end state is one where the very best most evolved "superbug" bacteria, the ones immune to any known antibiotic ... are thereby back to the "no antibiotics" status quo at most, not deadlier.

We call them "superbugs" only because the status quo where every germ was that dangerous was just that awful, not because it would somehow be even more awful for only a fraction to again be that dangerous.

For example, I've genuinely come around to thinking that penicillin was a mistake (because its' widespread adoption inadvertently launched a never-ending biological arms race).

never-ending biological arms race was already happening, penicillin give humans powerful weapon that gets less powerful but is still really powerful and unlocked entire piles of things that can be used

both me and my brother would be dead without antibiotics and thousands (millions?) of other people as well

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