81–90 of 136 posts
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> Knuth may have seemed like a luddite, but given how many people are hooked onto news/social/media/e-mail/Slack, his hard stance on email was perhaps more wise than most of us realized. What was his stance on email?
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
Look I hate Facebook, Google, the news, prefer physical books, like to exercise, whatever but I always hate seeing this stuff. In Western society there are always two lies operating at once. The first lie is that technology will save us and fix everything and is the ultimate path, the second lie is that throwing away all of our technology, being as close to nature as possible, blah blah will also save us and fix ever…
One of the things that was pointed out last time this topic came up (only a few weeks ago) is that most all of us who benefit from modern civilization enough so to be commenting about it on HN are enabled by massive amounts of cheap, wage-slave labor from the poorer half of the world. So while the average 9-to-5 job, smartphone-browsing lifestyle is probably preferable to the brutality of being a hunter-gatherer, if…
"if I were a garment factory worker making 100$/month under terrible conditions and long hours, then things might change -- I'd personally take my chances out in the wilderness."
Maybe that's true, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to suggest you would simply not be able to live in the same conditions 2 billion people live in and accept (they don't go out to the wilderness). Are you really so different that for you this will be such and impossible situation that you'd throw yourself to the wilderness?
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I'm not sure you know enough to compare the two. Disease, for example, is mostly a product of settled societies, not hunter-gatherers. Crime was a different issue as well, when tribes knew all the members. And sure, tribes had conflicts, but they were often not as violent as the total wars of the last couple centuries. I'm surprised so many people who know nothing except modern society are so quick to make sweeping a…
They are also comparing it to the best outcomes for individuals in modern society. It's not like people don't still get raped, killed over resources, and finished off prematurely by disease and starvation. I'm not sure modern civilization would look the same without a long and continuing history of people sacrificed at the altar of progress.
The only time I'm relaxed and feel happy is when I am out in untamed nature - seeing and hearing nature. It doesn't matter if its just a hike or "working" hard on trail maintenance. If this[1] is true, "Every 2.5 minutes, the American West loses a football field worth of natural area to human development." Walking down the street among human development just doesn't do anything for me, so I quit going outside. It see…
I feel the opposite way. In my mind raw nature is chaos and unpredictability. It's hard to relax when I'm not at least in medium sized town.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the things that was pointed out last time this topic came up (only a few weeks ago) is that most all of us who benefit from modern civilization enough so to be commenting about it on HN are enabled by massive amounts of cheap, wage-slave labor from the poorer half of the world. So while the average 9-to-5 job, smartphone-browsing lifestyle is probably preferable to the brutality of being a hunter-gatherer, if…
Farmers and other poor from China's interior make a different calculus. Many move to the eastern parts of the country to work in those factories because they are a better alternative to what they have back home. It's not all that different from kids in Podunk USA moving to bigger cities for better opportunities despite "the rat race" in cities. If north America and Europe had not essentially outsourced their labor to…
These are people who basically lived in hunter-gatherer style until very recently, and have recently started to adopt the "modern" lifestyle. According to him, they do not regret it.
Also, the "happy savage" meme has been around for literally centuries, and it's generally been propagated by rich, educated non-savages.
Maybe they are, humans have never been rational. It is much more important to have vaccines and antibiotics than to be happy. People reading this crap who then get the urge to strip down to a loincloth and run into the woods should be aware that these viewpoints always portray the best case scenario. Forget germs, starvation, or exposure (which are enough to make you miserable / kill you by themselves), what about ot…
I'm not sure you know enough to compare the two. Disease, for example, is mostly a product of settled societies, not hunter-gatherers. Crime was a different issue as well, when tribes knew all the members. And sure, tribes had conflicts, but they were often not as violent as the total wars of the last couple centuries. I'm surprised so many people who know nothing except modern society are so quick to make sweeping a…
how is this a thing? Maybe you're thinking of large scale epidemics, but the most common cause of death in tribal settings are (modernly) treatable infections.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the things that was pointed out last time this topic came up (only a few weeks ago) is that most all of us who benefit from modern civilization enough so to be commenting about it on HN are enabled by massive amounts of cheap, wage-slave labor from the poorer half of the world. So while the average 9-to-5 job, smartphone-browsing lifestyle is probably preferable to the brutality of being a hunter-gatherer, if…
That's just not true. It's not how economics/capitalism works. It's possible for both us "over here in the west" to benefit from "cheap labor" elsewhere, and for the people providing the "cheap labor" to benefit as well! It's a win-win in most cases, which is why over the last 40 years more people have moved out of poverty than at any other point in human history. "if I were a garment factory worker making 100$/month…
These garment factory workers don't have the option to become hunter-gather. There probably is nothing to gather or hunt around where they live and the skills to do it are lost. We are comparing two models of society. Are humans in our capitalistic society happier on average than hunter-gatherers of the past?
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Are a large percentage of people in our technological society actualized in that way? Do people that take a 2nd job to put food on the table for their kids see that as progress for the human race?
Would you rather take a 2nd job or run around naked looking for an animal you can kill? Everyone realizes the progress humanity has made. It is disrespectful to the people taking second jobs to insinuate that they'd be better off living ten thousand years ago. What does that say about how you view their life?