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Comment by jxub | Hacker News Reader

It might be a sensitive topic, but apart from small things like knowledge of medicinal plants, there is little to be learned from niche cultures in terms of technology or even the advancements in art. Most of the progress has been made by tinkerers in populous areas and spreaded fast thanks to the shared languages.

Maybe a brash conclusion would be to think that small cultures hamper progress by elevating the barriers to communication and spending energy pointlessly (from an utilitarian point of view) on little artisanal trinkets that are vastly more inefficient compared to, albeit somewhat dystopic, modern manufacturing and unified cultural anglosaxon mish mash.

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> advancements in art

I don't think art is a linear progression.

> It might be a sensitive topic

You're telling people of non-dominant cultures that their art and "artisanal trinkets" are, at best, a worthless waist of time.

> I don't think art is a linear progression.

True, I lumped it together with technology. The case with art is, it benefits from perspiration from other artists which ocurrs mostly at the scale of bigger cultures.

> You're telling people of non-dominant cultures that their art and "artisanal trinkets" are, at best, a worthless waist of time.

Well, that's the logical conclusion from a pragmatic viewpoint, but emotion bends logic, therefore causing many inefficiencies (which may look "efficient", but just because of looking at them through the filter of emotion).

However, I don't follow the dogma of pragmatism on a personal level, which is just another point that explains the human paranoia between logic and emotions.

How can you determine what is efficient without knowing what is valuable? And how you determine what is valuable only by logic?

Even the instinct to survive is an emotion. An emotionless agent wouldn't care about survival.

Logic can show you how to arrive to any place, but only e-motion will compel you to move and go.

The question we have to ask ourselves is: "Is emotion perfectly aligned with our incentive maximization?".

By now, we don't have an coherent answer as our main method of value assesment is money (whose value is shared as a belief).

Also, before we proceed we should try to strip our incentives of every trace of emotion, which we'll assume as flawedly disposed against us, as it lags by millenia behing our rational brain, which makes most emotional feedback futile nowadays.

We should first strive to develop a framework that encompasses and evaluates every aspect of existence (which money can't capture yet), and then deny our emotions and work towards achieving the goals of said framework. That or wander aimlessly on this planet guided by our hormonal responses and never leaving the Solar System, just living by our feelings. Unless, of course, we'll manage to reduce the lag of experience-emotions to one comparable to that of reason.

> It might be a sensitive topic, but apart from small things like knowledge of medicinal plants, there is little to be learned from niche cultures in terms of technology or even the advancements in art.

That was the fundamental belief behind the eurocentric approach to anthropology, and other ethnocentric supremacist belief systems which from ignorance brought a lot of hardship to the world.

You don't have to look far enough to see how your culture, not long ago, was just as niche and pointless as the ones you're criticising now. You should also know that dominating cultures have already succumbed into irrelevance in spite of all the supremacist beliefs. Perhaps there's something to be learned about poopooing other cultures

I'm not criticizing other cultures nor idealizing the mainstream one. I'm just pointing out that large efficiency gains can be had from having fewer and bigger cultures.

However, this optimization makes also our civilization more fragile, so the tradeoffs are more complex than in your version of the theory.

> "I'm not criticizing other cultures"

Maybe that wasn't your intent, but that's certainly what you did. You basically said that all they have to contribute is knowledge of herbs.

There is more to life than the bottom line. Your conception of life as some sort of great march to technotopia (or whatever variant) is just one viewpoint among many.

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