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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

It's not quite as simple as "it works like 'Lord of the Flies' or it doesn't". Nicholas Christakis, in his book "Blueprint", devotes a chapter to a database that he and his grad students made of shipwrecks, where the survivors lived long enough, in enough isolation, that they had to more or less put together a temporary society. There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they did not.

My review of Christakis' book, in case you're curious: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2851365787

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Nice review. In a sense I find this something akin to the late David Graeber point on it’s column about bulling. How you can find data pointing towards the human society propensity for violence, and also data of human society propensity for cooperation and refusal to engage on violence even when confronted with losing their way of living, although he also raises the point when historically there has been more propensity to consider only the violent ugly aspect, as you can almost certainly find it on people who appeal to “human nature”.

It is not what is human. It is also, how you raise those kids. Ars you raising them in bully house boarding school full of abuse? You get different results then if you raise them with different values.

IDK if its a modern bias or a recurring one, but people are very drawn to the idea of a core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away.

The way the conversations I've had tend to go is ever more contrived scenarios. Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots. You need to avoid scenarios like these, where the boys know about raising chickens, praying and stuff. lol As if a parentless, cultureless person is more human than the rest of us... more indicative of "true" human nature.

Once we set to answering a question, it seems very hard to question the question.

Yes of course, the natural course of development of humans is to do away with all other humans. Then you can be fully human.

There is an idea that after the bombs fall we all turn into raping and pillaging marauders. I have no idea why people find this idea comforting.

In reality villages will be built, laws written and religions made up.

These villages better build defenses against the marauders or all is for naught. And of course, the best defense is a good offense. And... Fast forward to the presently peaceful times of mutually assured destruction!

That is a point of a village as opposed to living in separate farmsteads. (there are other points to villages, but putting a group of people together is an automatic form of defense)

Historically, this doesn't seem to be true.

Villages appear long before defensive fortifications in the record, in many cases. Pure reason is not very good at forming predictive theories about history, as a general rule.

There are many possible reasons for villages, and cultural reasons are a very big determinant of how people live. So are economic reasons. Many of us live in big cities now, and it's generally less safe.

You get villages because foraging really sucks. It's an ease-of-survival thing around food production.

Foraging is done from villages as well. They tend to not have tents/houses, just a community fire that moves when the tribe moves. Still a village.

Foraging sucks less than subsistence farming. However farmers are able to put a lot more people into given land area and so farming villages won out.

Just having a number of people living together is protection even before fortification. Your point is well taken though.

Don't underestimate just how many people are needed to defend a village.

A village has a lot of land to defend and not many people to do it. The local town or city sized group will just pitch up with many more men and overrun you. All whilst having enough people left for defence. And they are likely to have more access to heavy weapons that can blow your house up from a distance.

Nations will overrun villages, but a city alone doesn't. Cities need villages to provide food, so a city never goes to war - it is instead the nation, headed by the city but also including all the villages.

It can be both, no?

Look at human history: lots of villages and religions, also lots of raping and pillaging.

We tend to record the raping and pillaging because those are the times of disruption. I'm not a historian, but I can imagine that there are long stretches of history that are relatively conflict-free for most of the world, but such times are not really that interesting so no one tells stories about them.

At least in the enlightenment period, tend to come from political philosophy rather than history... though the two are closely related in this period. Notably, Hobbes and his "state of nature" concept.

Philosophy of this period (also Locke, Marx, etc) tended to speculate about the past using reason, rather than empirically. A lot of their ideas have been passed down to us.

Hobbes' saw life in the "natural" state "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Eventually government arises, using its monopoly of violence to end day-to-day violence, cheating and such.

I don't think the original writers are compelling anymore, but they are hard to shake entirely. Memes die hard.

In any case, I think the reality of people at all times is that cooperation is a fundamental. There are no societies without cooperation, some form of solidarity, love, etc. We could have never survived without it. Violence is also common in history, but we don't need it to survive. We also know that primates, dogs and other creatures have demonstrably empathetic behaviours, a sense of fairness and such.

As I implied at the start, I think the mistake is literal fundamentalism. Human behaviour can't be logically derived from a fundamental nature.

probably the fallout games paint an accurate picture.

“A Canticle for Leibowitz” is a great book which follows this scenario.

>core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away.

That always seemed out of whack for me. If you change the environment, the individual changes too.

That's just a different individual, calling it more "true" or "pure" seems like asking "how much is 1 + apple?" (where Apple is an actual apple, not a variable).

The whole premise is fundamentally wrong. How I am right now is not false nor unnatural.

>> How (is it) not false nor unnatural.

Exactly. There have never been culturaless, parentless people. If there were/are, then that is simply a terrible circumstance and terrible results will probably occur.

>Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots.

I recommend "Raised by Wolves".

Awesome show; looking forward to the next season. Explores parenting, "religion" vs "science", desolation, and growing up.

People are quick to discount the value of education (or upbringing) from the early age. Humans have started developing quickly with the development of language and especially writing. Take that away, and we are looking at another dozens of thousands of years of getting back to it, if at all.

The best evidence to me is how those "lost in woods, found years later" kids have developed: mostly mimicking other animals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child). It's even hard to change that later on.

This review is obviously high effort. What's the incentive here? Is this what the community regularly does in Goodreads? Or are you somehow affiliated with the author and treat this as a favour?

Other reviews for this book on Goodreads are equally high effort. It’s not uncommon to see long and insightful reviews in the Goodreads community. I’d assume good intent :)

I don't know why you're being downvoted when it's clear your question is out of curiosity.

High effort reviews are common on Goodreads, why? Because it's a community about passionate readers and probably those who write the very detailed reviews have enjoyed reading some other reviews and want to contribute back to the community. I think it's the same reason as people contributes to wikipedia: for the sake of sharing knowledge

It does come across somewhat accusatory. Without the suggested affiliation with the author it would sound less so.

> I don't know why you're being downvoted when it's clear your question is out of curiosity.

It is an odd question on the internet where people regularly and normally put a lot of effort into reviews, blog posts, discussion forums comments and so on.

That coupled with question about affiliation probably makes people interpret is as not questions out of curiosity, but rather as sleazy way to introduce doubt on the author motivation.

Good point. That was not my intention. But my communication skills before caffeine digests are not where I would want them to be :/

Hmmmm...not sure, entirely. I think it's that, by putting in more effort, I end up processing the book mentally in a more thorough way. Something like what my grade school literature teacher might have said was the point of book reports. Thinking over "well, exactly what did I think of it?" tends to make me think over the book's contents more carefully, instead of just putting it down and immediately moving on.

> There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they did not.

The fact that it's a coin flip is the key aspect of the message Golding wanted to impart. It's chilling, and unsurprising, that reality bears it out.

The coin flip in the book is that they had two potential leaders, one of the responsible and the other one pretty sociopathic but charismatic - the nascent society followed the sociopathic, charismatic one.

At any rate there were quite a few more kids than 6 in the book, so pointing at this incident and saying 'see, it would work out' is just silly.

... sounds a lot like many democracies choosing a sociopathic but charismatic leader.

He was a guest on the 'Singal Minded' [0] podcast a while back as well and talked about his research.

[0] https://singalmindedconvos.fireside.fm/7 I use the RSS feed but that's the link to the exact episode

Interesting, thanks for that!

These are the type of fascinating comments that keep me coming back to HN. Thank you.

Book recommendations are especially high points for me. Thank you GP.

> The attempt to infuse sociology with biological facts (e.g. genes matter, evolution still impacts humans, etc.) has been controversial (even today the term "sociobiology" is radioactive to some).

My immediate reaction to your post was that maybe we could learn something about what causes societies to collapse, and learn something?

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition, Diamond

Interesting overview

Seconded.

The first review is by Bill Gates "Why do I love my wife, Melinda?"

That didn't age well.

Did they find any variables that could explain whether or not the group turned on each other? e.g. resource abundance, gender makeup, age of people, N people, N days stranded, etc?

One important factor was, "did they sacrifice somebody early on?", for example in the actual evacuation from the ship. Once it is implanted in everyone's minds that individuals get sacrificed, it erodes trust, and makes everyone suspicious of everyone else. Of course, it's hard to distinguish between cause and effect in things like that.

There's a lot of details in the details, though, you might want to read the whole thing! :)

That makes sense. Nobody has a monopoly on violence so everyone wants to front-run their own demise by killing the person that will kill them with a small but non-trivial probability. Pre-emptive violence becomes rational in such an environemnt.

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