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Comment by mjfl | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they are, humans have never been rational. It is much more important to have vaccines and antibiotics than to be happy. People reading this crap who then get the urge to strip down to a loincloth and run into the woods should be aware that these viewpoints always portray the best case scenario. Forget germs, starvation, or exposure (which are enough to make you miserable / kill you by themselves), what about other people? What if someone mugs you and takes your stuff. What if another tribe comes in and says (understandably) "look, food is scarce, we're claiming this herd of gazelle. If you hunt these gazelle, we'll kill you." If you're a woman, what if you get raped? If you're a man, what if your wife gets raped, are you gonna go kill the guy? You? What if you get killed trying to do that, what happens to your wife?

No, living under modern society is much better, happy or not.

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I think that part of the argument is about happiness -- not about death.

I ran around in the woods with a (figurative) loincloth for many years and there is something to it. :)

I'm not arguing that you are completely wrong, but you're also talking about a best case scenario in modern society. Spending time with people further towards the bottom of modern society will give a less positive outlook on modern happiness.

This excerpt is interesting:

"The colonials occasionally tried to welcome Native American children into their midst, but they couldn’t persuade them to stay. Benjamin Franklin observed the phenomenon in 1753, writing, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”

During the wars with the Indians, many European settlers were taken prisoner and held within Indian tribes. After a while, they had plenty of chances to escape and return, and yet they did not. In fact, when they were “rescued,” they fled and hid from their rescuers."

Sometimes the Indians tried to forcibly return the colonials in a prisoner swap, and still the colonials refused to go. In one case, the Shawanese Indians were compelled to tie up some European women in order to ship them back. After they were returned, the women escaped the colonial towns and ran back to the Indians.

Even as late as 1782, the pattern was still going strong. Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote, "Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluen...

I'm not sure you know enough to compare the two.

Disease, for example, is mostly a product of settled societies, not hunter-gatherers. Crime was a different issue as well, when tribes knew all the members. And sure, tribes had conflicts, but they were often not as violent as the total wars of the last couple centuries.

I'm surprised so many people who know nothing except modern society are so quick to make sweeping assumptions about a distant and unrecorded past.

They are also comparing it to the best outcomes for individuals in modern society. It's not like people don't still get raped, killed over resources, and finished off prematurely by disease and starvation. I'm not sure modern civilization would look the same without a long and continuing history of people sacrificed at the altar of progress.

but at least in society in the worst case I have police, medicine, insurance.. people working for money to help you

It's a common misconception that the job of police is to help people. Their job is to apprehend and arrest people. Whether that actually helps anyone or not is highly situational.

Same logic applies to medicine and insurance.

Their job is to apprehend and arrest people who break laws. In a society without them, there's no one to arrest those who assault you, rob from you, rape you, or murder you. And if you don't think that's necessary you are incredibly naive.

The point is that they may be ncessary, but they're not sufficient.

Homicide rates in hunter gatherer societies are extremely high:

https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/no-hunter-gat...

This is not a settled question. The references in your link are mostly new-world non-state (nonstate != hunter-gatherer), whereas Africa, where most of human foraging history occurred is under-represented. There are significant differences in environmental constraints and physical and social ecology between these regions.

The link also mischaracterises the argument that anthropologists make: they do not believe that foragers had a fundamentally different ("noble savage in a Marxist feminist garden") character than moderns, but that their incentives and constraints differed. It is hard to find people to war with if you are living at extremely low population density, or to carry out ambush raids along long sightlines in the savannah. You are probably less likely to murder your neighbours' children if they are your nieces, or fail to share food with your brother's wife. Hunter-gatherer social technology exploiting human biases (e.g. toward kin) is often ignored in favour of wishful retrocasting of our own political viewpoints.

Globally, foragers may not have enjoyed the low levels of violence we do in modern society, but they may have been competitive with gardening/agricultural/tribal/state societies for millennia.

My understanding is that it's a settled question and that the evidence of extremely high homicide rates in hunter gatherer societies is overwhelming. If you have any links suggesting otherwise, I'd be interested in seeing them.

As for relatedness, that's relative (no pun intended). If everyone within 200 square kilometres is at a genetic distance of a second or third cousin, then a second cousin is the base for a non-relative. In any case, regardless of why precisely it is that violent death is so common pre-modern and especially pre-state societies, it's abundantly clear that it is.

Regarding low population densities, you'll notice that Australian Aborigine tribes are represented in that chart and exhibit murder rates that are far higher than those in modern societies. They do however have the lowest homicide rates among hunter gatherer tribes. The highest homicide rates are found in the Amazon rainforest, where population densities would be highest. So it appears that the two factors that contribute to high homicide rates are pre-state/agricultural society and high population density, and that in the case of the tribes living in the most sparsely populated regions, the inhibiting effect of extremely low population densities on homicide rates does not make up for aggravating effect of living in pre-state societies.

It is clear that homicide rates were higher in the past than they are in modern societies. What is not clear is whether hunter-gatherer homicide rates were higher than those of pre-modern agriculturalists. Here we are primarily comparing band-stage forager societies to other forms of social organisation/dietary lifeway (tribal gardening societies as found in much of Oceania, for example).

Of course relatedness is relative, but the argument is that encounter rates of whatever a group deemed "non-relative" were relatively low and that hostile contact was very costly/relatively unproductive. The "other" was known, cementing feelings of kinship, but distant.

The most violent societies according to your charts are post-band but pre-state with relatively high population density. That is not in contradiction with the "foragers nonviolent compared to other pre-state and comparable to earlier state societies" model.

The interesting question is whether there may have been two optima for human organisation - one at very low population density mobile foraging, the other at the point of the modern state. The modern state may be preferable to the first optimum, but the idea that it takes 10,000 of evolutionary search time to find the second hill is fascinating.

they do not believe that foragers had a fundamentally different ("noble savage in a Marxist feminist garden") character than moderns, but that their incentives and constraints differed.

This is also not a settled question. Many scientists believe that the incentives and constraints on settled peoples led to very different genetic pressures, thus leading to a very different character in modern societies than those from from a mere 10k-20k years ago.

> Disease, for example, is mostly a product of settled societies, not hunter-gatherers

how is this a thing? Maybe you're thinking of large scale epidemics, but the most common cause of death in tribal settings are (modernly) treatable infections.

While I definitely do not agree with your value judgement, people should in fact accept that the tradeoff was made for them.

It is much more important to have vaccines and antibiotics than to be happy.

Is this really true? That it's better to live until 70 or 80 and be unhappy your whole life, than to have a happy life while running the risk of an early death from a preventable disease or infection? I know which I'd pick.

It is obviously better to be happy than sad, but you've ignored 2 facts: 1) humans are very bad at appreciating what they have, and 2) humans are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. People who are tired of this "grass is always greener" capitalist world and yearn for simpler things are doing exactly that, thinking that the "grass is greener" on the other side when it isn't. All people will eventually become miserable in the wilderness because of some tragedy, then they die, that's how nature works. Thus it is more important to have vacciness and antibiotics than to be happy because your brain is stupid and irrational, doesn't appreciate what it has, and fantasizes of edenic states elsewhere that don't exist.

Also, you know which one you would pick. You've already picked it. As technology increases, there's nothing preventing you from slowly moving out into the wilderness besides an acknowledgement that modern comforts are worth it.

there's nothing preventing you from slowly moving out into the wilderness

Yes, there is - people don't exist in a solitary state; they only can survive in groups. It requires dozens of humans to band together for any chance of survival and reproduction. Even then it can't just be done in a vacant lot; it requires an ecosystem such as only exists today in national parks and reserves, where hunting and gathering is not allowed.

So just because a single person can't just walk into the bushes and survive, doesn't mean that the 21st Century urban lifestyle is superior to a hunter-gatherer society in every way. It's not an either-or: both have advantages.

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