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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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yes, and girls could playfully act like mothers using dolls, which helped adapt them to becoming mothers later on.
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.
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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 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
They vote. BLM wasn't just waste, it did a lot of damage.
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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.
ISIS is not an ethnoreligion. It came from former Iraqi army members who happened to be Sunni and saw Shia oppressing them.
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