Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

uncontactedtribes.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 378 posts

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#171

Post by gregwebs »

BoppreH wrote: post #141
lwhi wrote: post #16

Poor poor people - they'll be better off if we stay away. EDIT: There is absolutely no chance that our western society has 'got it right'. If you think otherwise, I'm afraid you're deluding yourself.

Our life expectancy and education is literally thousands of years ahead of anything they have. You can argue about violence, capitalism and religion, and I'd agree, but parts of our culture are better then theirs in easily measurable ways.

education: it depends on the subject- many of the people under discussion are probably expert trackers/hunters and have a more intimate knowledge of their surroundings than even our modern biologists. Most of civilization's education is not very useful in this context.

I doubt there is a single part of our culture that is "better in an easily measurable way". This includes life expectancy, which of course cannot be "literally thousands of years ahead".

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#172

Post by borism »

nerfhammer wrote: post #135
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is so bad about leaving them alone? I would bet they are much happer than the majority of the FB and Twitter obsessed narcissist that I run into every day. What is so bad is you making the decision for them -- one way or the other. It's that kind of pompous paternalistic attitude that caused all kinds of pain and misery. If they are happy with a life expectancy of 30, of having mothers die in childbirth commonly…

While I agree totally with the points you've made, I don't know how to balance that against the nearly unavoidable side effect that contacting them may very likely end up killing most of them from diseases to which they have no resistance.

there is medicine you know, we don't live in XV century?

it's the thought that kills indigenous tribes, not disease.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#173

Post by CamperBob »

forensic wrote: post #86
xenophanes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should give them access to technology and to our way of life. Our way of life is better. Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. Help is exactly what I would want from advanced alien visitors. I don't want them to respect my culture just because it is mine; I want something better for myself, not cultural relativism. There…

>Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. The point is that they are not suffering. Modern anthropology and the best science actually indicates that tribal hunter-gatherers experience higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than your typical citizen of an agricultural society. Tribal hunter-gatherers have healthier diets, l…

Modern anthropology and the best science actually indicates that tribal hunter-gatherers experience higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than your typical citizen of an agricultural society.

So does the typical Oxycontin addict. 'Happiness and satisfaction' are weasel words that ultimately have no objective meaning.

Tribal hunter-gatherers have healthier diets, live longer without outside interference,

No, they do not.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#174

Post by anigbrowl »

forensic wrote: post #86
xenophanes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should give them access to technology and to our way of life. Our way of life is better. Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. Help is exactly what I would want from advanced alien visitors. I don't want them to respect my culture just because it is mine; I want something better for myself, not cultural relativism. There…

>Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. The point is that they are not suffering. Modern anthropology and the best science actually indicates that tribal hunter-gatherers experience higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than your typical citizen of an agricultural society. Tribal hunter-gatherers have healthier diets, l…

I guess you didn't read the stuff on the website describing how they cultivate manioc and papaya in gardens. They've already adopted agriculture.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#175

Post by forensic »

gort wrote: post #130
forensic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shortness of tribal people's lives has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, it's pure myth. The book Sex at Dawn demonstrates this using the latest anthropology and archaeology if you want to know more. Until recently, it was normal for tribal societies to live longer on average than agricultural societies. All of the statistics that support the idea that tribal life is short were done very poorly and skewed by abo…

> warfare was less painful for all involved Does that book or other sources you have give a rough idea of how rare/common death by warfare/violence is in this type of society?

They go into various statistics yes.

But on a more qualitative note, tribal societies gain little from total war. "Total war" is the modern concept that every war is a struggle for existence and every avenue must be utilized to destroy the enemy culture/civilization.

In tribal societies most violent conflict was settled symbolically - Keegan goes into this in one of his books I forget which one.

For instance the tribes will line up against each other like in typical war and then attack each other, but due to various spiritual taboos against certain war practices, it's really more like a sport than what we consider war. There will be few casualties and most of the combat will be decided more like wrestling or, in some cases, even more like a dance competition. This is not a joke.

Obviously the particular superstitions and rituals differed among tribes, but hunter-gatherer warfare in general did not lead to even fractions of the amount of suffering that agricultural warfare leads to.

Having said all this, it's essentially impossible for hunter-gatherers to compete with agricultural civilization. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma - whichever tribe "decides" to become agricultural will worse lives individually, but the collective is so powerful and efficient that it replicates itself.

Agriculture is better for our genes - we multiply far more. But hunter-gathering is better for our quality of life.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#176

Post by lwhi »

Groxx wrote: post #156
lwhi wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, it's an extreme example .. but it definitely exists on the same side of the scale. -- Look at what happened to Australian Aboriginals - the settlers who separated kids from their families had the best of intentions - but they also had a sense of superiority which gave them an utter contempt for the culture of the children in question. There are some parallels between those settlers and the OP's statement: " The…

I've got to agree with the parent to yours, it's still a different scale. Ethnic cleansing seeks to destroy that which is different. Ethno-centric superiority complexes (like this, not necessarily all) seek to improve that which is different. They are capable of causing the similar outcomes, but I know of no examples (they didn't kill the children), and the motivations are almost total opposites. Both are essentially…

Maybe children weren't killed, but Australian Aboriginal society has been completely decimated - many of the stories involved are heartbreaking, and these people now have many many more problems that ever before.

I'm sure that regimes that take part in ethnic cleansing believe that they're doing the right thing. A sense of superiority helps them to make their choices.

Whether violence is used or not, in some ways, the effect is the same.

EDIT: If you read about these people and the problems that they're facing, it's not difficult to see that they were pretty much undeniably better off before. It's nothing but a tragedy - and their ill-treatment even continues to this day.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#177

Post by olalonde »

Devilboy wrote: post #159
russell_h wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I expect thats how it would be handled here (although "granting an exception" to the Constitution could get tricky, depending on the timeline in this hypothetical). What I really meant (and I wasn't very clear on this) was more of how could we ethically reconcile our laws with our desire, if we have one, to preserve such tribes. For the most part it seems like if you have to special-case something you're doing…

Some of these tribes are even cannibals, they kill people and eat them. Should we turn a blind eye to that too? I don't know. It's a hard question.

Indeed. There's actually a term for that: cultural relativism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#178

Post by billswift »

gort wrote: post #130
forensic wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shortness of tribal people's lives has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, it's pure myth. The book Sex at Dawn demonstrates this using the latest anthropology and archaeology if you want to know more. Until recently, it was normal for tribal societies to live longer on average than agricultural societies. All of the statistics that support the idea that tribal life is short were done very poorly and skewed by abo…

> warfare was less painful for all involved Does that book or other sources you have give a rough idea of how rare/common death by warfare/violence is in this type of society?

I haven't read that book, but others have estimated (it varies between tribes) that roughly half of all males that make it to adulthood die of violence - either within (murder and vengeance killing) or between tribes (warfare). One source, though I don't remember what kind of numbers he gave is Pinker's The Blank Slate; which also excoriates the kind of "primitive worship" that seems to be common in these comments.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#179

Post by [deleted] »

forensic wrote: post #86
xenophanes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should give them access to technology and to our way of life. Our way of life is better. Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. Help is exactly what I would want from advanced alien visitors. I don't want them to respect my culture just because it is mine; I want something better for myself, not cultural relativism. There…

>Preserving their backwards culture so they can continue lives of misery and suffering is just as disgusting as the Prime Directive. The point is that they are not suffering. Modern anthropology and the best science actually indicates that tribal hunter-gatherers experience higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than your typical citizen of an agricultural society. Tribal hunter-gatherers have healthier diets, l…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN