Often, the top 50 or so posts will remain relatively static for days, while posts like this never make it far enough up the rankings for to actually see them.
In this case my comment was not as much against dupes in general as it was expressing disappointment that yet another post about "Against the Grain" should reach front page and thus showing that it likely resonates with significant portion of HNers which I would rather not be the case.
Oh, what is it about this article you find so displeasing to associate with HN readers?
I realise some people will be more marginal to the concept of being a hippy-anti-civilisation hunter gatherer... but regardless, the answers given by the interviewee were well reasoned and objective, I thought most HN reader would have appreciated them. The title however is poor and misleading.
More like, "A journalist critical of modern society attempts to coerce answers that align with his worldview from an author that wrote a book on how our history isn't as straight forward as we typically think it is".
I'm reading "Against the Grain" at the moment. It's good, but James Scott (the author) is also clearly a little out of his academic comfort zone in it - Scott is a political scientist & anthropologist, not an archaeologist. He also tends to repeat himself a lot.
Scott has also written "Seeing Like A State", a great book about, in its own words, "how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed" - in particular, grand schemes by powerful central governments which forced pre-existing social and ecological arrangements into a form more understandable to central management, but in the process lost some essential flexibility.
Also related, an older piece in the same vein as "Against the Grain" is Jared Diamond's short essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race": http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html (Jared Diamond is also not an archaeologist, however. I'm curious what archaeologists have to think about this line of reasoning in general.)
It’s really hard to form these arguments and hypotheses rigorously, and I rarely see anyone try to do so. What does it mean to ask “were we happier before the agricultural revolution than we are now?”
Are we talking about the mean happiness of all humans at one instant? If that’s our only goal, maybe we can achieve it by killing or sterilizing everyone below a certain level of happiness, but obviously that goes against most people’s moral beliefs.
Or are we talking about maximizing the sum of all humans’ happiness? If that’s our only goal, maybe we can achieve it by maximizing birth rates and thus maximizing the human population regardless of each human’s quality of life, but obviously that also goes against most of our moral beliefs. Perhaps we can get around this reductio ad absurdum by allowing for negative happiness values, e.g. for people born into starvation or poverty, but calculating an absolute utility value for each human is difficult or impossible anyway (which affects all of these proposals).
Or how about Pareto efficiency? If our only goal is to achieve a state wherein no one’s happiness can be increased without decreasing someone else’s happiness, that could perhaps be achieved by having one rich despot on whom everyone else is dependent, which again goes against most people’s moral beliefs.
One thought experiment occurs to me: would you rather be born to a random pair of parents in the world now, or a random pair of parents 15,000 years ago? This seems like a very personal way to phrase the central question: do you believe that humans were happier then or now?
Granted, I suspect most people reading this would have the same gut reaction as me: to choose being born to random parents now. But how much of that is influenced by our experiences with and dependence on modern society? Most readers of this comment are probably well above the current global average of quality of life according to any plausible definition. Perhaps people currently living in poverty would have different gut reactions to the proposal.
It’s outside the scope of this article, but the question could be extended into the future, where we have even less data (none). Would you rather be born to random parents now, or random parents some period in the future?
>It’s really hard to form these arguments and hypotheses rigorously, and I rarely see anyone try to do so. What does it mean to ask “were we happier before the agricultural revolution than we are now?”
>Are we talking about the mean happiness of all humans at one instant? If that’s our only goal, maybe we can achieve it by killing or sterilizing everyone below a certain level of happiness, but obviously that goes against most people’s moral beliefs.
While the interviewer was clearly pushing for comparisons of happiness in modern civilisation, I don't feel that either participant in the conversation were attempting to rigorously quantify it... That would seem as fruitless an endeavour as attempting to quantify broad intelligence. The details are not only subjective, but in this case likely to group quite disparate "wants" for happiness due to experiencing an entirely different lifestyles. They are not all (or hardly at all) directly comparable, but it's interesting to contemplate the differences to see what we have gained and lost.
In relation to happiness: the most interesting "correction" discussed is how the transition to agriculture clearly and quantifiably did _not_ provide an immediate improvement in quality of life (and most likely by proxy happiness), bone records show that undernourishment was an effect of becoming an early member of agricultural society.
We tend to think of hunter gathers as we used to think about neanderthals (as being obsolete, rather than simply different). Civilisation clearly has many advantages that are not possible in a hunter gatherer society, but even in it's evolved form mostly void of the initial malnutrition and disease has many side effects which are not present in hunter gatherer society that are not necessarily advantages. Likewise hunter gatherer lifestyles have advantages that are not practically possible in modern civilisation.
I guess my point is, they are different, and it's important to think of them as different rather than obsolete and degenerate as most people do... even trying to compare them in terms of crude quantifiers such as "happiness" seems wrong in this sense (for better or worse).
I really think it's important to highlight one of the points being made: That modern society - even western if you'd like - while begin awfully smug about it's freedoms, rarely translates this to literal freedom - leisure - for the vast majority of its people.
The notion that you can have all the benefits of a centrally governed society with all the liberties of total freedom is an unrealistic expectation. In order to ensure basic societal services are readily available for an entire nation, certain personal liberties must be given up in exchange. You can't have it both ways. For some people, this is news to them. Myself, and apparently most of the western world, we'd rather give up those liberties for the massive benefits that we get in exchange. The idea of absolute freedom is chaos.
I'm not sure what you're even talking about. All I'm saying is that given the vast progress we've made, leisure for the masses has been disproportionately disfavoured. To say that, if I follow you correctly, this situation is somehow inherently "how it go to be" is just dogmatic.
> Myself, and apparently most of the western world, we'd rather give up those liberties for the massive benefits that we get in exchange.
Never mind that this is a blatant false dichotomy, there is no such choice offered.
One intellectual vice we acquired since the middle ages is a fanatical belief in 'progress'.
It got progressively worse, by the 18th century it got to be a reason for killing people, something that in the 20th was done to tens of millions.
And the funny bit is that the theorists behind the mass murders had stated that "historical progress" was inevitable anyways. Blood sacrifices to hurry up the tide, how quaint ...
Why did you pick the the middle ages? Couldn't you go back to any period in recorded human history and find that your idea true? When has there not been the idea of 'my idea better, you all believe now or die now'. Why tie it to some modern construct of progress?
If you read for instance Montaigne, they were debating the merits of the ancients and the moderns. Up to the 16th century there was a pervading sense of inferiority from a previous classical golden age.
The very idea of historical progress is a modern construct.
The left and the techno-obsessed have a fanatical belief in progress. The right is more aware of the fragility of human nature and human institutions.
But both groups make their beliefs into reasons for killing people. The left kills people it thinks stand in the way of progress towards utopia. The right kills people it thinks threaten the purity or safety of what has already been built.
It's not a partisan. The House of Representatives was unanimous in passing the Self Drive act, which proposes sweeping and permissive regulation to empower the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles. It's like the only thing everybody in Washington agrees on.
Conversely, there are plenty of anti-technology people on the left. I follow Urban planning, there are strong advocates for more traditional forms of transportation such as cycling and trains, and those are generally regarded to be left of centre views. Environmentalism is a deeply conservative movement, but in the twisted times we live in, those people for some reason fall left of centre.
Yeah, when I first wrote this, I used "conservative" instead of "right", because most of the right aren't conservatives: they're market fundamentalists or religious zealots - neither of which puts conservation of the good at the top of their list of values, regardless of their rhetoric. And yes, many on the left aren't interested in freedom at all: they're intensely authoritarian, which is no surprise when "equality" is the highest good in your value system.
And plenty of people from all parts of the political spectrum are simply exploiting the intuitions of their "tribe" for status advantages.
I don't like Sapiens. In a complex world the time it takes for an average second grader to become a subject matter expert is about 30 years. And it's increasing not decreasing.
Reading Sapiens will make you feel and sound like you know what you are talking about.
And therefore it is for people who cannot put in the thirty years to feel like subject matter experts.
It's like what Jon Stewart/Rush Limbaugh and their clones do for their fan clubs.
I sometimes wonder if the libertarian future where governments, nation and civilization disappear to let technology reign over everything, is actually a relevant prediction.
I didn't downvote you, but your comment is not nearly as funny or clever as you seem to think it is. Also, this isn't reddit. If you're not contributing to the conversation here, you will be downvoted.
I don't care much for your herd mentality. When I comment,I expect my audience to be individuals not herd members that think "this is how we do things here". I have been around elitist types long enough to not be bothered by it too much. Do what you will,what can I do other than wonder in amusement how something as simple as a harmless pun can be taken so seriously. And I don't use reddit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425374
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15410969
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15352268