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taw comments on Thoughts on moral intuitions - LessWrong
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Dear everyone, please stop talking about "hunter gatherers". We have precisely zero samples of any real Paleolithic societies unaffected by extensive contact with Neolithic cultures.
Can you elaborate on this? I mean, can you give me a reason that using the phrase "hunter-gatherer" is a mistake? I understand your second sentence but I don't understand why that's a reason.
People make all kinds of stuff about how humans supposedly lived in "natural state" with absolute certainty, and we know just about nothing abut it, other than some extremely dubious extrapolations.
A fairly safe extrapolation is that human were always able to live in very diverse environments, so even if we somehow find one unpolluted sample somehow (by time travel most likely...), it will give us zero knowledge of "typical" Paleolithic humans.
The label has also been used on countless modern and fairly recent historical societies which are definitely not living in any kind of Paleolithic-like conditions. Like agricultural societies in Papua New-Guinea. And banana farmers Yanomami (who are everybody's favourite "hunter gatherers" when talking about violence in "Paleolithic"). etc. Or Inuit who had domesticated dogs, and lived in condition as climatically removed from Paleolithic humans as possible.
With pretty much 100% rate of statement being wrong when anybody says anything about "hunter gatherers" due to these reasons.
That's a great example of all these fallacies put together. Murder rates of some people who were actually not hunter gatherers (my bet is they refer to Yanomami), after fairly significant amount of contact with civilization (so not even in their "natural" state, whatever that might be), in one short time period when research was conducted (as we know 1939-1945 murder rates are perfectly extrapolable to entire European history), among people who are not really hunter gatherers in the first place, was found to be fairly high. This is then generalized to what all humans must have been like in prehistory.
With such a clusterfuck of fallacies happening every time anybody says anything about "hunter gatherers", let's just stop.
Assuming your premises, how the heck would you know?
I think that that paragraph before the one you quoted counts as "presenting evidence."
That just leaves hyperbole - which I'm sure you've never used yourself.
I try to avoid self defeating ironic hyperbole.
I don't approve of taw's tone - as you note, it is more off-putting than persuasive. But "ancestral environment" is an applause light in this community. I don't see what your comment adds beyond reinforcing the applause light.
"Ancestral Environment"? I thought he was talking about the phrase "Hunter Gatherer". The former phrase isn't even in the comment!
The meaning is, however, found in the original context. stcredzero:
That's a reference to ancestral environment.
That's a reference to present-day hunter-gatherers, with the implication that what we see among modern groups so described is what happened among humans generally in the Paleolithic, when hunting and gathering were the only ways that people had yet invented for getting their food. This is the fallacy that taw is talking about when he says:
To which stcredzero replied by quoting:
And so on.
http://www.crinfo.org/articlesummary/10594/
Please explain to me how Bushmen picked up the above from industrialized society. It strikes me as highly unlikely that this pattern of behavior didn't predate the industrial era.
Did you consider precisely what you were objecting to, or was this a knee-jerk reaction to a general category?
Bushmen lived in contact with pastoralist and then agricultural societies nearby for millennia. The idea that they represent some kind of pre-contact human nature is baseless.
"Industrialized" or not isn't relevant.