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Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

> Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food

That's a bizarre claim, confidently stated.

Of course I can make a fire, cook and my own food. You can, too. When it comes to hunting, skinning and the cutting of animals, that takes a bit more practice but anyone can manage something even if the result isn't pretty.

If stores ran out of food we would have devastating problems but because of specialization, just because we live in cities now you simply can't go out hunting even if you wanted to. Plus there is probably much more pressing problems to take care of, such as the lack of water and fuel.

If most people actually couldn't cook their own food, should they need, that would be a huge problem. Which makes the comparison with IT apt.

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I don't think they're saying _you_ can't do those things, just that most people can't which I have to agree with.

They're not saying people can't learn those things either, but that's the practice you're talking about here. The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.

> The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.

You can eat some real terrible stuff and like 99.999% of the time only get the shits, which isn't really a concern if you have good access to clean drinking water and can stay hydrated.

The overwhelming majority of people probably would figure it out even if they wind up eating a lot of questionable stuff in the first month and productivity in other areas would dedicate more resources to it.

You're not going to be any good for hunting, farming or keeping warm if you have the shits though.

Can you list a situation where this matters that you know this personally?

Maybe if you end up alone and lost in a huge forest or the Outback, but this is a highly unlikely scenario.

If society falls apart cooking isn’t something you need to be that worried about unless you survive the first few weeks. Getting people to work together with different skills is going to be far more beneficial.

The existential crisis part for me is that no-one (or not enough people) have the skills or knowledge required to do these things. Getting people to work together only works if some people have those skills to begin with.

I also wasn't putting the focus is on cooking, the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important.

And you are far more optimistic about people than me if you think people working together is the likely scenario here.

>the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important

These are very important when you're alone. Like deep in the woods with a tiny group maybe.

The kinds of problems you'll actually see are something going bad and there being a lot of people around trying to survive on ever decreasing resources. A single person out of 100 can teach people how to cook, or hunt, or grow crops.

If things are that bad then there is nearly a zero percent change that any of those, other than maybe clean water, are going to be your biggest issue. People that do form groups and don't care about committing acts of violence are going to take everything you have and leave you for dead if not just outright kill you. You will have to have a big enough group to defend your holdings 24/7 with the ability to take some losses.

Simply put there is not enough room on the planet for hunter gathers and 8 billion people. That number has to fall down to the 1 billion or so range pretty quickly, like we saw around the 1900s.

The well known SHTF story that summarises your point written by a guy who lived in Sarajevo:

https://www.scribd.com/document/110974061/Selco-s-Survival

From a real situation, only alluding to the true horrors of the situation.

You think that the majority of people actually know how to do those things successfully in the absence of modern logistics or looking up how to do it online?

I have a general idea of how those things work, but successfully hunting an animal isn't something I have ever done or have the tools (and training on those tools) to accomplish.

Which crops can I grow in my climate zone to actually feed my family, and where would I get seeds and supplies to do so? Again I might have some general ideas here but not specifics about how to be successful given short notice.

I might successfully get a squirrel or two, or get a few plants to grow, but the result is still likely starvation for myself and my family if we were to attempt full self-reliance in those areas without preparation.

In the same way that I have a general idea of how CPU registers, cache, and instructions work but couldn't actually produce a working assembly program without reference materials.

I mean before you stave to death because you don’t have food in your granary from last year, you don’t even have the land to hunt or plant food so it’s not even relevant

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