Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

"Archaeologists often find “trade beads” at Native American archaeological sites. Europeans and others created glass beads using technology that didn’t exist in Native cultures. Explorers carried them to trade with aboriginal people they encountered. Dutchman Peter Minuit included trade beads in his deal for Manhattan Island in 1626."

I would like to get your opinion on this part. Do you consider this unethical behaviour? At first it looks like it is unethical but on the other hand: while the beads might not have been worth much to Europeans themselves, they could still serve as bartering objects among natives where they were rare, "uncopyable" and therefore could serve as store of value.

Maybe this perspective helps: if aliens arrived that could effortlessly solve cryptographic puzzles (think "crypto-currency mining") and there were humans who were very interested in these - should an alien refuse to trade with a human who wanted to give them things in return for a funny number?

(If there are flaws in this comparison, point them out, please)

The Manhattan trade was unethical and the Dutch knew it[1]. The comparison is not apt, to update it:

Aliens land and offer exchange of a novel metal alloy for your house and its land. They demonstrate the metal alloy has incredible sci-fi properties and its value (monetarily for you and the discovery for all human kind) far outweighs the value of your house. You accept the trade.

What you didn't realize is that the production of the metal alloy is impossible by Earth civilization standards, its production requires the energy of several sun-like stars (this is a trivial amount of energy for the aliens). Also, there was a misunderstanding in the trade, the metal alloy wasn't for just your house and its land, it was for the entire Northern hemisphere of Earth! The aliens colonize the land backed up with the signed and legal trade deal. Its legality is of course disputed by Earth courts but the alien colonists carry novel viruses which eradicate 80-90% of the existing Earth population, governments and militaries crumble.

[1] 5th to last paragraph but all of it is informative http://newamsterdamhistorycenter.org/education/schaghen.html

> Its legality is of course disputed by Earth courts but the alien colonists carry novel viruses which eradicate 80-90% of the existing Earth population, governments and militaries crumble.

This indeed happened in America, but as the analogous example here tends to show, it kind of makes the contract issue moot.

Closer: A few aliens arrive, look around, decide it is too hard to live here, then go home. But, they leave behind viruses that reduce the population by 90%. 100 years later, aliens come back in much larger numbers, this time to stay. At that point they offer the alloy.

The difference is being able to solve crypto puzzles has actual uses whereas the beads are inherently worthless. A better comparison would be if the aliens offered us some shiny space junk.

Any deal involving something that one party doesn't know or understand is probably unethical. It's also questionable whether the aboriginal people understood the implications of trading their land.

> The difference is being able to solve crypto puzzles has actual uses

I was hinting at crypto-currency mining which is an activity that would be meaningless if it did not produce results that are rare enough to suffice as store of value. I updated the earlier comment to make that clear.

The mining part doesn't belong in the analogy but I think the perspective is dead on.

Here's what you're missing:

What is rare about the results produced in mining is something that we humans would have control over, not the aliens.

Aliens showing up with literal alien technology is one of the few things that might get a cryptocurrency to update their PoW someway or another.

Genuine question: why is it unethical? It's a trade. If it were not deemed a worthwhile trade by either party, they're free to reject the offer.

If an alien appeared before me and offered me some crazy never-before-seen four dimensional shapeshifting object in exchange for a bag of coffee, I'd accept it. Was I taken advantage of? I'd be the envy of my friends, for one.

Clarifying edit: I believe the Manhattan example to be unethical, but probably not the alien example. The reason I think so is because I highly doubt (given colonial history in North America) that the trade terms were particularly clear or even that the decision was theirs to make.

Rambling a bit, but here's another edit. The Manhattan trade sounds particularly fishy to me. Imagine that the alien was offering you a shiny 4D object in exchange _for your house_. That would be so ridiculously unwise that I can't really accept that the residents of Manhattan island thought it a good deal.

And, what if they had demonstrated their cool raygun to you before offering to trade the 4d trinket for your house? Maybe you can at least trade the trinket for a smaller house in a worse school district, and that would be preferable to the indirect possibility of being disintegrated.

On the other hand the trinket might really be more valuable than your house as exposure to some technology that doesn't exist in the economy where you live. Or, trading coffee was equivalent to smuggling silkworms out of China. Or, you sold them the Brooklyn Bridge rather than coffee or your house.

This moves the goalposts though. Before the ethical question was whether or not it is ethical to trade items with unknown value to a less advanced group. Now it's whether it is ethical to do so under threat of violence (obviously unethical).

The Louisiana Purchase was paid with gold.

The people who sold Manhattan may not have understood the selling of territory, or been good representatives of all of Manhattan's residents, but I don't think beads are entirely the problem.

Napoleon sold inhabited territory he didn't control, and had no intention of wearing all of the gold. He was going to trade it away for useful goods and services necessary to take Britain by force.

What were the plans for the beads?

Let's say you have no prospect of sourcing the same beads (or therefore no need for a deep water port either) yet there is an entire continent west of you that has been depopulated by disease, and the remaining population has even less access to beads.

My point is that vanity and status confer real value on beads and gold, because it makes them tradable goods. Likewise legalistic notions of owning land are different than de facto control. I think the discomfort comes from the dynamics of a deal made when one party has more power.

> ...yet there is an entire continent west of you that has been depopulated by disease...

This is a rather popular myth, but most academics reject the virgin soil thesis as some combination of incomplete and simplistic. Europeans were intimately involved with precipitous population declines where they occurred in North America.

Though 1491 was published 15 years ago, it seemed both well-sourced and restrained in its claims. Whereas there may have been dense towns up and down the east coast in the 1400s, by the 1600s when the pilgrims arrived, and when Manhattan was sold, Europeans were encountering populations with their own politics and a societies suffering from collapses and multiple catastrophes.

1491 is generally a good book, but this was not the mainstream consensus when it was written and the information available has changed somewhat in the intervening decades. There are a lot of reasons to think that virgin soil thesis specifically is an insufficient explanation. I keep a link to Livi-Bacci's [1] essay to recommend on this topic. It remains approachable without having become severely outdated. Another good (though increasingly dated) critique is Jones' Virgin Soils Revisited [2], which unfortunately goes into quite a bit of detail about the biomedical issues with VST.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x

[2] https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697

i am going to be 'that guy'

there is SO MUCH context conventionally left out of the island of Manhattan trade deal. Look up the book 'Island at the Center of the Earth' It offers significant historical context from old dutch trade papers found and translated upstate from the Rensselaer estate. 'ownership' of the island was not a western definition of ownership. it was a native definition. the natives were entitled to food, shelter, and use of the land. it was almost a common good with ownership more of a 'primary caretaker' role, granted final decisions on how to use the land was in the Dutch rights.

I'm significantly abbreviating the terms of the trade, but, aside from the lack of context:

IT IS A FOOLS ERRAND TO APPLY MODERN ETHICAL MODELS TO HISTORICAL ETHICS AND MORES

Putting aside whether it is ethical, I would not entirely trust someone who didn't think there was at least an ethical issue in the Manhattan case.

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