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The Forbidden Island

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Re: The Forbidden Island

#131

Post by pcrh »

pcrh wrote: post #120
Anderkent wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone was raising their children in a similar quality of life in a western society, they would have their children taken away by social security. Do you disagree?

For one, we don't know enough about their quality of life to say anything about it. I would assume they have a better quality of life than the majority of the planet, in particular it is likely to be better than the majority of urban dwellers and subsistence farmers in the 3rd world. If you wanted to give them the quality of life enjoyed in the nicer parts of the US or Europe you would have to provide all those ameni…

For those interested, the article below is a study on what happened to the inhabitants of the nearby island Little Andaman after it was settled by mainlanders. Infant mortality rose (to 40%), malnutrition and disease increased, and life expectancy, even excluding infant mortality, was approx 35 yr.

http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/...

Re: The Forbidden Island

#132

Post by king_jester »

ekianjo wrote: post #83
rndmize wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subsistence farming isn't a reference to famines, its a reference to inequality. My point was that even today, the majority of the civilized world spends their time doing endless agricultural labor for minimal benefit, even though one would think that we would have a better alternative implemented by this point (especially since anthro studies have shown that by and large hunter/gatherer societies spend much less tim…

You focus on the wrong thing. It's not about inequality, it's obvious that the rich should get richer faster. You don't expect the rich to have a 1 dollar salary increase while the poor gets the same thing. Obviously not. So, of course the gap is widening. And it's not necessarily a problem, because even the super rich can't spend all of what they earn, and that money ends up being recycled in the economy (investment…

> It's not about inequality, it's obvious that the rich should get richer faster.

That the rich get richer faster and hoard more and more wealth while others fine their wealth decreasing over time is inequality.

> And it's not necessarily a problem, because even the super rich can't spend all of what they earn, and that money ends up being recycled in the economy (investment, etc..).

This is the trickle down theory, which is not true in any way whatsoever. Wealth does not get reinvested or redistributed in a way that reduces wealth disparity.

> It's rather about: is everyone getting richer ? And the answer is clearly yes.

This is demonstrably false. Don't confuse the availability of consumer goods with wealth. In the US, for example, actual wealth for low and middle class people/families has been declining for the last 30 years or so.

> Even the poorer people are getting a bit more than before and can afford a better life than their parents.

This is not true either. Homelessness, poverty, and unemployment rates are measured and we know that there is no long term downward trend for these things even as wealth disparity gets worse.

> That's what abundance mean: it's not about who gets the biggest share of the cake, it's the fact that cake is growing and everyone gets more cake than before.

Tell that to the people that are homeless or go hungry every day.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#133

Post by knowaveragejoe »

Anderkent wrote: post #126
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Childhood diseases * Stillborn children * Murder * Rape Good point. Since in joining modern society they'd be missing out on those things those things that no longer ever occur, a fair trade would be to introduce them to consumerism and all of the lovely, healthy, meaningful things that includes.

Are you suggesting they are as common in the modern society as they are in a savage one?

I'm suggesting that your suggestion that we solve those medical problems for them while introducing them to the negative cultural influences of modern society is not really a fair trade.

Especially when these people(and possibly a handful of others in the Amazon) are literally the last remaining people on earth to be unaffected by modern man.

Edit: See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069163

Re: The Forbidden Island

#134

Post by notahacker »

rndmize wrote: post #76
eshvk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thousands of years of war, famine, plague, slavery, and endless grinding inequality (still haven't quite fixed that one it seems) to get where we are now? Are you trying to tell me that these "noble savages" didn't have war, didn't have famine or inequality?

Tribal warfare was usually a matter of establishing boundaries. If I remember my history correctly, this was pretty clearly demonstrated in battles between Native Americans and European colonists in the 16 and 1700s. Tribal attacks were closer to raids - warriors would fight, some people would die, but damage on a lasting scale was minimal. Colonist attacks, on the other hand, were going to war in the civilized measu…

"War" is also a wildly different prospect for a society in which a person cannot be considered a man until he has ambushed and killed a random stranger from another tribe and fashioned their body parts into a trophy, to a society so accustomed to peace it requires ever-more-complex rationalizations to breach it, having invented Geneva conventions, treaties and the concept of being "humane" along the way. At the end, you're just as dead whether killed by the ruthless efficiency of an atomic bomb or a Holocaust in a protracted as you are if ambushed by a lone member of another tribe that's just moved into your area.

Let's put things into perspective: a tribe lives in total isolation from the rest of the world for 65000 years, eating an abundance of fish, and the most advanced technology they develop over that time is weapons, which they default to brandishing at the first sign of any outsiders or unexplained phenomenon. That's hardly a great advertisement for the ability of their simpler social structures and lack of external threats to yield peace and harmony.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#137

Post by precisioncoder »

geuis wrote: post #108
homeomorphic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know… suppose some highly advanced aliens with for the most part benign intent found us. Would you really like them to "stay the fuck away"? I, for one, would love for our technology to leapfrog ahead centuries, even though it would completely change our culture. The disease part can be handled today. We could go visit them in hazmat suits. And I know I'm being really generous when I'm comparing the modern wo…

Answer 1: Yes, stay the fuck away. If Race XYZ has ability to monitor us without us knowing, thus not interfering with us, sure go ahead. Its not like there's much we could to stop them. But the moment they make their existence known, we're fucked. At that moment, we aren't the world-conquering successful species we love and proclaim to be. We're the little tribe living on the little island that's quietly being prote…

Modern medicine, physics, modern housing, sanitation, plumbing, etc, etc. They have a massive amount to gain. You can romanticize their situation, or we can decide to leave them there for other reasons but claiming they have nothing to gain is just plain wrong.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#138

Post by bedhead »

JonnieCache wrote: post #53
eshvk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why leave them alone? (I have my own reasons why they should or shouldn't be left alone. I am just curious to figure out why you are so insistent that they be left alone.)

A. it is clearly what they want. B. contact with us is likely to be deadly to them.

C. What's the upside for us by contacting them? There's nothing at stake for us, it doesn't matter.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#139

Post by barking »

annnnd wrote: post #101
barking wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd argue that their attitude to the outside world can only be based on very little information most of which is probably no longer relevant

Actually, I would argue that their information is VERY relevant. Humans make the same mistakes / crimes / ... over and over and over again. I am quite sure that Columbus approached the natives with gifts, and look where it ended.

Really? You think they know what happened in the Americas post 1492?

And suppose that the people of that island began showing signs that they wished to make contact. What then?

Re: The Forbidden Island

#140

Post by scrabble »

lukifer wrote: post #33
6ren wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The archaeological record shows that tooth decay increased dramatically with agriculture, and prior to that, was much less frequent than today. It's one step forward, two steps back - at least, for dentistry. Many of our dramatically beneficial advances - such as covered sewage and vitamin-supplemented bread - solve problems that did not exist for less densely populated hunter-gatherers. The big problem for them was…

Don't forget the other major problem that civilization solved really well: infant mortality. (Unless you take the Malthusian perspective and see it as a boon to population management.)

The interesting thing here is that we have no idea if they have also solved infant mortality, but in a different way.

They've been around for so long, it's likely that they've solved some of the problems we have in unique ways.

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