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One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

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Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#61

Post by slothtrop »

bmitc wrote: post #60
slothtrop wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean better than early North American settlers. Agriculture is quite old, and integral to the birth of Civilization. Not really clear what the disparity might have been at the onset, though it might have been a hybrid system. It seems that even some indigenous societies in the Americas experimented with agriculture. > You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societi…

No, I meant all the way back to the birth of agriculture. See Against the Grain by James C. Scott.

A bit skeptical since he wrote Seeing Like A State but I'll put it on my list.

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#62

Post by ManuelKiessling »

UglyToad wrote: post #30

As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…

Wait, am I understanding this correctly: Graeber stole that one from Böll?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arb...

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#63

Post by UglyToad »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #62
UglyToad wrote: post #30

As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…

Wait, am I understanding this correctly: Graeber stole that one from Böll? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arb...

I initially said "with credit to Graeber" but as he acknowledges in the book it's from someone else, I guess here. I just find the Kindle UI too hostile to actually bother and pull out the full attribution so settled to "from" the book so readers could locate the citation.

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#64

Post by UglyToad »

bmitc wrote: post #60
slothtrop wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean better than early North American settlers. Agriculture is quite old, and integral to the birth of Civilization. Not really clear what the disparity might have been at the onset, though it might have been a hybrid system. It seems that even some indigenous societies in the Americas experimented with agriculture. > You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societi…

No, I meant all the way back to the birth of agriculture. See Against the Grain by James C. Scott.

To give a +1 here, I think Against the Grain makes a nice companion to Debt from what I assume are separate ends of the left-right spectrum within libertarianism, or at least I guess so from Against the Grain having a positive review from the Cato Institute on the cover.

They both construct convincing narratives from looking at the history that deconstruct the "just so" stories of economists. From AtG you see how most of 'civilization' throughout history has been experienced by most people as slavery and warfare and living standards actually improved, or at least didn't become much worse, for many with things like the fall of Rome.

Debt is fascinating because it shows just how new and novel the current inescapable logic of capitalism actually is. Adam Smith's fanciful notion of a fully formed civilization of shopkeepers who adopt coinage to streamline barter is shown to be complete nonsense and with it the foundations of much of "assumed" thought about how people and markets organise themselves.

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#65

Post by Epiphany21 »

ryan93 wrote: post #54
Epiphany21 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you have the data in hand and you're still making appeals to authority, you've lost the plot entirely.

the data shows a lot of time spend doing nothing

You don't say...

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#66

Post by [deleted] »

Aunche wrote: post #45
UglyToad wrote: post #30

As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…

Doing nothing and relaxing in a tropical paradise sounds great until everyone else gets the same idea and wants to do the same and moves there. Then, your island is no longer self sufficient, and the only jobs locals are qualified for are low-skill services for foreign tourists.

[deleted]

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#67

Post by user3939382 »

UglyToad wrote: post #30

As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…

Laying on the beach all day is a lot more enjoyable when, when you’re done, you have a nice, safe home to go back to, good food, health care, etc. It’s easy to romanticize having nothing but real life is complicated. Living primitively is simple but it’s not easy.

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#68

Post by UglyToad »

noodles_nomore wrote: post #50
api wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks their leg. - A natural disaster destroys your home. - You get cancer. - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone. - A draught causes a famine. - Your baby is born with a birth defect. ... and so on. I strongly suspect that humanity set of…

So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, wi…

There's more discussion of Hobbes in the book than can reasonably be quoted since it links in to themes developed across chapters, but for a taste:

"I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of "self-interest". It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right around Hobbes' time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments.

When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that all human life can be explained as the pursuit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores . By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense."[0]

Hobbes statement of some fundamental truth of human nature is both newer and less open-and-shut than we assume.

[0]: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/under... p 331

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#69

Post by ceeplusplus »

Daishiman wrote: post #25
ceeplusplus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's another study typical of social scientists who don't understand statistics trying to pass off their political views as science. If you look at the graphs presented the 95% confidence intervals range from no correlation to positive to negative correlation, sometimes in the same graph. And R^2 is sub 0.3 which means even the correlative effect is incredibly weak. Yet somehow the authors come to the conclusion that…

I'll take the social scientists who have man-decades of direct observation and interaction with said tribes over your random layman speculation.

I'm not speculating, I'm pointing out how their data analysis is grossly flawed because they don't understand the statistical methods they're using. Maybe your own political bias is showing.

Re: One of the most popular activities in non-industrial societies: doing nothing

#70

Post by jsiaajdsdaa »

tluyben2 wrote: post #58
jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #9

My dog also does nothing when not prompted, and he seems to be surviving just fine.

Your dog is convinced you will provide it with food and drink and other care until it dies(until you don't: it will look elsewhere eventually). I think if that would be the same for humans, things would be different. It seems it is something people strive to achieve even though when it finally happens, they won't be able to handle it. Dogs contemplate the passing of time and the waste (this is our sentiment, not inhe…

Interesting comment. As a human, I could quite easily procure food and drink that would last me for maybe a decade. I could also get firewood and medicine and some books so that I could entertain myself in a bunker in the event I wanted to live like that.

I think if a dog realized that food/drink isnt coming, he would go into feral mode and go hunting for that. But upon being satisfied, he would take a break for a bit, because he doesn't have the concept of stockpiling or calculating his long term needs.

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