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Comment by jablongo | Hacker News Reader

I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective, and that various indigenous communities made conscious philosophical choices that defined their path of rejecting technology as pursued by the empires of the time. However, I cannot get past the fact that life expectancy has risen steadily through the application of technology. And to me, a society in which the life expectancy at birth is 75 yrs (with a modest deviation from the mean) is clearly better to live in than one where the life expectancy is 25 yrs at birth. In that sense I still think "ancestors were dumb" because they didn't know what bacteria was and that it could kill you, for example.

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Those discrepancies in life expectancy are mostly due to chances of surviving the first few years. There are studies indicating that health and adult life expectancy were at their peak for Victorian middle classes.

Ok that may be true, but I personally think infant mortality is an undesirable attribute of any society.

That is a way to look at the "dumb" aspect, just as we would say "kids are dumb".

But I think it hides away how much they got done within their limited means and technology. Them not knowing about bacteria was less a limitation of their intelligence than a limitation of the scale they could observe the word (including data collection technology and drawing patterns from huge samples)

I don’t think anyone is saying not knowing what bacteria is is directly a function of individual intelligence. But it is an important measure of a society, along with things like - how often their young die, how often women die in childbirth, how many people die due to treatable diseases.

Human society has become vastly more knowledgeable over time, and so therefore its individuals, on average, have become so, but this does not imply that the intellectual capacity of individual humans has undergone any improvement. For example, despite our medical knowledge, there is plenty of irrationality, willful ignorance, denial, and poor judgement to be found.

Left to our own devices, none of us would ever learn anything more than a miniscule fraction of what we know today.

Yea, totally agree. But I think my point still refutes the one about long term hunter gatherer Luddite lifestyles being the result of conscious philosophical choices, at least in the context of health, since most people would choose a longer healthier life given the opportunity. There may be trade offs though I guess.

While I tend to agree with you, a society where "everyone" lives to age 70-80 does require a re-think of many social structures.

For example, one could wonder how much of the mess of current US politics is because the average age of people in power is so far about 60?

Are you saying that instituting the Carousel would simplify things?

Not to mention many people over 60 either need to continue working as commodified labor to survive and lack the familial care that was ubiquitious prior to modern rationalization of society or are stuck alone in a nursing home or retirement community.

Yes, the elderly also worked within prior socio-political configurations but I think we can agree bagging at Walmart is pretty distinct from doing artisanal crafting or agriculture.

> I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective

With what does that agree? Where is that stated?

It’s just part of respecting the lifestyles and choices that our ancestors made - recognizing that there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group.

I understand the concept; it was expressed in the GGP as if someone else had said it and you agreed, and I didn't see where else it had been said.

> there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group

It's essential to understand that people have perspectives, values, and situations outside my own or even outside my own imagination, and that their similarity to my 'system' is not a measure of their validity.

That means that making judgments is very error-prone. But that's different than saying all systems are equally valid, or are good, or that goodness is subjective. Making the judgment that system A is equally good and valid as system B by virtue of their existence is far more error prone. It's like saying, when evaluating programming languages for a project, 'I'm not absolutely certain, so I'm scoring them all 100!'.

I guess I thought that it was implied by the OP

> And to me, a society in which the life expectancy at birth is 75 yrs (with a modest deviation from the mean) is clearly better to live in than one where the life expectancy is 25 yrs at birth. In that sense I still think "ancestors were dumb" because they didn't know what bacteria was and that it could kill you, for example.

The key phrase is "at birth". The vast majority of the difference between "75 years at birth" and "25 years at birth" is due to infant/toddler mortality.

If you made it to 10, your life expectancy wasn't a lot different than today.

Well, except for that, and maternal mortality, war and famine, infectious diseases ...

The max has not really changed that much, and modern life may be killing some people, but the percentage of people who survive from 25 to 75 has also improved a lot.

*After learning more, Graeber definitely was very pro-technology, so I’m really arguing w/ no one here. I’ll have to read the book...

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