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Yvain comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure this is true; I know little about welfare politics, but I was under the impression there was a major shift over the last ten years toward limiting the amount of welfare benefits available to people who are "abusing the system" by not looking for work.
One could probably remain alive for long periods just by begging and being homeless, but this raises the question of what, exactly, is a "life worth living", such that we could rest content that people were working because they enjoy status competitions and not because they can't get a life worth living without doing so.
This is probably way too subjective to have an answer, but one thing that "sounds right" to me is that the state of nature provides a baseline. Back during hunter-gatherer times we had food, companionship, freedom, et cetera without working too hard for them (the average hunter-gatherer only hunted-gathered a few hours a day). Civilization made that kind of lifestyle impossible by killing all the megafauna and paving over their old habitat, but my totally subjective meaningless too-late-at-night-to-think-straight opinion is that we can't say that people can opt-out of society and still have a "life worth living" unless they have it about as good as the hunter-gatherers they would be if society hadn't come around and taken away that option.
The average unemployed person in a developed country has a lot of things better than hunter-gatherers, but just the psychological factors are so much worse that it's no contest.
Speaking from a lifetime of experience on welfare in the US (I'm disabled, and have gotten work from time to time but usually lost it due to factors stemming either from said disability, or the general life instability that poverty brings with it), your impressions are largely correct.
What I'd say is that the shift (and it's been more like the last forty years, albeit the pace has picked up since Reagan) is towards "preventing abuse" as a generic goal of the system; the result has been that the ability to deliver the services that ostensibly form the terminal goal of welfare-granting organizations is significantly diminished -- there's a presumption of suspicion the moment you walk in the door. Right now, SSI applicants are auto-denied and have to appeal if they want to be considered at all, even if all their administrative ducks are otherwise in a row; this used to be common practice, but now it's standard.
This also means that limits are fairly low. I can't receive more than 40 dollars a month in food stamps right now because my apartment manager won't fill out a form on my behalf stating the share of rent and other services I pay in my unit. He has an out; he's not involved in the household finances. But without that in writing, from that person, the office presumes that since I have roommates declared, my share of the household expenses is zero, ergo I'm entitled to the minimum allowable (they can't just deny me since I'm on SSDI).
And having been homeless for a little while (thankfully a friend helped me get the down payment on a place I could just barely afford), yeah...Vladimir_M's comments are based more on rhetoric than substance. One thing I observe is that many people who are long-term impoverished or homeless (self included) will project a bit of being inured to status as a way of just securing ourselves some dignity in our interactions with others -- but nobody in that situation could miss how deeply that status differential cuts whenever it's used against us, even implicitly in the way people just ignore or dismiss them,
As luck would have it, I have some limited experience with living for periods of about a month at a time in a household where we gathered about 80 percent of the food we ate (no exaggeration). Rich in what the land around of offered, rich in the basic assets needed to make use of it, rich in ability to keep ourselves entertained and occupied during our copious free time.
I could easily see the typical hunter-gatherer experience being very, very good. Certainly, I'd rather be financially and material poor under the conditions I described above, than in my present circumstances.
Then what limited the growth of forager peoples so substantially? There had to be a mechanism to prevent them from exceeding their region's carrying capacity. If a tribe of 50 people grew at a rate of 1% for 2000 years there would 24 billion people in it. Clearly that didn't happen; in fact there have been massive die-offs from starvation due to cyclical climate change, or to resource warfare (sometimes fought to extinction) between neighboring tribes.
You cannot be considered financially and materially impoverished if you have access to abundant natural resources. Nevermind if you own that or can enforce the exclusive status of your rights to it - if you have those resources available to you they at least count as cash flow if not assets.
Limited access to limited resources is far more typical, and life is not so leisurelly when you spend every hour of daylight working to procure food that still isn't enough to provide for you and your family. That is also the state of nature and was a situation that a great many people have found themselves in for the brief time that they managed to survive it.
That...actually doesn't represent the human condition for most of our ancestral history, nor the current state of surviving forager peoples for the most part.
Resources are limited, but you only need about 15 hours of work a week per hunter-gatherer individual devoted to food-producing activities. Overdo that and you may well tax your ecosystem past carrying capacity. This is why foragers wander a migratory circuit (although they tend to keep to a known, fixed route) or live in areas where there's sufficient ecological abundance to allowed for a sedentary lifestyle while still using hunter-gatherer strategies. It's also why they tended to have small populations. Scarcity was something that could happen, but that's why people developed food preservation technologies and techniques that you can assemble with nothing more than accumulated oral tradition and some common sense. Tie a haunch of meat down to some stones and toss it down to the bottom of a cold lake. That meat will keep for months, longer if the lake freezes over. It'll be gamy as hell, but you won't starve -- and this is a pretty typical solution in the toolkit of prehistoric humans from Northern regions. Drying, salting (sometimes using methods that would squick you -- one branch of my ancestors comes from a culture that used to preserve acorns by, kid you not, burying them in a corner of the home and urinating over the cache), chemical preservation, favoring foods that store long-term well in the first place, fermentation, and a flexible diet are all standard knowledge.
In the American Southwest (a hot, harsh, dry and ecologically-poor climate), Pueblo people and many others used to rely on the seasonal abundance of Mormon Crickets for protein. You can gather eighteen pounds of them an hour when they pass through, basically just by walking around and picking up bugs. The nutritional profile beats the hell out of any mammal meat, and they can be preserved like anything else. Think about that for a second -- one person, in one hour, can provide enough of these bugs to feed an entire village for a day, or their own household for weeks (and that's without preservation). It's not desperation; it's a sound food-gathering strategy, and a lot more palatable when you don't come from a culture used to think of insects as a culinary taboo.
Starving to death is more of an issue for low-tech pastoralists and agriculturalists -- people who use just a small fraction of the available edible resources to support populations that wouldn't be able to forage on the available resources. The relationship of effiort to output for them is linear; work your farm harder, get more food in proportion -- and you need to run a surplus every year in most cases because there is non-negotiable downtime during which it's going to be hard to switch to another food source (and even if you do, you'll be competing with your neighbors for it).
In my own case, I've taken part in of a family of five supplying themselves with only a few culturally-specific dietary staples (powdered milk, spices, flour, rice, things that we could easily have done without had they not been available) doing most of their food-production by just going out and getting it somewhere within a mile of home. Clams. squid and oysters were for storing (done with a freezer or by canning with water and salt) and cooking up into dishes we could eat for the rest of the month; small fish were gathered day-by-day, large fish stored (one salmon or sturgeon can feed five people for over a month when you have a freezer), crabs and similar gathered on a case-by-case basis. I personally wasn't fond of frog legs, but a nearby pond kept up with a whole lot of demand for frogs in my family and others. We never bothered with anything like deer or bird hunting, but we'd gather berries, tree fruits (apple, plum, pear) and mushrooms, grow garden veggies and basically just keep ourselves supplied.
I'm not saying everyone on Earth could switch back today -- heck no. A whole lot of people would starve to death after destroying the ecosystems they need. But my ancestors lived in that place for thousands of years and starving to death was not a common experience among them, because they weren't used to the population densities that only come with intensive agriculture. And there are people descended from foragers of even more remote and desolate climes -- some of them STILL living that way -- who can say the same thing.
Then what limited the growth of forager peoples so substantially? There had to be a mechanism to prevent them from exceeding their region's carrying capacity. If a tribe of 50 people grew at a rate of 1% a year for 2000 years there would 24 billion people in it. Clearly that didn't happen; in fact there have been massive die-offs from starvation due to cyclical climate change, or to resource warfare (sometimes fought to extinction) between neighboring tribes.
I am so glad you asked, because the answer to your question reveals a fundamental misapprehension you have about forager societies and indeed, the structure and values of ancestral human cultures.
The fact is that forager populations don't grow as fast as you think in the first place, and that across human cultures still living at or near forager methods of organization, there are many ways to directly and indirectly control population.
It starts with biology. Forager women reach menarche later, meaning they're not fertile until later in life. Why? Largely, it's that they tend to have much lower body fat percentages due to diet and the constant exercise of being on the move , and that's critical for sustaining a pregnancy, or even ovulating in the first place once you've reached the (much higher) age where you can do that. Spontaneous abortions or resorption of the fetus are rather common. Women in an industrial-farming culture attain menarche quite a bit earlier and are more likely to be fertile throughout their active years -- it only looks normal to you because it's what you're close to. So right out of the gate, forager women are less likely to get pregnant, and less likely to stay that way if they do.
Next biological filter: breastfeeding. Forager women don't wean their children onto bottles and then onto solid food the way you experienced growing up. Breastfeeding is the sole means for a much longer period, and it's undertaken constantly throughout the day -- sleeping with the baby, carrying them around during the daily routine. It goes on for years at a time even after the child is eating solid food. This causes the body to suppress ovulation -- meaning that long after you're technically able to get pregnant again, the body won't devote resources to it. All the hormonal and resource-delivery cues in your body point to an active child still very much in need of milk! Not only that, but it's routine in many such societies for women to trade off breastfeeding duty with one another's children -- the more kids there are, the more likely it is that every woman in the proximate social group will have moderately suppressed fertility. It's a weak effect, but it's enough to lengthen the birth interval considerably. In the US, a woman can have a baby just about every year -- for modern-day foragers, the birth interval is often two to five years wide. It's harder to get pregnant, and once you do, the kids come more slowly.
The next layer is direct means of abortion. In the US that tends to be pretty traumatic if it's not performed by a medical specialist. In some cases it still is for forager women -- the toolkit of abortives across all human cultures is very wide. Midwives and herbalists often have access to minimally-invasive methods, but they also often have painful or dangerous ones. What you won't find is many that are truly ineffective. Methods range from the unpleasant (direct insertion of some substance to cause vaginal bleeding and fetal rejection), to the taxing or dangerous (do hard work, lift heavy objects, jump from a high place) to fasting and ingestible drugs that can induce an abortion or just raise the likelihood of miscarriage.
The last layer is infanticide (and yes, we have this too, though it's a deprecated behavior). In all cultures that practice it it's considered a method of last resort, and it's usually done by people other than the mother, quickly and quietly. Forager cultures are used to having to do this from time to time, but it's still a rare event -- certainly not a matter of routine expedience.
The point I'm making is that population growth unto itself is not a goal or a value of forager societies like those every human being on earth is descended from (and which some still occupy today). Growth, as an ideological goal, is a non-starter for people living this way. Too many mouths to feed means you undercut the abundance of your lifestyle (and yes, it truly is abundance most of the time, not desperate Malthusian war of all against all) -- and forager lives tend to be pretty good on the whole, filled with communitas and leisure and recreation aplenty as long as everybody meets a modest commitment to generating food and the supporting activities of everyday life. I'm not making it out to be paradise; this is just really what it's like, day to day, to live in a small band of mostly close relatives and friends gathering food from what's available in the environment.
I've heard claims like these several times, but this situation where individuals voluntarily limit their reproduction for the common good can't possibly be a stable equilibrium. It faces a coordination problem, more specifically a tragedy of the commons. As soon as even a small minority of the forager population starts cheating and reproducing above the replacement rate (by evolving either cultural memes or hereditary philoprogenitive behaviors that motivate them to do so), in a few generations their exponential growth will completely swamp everyone else. The time scales on which forager societies have existed are certainly more than enough for this process to have taken place with certainty.
In order for such equilibrium to be stable, there would have to exist some fantastically powerful group selection mechanism that operates on the level of the whole species. I find this strikingly implausible, and to my knowledge, nobody has ever proposed how something like that might work.
It happened in the real world, ergo the issue lies with your understanding of the system we're talking about and not with its inability to conform to your model.
You're looking at this backwards. This is the reproductive context in which humanity evolved, and the Malthus-driven upward spiral of population and competition is the result of comparitively recent cultural shifts brought on by changing lifestyles that made it viable to do that. You don't need to invoke group selection in the form you're thinking of -- the cultural "mutations" you're positing can't gain a foothold until some branch of humanity has access to a lifestyle that makes it advantageous to defect like that. Forager societies don't have that incentive because if they overtax their resource base here and now they have to move, and for most of human prehistory (and the modern history of hunter-gatherers) the population densities were low enough that this gave the affected area time to recover, so when someone came back, things were fine again. A long-term climatic shift alters the range of viable habitats near you, but it takes something pretty darn catastrophic (more than just a seasonal or decadal shift) to entirely render a region uninhabitable to a group of size n.
The biggest filters to population growth in this system are entirely passive ones dictated by biology and resources -- the active ones are secondary measures, and they're undertaken because in a system like this, the collective good and the individual good are inextricably linked. It was a stable equilibrium for most of our evolution, and it only broke when and where agriculture became a viable option that DIDN'T immediately overtax the environment.
That's a state of affairs that took most of human existence to come into being.
You assert these things very confidently, but without any evidence. How exactly do we know that this state of affairs existed in human prehistory?
You say:
This, however, provides no answer to the question why individuals and small groups wouldn't defect, regardless of the subsequent collective consequences of such defection. You deny that you postulate group selection, but you keep talking in a very strong language of group selection. Earlier you asserted that "population growth unto itself is not a goal or a value of forager societies," and now you say that "[f]orager societies don't have that incentive." How can a society, i.e. a group, have "values" and "incentives," if you're not talking about group selection? And if you are, then you need to answer the standard objection to arguments from group selection, i.e. how such group "incentives" can stand against individual defection.
I have no problem with group selection in principle -- if you think you have a valid group-selectionist argument that invalidates my objections, I'd be extremely curious to hear it. But you keep contradicting yourself when you deny that you're making such an argument while at the same time making strong and explicit group-selectionist assertions.
Archaeological evidence regarding the health and population density of human beings and their dietary habits. Inference from surviving examples. The null hypothesis, that we didn't start with agriculture and therefore must have been hunter-gatherers for most of our existence as a species. The observatiion that the traits generally associated with the Malthusian trap are common experiences of agricultural societies and dependent upon conditions that don't obtain in predominantly and purely hunter-gatherer societies.
They might defect, but it'd gain them nothing. Their cultural toolkits and food-gathering strategies were dependent upon group work at a set quota which it was maladaptive to under- or overreach. An individual can''t survive for long like this compared to a smallish group; a larger group will split when it gets too big for an area, a big group can't sustainably form.
The answer to this lies in refuting the following:
"A small minority of the forager population" has to be taken in terms of each population group, and those are small. A small percentage of a given group might be just one or two people every handful of generations, here. A social umbrella-group of 150 scattered into bands of 10-50 throughout an area, versus just one or two people? Where's the exponential payoff? The absolute numbers are too low to support it, and the defectors are stuck with the cultural biases and methodologies they know. They can decide to get greedy, but they're outnumbered by the whole tribe, who are more than willing to provide censure or other forms of costly social signalling as a means of punishing defectors. They don't even have to kill the defectors or drive them out; the defectors are critically dependent on the group for their lifestyle. The alternatiive will be unappealing in all but a vast majority of cases.
You need the kind of population densities agriculture allows to start getting a really noticeable effect. It's not to say people don't ever become tempted to defect, but it's seldom a beneficial decision. And many cultures, such as the San ones in South Africa, have cultural mechanisms for ensuring nobody's ego gets too big for their britches, so to speak. Teasing and ribbing in place of praise when someone gets a big head about their accomplishments, passive reminders that they need the group more than they individually benefit it.
This isn't so much about group selection,as it is about all the individuals having their raft tied to the same ship -- a group big enough to provide the necessities of life, which also provides a lot of hedonic reinforcement for maintaining that state of affairs, and a lot of non-coercive negative signalling for noncompliance, coupled with the much more coercive but morally neutral threat presented by trying to make a living in this place all by yourself.
If you break a leg in a small group, the medical practitioner splints it and everyone keeps feeding you. If you do that by yourself, it probably never heals right and the next leopard to come along finds you easy pickings. That's what defection buys you in the ancestral environment.
Some quotes from Clark's Farewell to Alms (he also covers the very high age of marriage in England as one way England held down population growth):
Just to be clear, and so everyone knows where the goalposts are: as per the definition here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer , a forager society relies principally or entirely on wild-gathered food sources. Modern examples include the Pila Nguru, the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands, the Pirahã, the Nukak, the Inuit until the mid-20th century, the Hadza and San of southern Africa, and others.
To those not deeply familiar with anthropology this can lead to some counterintuitive cases. The Yanomamo, who depend mainly on domesticated bananas supplemented by hunting and fishing, aren't foragers in the strict sense. The modern Maya, and many Native American groups in general weren't pure foragers. The Salish and Chinook peoples of the Pacific Northwest of the United States were sedentary foragers.
The Polynesians and Chinese of those periods were not foragers -- both societies practiced extensive agriculture supplemented by hunting and gathering, as in preindustrial Europe.
I never said they were foragers; I thought the quotes were interesting from the controlling population perspective.
My apologies -- skimmed rather than read in detail and missed the purpose of your comment. Reply left up anyway since it may clarify terminology and definitions re: foragers for anyone who happens uipon the thread later. Thank you for clarifying!
Well that is certainly a lot for me to learn more about. Sorry I missed this post. How much of this has been directly observed in modern forager societies versus inferences from archaeology?
There's a lot of other studies about different passive fertility in forager groups that bear out the cross-cultural applicability of the San studies as well. Forgot to add that.
Studies of forager groups on several continents have come to the same basic conclusions around that. Some of those findings are summarized here: http://books.google.com/books?id=grrA421tRNkC&pg=PA431&lpg=PA431&dq=foragers+and+menarche&source=bl&ots=WNuoQO-gYV&sig=h1ahBo5ApBv4Q9uYxD47pM_whNM&hl=en&ei=NtBNTpzkFeOssALYip3rBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=foragers%20and%20menarche&f=false
The bits about breastfeeding and the other biological limiting factors (the indirect controls, basically) came to light during Richard Lee's fieldwork with the San and Ju/'hoansi peoples of South Africa in the 1960s.
The bit about active measures is available if you peruse the anthropological literature on the subject (I don't have a specific citation in mind), and the sort of thing covered in introductory classes to the field -- it's common knowledge within that domain.
As to resource warfare, it's a non-starter for most foragers. You walk away, or you strike an agreement about the use of lands. There are conflicts anyway, but they're infrequent -- the incentive isn't present to justify a bloody battle most of the time. And it doesn't come up as often as you think, either, because as I've stated, forager populations don't grow as quickly (they tend to stay around carrying capacity when different groups are summed over a given area) and indeed, devote active effort to keeping it that way, which supplements the tremendous passive biases in favor of slow growth.
Where it does come into prominence is with low-tech agriculturalists, pastoralists and horticulturalists. Those people have something to fight over (a stationary, vulnerable or scarce landbase, that rewards their effort with high population growth and gives incentive to expand or lock down an area for their exclusive use).
So in a forager society, population growth is managed how, specifically? Abstinence?
See my other reply, the long one, which goes into some detail answering that question.
Sorry, I don't see where you do. Food preservation techniques, migratory habits, gathering crabs or berries doesn't tell me anything at all about how people avoided population growth.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/6vq/on_the_unpopularity_of_cryonics_life_sucks_but_at/4ny0 Right here.
The specific situation in the U.S. or any other individual country doesn't really matter for my point. Even if I'm wrong about how easy freeloading is in the U.S., it's enough that we can point to some countries whose welfare systems are (or even just were at some point) generous enough to enable easy freeloading.
Ironically, in my opinion, in places where there exists a large underclass living off the welfare state, it is precisely their reversal to the forager lifestyle that the mainstream society sees as rampant social pathology and terrible deprivation of the benefits of civilized life. I think you're committing the common error of idealizing the foragers. You imagine them as if you and a bunch of other highly intelligent and civilized people had the opportunity to live well with minimal work. In reality, however, the living examples of the forager lifestyle correctly strike us as frightfully chaotic, violent, and intellectually dead.
(Of course, it's easy to idealize foragers from remote corners of the world or the distant prehistory. One is likely to develop a much more accurate picture about those who live close enough that one has to beware not to cross their path.)
You are not wrong about "freeloading," though that term is probably (unnecessarily pejorative). The Developed world is so obscenely wasteful that it is not necessary to beg. You can get all the food you want, much of it very nice - often much nicer than you could afford to buy by simply going out and picking it up. Of course, you don't get to pick and choose exactly what you want when you want it.
Clothing, with the exception of jeans, is all freely available. The same is true of appliances, bedding and consumer electronics of many kinds. The one commodity that is is very, very difficult to get at no cost is lodging. You can get books, MP3 players, CDs, printers, scanners, and often gourmet meals, but lodging is tough. The problem with housing and why it is qualitatively different that the other things I've cited is that while it is technically illegal to dustbin dive, in practice it is easy to do and extremely low risk. It is incredibly easy in the UK, if you get a dustbin key (easy to do).
However, the authorities take a very dim view of vagrancy, and they will usually ticket or arrest the person who has either "failure to account," or is clearly living in a vehicle or on the street. This is less true in the UK than the US. However, get caught on the street as a vagrant AND as a foreigner in the UK (or in the US, or in any Developed country) and you are in a world of hurt - typically you will be deported with prejudice and be unable to renter the country either "indefinitely," or for some fixed period of time.
If you can swing lodging, then the world is your oyster (for now). I travel with very little and within 2 weeks of settling on a spot in large city, I have cookware, flatware, clothing, a CD player, a large collection of classical CDs, and just about anything else I want to go looking for. There is an art to it, but the waste is so profligate that it is not hard to master, and absolutely no begging is required (except for lodging ;-))
It turns out that homelessness, in and of itself, approximately quadruples one's mortality risk: study pointer: