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Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

uncontactedtribes.org

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Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#241

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#242

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#243

Post by Helianthus16 »

lwhi wrote: post #134
raganwald wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treat people as you would like to be treated if you were them. I wish I had 100 upmods to give. This is exactly what I was saying elsewhere, we should think about how we would want to be treated. Would we want medicine and education offered to us? Would we want the option for some of our elders to live out the rest of their lives in a traditional manner? Would we want bulldozers knocking down our trees? Would we want…

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.

Ok.

India is now an "important" country. Burgeoning technologically and culturally, what it received from Britain was access to the intellectual firestorm of the Enlightenment. Hindu thinkers were involved in the formation of Universalism, the idea that all religions were different aspects of the same thing and could be united.

Of course, it cost them the pain of the Pakistan-India divide, the struggle of Gandhi, and a confusing cultural identity among a people that didn't necessarily have a singular cultural identity in the first place. But what price is too much?

South Africa paid the price, and is now among the most advanced of African nations.

Of course, most indigenous peoples just got royally fucked. Aboriginal Australians and the Maori. So I suppose your point in general holds.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#244

Post by Helianthus16 »

Charuru wrote: post #160
bugsy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you doing about the non-hypothetical slavery in the US right now?

You're talking about human trafficking/sex slaves? It's already illegal. I leave that up to the cops.

I hope he was talking about something a little more subtle, like the fact that we have so many Hispanic people here without citizenship and have therefore created a sort of lower subservient class. But probably not, slavery's a bit too strong a term unless there's a somewhat-mitigating "wage" in front of it.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#245

Post by dmg8 »

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…

It sounds as if you're envisioning these people being painlessly integrated into modern society, perhaps retrained as plumbers, software developers, etc., then joining Brazil's (extremely small) middle class. This is just not realistic.

In practice, these people joining "civilization" would almost certainly mean ending up living in grinding poverty in an extremely violent "favela" (Brazil's ubiquoutous shanty towns) with drugs and guns everywhere.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#246

Post by sukuriant »

dmg8 wrote: post #228
forensic wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been done. Individuals have been taken from tribes and allowed to integrate into western society. They usually choose to go back.

link?

yes, a link would be very nice for that one.

Furthermore, I'd like to know reasons for their return, if that's the case. Also, I'd like to know what their children think, if they have them in the outside world, and what happens if they're provided some of the benefits of outside society (eg: state-of-the-art surgery from top-trained surgeons)

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#247

Post by sukuriant »

I have been skimming over the comments in here, and I have come to two thoughts. First off, I don't have a well-established stance, but our god-like observation of their civilization is ... strange. I wonder what would happen if they all were struck by a terrible disease as the scientists with their kilometre-spying cameras watched. Would they go and help? Where's their "don't contact them" nature, then?

But that wasn't the thought I intended to contemplate. Some people have said that their culture is lost. Why is their culture lost? And this is terrible, but, does it matter? If their culture is full of things long since dis-proven, what has been lost? If they choose to leave their old ways upon discovering/learning (through whatever means) our ways, what does that matter? Please explain why these things are bad to me. If a people has chosen a different way of life upon experiencing it, who cares that it's gone? The anthropologists that were having fun? This desperation to keep these people isolated reminds me of another article I read on HN a while ago that discussed scientists that were very sad about the situation that polar bears and grizzlies were beginning to breed. I thought it was beautiful to see their joined species able to survive, but I can only imagine the people that wanted to keep them separate were disappointed, in part, because there wouldn't be any pure-bred polar bears anymore.

My other thought is a request to HN for this very type of article. Please, please, please, for heated debates like this with the numerous tree-like threads. Please make a way to collapse sub-threads so the train of thought that brought someone to a particular point can be clearly seen.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#248

Post by mrleinad »

Groxx wrote: post #238
mrleinad wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last paragraph, if analyzed, contains a false assesment. If they walk in a straight line and contact us, and then they don't return to their way of life because they want to keep that contact, then we can be certain they want to communicate with us. We can CHOOSE to stay away. There's nothing that states we MUST communicate or have relationships with all human beings, nor step onto EVERY land until everything's…

Really? What if they're just out walking and are unaware of the existence of other humans? Finding a city when you think your group is all there is would be rather "contaminating". And you've still contaminated that one; if they bring back that information, you've allowed contamination of the culture as a whole, the same as if you went yourselves, except you get to sit back and lie about how you had nothing to do wit…

"What if they're the anarchist of the group?"

What if they are? Can you see the diference between giving them, a group with far fewer resources to defend themselves, the chance to remain isolated if they want it so, or contact us as well, against forcing our presence there?

"Our existence is interference if they become aware of it"

I concede you that point. Can I rephrase "must not contact them" with "should minimize points of contact from our side"? Those planes have their purpose: to make us aware of their presence, because we're about to wipe out their environment. Should we keep our distance? Yes. Should we do nothing and let companies run them over? No, absolutely not. Then I go for flying over them and take pictures.. It's the lesser of two evils.

There's no magic. Once they discover us, instead of we discovering them, they can take the step to communicate wth us.

Re: Aerial footage of uncontacted Amazon tribe

#250

Post by necolas »

Pheter wrote: post #199
gregwebs wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

How is life expectancy not easy to measure? (Unless you mean without disturbing them)

Why should we assume 'life expectancy' is an absolute measure of progress. One could equally argue that what one does over the course of a lifetime is more important than how long it lasts. Many people in our social systems spend the best part of 15 years in school, then 40 years working 40 hours a week, and may spend their final years riddled with diseases; depression and mental illness are on the rise; obesity, diabetes, back problems, etc., are increasingly common even in the young.

It was only relatively recently that the overall health of a person living in an agricultural society came to be comparable with the health inferred from ancient hunter gatherer skeletons.

There is no way to objectively 'measure' whether their lives or ours are better spent or more enjoyable.

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