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Comment by 627467 | Hacker News Reader

> Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms – what archaeologists call culture – were fundamentally integrated into technological solutions in this part of Peru in ancient times. Isolating and removing the tools from that knowledge made them less effective.

Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms may have helped indigenous people perpetuate the solutions/technologies. Studying and understanding those may help people - today - to more quickly understand those solutions. But it's not like a thorough understand ing and application of these technologies - today - require us to "maintain technology and culture coupling" as this _archeologist professor_ implies.

The Spanish may have made wrong assumptions at first and failed to replicate the solution, but if we still see it being used today, that's because the colonist eventually learned - without perpetuating the culture (not to the same extend as the indigenous)

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Exactly - just because they used culture, or religion, to underpin that stuff - doesn’t mean we need to. Doesn’t mean we need to use the same culture, or even the same religion, for that matter. “This is what works, and this is why it works, and this is the benefit, and this is why it’s worthwhile” can be enough, with a minimum of pretense.

Permaculture design was developed out of systematically studying indigenous methods from around the world, and one of the insights is that how humans inhabit the land — the culture — matters a lot. If something is not aligned to human interests and norms, they won’t do it.

It goes with what Christopher Alexander understood about living architecture. How people use it matters. The whole point of pattern languages was the creation of a grammar where all possible ways in which patterns come together develop a valid, architecturally cohesive design. This allows the inhabitants themselves to make changes as their life and circumstances change, and as long as they follow the grammar, it will come out as a cohesive, functional design. Alexander also systematically studied indigenous architecture and went in with a background in mathematics. There is a reason his work influenced people working with software architecture and human-computing interactive design (but our computer systems and products does not realize the full potential of Alexander’s ideas).

There is a kind of bias at play, where we think the culture itself is rigid, and becomes out of date, and therefore, impedes progress. It does not have to be that way, and often time, the culture itself encodes ideas that are crucial. Furthermore, cultural practices can be understood or designed such that it is flexible and versatile — similar to Peru’s pre-Hispanic system of canals. If anything, it’s the bias of our modern worldview that tries to fix culture into the rigid structures just as it tries to create rigid solutions.

For a deeper reading on why that might be, I suggest: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

> if something is not aligned to human interests and norms, they won’t do it.

I won't litigate strongly against this statement because its obvious this matters, but human interests and norms are not immutable and the mechanism to change it definitely involve doing things (at some scale) that can be seen as abnormal or against (some) human interests. This tension and how it's resolved is the evolutionary pressure.

> where we think the culture itself is rigid

Well, the article cites the example of the Spanish failing for decades to irrigate the land because they dismissed the existing culture. Seems like the author has a rigid view of culture, because it seems clear to me that the syncretic culture post-conquest (Spanish ruled) was one radically different to indigenous or european ones.

Working at the scale of product design and user experience, it is easy to see what a user is doing as against their own personal interest. What I've found is that there is usually some kind of motivation for some things to be done. It might not be strictly rational, but more often than not, there is some kind of narrative or view from which that particular action, belief, or rational makes sense. They are often unexamined.

So I probably shouldn't have said "aligned to human interest", because the scope of that interest is different among individuals (for different aspect of their life). That scope is dynamic. It could be self-interested, or interest of the immediate family or community they belong to. Thank you for bringing that up.

As far as the rigidity -- I appreciate your view and comment on this. I admit too. It may be obvious to you that the post-conquest syncretic culture is different, but it was a blind spot for me. I didn't even think about that. I say all of this to say that the lens (view) in which we see all of this isn't itself always seen by the person looking through it. In my case, I know about the idea and I can still miss it.

However, I have learned tbat many arguments that talk past each other happen because the view from which people argue from are not always called out or clearly defined. There are things that can be dismissed simply because it doesn't fit the view.

Re-reading your original comment -- perhaps it's better stated that, while you don't have to couple the original culture and technology, for something to be practiced now, those technologies need to be coupled with the current-day culture.

I've been saying for a while that "Religion is a social technology". Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as universal a moral as you'd like to believe, and the other commandments are also good life advice. Even "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" serves an important purpose in keeping everyone on the same page.

Nearly every culture has a tradition of parables; Tales that reveal important truths by metaphor. Whether they be about how to interact with others, how to motivate and treat yourself, or of outside dangers.

Religion serves an important teaching purpose. Most have converged a lot; There's a lot of truths that are universal. Still, they're not all created equal. You probably shouldn't hate someone just because of their religion... Unless they're part of a death cult.

Atheists are no more murderous the Christians. Religion is not necessary for that. Or even helpful.

Useful anymore, it’s not. We have education now which tells us how to society.

Yet pre Christian societies in Europe were arguably significantly more brutal. Establishing at least some basic principals of universal equality was a big deal (something modern atheists inherited directly from Christianity)

e.g. even amongst the civilized Greeks and and Romans foreigners who had no legal ties to their city states (some form of citizenship or diplomatic treaties with their home city) were basically treated as subhuman and could be enslaved and murdered with little to no repercussions.

Universalist religions extended that to vast geographic areas and established some basic shared principles and trust between strangers e.g. in the middle ages somebody from Scandinavia could travel to Rome on their own with relatively (of course still significant) little risk of being robbed, enslaved or murdered while being able to rely on hospitality from complete strangers/foreigners during his trip.

Of course the Romans already had something similar by the 100s AD (non citizens and slaves were of course excluded) but political systems are much more fragile than religions.

We ran the experiment the ussr and china where thoroughly atheistified and decultured. And the results are in. Both societies are thoroughly amoral and horrifying. There are murderous religions, but christianity got tamed pretty well.And i say that and i hate the jesuszombies with a passion.

We use culture now.

“Culture is just the way things are done around here”

Peer review is culture. Work place legislation is culture.

The article argues that trying to extract technology and reapply it, without the culture, is a fools errand.

It’s trivially true: you can’t just teach some people to code and expect them release an app that can scale to millions of users. It requires culture to function and deliver.

We need to understand the culture required to deliver the technology, not just the technology itself.

I for one would be very interested to hear about how different types of labour organisation were required to deliver their water.

Traditions are solutions to problems that civilizations forgot they had

problem of today is not having enough knowledge, books, ... for storing that stuff or for generating more appropriate stuff to work with modern knowledge they did not had, but problem is not having workforce big enough to do this stuff AND live in current economic system on top of physical/planetwide system.

there is just too may people and only two things can solve that problem - A) what stalin, hitler, did [ graph in GIF https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH_C_MORTACRACIES.GIF ] B) culture of not having 4 children and having need to live energy expensive life.

after hitler in west, reforms were made. after lenin in east, stalinist came.

so without having everybody on board choosing B)... what is the answer? and you can not be peruan-style farmer when you have terrorists pumping oil from ground , building tanks, drones, paying people to burn buildings, cars, writing nonsense "red-pilling" people ...

USA was lucky not having wars, and not having war in USA was 99.999% because of geography - no land bridge. and 0.001% of "tyrrany" of state not allowing mass murder in rest of the world (yes redpill-ing oil here). but culture is changing, state no longer cares about that 0.001% (or atleast seem so ).

we do not care about transporting muck into our fields so we do not need to manufacture fertilizers. so yeah culture is not important but it is. he means culture as a "we do care about sitting next to your field and thinking about it [but that means not spending time programming healthcare system systems] and we do care about earth" [even without hippie drugs]

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