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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to think about why many people believe tribes like this should remain "uncontacted". For better or worse, it's revealing of modern values.

Also, what is the long term fate of such tribes? Without genes flowing in, it's probably not good.

I wonder about a protocol that a high technology civilization could use to contact them. Priorities would be to avoid violence, disease, misunderstandings and so on but at the same time, to allow them enter into the modern world over some generations. Kind of like sci-fi where an alien species contacts humanity (e.g. Childhood's End).

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I think this comment is not intending to be anything other than curious, but it strikes me with a bit of techno-savior assimilation sentiment. These autonomous tribes have plenty of opportunities to reach out to modern western culture when they are interested in doing so. Suggesting how they should "enter into the modern world over some generations" seems presumptious, even culturally aggressive.

I think there's a savior complex on both sides, both intervention and non-intervention. In general, humans tend to think they know what's best for other people no matter what the situation is.

I tend to agree with your assessment that the balls in their Court and they can do what they want

What's the non-savior third option, medium intervention? Ask what they want?

Humility and let them choose what they want. We don't need to come down hard, form an opinion, and coerce everyone into doing what we want.

Sometimes it's fine to sit back and let people make their own decisions and even mistakes, as long as they don't adversely impact you.

How could a primitive person or community grasp the long term implications of modern life when even we don't?

why do they have to understand the long term implications to have control over their own lives.

nobody has perfect information. that is the human condition. We dont know the future: how our lives will develop, how our marriages will end, what our kids will be like, and when and how we will die.

understanding the short term implications is already hard enough.

for example assuming they are granted to own the land they live on, we could not just let them sell the right to logging and let others destroy their land. so we need to be careful which the choices we allow them to make. eg, if they want to move into the city, fine, but then we need to make sure they can reverse that decision and go back, or at least continue some of their lifestyle. iaw: the problem is irreversible decisions that are difficult to understand.

but also problems caused by learning about alcohol, depending on government support, education that doesn't respect their culture and knowledge, etc.

so my approach would be to teach them knowledge they can use to improve their lives, introduce them to the idea that others live in other ways, but also that it takes an effort to change their lifestyle. like they will have to learn new trades in order to get jobs and earn an income if they want to do that.

> Sometimes it's fine to sit back and let people make their own decisions and even mistakes...

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

Is sitting back different from the non-intervention policy?

Radical cultural relativism is rooted in a profound ignorance of human cognition: it is true for every human, who has ever lived, that a more precise empirical knowledge of the world is preferable. It is even likely that we might also learn from them (e.g medicinal use of undocumented amazonian plants, or even just ingenious ways of structuring language and social organisation).

In the past, this particular aspect co-occurred with colonial genocide and economic exploitation. But that is not an excuse to stipulate that there isn’t an objective benefit to the progress of understanding and culture.

You write as if economic exploitation was somehow off the table. But economic exploitation isn't restricted to outright slavery, not at all.

Trade is disastrous when suddenly all local production has to compete with hyper efficient imports, but there's no export to really pay for imports. The damage to local production happens despite the imbalance. Repeatedly give a man a fish and sooner or later he will forget everything he ever knew about fishing.

These people don't have an economy, so there is no economy to destroy, getting access to a market is far preferable to trying to survive in the wilds.

Of course they have a market. Not a market of real estate bubbles and NFTs, that's for sure, but a market of skills and cooperation. They may not have much job specialisation (or they do, difficult to tell without contacting), but even without, different levels in experience and physical fitness will make that a market nonetheless.

And what level of experience we are looking at! Remember the 10000h rule? Imagine a group developing exactly one skill set since childhood. Trained by a chain of ancestors following the same path that would make the Bene Gesserit blush.

This would all collapse under contact. A few years of handouts and/or one-time trades and nothing of those abilities would be left. And those years would be far too short to find a place in the new (to them) market above that of beggars and thieves. They would have trouble even working as prostitutes not knowing the cultural codes around that.

Apologies for the wall of text, but your reply triggered something I've been thinking about a lot recently.

I agree with you on many points, but the word "preferable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It doesn't describe who it is preferable to, or how objective outcomes inform people's preferences, or whether this preference only exists when it is non-uniformly distributed across the world.

I believe that more precise empirical knowledge of the world is preferable, but I don't think it generalises - or naturalises - to human cognition. Or that it is causally related to reduction of colonial genocide and economic exploitation.

Anecdotally, I know a number of people who prefer their "objectively better" life courtesy of vigorous anti-intellectualism, conspiracy, religious fundamentalism, internalised naturalisation of race/gender/faith/etc. And other cognitive distortions - as I would call them.

Again though, I agree with you because I believe (among other things) that less human suffering is preferable, increased longevity is preferable, our species surviving longer is preferable, and other species surviving with us is also preferable. And I believe more precise empirical knowledge is the best way to achieve those things.

But many, many people disagree, and many just believe differently. As far as we know, that disagreement is not due to a kind of naturalised deficiency of cognition.

Even the most strictly enforced religions couldn’t avoid cults and schisms. The progress of understanding really seems inevitable. You can only gaslight yourself for so long, into denying the natural predisposition of the human cognition to change, when presented with new information.

I think there is a little bit of a "Prime Directive" at play (which may be a rehashing of your thesis). Uncontacted peoples are also highly sought by researchers for scientific investigation (which human traits are due to our culture and which aren’t?). There’s also the reality that economic interests may eventually force the issue and these people may be "relocated" to support mining, logging, fishing.

Yes, the description of the linked video mentions the tribe is being encroached upon by logging interests, so this entire conversation is moot. Capitalism will kill them soon enough, either through assimilation or extermination.

The last Australian deep desert tribe to discover that their continent had been colonized by white people was in 1984. When they realized that extended family members from other groups had been living with running water (and sugar!) for years while they were out in the desert, they were pissed. Only one member of the group chose not to join modern society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintupi_Nine

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591

I’d never heard of this, thanks

There are many indigenous tribes in Brazil for example (still surviving in more or less pre-colonial territory). I'm very far from a specialist (and specialists do exist), but I know there are many different attitudes. Some tribes have known technology but don't like it. Some use smartphones and wear clothes (usually those have some economic activity I guess). Some have an inbetween approach, and the leaders are reluctant to let technology in (it's interesting in Brazil usually the role of spiritual leader is different from the "executive leader" afaik, it's the Paje (more spiritual) and the Cacique (more executive)).

So it's a reality many actually don't want to mix with civilization.

I haven't gotten to read it yet, but I highly recommend Ailton Krenak's book "A vida não é Util"[1] (Life is Not Useful) and his other ones, he discusses some of those questions as an indigenous person.

Also, really most tribes in Brazil are in existential danger from many activities, specially illegal logging and mining. One significant role they perform is defend the forest since it's their territory and traditional livelihood.[2] Differently from elsewhere, tribes in Brazil are quite unique because many have been agricultural in pre-colonization times (I believe cassava is the staple crop generally), and have unique cultures like music, languages, garments and dishes.

But generally each tribes has its own unique culture and history and we cannot generalize much (some are more violent, some much less, etc. too).

[1] Seems to be available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Not-Useful-Ailton-Krenak-ebook/d... (This time Amazon's name is fitting :) )

[2] Brazil has quite generous indigenous reservations I think and we generally quite value indigenous people culturally, but we are struggling to defend most forests from criminals and, what other word to use, evil business interests in the region.

(One significant cultural movement is Brazil from the early 20th century was the idea of "Anthropophagy", which is to value all cultures and learn what we can from them, absorb ("eat") what's good they have to teach us)

Your comment assumes that these tribes are not aware of us, I think that they have the exclusive right to choose when/if to reach out to the “civilized world”, we don’t have to make that choice for them.

We’ve seen what happens when we choose to meddle with these tribes when people tried to reach out to the Sentinel tribe. A missionary traveled to the island and tried to introduce them to Christianity (he was killed as a result), another group of people kidnapped six of the island’s inhabitants for the purpose of “studying” them. Eventually the situation got bad enough that the Indian government intervened and made it illegal to go the island by sea or air (they banned air travel because the sentinels would fire arrows at helicopters). We need to just leave these people alone and only observe from a great distance.

> It's interesting to think about why many people believe tribes like this should remain "uncontacted".

It's less "they should remain uncontacted", and more "any contact should be on their terms". If they prefer being left alone, that must be respected.

> Also, what is the long term fate of such tribes? Without genes flowing in, it's probably not good.

If contact was made, the short term fate of the tribes would likely be bad. They likely don't have immunity to all the diseases that we do. It could prove devasting.

This is not 1492.

We can send robots with video screens, to mention one of the many solutions for that well known issue.

Which are then promptly destroyed because the tribes don’t understand what a computer is

We definitely have the technology to make machines that stone age people can't destroy or move.

That is precisely what the monoliths from 2001 were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(Space_Odyssey)

Why are you so keen on going to such extreme lengths to strip these people of their autonomy and be in control of how they live their lives? How would you like it if they kidnapped you in the night and forced you to live with them?

Let them make the decision for themselves. Stop trying to control other people. Their decisions aren't negatively impacting you so you have no moral justification for taking control of their lives.

You're being weird...

I wrote nothing about controlling people. Only communicating with them, so they can make informed decisions about what level of contact they want.

There is a strong argument that they should remain uncontacted, because they are not exposed to our pathogens. Death rates of 90% are typical. This was the story on islands all over the Pacific. It still happens to Amazon tribes today.

It is a general pattern. Whenever the larger evolutionary pool encounters the smaller one, the larger pool's viruses spread like wildfire through the smaller population, wrecking it. And it's not just viruses. Whenever predators from Eurasia/Africa, the "Old World", the largest landmass, arrive on an island, it is an extinction event. How much destruction has the housecat wrought?

Now, perhaps this is, fundamentally, an unstable dynamic, literally in the dynamical-systems sense, and the situation cannot be maintained. Ultimately they will come into contact with these diseases; the only question is how and when.

(To strike a philosophical note, however, your death is also inevitable, yet you seek to delay it.)

So perhaps some protocol, as you suggest, of extremely careful, "clean room" contact, with vaccines, or something like that, might be possible and desirable. How to win sufficient trust, I don't know.

But the disease aspect is important.

It would be great to drop a few a Starlink terminals and some solar panels to contact these people and explain the disease risks

Why can this not be addressed with vaccines?

Our newborns don't have these immunities either, right?

Or am I misunderstanding the human immune system?

Newborns inherit antibodies from their mothers iirc.

Besides how hard it is to get everyone on board with vaccines even when they have been raised in a culture that's seen wild success from them for generations

Mothers are indeed capable of transmitting antibodies through milk, but a significant portion of it does come through exposure and vaccines. As kids start school or daycare they reshuffle all the germs they live with, as they meet new friends, go to camp, start a new school, shuffle again. Often it just feels like a runny nose or a mild fever, a little bit here, a little bit there. The problem is that the body doesn’t not exterminate a virus from its ecology. It may be kept at bay, and from critical mass, but might be extant on the skin ( hands especially ) or in the lungs for instance, just not at infection levels.

Experiencing that petri dish as an adult can be overwhelming. For the same reason that kids have a staggered plan of shots that lasts for a dozen years, you’d have to trickle in the resistance more or less that way that you came about it, or you’re not really “not overloading their immune system”

> Why can this not be addressed with vaccines?

It takes a lot of time to trust strange people enough to let them pierce your body to inject random substances. After about a century of vaccination among the "civilized", with proven results, there's still a lot of people that are not OK with it.

There are genetic factors, probably epigenetic ones, and environmental too.

Death rates of 90% are not typical. I'm not even aware of them in reliable literature, only their reporting in certain popular sources that aren't supported by good evidence.

The medical procedures for "contact" are pretty straightforward. You screen and temporarily quarantine the contact team for diseases. You ensure only those people are meeting with the indigenous group, and that the contact team isn't being exposed themselves. You have physicians and other medical staff available in the contact team to provide medical care.

The goal isn't to prevent all disease transmission. That's not possible because "uncontacted" tribes are already interacting with the outside world. The Nomole people in TFA trade with their Piro cousins for example, and interact with loggers, miners mineral surveyors, among others. The goal is to minimize the transmissions you can control and provide the political/cultural/medical resources necessary to deal with whatever situation is initiating the contact process.

I wonder how many of these tribe would actually prefer to remain isolated if they knew about the rest of the world.

Im pretty sure they do know but the rest has been demonized and local lore has built up.

Prefering the old ways is real.

Growing up (1960s) I was exposed to Western Desert language groups, in the mid 80's I spoke to the Pintupi Nine.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591

One brother turned back soon after, the others declined in health thanks to modern life and sugar.

It's interesting to contrast first hand experience with lifetime hunter gatherers with techbro manifests about how living with technology is so much better.

Given a real choice not everyone is convinced.

"give them a taste of sugar and they'll never go back"

I hate this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive seems relevant.

if there was a civilization with full body on demand super virtual reality orgasm suits and free cocain, then you'd also join them i'm sure ... while in fact you are sitting so smart and diabetic behind your screen discussing online with people you'll never meet (okay, that's also my flaw - touché) believing that living longer and more comfortable equates to living fulfilled and happy.

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