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Comment by DoubleDerper | Hacker News Reader

I think this comment is not intending to be anything other than curious, but it strikes me with a bit of techno-savior assimilation sentiment. These autonomous tribes have plenty of opportunities to reach out to modern western culture when they are interested in doing so. Suggesting how they should "enter into the modern world over some generations" seems presumptious, even culturally aggressive.

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The last Australian deep desert tribe to discover that their continent had been colonized by white people was in 1984. When they realized that extended family members from other groups had been living with running water (and sugar!) for years while they were out in the desert, they were pissed. Only one member of the group chose not to join modern society.

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

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591

I’d never heard of this, thanks

I think there's a savior complex on both sides, both intervention and non-intervention. In general, humans tend to think they know what's best for other people no matter what the situation is.

I tend to agree with your assessment that the balls in their Court and they can do what they want

What's the non-savior third option, medium intervention? Ask what they want?

Humility and let them choose what they want. We don't need to come down hard, form an opinion, and coerce everyone into doing what we want.

Sometimes it's fine to sit back and let people make their own decisions and even mistakes, as long as they don't adversely impact you.

How could a primitive person or community grasp the long term implications of modern life when even we don't?

why do they have to understand the long term implications to have control over their own lives.

nobody has perfect information. that is the human condition. We dont know the future: how our lives will develop, how our marriages will end, what our kids will be like, and when and how we will die.

understanding the short term implications is already hard enough.

for example assuming they are granted to own the land they live on, we could not just let them sell the right to logging and let others destroy their land. so we need to be careful which the choices we allow them to make. eg, if they want to move into the city, fine, but then we need to make sure they can reverse that decision and go back, or at least continue some of their lifestyle. iaw: the problem is irreversible decisions that are difficult to understand.

but also problems caused by learning about alcohol, depending on government support, education that doesn't respect their culture and knowledge, etc.

so my approach would be to teach them knowledge they can use to improve their lives, introduce them to the idea that others live in other ways, but also that it takes an effort to change their lifestyle. like they will have to learn new trades in order to get jobs and earn an income if they want to do that.

> Sometimes it's fine to sit back and let people make their own decisions and even mistakes...

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

Is sitting back different from the non-intervention policy?

I think there is a little bit of a "Prime Directive" at play (which may be a rehashing of your thesis). Uncontacted peoples are also highly sought by researchers for scientific investigation (which human traits are due to our culture and which aren’t?). There’s also the reality that economic interests may eventually force the issue and these people may be "relocated" to support mining, logging, fishing.

Yes, the description of the linked video mentions the tribe is being encroached upon by logging interests, so this entire conversation is moot. Capitalism will kill them soon enough, either through assimilation or extermination.

Radical cultural relativism is rooted in a profound ignorance of human cognition: it is true for every human, who has ever lived, that a more precise empirical knowledge of the world is preferable. It is even likely that we might also learn from them (e.g medicinal use of undocumented amazonian plants, or even just ingenious ways of structuring language and social organisation).

In the past, this particular aspect co-occurred with colonial genocide and economic exploitation. But that is not an excuse to stipulate that there isn’t an objective benefit to the progress of understanding and culture.

You write as if economic exploitation was somehow off the table. But economic exploitation isn't restricted to outright slavery, not at all.

Trade is disastrous when suddenly all local production has to compete with hyper efficient imports, but there's no export to really pay for imports. The damage to local production happens despite the imbalance. Repeatedly give a man a fish and sooner or later he will forget everything he ever knew about fishing.

These people don't have an economy, so there is no economy to destroy, getting access to a market is far preferable to trying to survive in the wilds.

Of course they have a market. Not a market of real estate bubbles and NFTs, that's for sure, but a market of skills and cooperation. They may not have much job specialisation (or they do, difficult to tell without contacting), but even without, different levels in experience and physical fitness will make that a market nonetheless.

And what level of experience we are looking at! Remember the 10000h rule? Imagine a group developing exactly one skill set since childhood. Trained by a chain of ancestors following the same path that would make the Bene Gesserit blush.

This would all collapse under contact. A few years of handouts and/or one-time trades and nothing of those abilities would be left. And those years would be far too short to find a place in the new (to them) market above that of beggars and thieves. They would have trouble even working as prostitutes not knowing the cultural codes around that.

Apologies for the wall of text, but your reply triggered something I've been thinking about a lot recently.

I agree with you on many points, but the word "preferable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It doesn't describe who it is preferable to, or how objective outcomes inform people's preferences, or whether this preference only exists when it is non-uniformly distributed across the world.

I believe that more precise empirical knowledge of the world is preferable, but I don't think it generalises - or naturalises - to human cognition. Or that it is causally related to reduction of colonial genocide and economic exploitation.

Anecdotally, I know a number of people who prefer their "objectively better" life courtesy of vigorous anti-intellectualism, conspiracy, religious fundamentalism, internalised naturalisation of race/gender/faith/etc. And other cognitive distortions - as I would call them.

Again though, I agree with you because I believe (among other things) that less human suffering is preferable, increased longevity is preferable, our species surviving longer is preferable, and other species surviving with us is also preferable. And I believe more precise empirical knowledge is the best way to achieve those things.

But many, many people disagree, and many just believe differently. As far as we know, that disagreement is not due to a kind of naturalised deficiency of cognition.

Even the most strictly enforced religions couldn’t avoid cults and schisms. The progress of understanding really seems inevitable. You can only gaslight yourself for so long, into denying the natural predisposition of the human cognition to change, when presented with new information.

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