Hacker News Reader

Comment by emit_time | Hacker News Reader

> Just consider that they built structures that still exist today when we have difficulty building structures that last beyond 50 years before they have to be torn down due to failures in the materials.

That might have quite a bit to do with the economic incentives people base their decisions around when building.

Also, survivorship bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)

View on HN

I'll grant that "survivorship bias" may be in the argument. As I have said elsewhere, the thing I am highlighting in the attitude towards previous societies as being "primitive." This is, itself, a highly detrimental bias to the argument being presented in the original document.

We can say that they were different technologically, but based on the frailty of our technological systems now, we really can't say that we are superior to those so-called "primitive" societies.

> they were different technologically

We can do everything they could. They can do little we can. They came before us and progressed into us. To refute ancient cultures’ primitiveness is to deny the word any meaning.

Some of these primitive people walked across continents and sailed across oceans using only very simple tools.

Knowledge is contextual. Our ancestors couldn’t manage a web server, but not many HN readers would survive for long with the tools our ancestors used if dumped into the environments they lived in.

What do you actually think "primitive" means?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com