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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

I agree the application of the logic doesn't end with isolated populations. The relevant difference is that those brought up in the modern world have/had the potential to engage with knowledge of addiction and other vices, and decide for themselves how to steer their lives in an informed way. We draw a somewhat arbitrary line for being responsible for oneself as the best way to structure society given the tradeoffs. There's just no sense in which these isolated populations as a whole can be sufficiently informed about the modern world to suitably navigate its complexities to lead to their prospering in it.

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But on the other hand you are assuming the modern world is bad and so therefore exposure to it is a dangerous and negative thing. I'm here to tell you that having access to medicine and playing sports and whatever is pretty great too. It's not all bad. I think you're taking a little bit of this Star Trek version of "leave them alone to develop on their own" but if the shoe were reversed and there was an alien species out there that could come down and talk to us and share knowledge and potentially harmful things as well, I'd like to make that choice for myself.

It's certainly a complicated subject, but I'd just challenge you to think of the positive version as well, not just the negative (addiction/vices/&c). It seems you have a default negative view of the world, some of us have a default positive view of the world. Modern life is pretty awesome!

My concern isn't mainly about addiction and vices, its more about a loss of meaning and being adrift in an alien world. The addiction/vices are just what one falls into when your life becomes devoid of meaning. I think the mental health crisis that most of the western world seems to be engulfed by, despite living in an age of endless wonders, goes to show that there is something deeply wrong with our modern way of living. My caution is against introducing this "sickness" (for lack of a better term) into populations even less able to defend and preserve personal meaning against an onslaught of technology and ideas that would evaporate their personal sources of meaning in an instant. That is no gift to anyone.

I just think you are super focused on the negatives. My life is great, I don't have a mental health crisis, most of my friends are doing well and having kids and enjoying their lives, and more.

There might be something deeply wrong with the modern world (which by the way includes other countries ranging from, idk, Iran, to Vietnam, to Korea) but there are a lot of things deeply right about it: opportunity, human rights, women's rights, independence, opportunities to build rocket ships or sail the world. That seems like one hell of a gift that I wouldn't want to deny anyone. If anything, providing opportunities and giving human minds the chance to flourish and be creative seems less of a sickness and more of a cure.

The danger when making decisions on behalf of other people is in imagining yourself in their position, rather than imagining them in their position. So you have a happy fulfilled life, you have the kinds of human relationships that provide deep meaning to you, you have the right kind of curiosity and wonder to be fulfilled by witnessing burgeoning technological progress, etc etc. Yes, being deprived of all that would be very bad for you.

Now imagine someone psychologically very average whose source of meaning is in the familiar environment where they have an acceptable amount of status, broad community support and much social engagement. They have a peculiar culture and social practices which gives them deep personal meaning. Now imagine all of that is swept away; no social status, no familiar environment, cultural practices gone, extended family scattered to the wind. What value does the wonders of the modern world have to someone who has lost everything they value?

Consumerism, technological marvels, and endless entertainment are the modern world's answers to the waning sources of personal meaning in modern life. Turns out that it's all a very poor replacement.

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