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Comment by jmilloy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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