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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26574 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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From NYT (archive): Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group's first female leader spoke. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.

"When it arrived, everyone was happy," said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village's maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. "But now, things have gotten worse," she said. She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. "Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet," she said. "They're learning the ways of the white people."

After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.

During the meetings, teenagers swiped through Kwai, a Chinese-owned social network. Young boys watched videos of the Brazilian soccer star Neymar Jr. And two 15-year-old girls said they chatted with strangers on Instagram. One said she now dreamed of traveling the world, while the other wants to be a dentist in São Paulo.

A case study in what happens when you take a “natural” society and introduce the internet. This relates in some interesting ways to an overview of Hunter-Gatherers and Play that I posted a few weeks ago in the FFT:

Given the indulgence that hunter-gatherer adults exhibit toward children, it is no surprise that the children spend most of their time playing. Play, almost by definition, is what children want to do. The adults have no qualms about this, because they believe that it is through play that children learn what they must to become effective adults. In a survey of ten hunter-gatherer researchers, who had lived in 7 different hunter-gatherer cultures, all of the researchers said that children were free to play essentially from dawn to dusk every day (see Gray, 2009). In a published report on how Ju/’hoan children spent their time, Patricia Draper (1976, pp 205-206) concluded: "[Ju/’hoan] children are late in being held responsible for subsistence tasks. Girls are around 14 years old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before they begin serious hunting. … Children do amazingly little work." In a study of peoples with mixed hunter-gatherer and agricultural subsistence, in Botswana, John Bock and Sarah Johnson (2004) found that the more a family was involved in hunting and gathering, and the less they were involved in agriculture, the more time children had to play.

Hunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly all that occurs in camp––the preparations to move; the building of huts; the making and mending of tools and other artifacts; the food preparation and cooking; the nursing and care of infants; the precautions taken against predators and diseases; the gossip, discussions, arguments, and politics; the songs, dances, festivities, and stories. They sometimes accompany adults on food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips. In the course of their daily lives, they see, hear, and have the opportunity to explore everything that is relevant to becoming a successful adult in their culture, and they incorporate all of this into their play. They play at the activities that they observe in the adults around them, and as they grow older, their play turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division between playful participation and real participation in the valued activities of the band.

The above-mentioned survey of researchers elicited many examples of valued adult activities that were mimicked regularly by children in play. Digging up tubers, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, building huts, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, storytelling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. The specific lists varied from culture to culture, in accordance with differences in the skills that were exemplified by adults in each culture. All of the respondents said that boys in the culture they studied engaged in a great deal of playful hunting. The two respondents who studied the Agta—a culture in which women as well as men regularly hunt—noted that girls as well as boys, in that culture, engaged in much playful hunting.

Apparently, when children are free to do what they want, they spend much of their time playing at the very activities that they see, from direct experience, are most crucial for success in their culture. Their conscious motive is fun, not education. It is exciting for children, everywhere, to pretend that they are powerful, competent adults, doing beautifully and skillfully what they see the adults around them doing. From an evolutionary perspective, it is no coincidence that children are constructed in such a way.

Equally important to learning how to hunt and gather, for hunter-gather children, is learning how to interact with others assertively yet peacefully. In their play, children practice arguing. Turnbull has described how older Mbuti children (age 9 and up) playfully rehash and try to improve upon the arguments that they have heard among adults.

In a “primitive” or natural society, childrens’ play is an effortless rendition of adult activity. Over their crucial years of cognitive development, children slowly become adults through stress-free exploration and imitation. The playfulness guides them toward skill acquisition, not unlike a fun video game. In the absence of superstimuli, there is no better way to “play”, so boredom promotes the learning behavior effortlessly. This has the inherent benefit of acting as “shaping” (in a psychological sense) because the skill that is learned is never beyond one’s capacity, is imitated through one’s father, and with the older children who act as mentors (“the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise”).

Their original arrangement was paradisal. Just from a psychological standpoint. It is the optimal way for a child to learn. When StarLink was introduced, the paradisal order was disrupted — innocent children have consumed Apple in the prelapsarian garden, so to speak. There is no turning back; they will likely look at their loincloths and feel shame at their nakedness. But I do wonder then, what about us developed people? Are we doomed to fall further and further from grace, our children forever destined to the cognitive hazards of superstimuli? Is there no way out, no rope we can grab to lift us back to grace?

Are we doomed to fall further and further from grace, our children forever destined to the cognitive hazards of superstimuli? Is there no way out, no rope we can grab to lift us back to grace?

Realized I have so many thoughts on this that I can't really condense them to a mere comment.

I think superstimuli are a frightening problem for raising kids because there's now far more 'irretrievable' pitfalls a young person can fall into during their developmental stages that may screw up the rest of their lives. Getting into hard drugs, falling into a porn addiction, or gambling all your spare funds away (and then the rest of your funds) in a fit of passion because there's almost no friction in the system to slow you down from making that life-altering choice.

Kids don't even get the chance to develop higher reasoning/self control before they're getting pwned by egregores that are built specifically to suck them in and extract resources. And thus they think this is just 'normal' and don't even notice the alternate path they could have taken.

Likewise, I think that removing too much hardship from children's development is having the effect of leaving them completely unprepared for regulating their own behavior because they don't get the feedback loop of making bad decisions => suffer painful consequences => adjust behavior and learn to avoid the things that burned them in the future.

So simultaneously kids are being spit out into a world that is aggressively attempting to get them addicted to products and services that are not necessarily healthy for them, and the kids are unable to exercise their agency to forgo pleasure or accept temporary pain to get themselves onto a better path.

And this model seems to be reflected in the current path of civilization, as well.

How do you rip a whole population away from a stimulus that it has become psychologically dependent upon?

This reminds me of some articles Scott had shared a while back about "vibes collapse" in remote tribes, when first introduced to larger civilizations. For instance: https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-24-planetary-scale-vibe-collapse.html

I'm not certain what to think about it. Since the smartphones and modern social media are only ~15 years old, we're still figuring out how to fit them in at a civilizational level.

The classy people like @WhiningCoil are taking up aesthetic crafting hobbies and artisanal homeschooling sans social media.

The uncool moms like me are begging our children to please, please just go watch a couple of episodes Octonauts so that I can get some alone time.

People have been making fun of the overconsumption of written stories since before Cervantes. I suppose it would probably be useful to consider something telos related, but haven't heard anything extremely compelling yet. Perhaps it would be good for some Jesuits to bring the tribe more Aristotle.

Wow, this sounds like the first 20 minutes of The Gods Must Be Crazy, wherein a hunter gatherer tribe gets a Coke bottle and it ruins their whole society. I'd recommend the movie, but the rest of it isn't that good.

I had a hazy memory of the beginning of that film for decades since watching it with my dad in the early 90s. Stuck with me for years, and only recently was I able to find out the name of it.

Remember absolutely nothing else, so you're probably that right that the rest was meh.

Eh, I loved that movie when I was a kid. It's great. guerrilla warfare, awkward romance, a cursed land-rover called The Antichrist, it's all over the place. The sequel was great too, had the honey badger meme twenty years early.

"Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet," she said. "They're learning the ways of the white people."

Genuinely hilarious commentary, although I would personally bet quite a bit that they are not, in fact, learning the ways of the white people.

It's the meme version of getting smallpox etc, without either vaccines or any childhood immunity. Western Civilization has great books too, bot it takes quite a lot of education to appreciate it.

I suppose the "white person" version of just naturally absorbing weaving and making attractive books is that my parents were always, every day, talking about what they were reading, reading it out loud, and going on about their favorite books and philosophy professors -- a kind of meme childhood immunization.

An isolated tribe in Brazil probably doesn’t speak enough English to watch black TikTok. Some broken Portuguese, on the other hand, seems plausible, and Brazilian social media probably is dominated by white-looking people due to different racial dynamics in Latin America.

Say more?

Cynically, I expect that the young people in the tribe are learning about TikTok trends and performative nonsense from Western culture, but getting absolutely none of the cultural and personal habits that are the "ways of the white people" that have generated the wealth and success of the Western world. That she believes that learning the ways of the white people leads to laziness suggests that she also doesn't actually know anything about those white cultural habits and is going entirely off of what she sees on the internet and sees the kids developing. In reality, white culture looks a lot like that Smithsonian poster (that was apparently intended to be a critique) - rugged individualism, family structure, future orientation, rigid time schedules with time viewed as a commodity, and hard work as the key to success. I doubt the tribe is learning those values, which is perhaps an indictment of internet culture, but has nothing to do with the ways of the white people.

rugged individualism, family structure, future orientation, rigid time schedules with time viewed as a commodity, and hard work as the key to success

You think white culture is the only culture that has these values?

The Smithsonian's African-American Museum created the brochure. I don't think any of those traits are individually specific to white people, but collectively I think they're a good way of describing the culture of Amerikaners in contrast to other groups that have inhabited the continent.

I can't name any others that has all those features, can you? Certainly not the combination with "rugged individualism"

The idea of “white culture” is a joke on its face. Is a redneck in a lifted F-350 with a fondness for fishing and drinking cheap beer white culture? Or is an over educated millennial white woman who dyes her hair, loves dogs and hates her parents white culture? If both answers are yes, which one is more white?

Also, from the tribal matriarch’s perspective, white people spend all day sitting in chairs and getting fat. She’s not impressed by your brokerage account or your ability to get to work on time.

Yes, those are both white culture. Neither is "more white" anymore than different Asian subcultures are "more Asian". I can find both endearing and dislikeable things about aspects of both of their subcultures, but they do share the relevant traits called out by the Smithsonian poster on the matter. In their own ways, they find success in white cultures and I say good for them.

I can think of few people I'm less interested in impressing than the matriarch of a jungle tribe whose culture is obliterated the moment it comes into contact with the civilized world.

While I sometimes entertain goofy social arrangements to solve this problem — could you livestream Dad working on excel spreadsheets at daycare to get kids organically playing at number problems? — there are only three, equally terrifying resolutions to the problem of humans getting less and less adapted to the current environment.

  1. Retvrn. Industrial civilization collapses at a global level. Humanity returns to the original affluent society, with the depletion of easily accessible hydrocarbons preventing complex civilization from ever re-emerging. @RandomRanger's concerns are moot because no efficient rival can appear to outcompete neo-primitives. Uncle Ted fans throw a wild party before getting to the business of the hunger wars that kill off 7 billion or so.
  2. Abolition of man. Industrial civilization re-writes human nature to be better adapted to what it needs from humans. Probably this is conducted through "voluntary" methods in most countries, though eventually those that refuse modification die off due to non-modified males becoming socially dysfunctional losers compared to the kids who spend 14 hours a day playing at economically relevant skills. This dynamic leads to a transhumanist arms race of unpredictable but probably horrifying, escalating self-modifications.
  3. Wall-E (or human extinction). Humans become irrelevant to industrial civilization. The optimistic view of this is a human zoo of total emancipation and self-actualization: a Disneyland with children, who play at hide and seek or with VR games or whatever. The pessimistic view is human extinction, with industrial civilization carrying on blindly turning as much of the universe as possible into low entropy structures.

Retvrn. Industrial civilization collapses at a global level. Humanity returns to the original affluent society, with the depletion of easily accessible hydrocarbons preventing complex civilization from ever re-emerging.

Complex civilization emerged without easy access to hydrocarbons - Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, China, Japan, Rome etc. You can have some pretty sophisticated and complex civilization powered solely by renewable resources. You can't have our incredibly wasteful modern society, but that doesn't mean you don't get complex civilization.

While I sometimes entertain goofy social arrangements to solve this problem — could you livestream Dad working on excel spreadsheets at daycare to get kids organically playing at number problems?

N=1 but my dad was a programmer and some of my earliest memories are of him writing cool little simulations and letting me play with changing numbers in them to see how the results changed. And some types of programming still feel like play to me now.

So I suspect the answer is "yes" (at least as long as the spreadsheet manipulator appeared high status, but I expect that wouldn't be a problem because "the person everyone is paying attention to" is pretty strongly correlated with status).

"the person everyone is paying attention to" is pretty strongly correlated with status

Children don’t generally hold their teachers in high regard, in my experience. And they pay attention to them all day every day.

My (not extremely reliable) memory from my childhood is that teachers were highly regarded throughout early elementary school, though that respect was greatly diminished by the end of elementary school and nonexistent by middle school.

I think children hold the good teachers in high regard. Most teachers aren't good. I think if we broke teachers unions and empowered school choice, we could quickly see a great deal of very good teachers teaching. Everyone loves a good teacher in the right circumstances, from students to parents to administrators to the good teacher themselves because it's such a fulfilling job. But in public schools where the principals receive the same salary regardless of performance, and powerful unions dedicated to preserving jobs over teaching children, good teachers are secondary to minimally risky teachers who don't get the school bad press.

I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t remember a single teacher or professor from my school years fondly, except for the 10th grade English teacher that 15-year-old me badly wanted to fuck. And I attended very highly ranked (albeit public) schools and a historically top tier university program. I certainly didn’t think of these people as high status.

But I’ve read a fair number of sappy “the amazing teacher I’ll never forget” stories from Redditors over the years, so I’ll concede that I’m probably a minority.

Did any of your peers regard any teachers fondly at the time? No one was going, "Oh, it's too bad you got Mrs. Alice for math, she can't teach! I'm lucky I got Mr. Bob, he's hilarious and makes the subject make sense"?

Nope. A few professors were reviled for being harsh graders, but that’s about it.

Uh, farmers had to deal with this problem, what, 7,000 years ago? They seem to have found a workable solution.

Yes, taking your kids’ phones away and beating them for laziness or misbehavior is less pleasant than hunter-gatherer life. But agriculture is much closer to our current situation than hunter-gathering, and it seems to work for them.

This just reads and learned helplessness to me. As though the only possible solution is some manner of apocalypse, when that just serves as a convenient excuse to abandon all personal agency.

I've lucked into an arrangement that works fantastic. I work from home, and maintain productive hobbies. We don't watch TV as a family except sparingly. My wife and I strive to stay off our phones in front of our daughter, usually opting for reading instead.

Our 4 year old wants to do everything we do, which consist of exercise, woodworking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, yardwork and reading. She's already begging me to teach her how to program, which is obviously a ways off, but the wife is teaching her to read. If we actually make the leap to homeschooling her next year, I expect these trends to continue and strengthen.

It's honestly not that hard. Stay off your damned phone, and don't give them to children. Also, don't be a slob. Have an industrious hobby instead of being a couch potato.

Our 4 year old wants to do everything we do, which consist of exercise, woodworking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, yardwork and reading. She's already begging me to teach her how to program, which is obviously a ways off, but the wife is teaching her to read.

There are tons of drag-and-drop educational programming apps that teach stuff like loops and functions.

You benefit from an overvalued career that doesn’t require you to walk, shake hands, or do much more than bum around on a laptop all day. Presumably, your wife doesn’t work if you’re considering homeschooling. Your opinion on it being “honestly not that hard” is worth very little to the average person.

And I wouldn’t brag too much about the success of your parenting before your child is a teenager. Homeschooled children usually end up weird and unsociable.

Homeschooled children usually end up weird and unsociable.

I'm the 'designated cool grownup' for a homeschooling community. 'Weird' is not a normal thing I see with young people who can't find their way. 'Undersocialized' is, but homeschool graduates are a real mix. There's success stories and there's failures.

Definitely upvoting 'don't brag about your parenting success until you have a twenty year old', though.

Definitely upvoting 'don't brag about your parenting success until you have a twenty year old', though.

This is fair, but at the same time I object to all this plain old giving up I see, and simply assuming everyone taking steps to protect their kids from superstimuli is actually fucking them up even worse.

everyone taking steps to protect their kids from superstimuli is actually fucking them up even worse.

That does happen, but usually with people who are a bit loopy to begin with. Honestly I’m not sure that oversheltering can be cleanly distinguished from controlling parenting or general nuttiness in a lot of those cases.

Like I said, homeschoolers seem to have a pretty wide variance IME. Most are more or less average, some produce kids that are ready to be normal, functional adults by 16, some produce 25 year olds that act like middle schoolers. Going entirely off the worst cases leaves doesn’t paint a good picture, but neither does going entirely off the best.

Pretty much every engineering related job that doesn't involve direct supervision of construction or experiments can be done remotely.

Also I doubt he uses a laptop. They're supremely bad ergonomy wise, a screen or two and a keyboard do wonders.

Pretty much every engineering related job that doesn't involve direct supervision of construction or experiments can be done remotely.

Fake email-and-excel engineering jobs can be done anywhere your imagination takes you.

Pretty much the entirety of the software field doesn't require anything but an internet connection.

Engineers at least some of them might need to go somewhere and talk to the production people and look at what goes on, but with software, there's never really any need.

Yes, I’m aware that software isn’t real engineering.

49" 32:9 display. I can never go back.

Do you just never use maximized windows with a 32:9? With 3 smaller 16:9s I have one window active in each of them, but you must have a way of aligning multiple windows on one screen to use all that space

Yeah, I typically go with two windows. Apparently if I just drag a window to the edge, it snaps to filling the left or right half of the screen. Seems to be built into Windows 10. I installed PowerToys that has even more advanced options for window partitioning, but I haven't found I need it. My monitor actually came with some Samsung branded utilities for the same, but I found them actually more annoying than the default(?) Windows behavior.

I was going to mention Win+Left/Right if aquota didn't. It's great for snapping to the inner side of a two monitor setup. But I suppose you don't really need that feature.

pro tip, windows key + left/right arrow key has the same effect as dragging all the way to the side. If you continue to hold the windows key after doing this you can then hit the up or down arrow to quarter the window.

Tbh I don't see either 1. or 3. as remotely realistic. You say "RandomRanger's concerns are moot because no efficient rival can appear to outcompete neo-primitives", I say "Obviously any neo-primitive will be outcompeted by non-primitives". Hydrocarbon certainly makes industrial civilisation easier, but there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that it was strictly necessary, and even less that we require it now that we have already developed so far. Even worse, RandomRanger's point is about farmers, not industrial civilisation, so hunter-gatherers were already outcompeted long before hydrocarbons were relevant. There is just no going back.

Wall-E is also an intrinsically unstable system. The beings profiting from this system (humans) have no power, the beings who have all the power (AI overlords or such) do not profit from it. No matter how many safeguards we set up, a single mistake and we're done.

For better or worse, some sort of transhumanism seems to me like the only way forward.

How much do modern urban people profit from cats and dogs? I'm fond of my balls, but I can imagine worse fates than living as pets.

Yeah, have fun being (at best!) dropped into the wilderness bc your caretaker AI hit some economic difficulties. Humans already have a very strong in-built anthropomorphising bias and will often waste incredible money on pets, but this is a function of their affluence. If times get hard, they have no trouble getting rid of and/or mistreating them. In theory we might be able to design AIs who love us so desperately that they won't do it, but this is not the path we are currently going. And even then you'll have the problem that rogue AIs unburdened by humans might outcompete the good ones anyway. Either way it just seems like a stupid bet to take.

the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years

They don't have a hope in hell, do they?

If the paradisal order was so great, hunter-gatherers wouldn't have been getting stomped by farmers for the last 10,000 years. Yes, occasionally the nomad horse-archers went out on great rampages to beat the farmers - but they always lose in the end.

Suppose we took the socialist narrative as true. Maybe women did have better sex under socialism, maybe it was fine to work casually at your guaranteed state job and have fewer Bing Bing Wahoo electronic gadgets that destroy the souls of children. I expect people here immediately think about leaky refrigerators, televisions that exploded, 10-year waitlists for bad cars, breadlines, torture and repression...

Imagine that the social, human-enjoyment problems of socialism were greatly ameliorated - it still wasn't competitive. Capitalism produced greater technical sophistication, more advanced weapons, more of everything. Even if socialism was more fun, it couldn't compete. The innate human will to power and wealth draws people away from socialism. Likewise with hunter-gatherers. As Scott says, maybe it was really fun to hunt without much care for the future, have fun around the fireplace, skin and brutally torture beaten enemies. Maybe it was way more fun not having to do these tedious scientifically managed tasks. Even then, there was a darker side to their existence.

Noble or Savage, it still doesn't matter, they couldn't compete in armaments or numbers. And so they go into the dustbin of history. If apprenticeships and playful imitation were the optimal way to learn, they'd be the ones ruling over us. We need literacy, advanced mathematics, management and hyperspecialization to maintain a vastly more complex civilization. We need hundreds of thousands of words to describe everything in the universe, they only need to worry about things they can physically observe in their forest.

Of course there are problems in our civilization. Superstimulus for instance can and should be regulated. Education can be greatly improved, it's not fit for function even by scientific standards let alone student enjoyment. There are many political/societal problems that need to be addressed. But we're not falling from grace, hunter-gatherers are far below us.

Yes, occasionally the nomad horse-archers

Horse-archers aren't hunter-gatherers, they are herders, a much later thing that farmers. And they had wagons with spoked wheels, which is rocket science for any h-g

If the paradisal order was so great, hunter-gatherers wouldn't have been getting stomped by farmers for the last 10,000 years. Yes, occasionally the nomad horse-archers went out on great rampages to beat the farmers - but they always lose in the end.

Point of contention, you're conflating hunter-gatherers with pastoralists. Pastoralists (like the Mongols) dominated agriculturalists regularly until the last few hundred years.

“Regularly” is overselling it. “Periodically” would be more accurate. The Romans, Chinese, and medieval Europeans did fine against steppe nomads on average. There’s one giant exception, and it involved demolishing the entire Mongol tribal structure while using the spoils of agricultural societies to hold things together. The story of the Yuan dynasty is one of pivoting away from the horse in order to raise troops who’d never seen a steppe.

There’s a couple of other glaring exceptions. One of them is a way of life for over a billion people today- Islam. Islam spread mostly by conquest by camel herders. And attempting to apply perfectly reasonable and sensible camel herder laws to agricultural societies explain partly why Islamic societies are so messed up in the present day. Sharia law is actually, by 700 AD standards, reasonably fair and just, and the facial injustice is mostly things that can be routed around by later societies. Even Saudi Arabia doesn’t have slavery or execute homosexuals anymore. No, applying pastoralist law to agrarian peasant societies creates conditions which make life suckier; the structures of islamic inheritance, for example, incentivize poor treatment of women when applied to land, but not livestock.

Persia is a partially separate exception; it just kept getting conquered by nomads, one of those with the bigger mark being those same Islamic Arabs.

The indo-European expansion came in waves, was carried out by pastoralists, and beat up on settled agrarians quite a bit. Today, all of Europe and most of the Indian subcontinent are the result. For that matter India is almost like Persia in getting conquered by steppe nomads a lot, with lasting import.

Doesn’t it have to switch over at some point? Medieval Europe had clearly left any pastoral roots behind.

Same for early Islam. I’m willing to believe that Muhammad and his earliest followers were nomadic raiders. But by the time you’re getting planned cities, raising peasant levies, and digging canals to irrigate, you’ve clearly adopted agriculture.

Large parts of medieval Europe seem to be in the process of becoming meaningfully less steppe-nomad influenced right as the historical record starts becoming adequate. The Catholic Church(really the Orthodox Church too, but I'm assuming you're discussing western Europe) really wanted Germanic peoples to adopt the mores associated with more settled Roman society, with a few Christian twists. In England this process is better documented than most and also much starker; Anglo-Saxon law bore unmistakable nomadic influences around things like property, inheritance, and the like, as well as the tendency to use a fine for literally everything(and these fines were too high for individuals to pay, with precise details spelled out in statute of who paid what the convicted could not based on relation- a logical adaptation for a nomadic society in which geographic administration of justice is prima facie impossible, but rather counterproductive in an agrarian society). This last part is knowably part of other pre-Christian Germanic societies eg the Vikings; boring details about inheritance and possession don't get recorded in epic poems but crime and punishment often do. Christendom seems to really hate steppe-nomad laws and customs, though, so the middle ages is in large part a time when all that stuff is getting replaced. I'm not sure if northern Indian Hindus have much steppe influence on their culture beyond language today, or if it can be separated from Persian and Mughal influence.

Islam by contrast both A) has steppe nomad raider mores written into the religion and B) achieved most of its expansion under the leadership of nomads who had not switched to agriculture yet(as they tended to do once they had good enough land). The Mughals, Seljuks, etc all spread Islam after joining it as steppe nomads. To say nothing of much of the Islamic heartland being captured in the first wave of conquest before Muhammed's(really Abu Bakr's) followers had learnt to farm.

That A) is a pretty big feature that keeps causing problems in settled-down Islamic societies; the Ottoman empire notoriously had constant secession disputes that it resolved by murdering the shit out of princes because Islamic inheritance rules(based on steppe tradition) prevented primogeniture. Desert camel-herder inheritance rules are also the reason for Islamic societies' very high rates of cousin marriage today.

Certain Muslim societies seem to retain features of Arab pastoral culture that are either irrelevant to or harmful to their modern day prosperity e.g. cousin marriage in Pakistan.

The paradise I am referring to is the way that children are socialized and trained into adults. I’m not making a sweeping generalization about civilizational flaws — I understand the fall is irrevocable — though there are probably other ways that HG’s hold insight on maximizing happiness. If certain instincts originated in tandem with the HG lifestyle, then the HG lifestyle gives us a picture on how those instincts are best oriented and satisfied. We can then find their approximate civilizational version. For instance, if HG’s do a lot of things with their hands, then we may ask whether humans today are doing enough with their hands, and indeed studies show that enjoying hand-related hobbies is good for the brain and can be very satisfying. Consider how it works with other animals: were you developing the most pleasant enclosure for wild deer, it would probably just mimic their natural environment but without predators. So it is with Man (plausibly).

But back to the point, the children are raised with something we can call “adaptive boredom”. They get bored, which is a displeasing feeling, but that acts as a springboard to get them to playfully train as adults. Their training is stress-free, natural, and probably cognitively efficient. The phone-y superstimuli is introduced and suddenly their minds are focused on things which are more pleasant than anything around them, which replace boredom with novelty, but which do not lead to effortless adaption to adulthood. Those children now cannot enjoy the most pleasant path toward adulthood, because they have consumed the forbidden Apple product, and as such their mind is preoccupied with otherworldly pleasures. For the children to adapt into adulthood you now need to cajole them, punishment them, incentivize them. All of these are less preferable because they reduce intrinsic enjoyment of the activity. Meanwhile, the phoney stimuli is taking up cognitive real estate that really isn’t for the longterm good. That human instinct to pass by a tree and grab a desirable fruit is being abused by technological moneygrubbers, as the children now grab their phone and consume something pleasing the eye. It would be much better if they felt boredom, because the longterm displeasure from technology outweighs the temporary adaptive pleasure of boredom. (And this isn’t even going into studies on “wakeful rest” and the default mode network where boredom is shown to be healthy to the mind…)

Our civilizations did not always have superstimuli available to young people. You know, if you were growing up somewhere in the 19th century, you may be doing something like what the primitive kids were doing re adaptive boredom. Civilization did introduce unpleasant discipline, but there still would have been a pro-adaptive playfulness component, where the kid would “playfully” read an entertaining book which shaped his ability to read, or would “playfully” act out military drills, etc.

Great post.

In the past children played more often by being outside and interacting with other children which helped them to develop social skills. Of course that had its own trade offs.

or would “playfully” act out military drills, etc.

Yes, and girls could playfully act like mothers using dolls, which helped adapt them to becoming mothers later on.

  • It would be much better if they felt boredom, because the longterm displeasure from technology outweighs the temporary adaptive pleasure of boredom. (And this isn’t even going into studies on “wakeful rest” and the default mode network where boredom is shown to be healthy to the mind…)

Yes, this is the whole dichotomy between hedonism and becoming a slave of one's passions vs greater pleasure issue that as old as the ancient Greeks and probably older has always been a challenge for societies. Now far more so of course. Ideally there is moderation rather than no use of say video games, mobile games. But things are out of hand today, and that does have something to do with technological moneygrubbers.

Steve Sailer sometimes says that modern marketing departments are too effective. Under modern capitalism which is more efficient at getting consumers to buy stuff, the consumer rather than a rational actor, can't compete and is too easily manipulated. Children being even more vulnerable. This can also apply to the food industry where the people's best interest is different and conflicts with their hedonistic desires and the marketing department, developers of food that want to make it hyper palatable. There is also an ideological component to this which is about not only favoring the monetary interests of the "technological moneygrubbers" but also those who prefer the population to be pacified and at such not a threat to the ruling elite.

Technology it self provides more challenges, in addition to issues of ideology. I don't buy into the progressive myth that changes necessarilly improve society. Good things to work well, do so due to a delicate balance requiring various things necessary. Ideally we use technology to only get the good while mitigating the bad, but it doesn't work that way. The problem is that even people like me who want to fix things are not going to make it so society doesn't have the technology that it has now, and is technologically the same to the type of society that resulted in quite different childhoods.

One thing is true. For how much Internet, television, mobile phones give, they also take away things. More so now with Artificial Intelligence which is very woke/progressive intersectionalist, giving much greater power to those who designed it and leading to a more centralized world, unless enough other players like GAB AI start appearing.

Also, this point is directed less towards you but it is obviously possible for a society to be more powerful due to technology and its people living a more depraved existence.

War Communism might in fact be far more powerful way to conduct war than a society that doesn't treat its people like slaves, but it is a very shitty way to live.

If the paradisal order was so great, hunter-gatherers wouldn't have been getting stomped by farmers for the last 10,000 years.

At the time most of that stomping took place, your average farmer was stunted, malnourished, and sickly compared to his hunter-gatherer counterpart and beat them simply because they could sustain a much higher population of miserable peasants. Of course, if you are evaluating societies on a purely Darwinian basis of survival then whatever won out is superior, but that leaves out every moral and aesthetic consideration that informs most people's judgement of what makes life worth living.

As an example, if we extrapolate current trends in fertility, the median Motte user will be outbred and replaced by individuals with lower IQ and religious sects like the Amish and Hasidic Jews, whose descendants will most likely be either disinclined to or incapable of maintaining our current industrial civilization. Would that then make them better than us? (I know there's a half dozen ways to yes.chad this, but I'm just curious if you hold any of those positions)

if we extrapolate current trends in fertility, the median Motte user will be outbred and replaced by individuals with lower IQ and religious sects like the Amish and Hasidic Jews

If they're around and we're not, then they would be better than us. I subscribe to 'if you're so smart, why aren't you rich' logic on this. Unless we get wiped by something beyond our control like an alien invasion, we're responsible for our own destiny.

I say no, the Amish and Hasidics won't be around. If society breaks down you get warlordism and peaceful religious cults will get shredded by the violent ones. Something like the Taliban or a drug cartel is more competitive than Amish and Hasidics. Hasidics are very good at surviving in these credulous bureaucratic states that can be rules-lawyered. Amish technology is simple and robust in certain respects against EMP or supply chain breakdown. But their culture is not on the upward path.

If our civilization fails, someone else will use the methods of industrial civilization to subdue the rest, they'll re-establish the upward path. Someone will try course-correction, aggressively increasing fertility or embracing massive cloning or AI...

Aesthetic and moral considerations are secondary to survival. It's no good saying 'oh preindustrial civilization is so great' even if it's true, Ted should've had the wisdom to understand that nobody is going to pull back. Competitive dynamics prohibit it.

It's no good saying 'oh preindustrial civilization is so great' even if it's true, Ted should've had the wisdom to understand that nobody is going to pull back.

I mean, I care about the truth even if the truth is that the type of society that most people would want to live in given the choice will inevitably be destroyed by another type of society that is more fit in an evolutionary sense. That would be sad, just like the fact of our mortality or the eventual heat death of the universe are sad, but we all come to understand and accept such things in our own time, and in general asking questions irrelevant to our immediate survival is pretty central to my conception of what separates humans from worms and jellyfish.

But ours is the only civilization that can contemplate such abstract theoretical questions. We have words like philosophy, evolutionary, heat death of the universe. I'm pretty sure hunter-gatherers don't have that. They don't usually have writing, their language actually is limited to what's directly needed for survival.

I think we industrialized people shouldn't romanticize nomadic or pre-industrial life overly. Much of it would not be to our liking. India and the other poor countries are not enthusiastic about such a lifestyle.

Questions that are irrelevant to contemporary concerns can often be useful - but ideas that cannot possibly be implemented are much less so. Indeed, some knowledge can be harmful. Suppose that it is true, then we'd be forever unsatisfied trying to return to monkey and failing due to competition and coordination problems. Perhaps there'd be more terror groups in the style of Ted. Ignorance can be blissful in certain cases.

The Amish and mennonites in Mexico seem to be doing great with the cartels, and the Hasidim can plausibly start doing something besides welfare fraud; indeed, I’ve heard they already are.

If they're around and we're not, then they would be better than us.

Well, let's do a thought experiment. Suppose a civilization invents a technology that gives them an extreme competitive advantage but, for some contrived reason, it can only be powered by immense amounts of human suffering. Everyone gets plugged into the machine and subjected to intense unending physical torture, like an inverted hellscape version of The Matrix. Presumably, you would never choose to live in such a society, no matter how evolutionarily successful they were.

You could bite the bullet and say that, yes, because they survive and outlast, they are better - but this would only be the most abstract type of "better", because your revealed preferences would show that you could never actually accept such an arrangement.

You have the luxury of extolling the virtues of Darwinian competition because, coincidentally, the most dominant civilization on the planet right now is also the one that provides that most lavish opportunities for hedonism. The social organism itself becomes more competitive, while the individual is allowed to become more sedentary, more secure, increasingly protected from the vicissitudes of nature - a strange kind of "competition" indeed. If being competitive meant actually living the life of a drug cartel lackey or a post-apocalyptic warlord, if it meant actual physical competition and actual danger, then you would likely find that a reassessment of your fundamental values would be in order.

If the Pain Obelisk is inevitable, the Pain Obelisk is inevitable.

The only moral action is the minimization of entropy.

All we can do is pray that out creator isn't so cruel as to make this our destiny. But we can't change it.

Darwinian competition is natural law. It cannot be negotiated with. We can only irrationally hope evil doesn't win in the end.

It's a pretty lame thought experiment if it requires made-up dynamics hugely divorced from common experience or conceivable logic. That nobody wants to build the Torment Nexus because it doesn't obviously create value is a strong argument for it not being competitive.

Industrialism was very unpleasant for some. You'd work long hours from a very young age in a polluted and unsafe working environment. But people still went to cities for jobs! Lots of people became richer and better off than before! Their children inherited the fruits of an advanced civilization and squandered much of it, yet there is much to squander and at least people aren't dying of tuberculosis much these days.

Presumably, you would never choose to live in such a society, no matter how evolutionarily successful they were.

I won't get a choice, will I? If the Torment Nexus is on-path (for reasons I can't fathom), then it comes regardless of whether any individual wants it. My opinion does not matter at all. I wouldn't like it, nobody would like it but it would still be here and it would be better in the same way that machine guns are better than swords. Swords might be more aesthetic and manly and heroic and skill-intensive. They might be better socially, creating cultures where the best survive wars rather than the lucky... But none of that is nearly so important as the innate quality gap between the two.

Fertility just isn’t going to be necessary in the near future with mass automation. Having 300 million useless mouths to feed vs 50 million is only going to be a drag on productivity and prosperity for those left. In addition, tfr in the rich world might well rise when most people are ‘retired’ and no longer have a career to provide a sense of purpose.

A few countries with extreme collapsing rates like South Korea and possibly China might struggle briefly while human labor is still widely necessary, but for the West, where native tfr still hovers above 1.5 in most countries, there’s more than enough time left. And as you note, the Amish, Hasidim and so on are - in a true ‘collapse’ scenario - sitting ducks for faction with modern weaponry.

Useless mouths still vote and affect culture. Enough useless mouths can theoretically reject automation in increasingly violent ways. Useless mouths can do a lot of damage. There’s a reason the Catholic Church wants you to raw dog your wife endlessly and have 9 children before she gets too old.

I agree, I think "a useless mouth and his clout are soon parted". To the extent that competition still operates at any scale, I worry that anti-automators will be eventually marginalized, no matter how many kids we have.

USA imported black slaves to pick cotton, not needed anymore, and they are now a net drain. They are not "soon parted" but have privileged status.

Good point. I agree they have de jure privileged status, and that this leads to some substantial concrete benefits. But I'd counter that, to the extent that competition operates, it naturally disenfranchises them from almost all angles and makes their own self-advocacy ineffective. E.g. affirmative action spots mostly go to non-ADOS, BLM was a corrupt waste of political energy (compared to e.g. the at least-somewhat effective ADL), high-income people move away leaving places like Detroit.

I'm saying that a human worker advocacy org, in a world of more sophisticated machine actors, would similarly end up being a useless skinsuit pretending to advocate on behalf of humans, but wouldn't be able to avoid the important sources of influence all naturally routing around human agency. E.g. if you were a rich human, would you use an inferior (by supposition) human-run investment firm to manage your assets, or a machine-based one?

So my ultimate claim is that we have to choose between freedom and competition versus the continued relevance of humans. I really don't want to have to choose between these things, but I think we do.

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The Hasidim might be up shit creek without a paddle, but the Amish do fine in cartel-ruled Mexico. As it turns out having a big peasant population lets you feed and pay your army better which lets you field a bigger one, and both peasants and warlords can figure that out.

The Mormons seem like they would form a militia that then turns into a garrison state- they do after all form a local majority, or at least notably large minority, in their core territory.

The Mormons would be fine: they’re already very over represented in the CIA and FBI, and gendarmerie and secret service officers tend to do the best after regime change or collapse.

In a regime collapse, yes, former secret police tend to do very well. In state collapse, on the other hand, they don't necessarily(not that anyone does). Cartel-run Mexico and the stateless parts of the middle east aren't ruled over by former spies and secret police officers, they're ruled over by whichever non-state actors have guns behind them.

That being said, cults(which is what the Amish are, even if they're popular) seem to do reasonably well in state collapse- that's where ISIS came from, and as noted the Amish are about as good off under the cartels as they were under the Mexican central government(although organizations which recruit military personnel literally by promising higher-quality rations[that's not a joke; cartel advertising to Mexican soldiers emphasizes better quality meals] will probably give high-productivity peasant farmers a better deal than they normally do).

Of course, state collapse is fantastically unlikely in the US because two levels of government would have to collapse, federal and state. In some areas one implies the other eventually, but not right up front. Regime collapse on the other hand is semi-plausible as a result of mismanaging a fiscal crisis, and just results in balkanization.

that's where ISIS came from

ISIS is not an ethnoreligion. It came from former Iraqi army members who happened to be Sunni and saw Shia oppressing them.

I think it lends credence to the argument that most of education is a waste. these tribes cut off from Western norms are able to catch up to speed instantly, almost through osmosis.

This is why I snort whenever someone insists that teachers are underpaid. Most high school graduates are functionally useless.

Same as literal monkeys. There are few things simpler than using a smartphone to consume slop.

Because the authors put major effort into it be usable by monkeys. Doing something productive (which we think education is for) is not that simple.

They are quickly able to learn to consume bottom denominator slop - I don't think they'll learn how to operate machinery or conduct statistical analysis by osmosis.

yeah but I'm talking the typical high schooler

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