I don't think portraying a snapshot rather than a steady-state society would be much of a problem: media like Avatar almost always captures the societies it portrays at unusually tumultuous times anyway, which is actually the main thing that makes the lack of curiosity and so forth conspicuous to me.
If the movie was about some kind of anthropologist-cum-method-actor trying to blend seamlessly into a stable culture that had never heard of a starship or a Hellfire missile, less inventive behavior on its citizens' parts wouldn't be so surprising. But it's not; it's about a contact scenario with a technologically superior species, and so the same behavior looks more like borderline-insane traditionalism or sentimentality.
If the movie was about some kind of anthropologist-cum-method-actor trying to blend seamlessly into a stable culture that had never heard of a starship or a Hellfire missile
I'd watch that movie.
Today's post, Failed Utopia #4-2 was originally published on 21 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Interpersonal Entanglement, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.