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Comment by seu | Hacker News Reader

> An individual human without any of the support provided by larger organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels, as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray.

This guy may be a math genius, but he should at least pay minimal respect to the thousands of people who have studied human cultures, societies and civilizations, and to their findings, before coming up with a post about groups of people based on what "post-apocaliptic fiction" has portrayed. As an anthropologist, I just stopped taking his ideas seriously at that point.

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I agree that his opinion should be taken with a grain of salt since the topic is far from his field of expertise, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect someone to do literature review before posting an opinion to a social media website.

Maybe he wanted his point to be conveyed easily and used "post-apocaliptic fiction" as a shortcut, but probably knows it's not so trivial. I think people not versed in a particular domain can still have interesting (even if wrong) ideas, that are worth reading and thinking about.

As an anthropologist can you sketch out, for us not so blessed, an example of the higher or highest levels of existence an individual lacking any support from any larger organized groups has actually obtained?

Thanks.

No, you're just supposed to shut up because an anthropologist has thrown a title at you.

The point OP is making is that anthropological research has done the hard work of uncovering real insights that the author presumes are learned from works of fiction

Famously homogeneous anthropological research that all pulls in the same direction with no differences of opinion, the alignment of Roger Sandall and Margaret Mead, the unification of romantic primitivism no longer slurred by designer tribalism?

I'd suggest it's fair to ask self identified experts what real insights they allude to.

I think the other commenter answered exactly what I meant and you decided to ignore it, so... I just suggest you read again what they wrote.

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