You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Nornagest comments on Open thread, 16-22 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: David_Gerard 16 June 2014 01:12PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (172)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Punoxysm 16 June 2014 06:30:40PM 3 points [-]

Hard question:

How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?

Let's give some hindsight benefit - suppose you were transported back to America circa 1800 as a respected chieftain, how could you act to minimize the horrible stuff that would happen to the Native Americans over the next 100 years? What's the best you could hope for given that you couldn't magically make the USA behave better?

Comment author: Nornagest 17 June 2014 05:05:49PM *  1 point [-]

America circa 1800 is a hard problem, even by the standards of cultures facing colonization. The colonial aspect usually gets emphasized when people talk about that part of history, and not without reason -- the US and the Spanish at the time did behave appallingly badly. But it wasn't the only issue that Native Americans then were facing, not by a long shot. Disease and its social fallout had mangled the American interior's existing social organization quite effectively before any of the people involved had met a European other than the occasional explorer or scout (see for example the Mississippian culture), and the asymmetrical spread of technology (especially the horse, which I think we can file under "technology" if you turn your head and squint) arrived to stir things up just about when the whole exotic disease thing started getting under control.

If we took Europeans off the continent in 1800, those issues would probably have sorted themselves out after a few decades of confusion. But they're more than enough to make mounting any kind of concerted response much, much harder.