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Comment by terbo | Hacker News Reader

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy

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There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival.

Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.

Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.

The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.

Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.

I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.

> I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop".

I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era.

You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior.

The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it.

If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!

The issue with 10 years of school is that we outsource schooling and childcare to others specialized on these matters. In the past we spuld teach them how to hunt, fish or take care of plants, animals.

i don't know where you want to take this critic but there's a lot of learn that is meant to be forgotten. transfer of learning is a scientific phenomenon. how it's useful for the day to day is at least questionable, as it's pretty hard to measure. if you take with a pretty rational look it feels insane to teach kids nobel prize type of knowledge that can't be understood or figured out entirely by crytalized knowledge (which is also a scientific term). how much that's necessary and how some fields like regulating emotions, arts and even critical thinking are missing on the grade, the quote about "we didn't know where to stop" feels pretty prevalent. it's not impossible to find a phd graduate working in some job someone without high-school graduation could learn, probably at the same rate/time span

It's just that we don't get to enjoy so much time with our kids as we did in the past, that's all. And then we get upset for being thrown into elderly homes.

How much do you remember of being a kid? Teenagers naturally want nothing to do with their parents if you want to have a good relationship with your adult children and you have to reforge it once your kids are past puberty.

Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.

Just like almost everyone above... 40 years? 50 years? talk about their childhood with rose tinted glasses on and how nowadays children are spoiled brats. But if you actually paid attention to what adults were saying when you were a teenager, you would remember more or less the same concepts.

>when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far.

10 years of schooling for children is too far. We just adapted to the masochism and forgot how unnatural it is. Then we grow and splurge on therapy and anti-depressants or lose ourselves in addictions and the rat race.

Or become empty idiots who find this "normal".

How much money and power is required? Should we stop technological development now or do humans still need new stuff?

Others won't stop it, the'll just invade later on. Look at Lebanon for instance.

Is your argument that Lebanon chose to stop advancing technologically and got invaded by a technologically superior nation for that?

They didn't choose, they're a failed state that others are using to attack their neighbours from.

Think about what friction means. If there is no frictiom how do you walk? How do you turn? How do you brake?

In systems theory Friction is a requirement for stability, controlability and predictability.

Take any system around you and reduce friction all kinds of x files will start getting reported and pile up. This is all well known(Goodharts Law, Bounded Rationality,Explore-Exploit tradeoff etc) to people who work on system stability not just optimization.

There's friction.. and then there's human-created obstacles.

I found the rest of the movie after the quote to be quite charming.

>casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.

That is the point though. Most of the atrocities of modern world is justified as a way to "save lives" and "in pursuit of more safety".

Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?

>Modern life is easy mode.

I really wonder how people can say this with a straight face. There is poison and adulteration everywhere. And in other places perpetual wars are going on. People are playing "research" with things that can wipe out human life if it gets out of a lab. I worry about the possibility that it will be done intentionally, because someone needed that breakthrough right now.. There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains. I would like to farm something on my own, but I don't own any land. Life without a million kinds of insurance seems impossible. We really are slaves, but everyone around seem to love that...And the joke is that everone, even slave masters are slaves themselves...to money.

Even when man was living in a jungle, you could have some moments peace of mind if you climbed on some high rock with your family with some kill you made earlier. But today, there is no where to hide from the dangers that inhabit this world now. And they kill slowly. Not a quick death, like before...

> Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?

There were more slaves and serfs 250 years ago than today. It takes some tremendous mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you are actually a slave when you are not, in fact, being shipped off to a foreign land in shackles just to pick cotton and get whipped because your owner got bored.

I wish your kids the best. Living under parents with this level of delusional paranoia can do some incredible damage to the minds of young people.

So using your perfectly working and well adjusted mind, you can only imagine a single kind of "slavery"?

Would it have helped if I said "bondage" instead of "slavery"? I think so, because you seemed to have latched on to some imagery strongly associated with that word, without trying to understand the point that is being made.

If you have to stretch the meaning of words in order to try to paint the present as comparable to the past, you've already lost the argument.

I'm sorry but an statement like:

>There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains.

Is an obscene display of ignorance. Do you know what dysentery is? Do you have any idea of the immense amount of pain and suffering caused through the ages by famine? Sickness? Have you in your life taken a history course?

You worry about your children, how afraid were you of their mother dying when giving birth? Because that happened constantly.

I mean the word. It's obscene. That people like you can be so utterly detached from the harsh realities of nature is the greatest testament imaginable that by God yes, we do have it easy.

What? we don't have sickness now? Or an ever increasing amount of sickness? We now have kids with diabetes now! Childhood cancer anyone? We don't have Dysentry for kids, but we have diabetes, and cancer for them now. They can now happily live a 100 years in a hospital!

Congratulations! What a win!

What's your point? The fact that we still have sickness means things are worse? What I find fascinating is how people like you, who reference a "pure" and "analog" world, have very "binary" views. Nature is complex, everything is continuous and lives on a spectrum, nothing is binary (not even death). Things can be way better, slightly better, worse etc. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad", everything exists somewhere in between. But your thinking is so simple and naive, it's a travesty of the nature you appeal to.

Grab a coin right now, try to call the result. If you fail, your child dies before age 10.

That was REALITY in the XII century. If you like that better by all means, contact a therapist as soon as possible.

>Grab a coin right now, try to call the result. If you fail, your child dies before age 10.

And today's reality is that the child would not die, but with a similar chance (may be not right now but in the near future) will have some disease that would make the child's and the families life hell until they run out of resources...and then child dies anyway....

Do you like that better?

You think *half of children* are going to have life-ending diseases that will "make the child's and the families life hell until they run out of resources"???

I think we are on that trajectory, yes.

And a huge contributor is the perception that it is OK, because we have advanced medical procedures for them...for who can afford them.

So capitalism/consumerism makes them sick (indiscriminately) and then sells them cure (when they can). Progress!

Then I'm just going to reiterate the "Talk to your therapist" and end this conversation.

Yea, I hope she has the reality denying drugs that you appear to be on...

You are still stretching, nobody is claiming suffering doesn't exist.

But to compare modern medical care and nutrition to even 100-200 years ago and say it was better in the past is quite... insane.

You can't cherrypick specific problems now and then compare to the entire existence in whatever before times you think were better.

To put it another way... I would easily trade being below average income/class now, to top 1% 200 years ago every single time.

>But to compare modern medical care and nutrition to even 100-200 years ago and say it was better in the past is quite... insane.

No one is saying that though. I am saying that if the price for that is that everyone is more sick, then it is not a better thing.

Ok, I agree if that is your hypothetical. But we have t define "if its happening" and what "everyone is more sick" means relative to before microplastics, or whatever your argument is.

I get your point, just disagree that more people are sick now (depending on the definition of sick). If you die, you're not sick anymore.

>just disagree that more people are sick now..

There are more sickness inducing things in air, water and food. And it is not slowing down. We are adding more and more of it..Look up "Regrettable substitution", and that is exactly as hopeless as it sounds...

So regulations are not doing shit.

So given that, and the basic implication that consuming more sickness inducing stuff would make more people sick, why do you need additional proof that people will get more and more sick going forward?

>There are more sickness inducing things in air, water and food.

I mean, just no. Unfortunately I don't have a time machine to kick your ass back 300 years ago to a city like London so you get to experience it for yourself.

>I mean, just no.

What exactly are you claiming? Environmental pollution was more 300 years ago than it is now?

The claim is twofold, that London, a major capital city, arguably the largest most important city at that time, had little to no functional sewerage, turds floating down the Thames, people drinking cholera straight from the pump, etc.

Which was true at that time.

The second part of the claim is that is no longer the case for London, and somewhat implied is that few other large capitals of the world have such extreme issues now as London has had in the past.

London may have cleaned up, but that'd be a stretch for several large modern cities in India, South America, Indonesia, etc. that are straining their civic infrastructure or applying unevenly.

Globally, in total mass (or other measures) environmental pollution is "worse" now - just largely less visible (pushed from the G20 out to other countries) or dismissed (carbon dioxide is good for plants!! (etc.)).

>turds floating down the Thames

Dude, what are you saying? Just boil the water and you are golden.

But you cannot remove the poisons in the industrial waste dumped into rivers by boiling or filtering. People are totally helpless now.

> you cannot remove the poisons in the industrial waste dumped into rivers by boiling or filtering.

That's why those methods aren't used.

> People are totally helpless now.

Depends on the country, some will regulate industry and insist on properly constructed separation ponds and heavy metal bioremediation.

Some of the hadza tribe left for school only to return to hunter gatherer lifestyle. Living in poverty on a farm isn't really how we used to live, that was already step 1 of industrialization. We used to live in decently large groups hunting.

The fact that one (1) tribe refuses to live in modern society is such big and shocking news affirms GP's point. Preference for industrialized life is so normal that those who choose otherwise are made newsworthy, just like the news will tell you about any plane crash big or small but never the thousands of flights that landed safely everyday.

Yet most people don't learn anything in those 10 years. The last 3 are more or less when learning happens.

> The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.

The quote is from the introduction of a comedy movie from 1980. Not high brow, not literature, before TikTok and tradwife content, before social media, not aiming to feed angst, not meant to be too deep. It’s the setup for 90 minutes of jokes.

> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

That quote gets less convincing by the day. It has reached a state where it’s regurgitated without proper context or consideration and is now no more than a deepity. There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves. Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.

>Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.

But they are changing it. "progress" in this case doesn't imply change for the better, only the will to power.

It's obviously wrong in the sense that the world is full of unreasonable men who only managed to ruin their own lives and the lives of others, and because plenty of change has occurred through "reasonable" means by "reasonable" people. What separates Bezos, Musk, Trump and the like isn't their unreasonableness so much as the power their privilege gives them. Trump was a C-tier celebrity known for being rich and playing himself on tv, then he was granted the privilege of the presidency. Musk and Bezos have the privilege of vast wealth and the control of companies. They have the power to bend reality to their will not because of their refusal to bend to the rules of society, but because the rules of society consider it reasonable that wealth should equal power.

It's a Nietzschean statement about self-actualization undermined by the reality of capitalism.

> There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves.

You say that like it's a counterexample, but is that not literally what the quote is saying? I mean what's the difference between that and:

> the unreasonable [man] persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

I think Wikipedia does a good job of defining what most people understand by “progress”.

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

> Progress is movement towards a perceived refined, improved, or otherwise desired state.

I.e. progress is understood as positive advancement. Otherwise we use other words like “regression”.

The quote as it is typically used is advocating for the unreasonable man because they precipitate progress. My point is that we shouldn’t idolise this idea of advancement in the abstract, because pretty clearly it can turn everything to shit. We’re not benefiting from those unreasonable men, quite the contrary.

I think the use of "progress" in the quote is somewhat ironic -- "movement towards a perceived refined [...] state", as the definition puts it; an unreasonable person's perception of progress likely doesn't match up with a reasonable person's.

As I see it, the quote neither advocates nor critiques unreasonableness, but rather observes that unreasonable people are most often the ones responsible for change. Whether you take that as a lesson on the merits of unreasonableness, the dangers of it, or something in between, is up to interpretation, and depends on how much one values reasonableness vs progress (for the record, I've heard the quote more often in a negative sense by people who put reasonableness above "progress"). It also depends on one's definition of "reasonableness" of course, and whether something can be unreasonable yet still a positive.

So I guess my point is that the quote can mean just about whatever you want it to mean. It's an interesting litmus test. I do agree that people using it as carte blanche for unreasonableness in the name of some sort of nebulous "progress" is, well, unreasonable, though with context I'm certain GP was using it as more of a critique.

Much of our complicated, built environment has mediocre user interface design. If thought were given to that, it would yield humans more agency.

> civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment

This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.

This has probably been true only in the last 300? 500? years. Before that, things were the same for 1000+ years for most of civilization, barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).

> barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).

Russians? It's still true today.

What a load of bollocks, that can only be said by someone who clearly hasn't read a history book in his entire life ...

> This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes.

That is basically how all animals live, either under threat from competitors or predators.

Is that how we have to live?

Many/most people don’t, and haven’t for a very long time. Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections.

Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.

> Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections. Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.

If you talk to people, I think you'll find there are an increasing number who don't actually agree with your idea of worse. It's a question of comforts vs agency. Victims of slavery or displacement are not automatically happy just because the water is cleaner than where they started.

Things we cannot control are a risk in any world. If you must die, do you want it to be because of bad luck and natural causes, or because you're increasing someone's profit margins? Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? Or do you want to live in a authoritarian system that's characterized by ignorance, misinformation, and disenfranchisement where any resistance to different kinds of faceless violence makes you the bad guy or the crazy one?

Those people are free to move to Afghanistan or Somalia or the Congo. I doubt they will.

> Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader?

No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie.

> Those people are free to move to Afghanistan or Somalia or the Congo. I doubt they will.

This is barely relevant, because it's not a plan for agency or comfort, it's strictly worse in that it would destroy both, in addition to adding displacement and isolation.

> No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie.

Frankly that's just projecting your cowardice onto everyone else. But there's a point where anyone will trade comfort for agency. Ready to lose access to modern dentistry if you don't ever have to worry about the coercive attention of the tax man? How about losing access to hot water if your vote is worth 1000x? No more scented soap if you can work on your schedule instead of the one the boss chooses?

By your logic, Ukraine would fold the first time the power went out. And there's a reason you can't just opt out of capitalism or citizenship, that land which is not used is still off limits everywhere, and so on. It's because probably a fifth of the population would take a very big hit in comfort to increase their agency

A hint for my detractors..

> Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village.

The rival tribe is MAGA, ironically destroying the commons partly because somone told them another tribe was taking their jobs. The ransacking is uncontested and uncontestable because the civilizing forces they oppose only serve to bind others against fighting back.

> Or a predatory animal.

That would be capitalism, killing far more people daily than wolves or bandits ever did.

> Or bacterial infections.

Full circle with this threat, since having lost healthcare at the same time as losing a job means that modernity isn't saving you from a risk like this anyway.

Is fear of losing jobs still a step up? This is more savage than actual savagery and deeply unnatural. Poll 5 strangers, and remove the threat of permanent isolation. You can snap your fingers, and be accepted into the community of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Or be a monk in medieval times. Transported with your family/community to pioneer days, whatever. At least 1 will tell you they don't want to live like this, that almost anything is better, and they'll be very happy to risk early death, extra illness, and extra lawlessness, come what may, because they face these things anyway. Whether you'd choose it personally or think it's wise isn't really the question.. it's hardly an inconsistent position and it's a very common way to feel about modern life.

> A hint for my detractors..

Nobody is going to want to read anything after that. It’s incredibly patronizing.

> his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school

Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.

I remember the story of the man who sued his parents for being born because he didn't consent to being born[0]. While as absurd as it is, as I navigate life, I legitimately ponder the question whether it is ethical to have children or not.

In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287

There is also the reverse - is it ethical not to have children? Maybe the hypothetical children want to exist.

That reminds me of James Morrow's This Is The Way The World Ends.

After a nuclear apocalypse wipes out most of humanity, the ghosts of now-will-never-be-born future people hold the survivors to trial because they're ticked off at losing their opportunity to live.

There is only one ethical way to solve that moral issue: Schrödinger birthing

That doesn’t work, on multiple levels. Existing is a prerequisite to wanting; you cannot want if you do not exist. But even if you ignore that, it’s not immediately ethical or unethical to do or not do something just because someone else wants it. But even if you ignore that too, there’s no way of knowing that child won’t be the next genocidal despot. And even if you ignore all that, you could never birth even a fraction of everyone who could ever be born, since those depend on genetics and you can never have every combination of human mating with the other half.

Another framing of this is that once you have fulfilled your basic needs of healthy, physical safety and companionship, almost everything else you do is massively deleveraged: you move vast amounts of matter and energy in order to make minute alterations to electrical impulses in your brain.

The entire concept of kids and public schools is a wealth redistribution mechanism and a solution to problems created by the industrial revolution. The concept of younger humans always existed, but itwas supercharged to the degree we know today.

Kids have infinite hit points and are easily manipulated. In a pure unregulated labor market, this drives out everyone but dumbest kids as laborers, and that's bad on many levels. Marking kids as legally incapable of labor and putting them into a 20-year timeout as they engage in educational busywork solves this problem.

Confession: never actually read Centuries of Childhood( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood )

It's a solution only at a superficial level, regarding wealth redistribution. It's just very hard to leave the social class you're born in. Not everyone is doomed by it, far from it, but not enough to consider it a solved problem.

Heck, it's not even considered a problem when your family is wealthy.

>But he some how didn't know when to stop.

I think he perfectly well knows. It is just that capitalism makes him want more.

No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..

>No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..

On the contrary, we looked for wine way, WAY before capitalism. Waged war and murdered a whole lot of people for spices mind you.

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