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Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

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Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#71

Post by Calwestjobs »

627467 wrote: post #28

> Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms – what archaeologists call culture – were fundamentally integrated into technological solutions in this part of Peru in ancient times. Isolating and removing the tools from that knowledge made them less effective. Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms may have helped indigenous people perpetuate the solutions/technologies. Studying and understanding those may help people - today…

problem of today is not having enough knowledge, books, ... for storing that stuff or for generating more appropriate stuff to work with modern knowledge they did not had, but problem is not having workforce big enough to do this stuff AND live in current economic system on top of physical/planetwide system.

there is just too may people and only two things can solve that problem - A) what stalin, hitler, did [ graph in GIF https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH_C_MORTACRACIES.GIF ] B) culture of not having 4 children and having need to live energy expensive life.

after hitler in west, reforms were made. after lenin in east, stalinist came.

so without having everybody on board choosing B)... what is the answer? and you can not be peruan-style farmer when you have terrorists pumping oil from ground , building tanks, drones, paying people to burn buildings, cars, writing nonsense "red-pilling" people ...

USA was lucky not having wars, and not having war in USA was 99.999% because of geography - no land bridge. and 0.001% of "tyrrany" of state not allowing mass murder in rest of the world (yes redpill-ing oil here). but culture is changing, state no longer cares about that 0.001% (or atleast seem so ).

we do not care about transporting muck into our fields so we do not need to manufacture fertilizers. so yeah culture is not important but it is. he means culture as a "we do care about sitting next to your field and thinking about it [but that means not spending time programming healthcare system systems] and we do care about earth" [even without hippie drugs]

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#72

Post by Spooky23 »

ashoeafoot wrote: post #58
Spooky23 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you study this stuff in the americas it’s depressing as the Spanish in particular slaughtered people and culture so completely and unimpeded for so long. The evil and barbarism of this colonial episode is difficult to fathom. The 20th century horror show of slaughter ran in relatively short episodes… this imperial era ran for hundreds of years. Because you’re left with archeological evidence, whose interpretation…

but then why romanticise what was destroyed ? Why not go at the world with a realistic view, which is that the "new world" was exactly the same as the old with dominant landempires holding colonies and tributories, aristocrats holding slaves, that where the landbound spaniards to their neighbors. Just because they have been genocided into a blank slate and you rightfully despise the acts of the genociders, does not m…

I didn’t. Why do you feel compelled to engage in “both sides” fallacy?

The Spanish Empire killed about 55M people or 90% of the indigenous population in a hundred years. That’s a scale of slaughter and suffering unprecedented even by the murderous ways of modern society, greater than even the Roman slaughter in Gaul.

Why is it so difficult for you to imagine that perhaps some of those 50 million people perhaps knew something? We’ll never know for sure, as everyone was killed and most aspects of their societies were destroyed.

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#73

Post by greenavocado »

627467 wrote: post #28

> Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms – what archaeologists call culture – were fundamentally integrated into technological solutions in this part of Peru in ancient times. Isolating and removing the tools from that knowledge made them less effective. Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms may have helped indigenous people perpetuate the solutions/technologies. Studying and understanding those may help people - today…

Traditions are solutions to problems that civilizations forgot they had

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#74

Post by watwut »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #54
mock-possum wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - just because they used culture, or religion, to underpin that stuff - doesn’t mean we need to. Doesn’t mean we need to use the same culture, or even the same religion, for that matter. “This is what works, and this is why it works, and this is the benefit, and this is why it’s worthwhile” can be enough, with a minimum of pretense.

I've been saying for a while that "Religion is a social technology". Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as universal a moral as you'd like to believe, and the other commandments are also good life advice. Even "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" serves an important purpose in keeping everyone on the same page. Nearly every culture has a tradition of parables; Tales that reveal important truths by metaphor. Whether they…

Atheists are no more murderous the Christians. Religion is not necessary for that. Or even helpful.

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#75

Post by ctack »

watwut wrote: post #74
GauntletWizard wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying for a while that "Religion is a social technology". Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as universal a moral as you'd like to believe, and the other commandments are also good life advice. Even "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" serves an important purpose in keeping everyone on the same page. Nearly every culture has a tradition of parables; Tales that reveal important truths by metaphor. Whether they…

Atheists are no more murderous the Christians. Religion is not necessary for that. Or even helpful.

Useful anymore, it’s not. We have education now which tells us how to society.

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#76

Post by luckylion »

mstipetic wrote: post #66
luckylion wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could and should have both. Sure, but one is much more important than the other. You can commit 50% of your resources as a society towards art and religion and the other half to science and production, and your standard of living will be much lower than if you committed 10% towards art and religion.

Define standard of living

The degree of wealth and material comfort available to a person or community

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#77

Post by wqaatwt »

watwut wrote: post #74
GauntletWizard wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying for a while that "Religion is a social technology". Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as universal a moral as you'd like to believe, and the other commandments are also good life advice. Even "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" serves an important purpose in keeping everyone on the same page. Nearly every culture has a tradition of parables; Tales that reveal important truths by metaphor. Whether they…

Atheists are no more murderous the Christians. Religion is not necessary for that. Or even helpful.

Yet pre Christian societies in Europe were arguably significantly more brutal. Establishing at least some basic principals of universal equality was a big deal (something modern atheists inherited directly from Christianity)

e.g. even amongst the civilized Greeks and and Romans foreigners who had no legal ties to their city states (some form of citizenship or diplomatic treaties with their home city) were basically treated as subhuman and could be enslaved and murdered with little to no repercussions.

Universalist religions extended that to vast geographic areas and established some basic shared principles and trust between strangers e.g. in the middle ages somebody from Scandinavia could travel to Rome on their own with relatively (of course still significant) little risk of being robbed, enslaved or murdered while being able to rely on hospitality from complete strangers/foreigners during his trip.

Of course the Romans already had something similar by the 100s AD (non citizens and slaves were of course excluded) but political systems are much more fragile than religions.

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#78

Post by hosh »

627467 wrote: post #55
hosh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permaculture design was developed out of systematically studying indigenous methods from around the world, and one of the insights is that how humans inhabit the land — the culture — matters a lot. If something is not aligned to human interests and norms, they won’t do it. It goes with what Christopher Alexander understood about living architecture. How people use it matters. The whole point of pattern languages was…

> if something is not aligned to human interests and norms, they won’t do it. I won't litigate strongly against this statement because its obvious this matters, but human interests and norms are not immutable and the mechanism to change it definitely involve doing things (at some scale) that can be seen as abnormal or against (some) human interests. This tension and how it's resolved is the evolutionary pressure. > w…

Working at the scale of product design and user experience, it is easy to see what a user is doing as against their own personal interest. What I've found is that there is usually some kind of motivation for some things to be done. It might not be strictly rational, but more often than not, there is some kind of narrative or view from which that particular action, belief, or rational makes sense. They are often unexamined.

So I probably shouldn't have said "aligned to human interest", because the scope of that interest is different among individuals (for different aspect of their life). That scope is dynamic. It could be self-interested, or interest of the immediate family or community they belong to. Thank you for bringing that up.

As far as the rigidity -- I appreciate your view and comment on this. I admit too. It may be obvious to you that the post-conquest syncretic culture is different, but it was a blind spot for me. I didn't even think about that. I say all of this to say that the lens (view) in which we see all of this isn't itself always seen by the person looking through it. In my case, I know about the idea and I can still miss it.

However, I have learned tbat many arguments that talk past each other happen because the view from which people argue from are not always called out or clearly defined. There are things that can be dismissed simply because it doesn't fit the view.

Re-reading your original comment -- perhaps it's better stated that, while you don't have to couple the original culture and technology, for something to be practiced now, those technologies need to be coupled with the current-day culture.

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#79

Post by lupusreal »

Retric wrote: post #31
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the shorter lifespan is that our cities grow much faster. Why build infrastructure that last 200 years if it needs to be ripped up in 50 due to no longer meeting population demands?

When they transported 100% of the output of a spring there’s no need to update the infrared as a city grows there was no way to go past 100%. Dams have the same kind of limits and are regularly designed for 150+ year lifetimes. The Hoover Dam is just about to turn 90 and it’s likely to last another 100 years. Quite a lot of the built environment is designed for 100+ year lifespans. When it isn’t there’s often very go…

Building a bridge that spans a wide road or river is extremely expensive without using iron or steel. If you do, that limits the lifespan because they corrode.

We never forgot how to build stone bridges, we stopped doing it most of the time because nobody wants to pay for it.

Re: Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

#80

Post by mstipetic »

luckylion wrote: post #76
mstipetic wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define standard of living

The degree of wealth and material comfort available to a person or community

That is a sad and myopic way of seeing things imo
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