Connected to this: Le Guin also wrote "The Lathe of Heaven". I wrote a review of it here on LW. It's a novel that seems entirely about how utopia will always have a cost, even when there's no obvious reason why, as a fundamentally karmic payoff, though it's also not always pessimistic about improvements being possible.

The robots didn't open the eggs box and individually put them in the rack inside the fridge, obviously crap, not buying the hype. /s

On one hand, true, on the other, would it be then understandable anyway when it was all written by possibly superhuman AIs working at certainly superhuman speeds without supervision?

Which I think correlates with the above, it makes sense being more prone to worry and dissatisfaction with the status quo would do that.

I think if you start having meta-priors, then what, you gotta have meta-meta-priors and so on? At some point that's just having more basic, fundamental priors that embrace a wider range of possibilities. The question is what would those look like, or if being general enough doesn't descend into a completely uniform (or very little informative) prior that is essentially of no help; you can think anything, but the trade-off is it's always going to be inefficient.

Appreciate that this means:

• the US thought that somehow the smart thing to do with an angry and paranoid rival nuclear power was play games of chicken while going "come at me bro"
• the USSR's response to this was to set up deterrence... by deploying people to secretly spy on the US guys to allow them to know beforehand if an attack was launched, so they could retaliate... which would have no deterrent effect if the US didn't know.

It's a wonder we're still here.

Well, there are attempts at "paleo diets" though for the most part they seem like unscientific fads. However it's also true that we've been at the agricultural game for long enough that we have adapted to that as well (case in point: lactose tolerance).

Or maybe our ancestors had to eat these things because they were efficient ways to get protein and fat into their bodies, and we consume enough of that already and too much of the bad things we do not fully understand that they also contain.

That doesn't convince me much, we mostly consume enough (or too much) of that via animal products in the first place. Well, putting aside seed oils, but their entire point is to be a cheap replacement for an animal saturated fat (butter) most of the time. Our diets tend to have "too much" of virtually anything, be it cholesterol from animal products or refined carbs from grains. We just eat too much. The non-adaptive part there is "we were never meant to deal with infinite food at our fingertips and so we never bothered evolving strong defences against that". Maybe a few centuries of evolution under these conditions would change that.

I think the point is less that the tribes didn't go vegetarian because this was better for them, and more that if our species subsisted for hundreds of thousands of years on a mixed diet that included meat, odds are our metabolism adapted to that.

Additionally, India might be a relevant case study here, because vegetarianism seems to have been common there for a long time.

The thing is, that likely only happened once civilisation went agricultural, and we know agricultural diet (with a lot less meat for peasants) was a big downgrade and people became significantly more sickly as a result. So it's a useful case study but not likely to really change the point.

Vegans/vegetarians had over twice the odds of depression (OR ~2.14) compared to omnivores

I would be a bit leery about selection effects here too. What kind of person becomes vegan? One who is generally very aware about suffering or social problems, or possibly very neurotic about what they eat. Sometimes both. If you're the kind who stops eating meat because they feel that farming and killing animals is monstrous, and then still have to live in a world which keeps perpetuating that, not to mention however many other things you also feel are similarly monstrous, aren't you going to be more prone to depression than the average person who may not worry much about any of that?

Yeah I've got no doubt it can be done, though as I said I don't think it's terribly dangerous yet. But my point is that you can build perfectly well lots of current systems without running afoul of this particular red line; self-replicating entities within the larger context of an evolutionary algorithm is not the same as letting loose a smart virus that copies itself through the internet.