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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Can we replace the editorialized title with the original?

> How Rice Farming Shaped Culture in Southern China

Agree, I like this article because it makes an interesting study of how our work shapes our culture, and if we're looking for parallels to tech, this sounds a bit like Conway's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

The way you grow crops helps determine the social structure of the society that grows the crops, and vice versa to an extent.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” - John Culkin (1967) A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan

Actually this is just Marxist history (which isn't the same thing as political Marxism btw, it just means a history that looks at how material conditions create reality).

I didn't read the article, I am not going to but the abstract suggests it is a pretty severe interpretation (talking about relationships is risky ground imo)...you have to be careful because material conditions tend to be correlated to other stuff but it is a well-developed branch of history (particularly, economic history).

Honestly that's the most convincing thing about Marxism - economics drives everything else, because if you ain't got the money you can't do anything else in the game.

That’s a puzzling assertion - Marxism is one of few isms that reject the fundamental principle of voluntary exchange which says in order to get what you want you need to provide the other party with something of equal or better value (in other party’s opinion) in return.

In Marxism everyone should get what they “need”. Which means no one does which eventually results in shortages and corruption.

> because if you ain't got the money you can't do anything else in the game.

And how does one “get money”? By looting? What would Marx do?

You ought to read Economics in One Lesson.

This isn't Economics...I tried to explain this in my first post. Marxist history != Marxism. They overlap significantly but most economic history until the 1990s was Marxist because it emphasised economic determinism (and, in fact, a lot of economics these days is Marxist in this sense too). The implications of economic determinism are slightly more complex (even Lenin did not completely buy it) but it is different from the layman's understanding of Marxism.

To give you an example, Adam Tooze (who has written a ton of very good books on economic history) is a Marxist historian.

I thought about it, but the abstract does a pretty bad job of stating that hypothesis, which I think is the most interesting finding in the paper. It's definitely a bit sensationalist but I don't think you would've read the paper if that were the title. :)

The thesis of the article appears to be, in broad strokes, examining how material conditions shape patterns of thought. If there is truth in that, perhaps it's not the best idea to push the tone of thread titles on a discussion website in the direction of sensationalism and forwarded emails.

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