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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

You're right! I hadn't considered that this was the Chinese border and the driver was Chinese. Makes more sense.

That said, examining this critically: how would someone from the other side of the border observe people going up the mountain, going inside caves, and falling to the ground and dying in droves? Did he go inside the caves himself and found the corpses, and if so, why? If he didn't, how did he know how many died? Did he count people going in and going out the caves? Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border and saw a stark decline in population, and was the only possible explanation starvation in caves (vs, say, migration)? If this is something that's common knowledge in the driver's community, the question becomes how did this community come to "know" all of this.

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Examining it critically, we see (in addition to it clearly referring to the northern border) a couple of claims that suggest actual observation: people "lying in the sun near the river in the spring awaiting the return of energy", and "women would reportedly illegally cross the river to prostitute themselves in China before the winter to obtain rice to survive." The river might be the Yalu or Tumen, and if the latter occurred, the women could quite plausibly be sources of additional information.

So yes, it is anecdotal evidence, but not, IMHO, entirely implausible at that.

> Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border...

Are you consistently as skeptical as you are in this case? For example, have you personally verified that the earth is round (or flat, according to what you believe it to be?)

> Are you consistently as skeptical as you are in this case? For example, have you personally verified that the earth is round

I am consistently skeptical about outrageous claims, particularly in ideologically charged contexts. Or try to be, anyway -- I'm not a robot and I'm of course subject to bias, like all humans.

For example, I dislike Trump but if I read something truly outrageous about him I tend to be skeptical about it. In Spanish we call it "avoid buying rotten fish", i.e. do not believe any stories about your hated enemy, just because they sound like something he would do, until you can have at least some degree of verification. Because sometimes those stories are planted maliciously or are plain wrong.

In the case of North Korea there is the problem that the country is so secretive -- unlike the US with Trump -- that it's truly hard to get confirmation of just about anything, so the rumors fly easily. If something sounds true about North Korea, then it must be true!

That the Earth is round is non-controversial. I don't see how it's wrong to double or triple check sociopolitical claims though.

I do believe North Korea is a hereditary dictatorship and that their people suffer, in case you were wondering. This doesn't mean I will automatically believe any claim about that country.

> I am consistently skeptical about outrageous claims.

You have not presented a case for this particular claim to be regarded as outrageous. Unless you do, then your attitude to such claims is beside the point here.

I believe that "people in border villages go up in mountain caves during the winter, and basically lie down there, starving and dying" to be a horror story, with some of the markings of an exaggeration.

Does it make it automatically untrue? No. Do I believe many North Koreans live in really harsh conditions? Yes.

But this particular tale does seem too horrific to believe without some sort of confirmation beyond hearsay. All it lacks is some cannibalism to make it the perfect horror story about North Korea.

> All it lacks is some cannibalism...

If you could have resisted the temptation to embellish, you would have made a quite reasonable point - though seeking collective shelter in caves in a harsh winter does not seem too far-fetched to me. It's not like humanity has no history of doing this! While famine is thankfully no longer a part of many peoples' experience, it has been for most of humanity's existence and still is for some.

As for ideological motivation, this anecdote is being presented in the context of an anthropological claim about early human behavior, not about North Korea or communism. I tend to trust OP's judgment as to whether he was being strung along by the driver for ideological reasons.

"Some people living under an oppressive regime starving and dying during the winter" is hardly outrageous. It's been true pretty much as long as human civilizations have been a thing. For some, even the winter part has been optional.

So I'm confused about the part you don't believe, is it that they went up to the mountains to do it?

Also the part where they keep lying there starving and dying, but by springtime the survivors can be observed lying in the sun. And the story makes it sound like a yearly occurrence.

Either the starvation wasn't quite as deadly, or new people kept moving to that strip of land, only to end up dying in winter.

But the comment I replied to said this:

> "people in border villages go up in mountain caves during the winter, and basically lie down there, starving and dying" to be a horror story

It didn't include all the other things you mentioned. Only the part in quotes seemed to be enough for GP to deem it as a suspect horror story.

But it's the whole story and its trappings what matters. Basically what yorwba said: that this is a cyclic, almost ritual yearly dying that wouldn't be out of place in a horror movie, with the villagers resignedly going up the mountain to a cave to lie down and die, but that somehow there are enough survivors when winter ends, seen "lying in the sun". I didn't think it was necessary to spell everything out, but the whole story seems like a horror story.

Needless to say, there's nothing unusual or unbelievable about people dying of starvation.

> ...almost ritual yearly dying...

Now you are depending on an absurdly literal reading of the tale to exaggerate its implausibility.

It is a well-established fact that North Korea suffered several years of famine in the mid 90s, with at least 1/4 million fatalities and probably much higher, arising from a combination of the loss of economic support from the former USSR, El Niño and a kleptocratic bureaucracy. In such circumstances, it would not be that implausible if some peasants reverted to the winter survival techniques used by millenia of nomads and subsistence farmers.

As for lying in the sun: if you are cold, famished, and have exhausted all the new-grown food that the spring has produced so far, then perhaps it is the best you can do.

> it would not be that implausible if some peasants reverted to the winter survival techniques used by millenia of nomads and subsistence farmers.

Sure, that would be very plausible. Stocking up a cave with food, keeping a small fire going inside with whatever flammable material is available, eating little and sleeping a lot to make the food last longer...

Not quite the same as the original story, though.

> Not quite the same as the original story, though.

You are doing the same as the_af here: nitpicking over the exact phrasing of the story in order to avoid realistically evaluating its credibility. Anecdotes are not theorems, invalidated by one infidelity. Your objections are pedantic and irrelevant to the author's purpose in relating it.

Furhermore:

> Stocking up a cave with food...

According to the driver, the women would reportedly illegally cross the river to prostitute themselves in China before the winter to obtain rice to survive.

>... keeping a small fire going inside with whatever flammable material is available...

and the nearby land so denuded of firewood that they would otherwise freeze to death.

>...eating little and sleeping a lot to make the food last longer.

Well, yes - that was apparently the point of relating this anecdote. As we can see, the story as presented is close to what you consider plausible, especially as we know there actually was a severe multi-year famine in North Korea not so long ago.

> Anecdotes are not theorems, invalidated by one infidelity. Your objections are pedantic and irrelevant to the author's purpose in relating it.

The author posted it in a comment on an article about Neanderthals who might have had the ability, never before observed in humans, to slow their base metabolic rate to withstand extreme cold. And they suggested those North Koreans were likely doing the same.

In my modified version, their body temperature stays within the normal range and they're conserving energy by limiting movement, but their base metabolism stays the same and they still have to eat regularly, i.e. they're not hibernating.

Maybe that's just "nitpicking over the exact phrasing of the story", but it's also the only way in which the story is relevant to TFA.

Whether the story, which you have as good as accepted as plausible [1], does closely parallel the proposed Neanderthal case, is a separate issue (in that regard, note that all OP says about that is "it is likely these people have the same bone deformities.")

>And [OP] suggested those North Koreans were likely doing the same. [my emphasis of the weasel word]

So it seems you will read the anecdote literally when doing so allows you to attack its credibility, and you will find an unstated assumption in it if doing so allows you to attack its relevance.

As noted above, the OP merely seems to be suggesting something that other posters have also mentioned: the physical evidence mentioned in the article might have been the result of winter famine, and not definitive evidence of hibernation; furthermore, there may be people alive today, or recently deceased, in whom this physiological damage might be found. I can't say for sure, but OP may be suggesting that they might help with the further studies of this hypothesis.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25490193

The border between China and NK is not hermetical closed. It's the easiest place to penetrate the border if you want to flee the county. Also China is NK's largest trading partner and the largest employer of NK labour outside of NK (buyer of slave labour might be more precise).

So it's really not so far-fetched that people living on the Chinese side of the border meet north koreans and hear their stories.

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