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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

People tend to forget how grueling pre-modern life before modern society etc., was for people. Most people were one bad season away from starvation and penury. No air conditioning/heat, medicines, heathy food, hygiene, good shelter, lighting, etc.

I'm not saying working in early mills or factories was fun, but it beat the hell out of subsistence living so much that people opted for that to remaining in the hinterlands --this still is the case in modern China --that's why there are so many illegal internal migrants moving to city manufacturing sectors.

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And yet, despite all that Payirti turned right around, left modern life, the arguing, the fighting, the diabetes, and returned to life as a hunter gather in the vast Kiwirrkurra desert.

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

Modern people tend to never be aware of how many hunter gathers live long fit healthy lifestyles.

Can that sustain 8-billion? Can they live totally disconnected from modern life? Is it sustainable above and below the tropics of cancer and capricorn?

I know there are some !Kung who live alright as bushmen, in a mild climate, but it's not an easy life. Anyhow, more power to them if they remove all traces of modernity from their lives.

Not that I disagree with everything, but 8 billions argument seems misplaced to me. Why should a life style support that many, if valid?

Logistic map (aka uncontrolled growth of population or overpopulation) is basically the fundamental source of suffering for all living things. Instead of planning for food, nature just overproduces demand and lets the weak starve to death and the average to just starve.

Rather than asking how it would support billions, we should ask how we are planning to not suffer in these numbers. Haven’t heard it regarding our current life style. Everyone tells us to reproduce more and pay more and more astronomic bills and loans, that’s it.

> Why should a life style support that many, if valid?

Personally, I would say a lifestyle that isn't just a thought experiment should answer one of

  A) How do you support the current population of the planet like this?
  B) How do you humanely reduce the population over time if you can't?

Obviously still value in thought experiments, but if you're talking about real life, ignoring those two questions gets a bit euthanasia/genocide-y pretty easily. "Every human being alive today not existing" should probably not pass the lifestyle test suite, right?

Most people in the world can’t work high-income jobs or live in nice single-family houses in pleasant spacious places. It seems like the rubric you are proposing would ban people who are able to enjoy these privileges from thinking about how they can improve their own lifestyles. Regression to mean is not my objective for myself or my family. That said, I certainly believe we should do what we can to improve the lot for most people, but it is simply not realistic to imagine that the only valid ways of life are those which can scale to the whole global population.

The world’s a very big place with a hugely diverse set of possible “valid” lifestyles (and limited ability to influence their reality). So what’s the big deal with proposing that maybe for some people a return to the land or to subsistence is a legitimate option?

We clearly don’t support anything now, so this argument seems to be in the same category of wishful thinking. These questions could be asked if the current system passed the tests. People already have 0-1 kids. They gather in packs to live in cardboard boxes with nominal utilities.

A system with free agents is very prone to painting itself into a corner, it’s unstable by design. One of the issues that we have is that on the brink of catastrophe we are still asking ourselves whether the less carastrophic measures are ethical. But times of “we do what we want” end with the last decent square mile allocated for crops and housing.

We’re at such hard physical limits for the first time, so it will take a couple of world wars to figure out new rules, I guess.

survivorship bias. the hunter gather lifestyle also kills a lot of people, often through little more than tripping over a stone or eating the wrong seeds[1]

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(book)

The survivors are indeed fit and healthy. The rest dies (often by someone else's hand) and isn't around to be observed.

> The rest dies (often by someone else's hand)

often ?

Is that a first person observation, guesswork, or dubious inference on the basis of sparse evidence of occasional battles in some parts of the world?

The certitiude of comments such as yours is always intriguing.

For reference, in the region in question there's no archealogical evidence of any pitched battles in the Tanimi and genetic evidence supports people arriving in various parts of Australia and pretty much staying where they got to tens of thousands of years back until the 1800's at least.

Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...

Pitched battles weren't a Stone Age occurence, true. That is more of a state and proto-state phenomenon. Tribal wars usually had form of raiding.

There is ample evidence for homicide among hunters and gatherers, though. We don't like to hear it, because the Noble Savage myth is still going strong.

https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/no-hunter-gat...

Yeah, we don't have a comprehensive record of every tribe ever. But violence is attested pretty well among those that we have.

It’s possible he spent his life studying the subject or watches a lot of Gistory Channel that often reveals blunt force trauma as a cause of death in various archeological digs. It seems to be a recurring theme that is safe enough to generalize without verbose reasoning attached.

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