Population Control Solves Alot of Problems

[Skipjack]

And our civilized western tribe still sees plenty of male circumcision

Your western civilization does, my western civilization luckily does not.
No scalpel will come near that little fella here
I regard the male circumcision as just as barbaric, btw (even though it does have some very small health benefits, especially for those living in a hot and humid climate without the chance to wash themselves with clean water every day).
For the record, I am not a big fan of plastic surgery for beauty reasons either (unless it is reconstructive, or is practiced with the "form follows function" methodology).

Medical doctors drill holes in peoples heads to relieve fluid pressure.

Yes, in some very, very rare cases, it can be beneficial. It would however not be a good idea to do this to "cure" a simple tension headache.

Tatooing triggers dopamine responses which does also provide pain relief.

I believe that would be endorphines that provide the pain releave.

The evidence of prehistoric trepanned skulls is that the wound healed. So apparently the patient survived.

Yeah, some survived, but did they get cured of their headache? I imagine my headache to be worse after someone drilled a hole into my skull than it was before someone did.

That medicine man likely has a far more expansive memory capacity than you or I, given the vast amount of oral history and traditional medicine he must learn without the benefit of written records or writing capabilities.

And a modern doctor pulls everything he knows out of his ass, or what?
Ever seen even one of the books they have to know by heart for their studies? These are huge volumes. They keep learning them for months, some books take as long as year to learn in order to prepare for a large exam in medical study.

As is today conducting an exorcism done by a checklist procedure by a large number of priests whose activities are believed in by a large percentage of our 'scientific' society.

By your "scientific" society maybe. Most people here are atheists. Most German people here anyway (the Turks will take over soon though and they are "true believers", lol).

Treatment outcomes improved with time and local skill.

To an "impressive" 78% at the time of the Incas. So 22% actually died pretty soon afterwards. That is a pretty bad number for some headaches.
They "may" have treated depressed skull fractures that way. The question is however whether they knew the mechanism behind this treatment working at all.
Also, as I said, 22% dead at its best is not that great a successrate. Noone knows how many of those that survived were actually helped by the treatment though. It is very likely that those benefiting from it are much less than 78% that survived (best case scenario also).

You interpret that as a statement that their culture is superior.

Well you actually stated that earlier in the thread, when you suggested that we should all return to being hunter gatherers, because it would make our lives so much better. The argument was that it would not.
I have not seen anything from you that makes me consider your position to have any value.

[Helius]

I say that hunter-gatherers have knowledge that we don't.

Of course. I couldn't make a Cloves spear point system if my life depended on it. I couldn't make a rifle either.

Cultures are, and have always been, different. Trying to rank them is a pointless exercise.

OK, I misread your implication. You implied to me that archaic cultures solves modern problems just as well as western civilization does. Current Medicine for example. You went off about willow bark being just as good as modern analgesic choices.

The ugly implication, at least for me was that we could go back to hunter gatherer lifestyles, like we're missing that option. We can't, at least without a Malthusian catastrophe.

That being said, I see the biggest difference between Western civilization and her scientific follow ons and Archaic hunter gatherer cultures, is that Current civilization may support more actualizing human souls, in better health than any collection of hunter gatherer societies ever could hope to, as beautiful as those lifestyles were at times. A good long term goal IMHO should be to increase the population to 100B actualizing, educated, spirited human souls spread from here to the ice worlds at the edge of interstellar space. I want lots of happy people.

[alexjrgreen]

I don't assert their superiority. I insist on their equality as human beings.

We know. You romanticize illiterates such that they are the intellectual equal of the most advanced individuals of the most advanced and complex civilization the world has ever seen, so long as such illiterates are ancient enough to not be actually interviewed.

Neither literacy nor illiteracy have anything to do with intelligence.

If you were to take the trouble to spend time with hunter-gatherers, you would probably find them to be your intellectual equals.

[alexjrgreen]

You interpret that as a statement that their culture is superior.

Well you actually stated that earlier in the thread, when you suggested that we should all return to being hunter gatherers, because it would make our lives so much better. The argument was that it would not.
I have not seen anything from you that makes me consider your position to have any value.

Quote?

[alexjrgreen]

The ugly implication, at least for me was that we could go back to hunter gatherer lifestyles, like we're missing that option. We can't, at least without a Malthusian catastrophe.

The lifestyle we have is an accident of history. It makes sense to review our options.

[taniwha]

Indeed literacy levels have little or nothing to do with intelligence, though until reading this thread I would have said they had plenty to do with ignorance, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Without literacy, you have only oral tradition to rely on. Oral tradition is notorious for corrupting information. When idioms in modern language get corrupted in just one generation because someone failed to hear a "n't", expecting medical (or any other) knowledge to survive multiple generations unscathed is ridiculous.

[Helius]

Neither literacy nor illiteracy have anything to do with intelligence.

I disagree. I doubt it is disjoint. I expect that a rich actualizing life tends to be coincident with both intelligence and literacy. Those Hunter-gatherers that eat their dead tend not to be actualizing, literate or bright.

If you were to take the trouble to spend time with hunter-gatherers, you would probably find them to be your intellectual equals.

Given a 98 IQ, I expect them to be my slight superior, unless of course they're at the end of their civilization curve and are eating each other for protein.

You're still romanticizing hunter gatherers. I can't believe it. Where I live, there was an influx hunter gatherers that took over land previously inhabited by another people, at about the end of the first millennium. I wonder if the losers got to open casinos?

[TallDave]

I say that hunter-gatherers have knowledge that we don't.

I'm sure they do, we just have vastly more knowledge that they don't.

You interpret that as a statement that their culture is superior

Yes, that would be stupid, but of course I didn't make that interpretation; if anything you did. You said "Their medicine is different from ours, not inferior." Our culture has produced vastly superior medical treatment, technology, and living standards; it is not just "different". You seem to think they are equal or better for reasons that don't appear to make a lick of sense.

The lifestyle we have is an accident of history. It makes sense to review our options.

No it isn't, it is the direct result of Western culture, the combination of liberty, tolerance, science, and free markets.

A good long term goal IMHO should be to increase the population to 100B actualizing, educated, spirited human souls spread from here to the ice worlds at the edge of interstellar space. I want lots of happy people.

Indeed. Consider that the economy could easily grow to seven times what it is now in 50 years. We may be farther beyond today than today is beyond 1909. We could well have achieved functional immortality and nearly unlimited leisure, and be colonizing the solar system.

And the future beyond that is bigger and better yet. The resources 100B people could bring to bear at a GDP per capita of $250K are truly awesome. We could be seriously working on terraforming Mars and Venus.

[Skipjack]

Hunter-gatherers have more free time than any other society on earth.

Agriculture increased viable population density, but not leisure time, with the possible exception of the very rich.

That was the follow on to (by Shubedobedubopbopbedo):

A modern version of hunting & gathering might be interesting. But you aren't capable of invention, so you can't see past the current "way of life" to come up with something superior.

[alexjrgreen]

Hunter-gatherers have more free time than any other society on earth.

Agriculture increased viable population density, but not leisure time, with the possible exception of the very rich.

Both true.

That was the follow on to (by Shubedobedubopbopbedo):

A modern version of hunting & gathering might be interesting. But you aren't capable of invention, so you can't see past the current "way of life" to come up with something superior.

Science fiction has explored the idea several times.

[alexjrgreen]

You interpret that as a statement that their culture is superior

Yes, that would be stupid, but of course I didn't make that interpretation; if anything you did. You said "Their medicine is different from ours, not inferior." Our culture has produced vastly superior medical treatment, technology, and living standards; it is not just "different". You seem to think they are equal or better for reasons that don't appear to make a lick of sense.

Our technology is certainly more advanced. Medical treatment and living standards have been better for the majority only in the last fifty years.

A substantial minority of people in our culture still have a worse standard of living than hunter-gatherers.

The lifestyle we have is an accident of history. It makes sense to review our options.

No it isn't, it is the direct result of Western culture, the combination of liberty, tolerance, science, and free markets.

Any number of historical conflicts could have ended differently. All would have affected our culture to some extent.

[alexjrgreen]

Without literacy, you have only oral tradition to rely on. Oral tradition is notorious for corrupting information. When idioms in modern language get corrupted in just one generation because someone failed to hear a "n't", expecting medical (or any other) knowledge to survive multiple generations unscathed is ridiculous.

Without literacy, oral transmission is astonishingly accurate. It only becomes corrupted with the widespread teaching of reading and writing.

[taniwha]

No, it is not astonishingly accurate, otherwise writing would never have been invented in the first place.

Yes, memory does tend to weaken with reading and writing, as does the ability to distinguish sounds not representable in your writing (Japanese people and the English language is an excellent example of this).

However, memory doesn't help with various accidents: student misunderstanding the teacher (and it somehow not being checked afterwards), the teacher dieing before passing everything on, and probably the biggest issue: "the one that got away". Humans have a tendency to embellish or otherwise alter any story, especially to suit an agenda. Writing can't completely stop any of this, but it does slow it down, because you then have one (or a few) records that can be referenced over many generations.

Making knowledge survive even 1000 years is difficult enough with writing available. Making it survive just 4 generations is extremely difficult without writing, though I won't say it's impossible.

Yes, children are sponges for information, but if they don't understand something because they can't relate to it, it just bounces off. By the time they can understand it, it often still bounces off because they think they know better. Writing helps keep that information available until those kids are both able to understand it and ready to accept it.

The only reason we know anything about ancient tribes more detailed than how they did something is through their writing (and that's when we're lucky: there are writing systems out there that we have no key to). Not only that, any ancient tribe that showed signs of being reasonably advanced had writing. Any civilizations that spanned more than a few tribes had writing: it enabled accurate communication. There's even an example of a civilization where writing allowed communication between tribes that didn't speak the same language (how the Chinese pulled that off, I don't know, but they did).

The HG lifestyle does have many pros, but it also has many cons (not too many, otherwise we wouldn't be here to have this discussion). Yes, the modern lifestyle also has its cons, but if the pros didn't outweigh the cons, people would be leaving it in droves, not trickles.

[MSimon]

The Census Bureau just released the 2005 data on what households have (HT: Ariel Goldring) and it has allowed me to update my data. In addition, I've also rendered the data more consistent. Each column on the poor below reflects households below the poverty line. In previous iterations I had said it was the "lowest quintile." I've discovered that some of my data was that, but the older stuff was "below the poverty line." I've now made it all poverty line as the cutoff. Here's the historical data:

Percentage of "Poor" Households 1984 compared to 2005:

Washing Machine - 58.2%, 68.7%
Clothes Dryer - 35.6%, 61.2%
Dishwasher - 13.6%, 36.6%
Refigerator - 95.8%, 98.5%
Stove - 95.2%, 97.0%
Microwave - 12.5%, 91.2%
Color TV - 70.3%, 97.4%
VCR/DVD Player - 3.4%, 83.6%
Personal Computer - 2.9%, 42.4%
Cell Phone - 00.0%, 48.3%
Air Conditioner - 42.5%, 78.8%
One or More Cars - 64.1%, 72.8% (2001)

http://libertarianrepublican.blogspot.c ... icher.html

[Skipjack]

A substantial minority of people in our culture still have a worse standard of living than hunter-gatherers.

Who? How, when?
I had a crappy life (well it still kinda is).
Being self employed in Austria, I am the milkcow of the nation while being comparably poor when I started my business. Nevertheless I did enjoy a pretty good standard of living. I had a washing mashine, a dryer even, a microwave oven, computers and a cellphone. I had a very comfortable apartment. I even had a car and I could even afford the insanely expensive gas prices in Austria. I did have health insurance too. That all with little over the existential minimum. Since noone has much less money than what I had back then (or otherwise you get support of some sorts), there is noone who has a crappier life.
Now if I take a step back, I would say that no matter how crappy it seemed at the time, it was still pretty good compared to a hunter gatherer.