Comment by LaGrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LaGrange | Hacker News Reader

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"I would bet they are much happer than the majority of the FB and Twitter obsessed narcissist that I run into every day."

Hi, I am an obsessed FB and Twitter narcissist, and I'm proud of it. I'm also happy about having access to the Western medicine, which, while not the only one, and not perfects, seems to be the only one that consistently works.

And you are not talking about giving them a "right". You are talking about choosing something for them -- we can contact them (which will unavoidably deeply alter their culture, and is quite dangerous) or not (and let them live uncomfortably). It's our choice, and we can't really run from it. By doing nothing we decide for them, whether we like it or not.

Oh, and your parent didn't really say that we should convert them. He said that we should give them access to our technology. And if that converts them, then possibly it's actually them who preferred our culture over their own.

I'm actually mostly on the side of avoiding contact for now -- but mostly because of health risks related to contact, not because I'm afraid for their culture. Culture is about the change, not about maintaining some snapshot of society.

Keep in mind that most of our thoughts about what is good have been shaped by the society we were raised in. If you were born and had lived your entire life in the rain forests of South America, you almost certainly wouldn't feel the same way.

Their very definition of comfort might be different from yours. Keep in mind that many people in more advanced countries prefer heat and humidity, sleeping on bare floors to soft mattresses, and many other things that many other people would consider odd.

Our culture is about change, many cultures are about tradition. Change is not inherently good.

What I was trying to say was that we have to make a decision and thus decide what's better for those people. We can't even ask them without influencing them.

Therefore we have to make a decision that seems best for them, even considering our cultural bias and imperfect view of their society. I can even say that we will make a decision for them, maybe just wrapping it into some feel-good distractions. When you decide not to interfere you're not really letting them evolve on their own, you're starting to avoid them. It's more subtle influence, but influence nonetheless.

I'm not really saying that change is inherently good, that's a view that can be easily disproved by samples from our own culture. I'm saying that change is an inseparable part of culture, and we shouldn't try too much to protect a culture from it (but we shouldn't actively try to destroy a culture without very good reasons -- like, I don't know, mass killings or something -- as well). Especially considering that (at least for me) people are more important than culture (while keeping in mind that culture is quite important for people).

As for preferences like those you've mentioned -- actually, here in Poland I know people from the whole spectrum on each of those issues, and soft mattresses are easily available. When you don't show a person a mattress you're not really letting the person choose to sleep on a bare floor, you're forcing the person to sleep on a bare floor.

Don't forget that technology is in itself a drug and nearly impossible for a "simple" mind to resist. To them technology appears as "tools of the Gods"... how could they reject it?

After all that, you have to think... do they really have the self-driven choice to accept it?

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