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

181–190 of 378 posts

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#181

Post by techiferous »

xenophanes wrote: post #27
raganwald wrote: post #9

You know that Golden Rule?" Not the one that VCs quote, but the one that goes "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you?" We should think about that when we choose how to deal with uncontacted tribes. It may be that one day another intelligence will need to decide how to deal with us, and on that day I hope we can say, "Yes, we used to have a habit of massacring technologically inferior peoples we encounte…

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…

"Our way of life is better."

Are you asserting that you know their culture well enough to make a meaningful comparison with your culture?

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#182

Post by forensic »

anigbrowl wrote: post #174
forensic wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

There are degrees of agriculturalism. How much of their diet is from foraging and hunting? Also there is still a big difference between cultures who cultivate fruits and cultures who cultivate grains and legumes.

If they adopt grains/legumes their population will increase and their lifespans will decline. But as long as they stick to fruit and animal meat, and avoid modern diseases, they will be healthier than our society.

It's NOT a foregone conclusion that they experience suffering/misery.

It's certainly possible but in order to claim this you need to provide evidence of their suffering/misery.

Most likely, it's quite the opposite. If they are anything like the typical tribal hunter-gatherers, depression is probably unheard of in their culture.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#183

Post by lwhi »

nitrogen wrote: post #163
lwhi wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd want to be left alone - give one example of colonialism that worked out well for indigenous people, and I'll maybe change my mind.

There are much less invasive options for contact than colonialism. Nobody said we have to move ourselves into some indigenous peoples' lands in order to offer them the chance to accept or reject a modern life.

But the effect is the same - their society would be absorbed, and probably forgotten.

It's like time travel - you can't go back because you don't know what kind of effects you'll have on the future. In this case you don't know what kind of effects contact will have on their (the tribe's) future.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#184

Post by Groxx »

lwhi wrote: post #176
Groxx wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

>many many more problems that ever before.

That's committing the same error the OP made, but in reverse. Instead of viewing your lifestyle as superior, you clearly view theirs as superior, since adopting the new one has been a net loss. "many of the stories involved are heartbreaking" - I don't doubt that. But all change comes with cost, though that one was certainly far higher than it should have been.

Citing past injustices in the pursuit of improving life doesn't mean the pursuit is incorrect. How about all the successes? Slavery was partially under the guise of improving lives (recently. Slavery has existed for far longer than we have records, usually the losing warring culture becoming slaves for the winning), but so was/is removing it.

In some ways, at some times, the effect is the same. What about the others? Should the pursuit be abandoned entirely?

The debate can be made more general: should we abandon everything that has ever caused suffering? Should only 100% successful lines be pursued? And, as no action is totally identical to a previous one: what's the measure used to tell if something is adequately different to be worth a shot?

edit to match edit: OK, so their problem is current ill-treatment. That is wrong. But that's still not the only thing that happens with cultural assimilation, nor does it always happen, nor must it continue indefinitely. If it improves at any point in the future, would it have been worthwhile? If 100 years of suffering result in 1000 of improvement, was it right or wrong? Not "could it have been better", is it right or wrong to suffer to gain improvement, or to impose suffering to grant improvement? We're debating broad decisions, not issues with a single choice. There's always something wrong with a single choice, and those nuggets of wrongness don't decide whether the core choice was right or wrong as a whole.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#185

Post by forensic »

CamperBob wrote: post #173
forensic wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, the…

I wasn't the one making the argument that these people are experiencing misery/suffering. Misery and suffering is no more objective than happiness and satisfaction. I would argue that both of these things are objective and can be observed in the brain and well as inferred from other criteria.

>No, they do not.

Yes, they do.

We can go back and forth like this all day or you can make a real argument. Read SEX AT DAWN and get back to me with your criticism of their anthropology.

Based on your statements regarding happiness I'm going to tentatively conclude that you're one of the ignorant engineers who has little contact with the social sciences.

Why do programmers believe they know more than everyone else in subjects where they are grossly ignorant? We need a word for this. Programmer hubris or something. I guess it's just the Dunning-Kruger effect striking again.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#186

Post by billswift »

m_myers wrote: post #148
BoppreH wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have two eyes with slightly different perspectives, and there's also the atmosphere to color blue things that are far away, so they have some idea of how far is it. Knowing how far and how big it looks like, you can estimate the real size. It's part of how our eye-brain interface works.

Yes, but it's hard to judge things that you have no reference frame for. There's another story about the Grand Canyon. Apparently the first Spaniards to reach it estimated it to be a couple hundred feet deep, and thought the part of the Colorado that they could see was about six feet across. It was a mile down and 200 feet across, but they had no concept of a canyon that big.

A better example might be from Colin Turnbull's The Forest People where one of the Pygmies accompanied him to the edge of the forest and refused to believe a distant "bug" was really a buffalo.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#187

Post by jeisenberg »

xenophanes wrote: post #27
raganwald wrote: post #9

You know that Golden Rule?" Not the one that VCs quote, but the one that goes "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you?" We should think about that when we choose how to deal with uncontacted tribes. It may be that one day another intelligence will need to decide how to deal with us, and on that day I hope we can say, "Yes, we used to have a habit of massacring technologically inferior peoples we encounte…

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…

This response is a joke, right?

What constitutes a 'civilized' lifestyle? Your concepts of 'backwards' and 'civilized' are grounded in normative assumptions about what is right and wrong. I am not a post-structuralist, but I expect someone to acknowledge his or her normative stance before degrading a culture different than your own. What do you mean when you say 'There is nothing good?' What do you define as 'good?'

There are 'tribes' whose languages don't even contain a sense of linear time, which goes against Chomsky's universal theory of language. Here is a recent article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...

No past, no present. I am sorry, but your narrow, ethnocentric mind can't cognitively understand what that kind of existence is like.

Look this up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology This varies across cultures and languages. At least pretend to respect difference.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#188

Post by forensic »

narrator wrote: post #96

I am really getting a kick out of the ironic juxtaposition of the most technologically primitive segment of the world population getting space up here at the top of Hacker News. After all, the Hacker News audience represents arguably the most technologically sophisticated segment of the world population.

Unfortunately I think Hacker News, in this thread, is providing support to the thesis that there is something about the engineer mindset that is inherently authoritarian and extremist.

http://www.slate.com/id/2240157/

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#190

Post by mrnothere »

Devilboy wrote: post #47
jbrennan wrote: post #5

I wonder what kind of disturbance just the helicopter (or whatever method was used to capture the footage) caused on the tribe. Obviously the tribe was aware of it, but if they've never been contacted, would they be able to even fathom what such a thing is? I'm genuinely curious because I'm also genuinely ignorant on how "uncontacted" tribes like that are and what their civilization is like. Could anyone enlighten me…

I'm sure they've seen planes plenty of times, I mean commercial airliners fly pretty much everywhere I think? I'm sure they'd love to see it up close though. They must assume it's a bird monster or something.

Nah, commercial airliners don't fly pretty much everywhere they fly between airports on predetermined routes. Through air traffic control "sectors" One of the things that is hard to understand for all of us who live so close to the civilized world, is how much of the world is uninhabited and poorly understood.
Post reply on HN