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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

It’s because they aren’t cutting down all the trees there. They’ve found a way to just actually live off the land without destroying. Way more than a millennium, they’ve been doing it for 50,000 years. It’s no joke.

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The “Easter Islanders cut down all their trees and collapsed society” as posited by Jared Diamond has long been disproven https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter...

Sure, but we have a modern day example in Haiti. It’s also common sense in some regards.

Your article says: "It’s therefore possible that it was the newcomers from Europe who contributed to the island’s societal collapse in the years to come."

Right, as usual, the evil Europeans were the cause of the collapse, and the fact that there were no trees left on the island for hundreds of years prior, and therefore no wood for building things, had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse. This modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities is incredible in a society that preaches to value reason and science rather than wishful thinking.

Diamond argued for a environment caused degradation + diverse factors of their society and thus indirectly attacked the west-"centric-diabolist meat pots.

These papers are a attempt to reconquer lost funding by the very same academics who happily ignore other cultures atrocities, be they in the past:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Zanzibar

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-h...

Or in the present: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/23/russia-partial-military...

Its extraordinary that such a blatantly racist (west centric diabolism) and ideological charged movement is still recognized as academia.

Like it or not, it's what current research - the science you appeal to -- appears to show. As stated here:

"...the researchers determined that the island experienced steady population growth from its initial settlement until European contact in 1722. After that date, two models show a possible population plateau, while another two models show possible decline."

and

"Current research shows that deforestation was prolonged and didn’t result in catastrophic erosion; the trees were ultimately replaced by gardens mulched with stone that increased agricultural productivity. During times of drought, the people may have relied on freshwater coastal seeps." [1]

"Evil Europeans" is your term in an attempt to make it seem as if the European culture is being attacked. There is no "modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities", it's rewriting of history taking into account new knowledge that Pacific peoples weren't stupid, had spread across the Pacific using navigation methods unknown to Europeans for thousands of years and recognising the effects of the introduction of outside cultures - disease, slavery and theft.

https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3155/resilience-not-co...

Because they are incapable of producing any economic surplus and thus have no population growth whatsoever. The whole noble savages trope you seem to be be leaning to might sound quite romantic but they didn’t really make a conscious choice to live how they do.

> It’s no joke.

So is high infant mortality, low life expectancy due to a very high likelihood of dying from a trivially treatable diseases, living in abject poverty etc etc.

In much of the world, hunter-gatherers have needed to spend no more than two hours per day on practical activities, year-round. Temperate climates have been more demanding.

In the highlands of India, remaining time is often spent brewing and drinking alcohol, with the biggest problem being elephants finding and raiding the brew pots.

That's not a life you would want to live though.

No, but it’s probably a pretty good life if that’s the only thing you know. They have a lot of sex on the beach (actually) and don’t look malnourished.

Reminds me of the parable chiding the fisherman relaxing at the beach to work hard, so he can later retire relaxing at the beach.

Yes, that is a good one.

Googled and found a few versions. Here is one:

https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...

Also see who thestorytellers are a part of (at the top).

Ok, but what’s the child mortality rate? Maternal mortality rate? Average life span? Rate of death from infected wounds? Random diseases caused by inbreeding? We may not have direct data on many basic quality of life indicators but we can make educated guesses from lots of historical analogues.

But how happy are they?

What an utterly absurd question. You've clearly lost sight of what's important: The metrics.

Yeah the islanders might say they are happy but are they meeting or exceeding their OKRs?

More importantly, how much did their 401k grow last year?

It’s easy for a society to be “happy” (whatever that mean and however you measure that) when only fully healthy people get a chance to live and everyone else is dead.

Are more people individually less happy better than fewer people individually more happy? Do you just multiply the two together to decide which is morally better?

More importantly, do you factor in people died from otherwise treatable diseases as negative happiness, or neutral (as they no more have a brain to secrete serotonin)? Is death unhappiness? For the subject and his relatives? When death is commonplace is it still a source of unhappiness or accepted as a part of natural flow, with human life being regarded as less permanent and more ephemeral, with greater emphasis on the present moment and less on future plans and ambitions?

Death is commonplace everywhere. Everybody dies.

I actually don’t think that’s too relevant of a question. If there’s a high amount of suffering and cruelty, along with a mental philosophy that allows for happiness in spite of that (for the survivors), that still doesn’t make the suffering ok. To say otherwise is to take a step toward justifying slavery if the slaves are conditioned to be happy…

Sometimes the quantitative measures cannot comprehend the life satisfaction.

Tooth decay rate? Smoking and obesity related diseases?

Probably pretty bad. But they don’t know a “better” paradigm exists. They’ve probably found ways to deal with those things as a society and accept it as the natural course of things/god based destiny etc. The real question is how happy and content are they on a day to day basis.

These people have survived for 50,000 years (!) on a resource limited island and have managed to continue to have a martial arm and frivolous beach orgies. I would have to assume they’re pretty happy on a day to day basis.

Not just that. Absent birth control and constrained by their food base, they have to actually kill a lot of their own kids.

Try telling that to the Marshallese, Torres Strait, Tiwi and Elcho Islanders though.

They'll tell you it's all good apart from colonists, blackbirders, and atomic tests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXkwDeaQS08

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vEntK3fwp8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/

Implying that that the majority of the people living there somehow made a conscious and at least a marginally informed choice to live how they do is more than bizarre.

That's certainly true of both the UK and Germany (and many other countries) where the majority of the population found themselves Born, Never Asked [1].

Is there a reason you'd make such a banal generic point specific to the Torres Strait Island or Tiwi Islands?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0ltGjJ7_U8

Implying that because they live in worse material conditions they have worse mental health or lower levels of happiness is even more bizarre. Makes you think what aspects of life you’d want to optimize for.

It goes both ways, dude.

No it doesn’t. If fully informed basically nobody living in modern society would chose to adopt that lifestyle (even if they somehow magically acquired all the skills required to succeed there etc.). The opposite is certainly not true

Hunter gatherers are like you. They are bound to their identity and are incapable of imagining things any other way unless it is forced upon them. They prefer to stick with what they know.

I'm not telling that to a paleolithic or neolithic islander, I'm telling that to you, a Western dude used to cars and planes, (public) medicine that mostly works, a heated and cooled house, kitchen appliances, TimTams, lattes, running water and sanitation. And I stand by my words.

Yeah no wonder they kill anyone who tries to come

Good for them. Honestly.

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