Comment by veritas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veritas | Hacker News Reader

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Not to pick a fight here or anything but in your original message, you implied something completely different. You implied that the hunter/gatherers would have no time to make any discoveries since they'd be off looking for food all the time.

Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).

So I think the point is that with farming you get free time, but also all the bad things mentioned above. What Diamond is arguing is that hunter/gatherers didn't have to deal with most (all?) of the negatives but still had plenty of free time to pursue their leisure. That is, civilization might not have been set back just because we didn't adopt farming. In the end, it was sheer numbers that decided the outcome, not the best method.

1. I didn't write the original message.

2. Yeah, we have overcrowding, inequality, classes, and war. There are bugs in agriculture. Overcrowding just means that most people aren't dying off quickly like they did when there wasn't farming. Inequality just means that some people are now wealthy, where before nobody was wealthy. I'd bet war happened before, too; it just happens on a larger scale now because everything happens on a larger scale now.

3. You can't do most kinds of technology, education, or pretty much any other kind of endeavor if you have to spend all your time near enough naturally growing sources of food to not spend all your time in transport. Most kinds of art and technology come from concentrating appropriate quantities of appropriate kinds of people in one place. That's the point of universities, conservatories, and, for that matter, companies. Most interesting things in the world come from concentrating people.

Sorry, you're right... you didn't write the message. My mistake :)

> Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).

And he's not wrong; because farming is progress, and progress brings good things as well as bad things. But, as we're an intelligent species, we recognize bad things (yes, it takes generations) and work around them.

Again you're equating farming with progress. Can you say that if we hadn't adopted farming that wouldn't have made progress?

If we had stick with hunting/gathering, obviously it would not have been progress.

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