Rewire Meaningless Addictions To Become A Life Long Learner

I have been saying this for over two decades because I did it. 

Dopamine is just a neurotransmitter; how we use it is up-to us. 

Rewire your curiosity. Neuroscience research shows that curiosity and impulsivity share remarkable overlaps in their neural substrates. The same brain circuits that make you compulsively check your phone can make you compulsively learn new things. When you experiment with new ideas or explore unfamiliar topics, you’re creating a positive version of a variable reward schedule: you don’t know what will work, what you’ll discover, or how it will feel, and that uncertainty feels rewarding.

- More Here

Scientists Are Tracking Worrying Declines in Insects—and the Birds That Feast on Them

In fact, 90 percent of the more than 10,700 known bird species rely on insects for food during at least part of their life cycle. Even the most dedicated seed-eating songbirds must eat insects and other arthropods, that many-legged group of creatures that includes spiders and millipedes, to produce eggs, to grow new feathers and to feed their young. Without insects, in other words, they wouldn’t survive. 

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People may not be motivated to save the insects for their own sake, but a world without insects is a world without birds. It’s a world where no college student will hear the fluty song of a white-throated sparrow across a mountain lake and have her life changed. It’s a world where nature offers no song to the rising sun. It’s a silent spring. 

In the long term, it would become something even worse. “Without insects, everything dies: all mammals, all reptiles, all birds and even humans,” Ware says. “If you want to conserve any of those other things, including us, you should want to conserve insects.”

- More Here

Personally, I learned about this couple of years ago and the change I made was to turn off the patio lights. Living in the woods, I used to leave the lights on all night but I learned that killed so many insects. 

Obviously, I never use any pesticides nor do I classify some random plants as "weeds" and destroy them.  

What We Still Get Wrong About Psychopaths

While the idea of psychopathy as a “brain disorder” has a long history and has been studied using various technologies, it wasn’t until the year 2000 that scientists began to rigorously test it using structural and functional MRI methods. Since then, dozens of MRI studies have been published, yet the most reasonable conclusion to draw from this research is that no reliable evidence has emerged to corroborate the idea that psychopathy—as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL)—is correlated with brain abnormalities of any kind.

Overall, the experimental results are predominantly nulls with a few statistically significant but inconsistent effects (often in opposing directions), which might be better explained as a byproduct of confounding variables unrelated to psychopathy, such as substance misuse, medication, or head trauma.

This conclusion raises an important question: If there has never been any clear evidence of brain abnormalities in psychopathic persons, why do so many scientists keep portraying psychopathy as a neurodevelopmental disorder?

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Of course, it is inherently difficult to determine whether the systematic omission of null effects from the review literature is an act of scientific spin or simply an honest mistake of overlooking null effects, or a mixture of both. And perhaps it does not matter what the reason is because, whether the problem boils down to an issue with scientific spin or honest mistakes, the reality is the same: For the past two decades forensic practitioners and legal decision-makers would have been misled if they had followed due diligence and relied on the review literature when seeking information about neuroimaging research about psychopathy. The good news is that in the past years, we have seen the publication of high-quality review studies, where authors are now paying more attention to the extent of nulls.

However, even as the review literature is slowly correcting, readers should be aware that spin about the brain-disorder view of psychopathy is not a problem limited to the scientific peer-reviewed literature. It is arguably more rampant in public media, including op-eds and journalistic interviews, as well as in popular books about psychopathy, sometimes written by leading scientists. A search on YouTube and TikTok will readily yield hundreds of videos (amassing millions of views) where experts are explaining how psychopathy is caused by a brain abnormality, and it is not uncommon for TV documentaries about psychopathy to include a segment with MRI research.

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Similarly, the book The Psychopath Inside by James Fallon (from 2013) conveys an admittedly absorbing story about how Fallon himself, a neuroscientist, accidentally discovered that he was a psychopath by studying his own MRIs. Lastly, in The Psychopath Whisperer by Kent Kiehl (from 2014), the narrative centers around neuroimaging research on psychopathic persons, of which the author, a leading expert, writes that the “consistency of their [psychopathic persons’] brain abnormalities never ceased to amaze me.”

The ideas conveyed in these popular books are, of course, scientifically untenable, and they arguably border on sheer make-believe. While they are undoubtedly entertaining, they come across as a form of spin that ends up doing a disservice to forensic practitioners and legal decision-makers as they perpetuate scientifically misleading views. 

- More Here

This is how science works - constantly correcting the past wrongs. 

This is from 2014, I was fascinated by James Fallon's work that I posted on this blog too. Plus, I shared this story with so many people.  I was wrong. Science is correcting it now. 

There is a new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser which is making a serious impact now. 

I have theory brewing inside me for a few years now and I will post it soon. 

Habitat Destruction & The Extinction Debt

My dear Sapiens; I will see, when I see you. 

And yeah, I am part of this moronic species who celebrates self-destruction. 

An important cause of extinction of any species is the destruction of the habitat that it needs to survive.

From Wiki: 

The term extinction debt was first used in 1994 in a paper by David Tilman, Robert May, Clarence Lehman and Martin Nowak, although Jared Diamond used the term "relaxation time" to describe a similar phenomenon in 1972.

In ecology, extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to events in the past. The phrases dead clade walking and survival without recovery express the same idea.

Extinction debt occurs because of time delays between impacts on a species, such as destruction of habitat, and the species' ultimate disappearance. For instance, long-lived trees may survive for many years even after reproduction of new trees has become impossible, and thus they may be committed to extinction. Technically, extinction debt generally refers to the number of species in an area likely to become extinct, rather than the prospects of any one species, but colloquially it refers to any occurrence of delayed extinction.

Extinction debt may be local or global, but most examples are local as these are easier to observe and model. It is most likely to be found in long-lived species and species with very specific habitat requirements (specialists). Extinction debt has important implications for conservation, as it implies that species may become extinct due to past habitat destruction, even if continued impacts cease, and that current reserves may not be sufficient to maintain the species that occupy them. Interventions such as habitat restoration may reverse extinction debt.

1994 paper by David Tilman, Robert May, Clarence Lehman and Martin Nowak:

Abstract

Habitat destruction is the major cause of species extinctions. Dominant species often are considered to be free of this threat because they are abundant in the undisturbed fragments that remain after destruction. Here we describe a model that explains multispecies coexistence in patchy habitats4 and which predicts that their abundance may be fleeting. Even moderate habitat destruction is predicted to cause time-delayed but deterministic extinction of the dominant competitor in remnant patches. Further species are predicted to become extinct, in order from the best to the poorest competitors, as habitat destruction increases. More-over, the more fragmented a habitat already is, the greater is the number of extinctions caused by added destruction. Because such extinctions occur generations after fragmentation, they represent a debt - a future ecological cost of current habitat destruction.

 

Beauty Happens - What If Animals Find Beauty In The World, Just Like We Do?

 

Today, we are comfortable describing these animals as having self-awareness, complex emotions, language-like communication, and even culture, but we hesitate to say they have a sense of beauty.

Perhaps that is because our ideas about beauty have been shaped by the philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment. Back then, beauty was conceived as a rarefied property best appreciated by mostly disinterested intellectual observers. That nose-in-the-air, art-for-art’s-sake concept of beauty no longer holds much sway in a culture that recognises the potential for beauty in pretty much anything, from classical art to windblown plastic bags. But Enlightenment thinking left behind a habit of regarding aesthetic experiences as distinct from other pleasures. Animals could hardly be expected to share them.

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Studies on whether other animals share these sensibilities mostly involve primates, rats, and a few test-amenable bird species. Chimpanzees seem to share our fondness for the colour red and for curved objects; newborn junglefowl soon develop a preference for symmetry. Even so, one can imagine that aesthetic sensibilities have far-reaching evolutionary roots, which go beyond tested species. Choosing mates is an obvious context: some researchers suggest that symmetry is generally a marker of good health. Another context is risk avoidance: jagged, angular objects are often dangerous. More broadly, complexity tends to reward a sense of curiosity. Richard Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, suggests that beauty demands ‘prolonged social and sensory engagement’. That engagement may have clear evolutionary benefits: an animal that lingers on a flowering tree’s loveliness might have a better chance of remembering its location when fruiting season comes.

We are even capable of finding beauty in ideas

To Prum, animals can only take aesthetic pleasure in those entities with which they have coevolved : wood thrushes and their layered, flute-like courtship songs, for example, or bumblebees and the pinks of wild roses. After countless generations of evaluation and choice, those stimuli are now entrained in their brains. Prum also thinks humans are unique in their ability to project tastes from one domain onto another, as when a predilection for colours that coevolved with fruit are projected onto the hues of a sunset.

- More Here and it was the them of 2017 Max's Holiday Card

The Rise Of Nazism & End Of Animosity Between Europe’s Catholics and Protestants

In the middle of the 20th century, a prolonged animosity came to an end. For more than four centuries, the enmity between Catholics and Protestants, known to theologians as the two confessions, had been one of the organising principles of European life. But, then, it stopped.

To grasp just how revolutionary this inter-Christian peace was, it’s worth remembering what came before it. Because the mutual hatred between the confessions shaped not only the early modern era, when gruesome acts of violence like St Bartholomew’s Day (1572) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) tore Europe apart. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism remained powerful forces well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and shaped social and political life. The most extreme case was Germany, where the Protestant majority in 1871 unleashed an aggressive campaign of persecution against the Catholic minority. For seven years, state authorities expelled Catholic orders, took over Catholic educational institutions, and censored Catholic publications.

In the Netherlands, Protestant crowds violently attacked Catholic processions; in Austria, a popular movement called ‘Away from Rome’ began a (failed) campaign in 1897 to eradicate Catholicism through mass conversion. Catholics, for their part, were just as hostile to Protestants. In France, Catholic magazines and sermons blamed Protestants for treason, some even called for stripping them of citizenship. Business associations, labour unions and even marching bands were often divided across confessional lines.

Even on an everyday level, it still was common into the 20th century for neighbourhoods, parties and magazines to be strictly Catholic or Protestant. Prominent politicians and lay writers routinely blamed the other confession for backwardness, subversion and sexual perversity. A prominent German historian even claimed, in the 1860s, that Catholics and Protestants were descendants of different races.

But then, by the 1950s, this mutual disdain ended.

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Why, then, did so many Europeans abandon these divisions within just a few decades? The answer lies in the 1930s, and especially the rise of Nazism.

The Nazis are generally remembered today for their extreme racism, imperialism and genocidal violence. But during their early years, their message often revolved around economic and gendered themes. And both echoed the concerns of many Christians. In the economic sphere, they promised a crusade against socialism and its more radical version, communism, and called on workers and employers to cooperate with each other in harmonious inequality. In the sphere of gender relations, the Nazis insisted on separation and inequality between the sexes, and used welfare policies to push women out of the workforce, so that they could focus on procreation. Early Nazi publications often explicitly claimed that these ideas overlapped with Christian teachings, and that they were Christianity’s allies.

But Nazi ideology also introduced an important innovation. While this is often forgotten, Nazism also promised to end the confessional divide. In its founding document from 1920, the party declared its support for ‘positive Christianity’, a new and racialised conception of religion that included both Catholics and Protestants. Adolf Hitler himself was quite preoccupied with the confessional division. In several passages of Mein Kampf (1925), as well as in several speeches, he blamed it for Germany’s internal divisions and weakness. The Nazis therefore claimed that a new order required a historic new, inter-Christian cooperation. Christian unity, the end of the centuries-long confessional war, was a necessary preparation for defeating ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, a goal that Hitler and his acolytes considered inevitable.

As long as Nazism was a fringe movement, Christian elites largely ignored this message. But its rise to power, first in Germany and then, through military conquest, its occupation of Europe, led many to emulate the Nazi call for confessional unity. In 1932, for example, the Catholic writer Robert Grosche launched the first Catholic journal to openly support Nazism. Grosche posited that both the Church and the Nazi movement recognised that God’s grace operated not through individuals but through racial communities. Catholics and Nazis, Grosche maintained, were allies in creating a ‘sacred space’ in which all of society mobilised together towards collective salvation. Grosche also became the most vocal proponent of engagement with Protestants. The two confessions, he mused, were brethren in the ‘community of blood’. The Austrian bishop Alois Hudal published some of the most prominent efforts to square Catholic teachings with Nazi dogma. Like Grosche, he envisioned a joint future: ‘He who … eliminates the religious division,’ he explained, ‘would render the greatest service’ to ‘the German race and Europe’s entire cultural leadership.’

This meant that they could cooperate in restricting procreation to those ‘racially healthy’

Ideas of Nazi-inspired confessional unity were not restricted to theology. They informed popular commentary on bread-and-butter issues, such as economics. The Protestant German economist Georg Wünsch, for instance, had spent the 1920s attacking socialism and Catholicism as detrimental to economic growth, but in the 1930s he changed his tune. When Wünsch in 1936 proclaimed his support for Nazi economic policies, especially public works, he declared that these programmes embodied the values of both confessions. Wünsch thought that Nazi public works would foster harmony between employers and workers while maintaining divinely ordained inequalities (since private property remained protected). In the 1930s, Catholic and Protestant theorists began to criticise earlier stereotypes and insist that both confessions could contribute to the modern economy. One leader of the Inner Mission, Germany’s largest Protestant charity, proclaimed that the ‘violent struggle’ over economic policies was no longer between the confessions but ‘between the Christian confessions and the irreligious’ worldview of socialists and communists.

Across Europe, many Catholics and Protestants also admired the Nazis’ assault on feminism and sexual minorities. And, in turn, this led them to insist on the existence of an interconfessional sexual ethics.

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The rise of Nazism in Europe, in short, dramatically reshaped Christian life. On the one hand, Christian elites across the continent were divided in their approach to the radical Right and its racism. On the other hand, that internal conflict led figures on both sides to seek new allies in the other confession. Both of these alliances, whether sympathetic or hostile to fascism, required enormous intellectual innovation. In both cases, these radical changes did not originate with bishops or popes; it was lay leaders and popular writers who led the way to a new Christian unity.

Since the new Christian peace was linked to Nazi ideology, one might expect it to die in the ruins of the Third Reich. But the exact opposite happened. The cooperation between Catholics and Protestants only deepened after the Second World War, becoming the mainstream of Christian life. Perhaps most importantly, talk of reconciliation moved from the sphere of ideas and small associations to the world of party politics and state power. Together, Christians were able to leave deep marks on European governance.

- More Here

Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug

Euan Ashley has claimed that exercise is the “single most potent medical invention” ever—more broadly effective than any medicine discovered in the natural world or devised in a laboratory. In 2025, this is the sort of rah-rah sentiment about working out that one might associate with a Make America Healthy Again ambassador rather than, say, the chair of medicine at Stanford University. So, what makes Ashley’s claim significant is that he is the chair of medicine at Stanford University.

Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put rats on tiny treadmills, worked them out for weeks, and cut into them to investigate how their organs and vessels responded to the workout compared to a control group of more sedentary rodents.1 The results were spectacular. Exercise transformed just about every tissue and molecular system that Ashley and his co-authors studied—not just the muscles and heart, but also the liver, adrenal glands, fat, and immune system.

When I asked Ashley if it was possible to design a drug that mimicked the observed effects of exercise, he was emphatic that, no, this was not possible. The benefits of exercise seem too broad for any one therapy to mimic. To a best approximation, aerobic fitness and weight-training seem to increase our metabolism, improve mitochondrial function, fortify our immune system, reduce inflammation, improve tissue-specific adaptations, and protect against disease.

The latest entry in the Exercise Is Magic file comes from the New England Journal of Medicine. In a recent study, 900 cancer patients who had undergone surgery on their advanced colon cancer were randomly assigned to two groups. One group got a “structured exercise program.” They went to behavioral support sessions and attended supervised exercise classes every few weeks for several years. The other group received only basic information about diet and health.

Compared to the control group, the exercise group saw “significantly” more years without cancer, a 7 percentage point increase in the overall survival rate after 8 years, and a dramatic reduction in new primary cancers. Exercise, it seems, doesn’t just prevent disease; it can also save your life after you get sick.

The author Daniel Lieberman has put it well: 

Exercise is healthy and rewarding even though it’s something we never evolved to do. To adapt to the physical ease of the modern world, people invented a variety of weight-resistant devices and bodily movements that allow today’s population to simulate the arduous tasks that were once necessary to make it through a life, and this strange pantomime of physical stress seems to do more for us at a molecular level than any therapy or intervention in the history of medicine.

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When I think about the case for global health spending, I think about the first days of my life. Nobody chooses how they come into the world. I achieved nothing to earn my birth in a hospital in Washington, D.C., as opposed to a clinic in Maputo or Kinshasa, or to deserve the automatic guarantee of American citizenship upon my first breath of air. That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either. The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor. Interventions as simple as bed nets, antiretroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS, and the distribution of commonplace vaccines and therapies in impoverished rural areas can save an astonishing number of lives, while costing a rich country an amount of money that makes practically no difference to any their citizen’s day-to-day.

Americans are blessed to be in possession of a kind of sorcerer’s stone—a bit of policy alchemy that can transform one-four hundredth of our spending into 100 million saved lives, in less than half a century. I think we should use it.

- More Here

Rajinikanth - One Of The Greatest Orators of Our Time

Over the last few years, I have been listening to his every talk (he gives 2 or 3 in a year); every one of these talks are filled with immense wisdom, humility, truth, humor and so much more. 

All this without any pride about his stardom and power and with full skin in the game. 

A simple human teaching other humans what he has learned from his life in a very very hard way. 

I have learned a ton from Rajni sir on how to be a good human being. Thank you, sir. 

• Your Intelligence will tell you which thing to speak
• Your ability will tell you how to speak 
• Audience will tell you how much to speak 
• Your experience will tell what to speak and what not to speak :-) 

The Politics of Contagion

Goddammit! 

Such beautiful words, sentences via a lived experience. 

Read the whole thing: eschew arrogance, victimhood, ideology and bring some gratitude into your life. 

In this moronic anthropomorphic world; most morons look for incentives. 

Remember, you will die sooner or later. Gratitude is probably the only tool which could reduce pain and suffering in months, weeks, and days before you die. 

There is you go, I gave you an incentive for having gratitude. 

It was summer. We all had mosquito bites and little scratches. That's how it is when you live in the woods. But now they didn’t heal. Instead, the bacteria was fizzing away in there, eating the edge of the wound outward, making it soft.

I started to feel kind of sick one day, and looked hard at one of my scabs. It looked sort of wet and puckered, like skin after a long bath. The next day all my little wounds looked like this. A few days later, it was worse. From a scrape on my shin I could see this angry red line of inflammation crawling up my leg—my blood had started to get infected—the evil was climbing toward my heart.

We had a well-stocked “medicine room” but only a few jars of old expired antibiotics. Those went to the worst cases. The rest of us tried healing it with herbs. I remember spending three hundred-fucking-degree days just hanging in a hammock, sweating and hallucinating from massive amounts of garlic and goldenseal and top-grade California hashish.

One guy actually had to have his lymph nodes removed—they liquefied in his armpits. He survived only because we took him to a hospital in the city, and they were legally required to treat indigents with no health insurance or money.

The worst part though, was the way it infected my mind. I felt like it was turning me evil. Oozing from many wounds, shambling around in the heat, surrounded by buzzing flies. I remember standing in the dinner line and wanting to eat my fellow comrades. Thinking about gnawing on their succulent flesh. Mouth watering at the image of a sizzling human drumstick. Suddenly thinking how very far away we were from society and its taboos.

[---]

Another year we couldn’t stop shitting ourselves, and didn’t know why.

We couldn’t find the culprit for weeks. We checked the drinking water filter and the hand soap, we cleaned the building, we made the primitivists move their roadkill tanning farther from the kitchen. But it wasn't enough. We kept getting sick. We learned later it was giardia.

Giardia is like a little tiny sucker fish in your stomach—not really a fish, it's a microorganism, but it latches its mouth onto your intestinal wall and sits there absorbing all the sugars and nutrients you would otherwise eat, and outputs the results of its metabolism. That means that it’s eating your food and shitting in your guts. They produce a lot of gas too, which has to come out somewhere, so all day long you’re burping out their farts.

No matter how much we washed our hands or cleaned our dishes, everyone kept getting sick. Sometimes we would recover for a minute and make a big decadent carrot cake to celebrate. Then we would all get sick again, shitting everywhere, spreading more of these critters back into our communal body. We learned later it’s the sugar that helps them multiply. Ass to hand to mouth to guts to ass, that’s the life cycle of giardia. And they were thriving.

[---]

Staph, giardia, and scabies in less than three years. Eventually I realized that these plagues were not coincidence. They were an inevitable outcome of the conditions. An organism is only as strong as its boundary layer. A society is much the same.

Our social organism was too open in some ways: the open door policy meant that all types of people could come in. All types of animals, diseases, and ideologies too. Our governance system was by consensus of those present, so as soon as you show up you get a vote. This made the governance completely impossible, as weekend warriors squared off against the people who would actually have to enact whatever decision was made.

We were too closed off as well. So far away in the mountains, with so little connection to the world, we lost immunities to things in the default world. When I returned I was disgusted by advertising, fluorescent lights, saran-wrapped foods, and all the other tissues of our modern technoleviathan. They were repellent to me, viscerally made me sick. I still think this is the correct reaction, but I’ve grown used to it now, and can stomach the grocery store with a smirk.

An organism must have a semi-permeable membrane. The ability to kick things out if they threaten its health, and the ability to intake resources to survive. Disgust is the immune system of the greater social organism. It protects us from contagion. But in a planetary society, we are constantly exposed to new vectors of change. Foreign organisms, environments, ideas; our cultures and societies are fully inflamed around these perceived intruders.

I see this online all the time. I watch as memetic phrases and viral emotions spread through my networks. We attack each other for following the wrong person on social media, for not wearing masks, for being inoculated with RNA, because we are all in constant fear of infection. No two groups can ally without first solving every small difference between them. Even homogenous ideological blocs tear themselves apart with loyalty tests and purity spirals. We are in a great autoimmune spasm of the human species.

If we are all one planetary social organism now, that creature is in pain. Its own organs attack each other, unable to recognize their interconnectedness. We’re constantly putting up boundaries. Boundaries between nations, between computers, between people.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve learned a lot from experimenting with radical social structures, both in the woods and on the internet. At the commune, I thought we could prototype methods of living that were more egalitarian and ecologically balanced, and then export them past the barrier of our village to replicate. Those experiments were mostly failed utopias.

But I learned something important there, something I believe needs to spread and take hold: not all contagion is destructive. The flower feeds the bee and the bee pollinates the flower; neither can exist without the other. We are not separate species who must fear infection by the other. We are a system of flows.

 

 

Don't Eat Honey

There are lots of people who say of themselves “I’m vegan except for honey.” This is a bit like someone saying “I’m a law-abiding citizen, never violating the law, except sometimes I’ll bring a young boy to the woods and slay him.” These people abstain from all the animal products except honey, even though honey is by far the worst of the commonly eaten animal products.

Now, this claim sounds outrageous. Why do I think it’s worse to eat honey than beef, eggs, chicken, dairy, and even foie gras? Don’t I know about the months-long torture process needed to fatten up ducks sold for foie gras? Don’t I know about the fact that they grind up baby male chicks in the egg industry and keep the females in tiny cages too small to turn around in? Don’t I know, don’t I know, don’t I know?

Indeed I do. I am no fan of these animal products. I fastidiously avoid eating them. In fact, I think that factory farming is a horror of unprecedented proportions, a crime, a tragedy, an embarrassment, a work of Satan himself that induces both cruelty and wickedness in those involved and perpetrates suffering on a scale so vast it can scarcely be fathomed. I can be accused of many things, but being a fan of most animal products is not one of them.

But I assure you, honey is worse (at least in expectation).

[---]

Let’s first establish that bees in the honey industry do not live good lives. First of all, their lives are very short. They live just a few weeks. They die painfully. So even putting aside grievous industry abuse, their lives aren’t likely to be great. Predation, starvation, succumbing to disease, and wear and tear are all common.

Second of all, the honey industry treats bees unimaginably terribly (most of the points I make here are drawn from the Rethink Priorities essay I just linked). They’re mostly kept in artificial, conditions, in mechanical structures that are routinely inspected in ways that are very stressful for the bees, who feel like the hive is under attack. Often, the bees sting themselves to death. In order to prevent this, the industry uses a process called smoking—lighting a fire, sending smoke into the hives, to prevent alarm pheromones from being detected and the bees from being (beeing) sent into a frenzy. Sometimes, however, smoking melts the wings of the bees (though my sense is this is somewhat rare). Reassembly of the hive after inspections often crushes bees to death.

These structures, called Langstroth hives, also have poor thermal insulation, increasing the risk of bees freezing to death or overheating. About 30% of hives die off during the winter, meaning this probably kills about 8 billion bees in the U.S. alone every single year. The industry also keeps the bees crammed together, leading to infestations of harmful parasites.

Oftentimes, beekeepers take too much honey and leave all of the bees to starve to death. This is a frequent cause of the mass bee die-offs that, remember, cause about a third of bee colonies not to survive the winter. Because beekeepers take honey, the bees main source of food, bees are left chronically malnourished, leading to higher risk of death, weakness, and disease. Bees in the commercial honey industry generally lack the ability to forage, which exacerbates nutrition problems.

Bees also undergo unpleasant transport conditions. More than half of bee colonies are transported at some point. Tragically, “bees from migratory colonies have a shorter lifespan and higher levels of oxidative stress than workers at stationary apiaries.” The transport process is very stressful for bees, just as it is for other animals. It also weirdly leads to bees having underdeveloped food glands, perhaps due to vibration from transport. Transport often is poorly ventilated, leading to bees overheating or freezing to death. Also, transport brings bees from many different colonies together, leading to rapid spread of disease.

Honey bees are often afflicted by parasites, poisoned with pesticides, and killed in other ways. Queen bees are routinely killed years before they’d die naturally, have their wings clipped, and are stressfully and invasively artificially inseminated. This selective breeding leaves bees more efficient commercially but with lower welfare levels than they’d otherwise have. Often bees are killed intentionally in the winter because it’s cheaper than keeping them around—by diesel, petrol, cyanide, freezing, drowning, and suffocation.

So, um, not great!

In short, bees are kept in unpleasant, artificial conditions, where a third of the hives die off during the winter from poor insulation—often being baked alive or freezing to death. They’re overworked and left chronically malnourished, all while riddled with parasites and subject to invasive and stressful inspections. And given the profound extent to which the honey industry brings invasive disease to wild bees and crowds out other pollinators, the net environmental impact is relatively unclear. The standard notion that honey should be eaten to preserve bees is a vast oversimplification.

Thus, if you eat even moderate amounts of honey, you cause extremely large numbers of bees to experience extremely unpleasant fates for extremely long times. If bees matter even negligibly, this is very bad!

[---]

So don’t eat honey! If you eat honey, you are causing staggeringly large amounts of very intense suffering. Eating honey is many times worse than eating other animal products, which are themselves bad enough. If you want to make an easy change to your diet to prevent a lot of the suffering that you cause, please, for the love of God, avoid honey.

- More Here