Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

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It's like you didn't even read my comment.

Why do you think everybody is just stacking technologies on top of a shared pool? That's a post-globalisation concept.

African people discovered plenty of technologies including metal forging - but they were less technologically advanced than Europeans when they were invaded. Why? Because the material situation in Europe is ideal for technological development. The climate is temperate, food is abundant, the Romans went everywhere dumping their own advanced tech on everybody, probably other factors a historian could elaborate. There are plenty of alternative explanations to the one you're implying, and the one that's been historically taught, which is "black people are not capable of developing civilisation or technology".

Edit given you appended "at any point in time": basically no milestone technological development has happened anywhere for quite some time now, excluding computers and the Internet. Everything's incremental now. Plus for much of that time many African countries have either been trying to recover from colonialism or been caught up in civil war (which should be expected when a power vacuum is created). I would say that mobile money is a good candidate for a meaningful invention though, and that came out of Nigeria.

>> Because the material situation in Europe is ideal for technological development. The climate is temperate, food is abundant,

>> the one that's been historically taught, which is "black people are not capable of developing civilisation or technology".

Jared Diamond posits the first theory, as well, in Guns, Germs, Steel.

These are competing theories for sure, amongst probably a massive number of other theories.

If you're trying to have a more accurate perception of reality you have to leave yourself open to even uncomfortable truths.

The "uncomfortable truth" (that black people are socially or intellectually inferior to white people) /is/ the established idea. We're only just now looking for alternative explanations because it turns out black people are regular people too and can function perfectly well within our "superior white civilisation", assuming they're not too busy being lynched or pushed into ghettos.

White superiority (dare I say, white supremacy?) has only just become uncomfortable instead of the accepted truth, because the evidence points to other explanations, and we've recently noticed what racial ideology leads to. It is not those looking at material explanations and examining African culture and development that are dogmatically clinging to ideological explanations - it's those who still think that colonial propaganda and white savior mythology represent a disinterested examination of the evidence.

> Jared Diamond posits the first theory, as well, in Guns, Germs, Steel.

No, he doesn't. GGS explicitly rejects any sort of pseudo-racial theory of civilizational superiority. The entire book is a methodical dissection of why different regions experienced different paces of development in the pre-colonial era, with climate, geography, and endemic food species being the leading factors.

But that's what I was saying as well - that civilisational development is not driven by some concept of racial traits, but that it's driven by material conditions.

Yes, I think we're on the same page.

Racialized theories of civilization are, on face value, absurd (and, well, racist). GGS goes to significant lengths to debunk them, including thoroughly collapsing the racial categories that colonial and post-colonial Westerners use.

I don't think they're absurd.

Humans are tribal to the core of our being.

Race matters, culturally, genetically, and is how we typically organized throughout history and even today.

The Irish, French, and British are pretty similar racially but divide pretty significantly on the tiny differences in that race.

To cast aside race as an arbitrary characteristic seems inaccurate view of reality.

Race is one of the most important attributes that makes us human.

The question of whether race or location is the causal factor seems to just be different dimensions of the same thing, no? Given that they pretty much correlate though most of history.

Not if the same race relocates to a different location and has similar outcomes.

If you reread my comment I said Jared Diamond takes the first theory of resource abundance as the reason.

It's still just a theory.

It also begs the question of why African Am. and Latin peoples don't do well when integrated into western society statistically as a whole.

Whereas Asians and Indians appear to do well.

This is probably inappropriate conversation for a place like HN, so I'm bowing out.

;)

Substantively editing your comments is considered a faux pas on HN.

As long as someone doesn't change their point, if someone wants to make their comment more clear by simplifying phrasing or adding more detail or examples, it's fine by me.

I'd rather a fleshed out idea than a off the cuff rough draft. That's actually one of the best parts of digital communication.

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