Comment by TotoHorner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TotoHorner | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't know how to tell this without being condescending, but do you guys even understand how farming works?

Not sure why you're being condescending when you're totally uninformed & wrong lol.

> The fertile soil is a result of a long process of bringing organic material and ash and depositing it on the field. Exactly the opposite of what we are doing today

2 minutes of research would tell you that the Terra Preta soil consists of - tiny, broken pottery shards - weathered charcoal - bones/compost/manure

> It is very easy to see how this developed. They probably have noticed that if they keep throwing their leftovers or feces in a particular area, everything starts growing better there. The same if you throw out ash. Which they had lots of beacuse they were burning a lot of wood every day, living in the rainforest and not facing energy price hikes. If you have a village and you hunt and gather every day, if you constantly keep burning wood fire and spread it all around your village for thousands of years -- guess what -- whether you planned it or not you will create those fields because I bet nobody would be trucking the garbage far from the village.

The fact that you keep referring to them as hunter-gatherers when they've clearly developed an advanced fertilizer is hilariously absurd.

They were clearly advanced at farming.

I think it would be better if you just red my comment more carefully.

Nowhere I called them "hunter-gatherers". That's something YOU wrote. You took words "hunter" and "gathered" and created in your mind "hunter-gatherer" which is completely different because it has a specific meaning.

People are still hunting and still gathering to this day. This does not make them hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers describe a civilisation that is primarily concerned with hunting because they do not farm anything. These people were clearly farming, but farming does not exclude hunting or gathering.

The pottery, bones, compost and manure do not indicate advanced knowledge of farming. This just describes a dumping ground of a pre-industrial civilisation. That's pretty much all of the garbage they had. And they had to throw it somewhere and that somewhere was around them where the fields were.

I am not saying they didn't have any knowledge, but saying they had advanced knowledge is just jumping to conclusions.

I agree with everything you said in both your posts, but you should maybe try to be less condescending.

Condescending on the original comment was because the authors could have asked any farmer and would get an explanation of what is happening.

Condescending on a response was because a guy didn't even bother to read my comment and was putting stuff in my mouth that I didn't say. And also because uses condescending language (like "hilariously absurd") when clearly wrong.

Do I think people should be nice to each other? Yeah, I do. But I also believe my self-imposed obligation to being nice to you is conditioned on you following minimum rules. I am not expecting much, really. Like don't say I wrote something which I did not. Or put a minimum effort when writing an article if you expect kind response. If you don't do it, I reserve my right to respond about it the way how I feel.

I believe requiring everybody to be nice to everybody else in every possible situation is not a good way to have an advanced civilisation. I think there was a Black Mirror episode to that effect.

Whatever. Just don't be condescending

The problem is they are not just condescending, but also just plain wrong.

Oh yeah, obviously. It's all a bit embarrassing. But easiest to get one message across at a time.

> Nowhere I called them "hunter-gatherers".

Earlier:

> If you have a village and you hunt and gather every day

> I think it would be better if you just red my comment more carefully.

> Nowhere I called them "hunter-gatherers". That's something YOU wrote. You took words "hunter" and "gathered" and created in your mind "hunter-gatherer" which is completely different because it has a specific meaning.

Someone who hunts and gathers every day is definitionally a hunter-gatherer, and vice versa. If you didn't mean to call them hunter-gatherers, then perhaps it's you who should be writing your comments more carefully.

> Nowhere I called them "hunter-gatherers". That's something YOU wrote. You took words "hunter" and "gathered" and created in your mind "hunter-gatherer" which is completely different because it has a specific meaning.

> Someone who hunts and gathers every day is definitionally a hunter-gatherer, and vice versa. If you didn't mean to call them hunter-gatherers, then perhaps it's you who should be writing your comments more carefully.

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