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Comment by theaeolist | Hacker News Reader

"To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered."

Science, astronomy, biology and archaeology -- all advanced culture -- cannot happen without the critical mass of population provided by cities, fed by agriculture. This article is such nonsense.

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For all our tremendous advances and expansive knowledge, we still have some billions of people that that are malnourished or starving, some that live on less than a dollar a day, some that die by the hundreds of thousands in wars over resources or religion; we have nations and societies that collapse within a few hundred years as they generally grow too top-heavy to function without replacement; we are depleting resources at tremendous rates without care to the cost; and so on.

As the article says, if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs. Today, you would most likely be born as one of the masses of poor subsistence farmers throughout the world, but most likely in China or India, who's life and work is miserable/back-breaking enough that they'll choose to make our electronics for 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day and consider it an improvement.

It seems that only in the last decade has modern technology reached the point where it can be provided to the masses and begin what might be a global transformation that leads to better lives for all - rather than better lives for a few at the expense of the many.

"if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs"

If you survived your first year of life, then your first 5 years of life, etc

Then you would have to hunt or do dangerous stuff with precarious tools, no health care in case of accident, etc

Oh and you would probably die by your 30s.

Makes the chinese factory kind of look good.

probably die by your 30s

Average life expectancy at birth is heavily influenced by infant mortality. Most people didn't really die in their 30s.

Yes, or as some people say "if you survived past 5 years old your expectancy is higher"

Not sure about the actual figures for that time period, though.

About half died at 1 year. The other half died at 60 years. A few died in between because of wars or whatever.

Average: 30 years.

I oversimplified a bit, but you can see the overview of the statistics misinterpretation.

That you would speak of doing dangerous stuff with tools and a lack of healthcare and follow that with a mention of the Chinese factory... I find ironic.

Further, while infant mortality was a problem (and has continued to be up until the last hundred years), you would probably not die by your thirties (life expectancy calculations are throw off precisely by infant mortality rates - the life expectancy for a person in almost any society goes up to at least 50 if you discount deaths of those under a year of age or so.)

Is there something wrong with hunting, or difficult about it? I'm fairly sure we were good enough to wipe out a few species before the rise of agriculture. As for "dangerous stuff with precarious tools"... by all means, enlighten me. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything more dangerous than a sharp edge in any non-technologically advanced society. The number of dangers we have today from our tools (heard about a car crash on the radio recently?) and the lethality of them (how many people die from gun accidents? from mixing bleach and ammonia? electrocution? power tools? industrial machinery?)

Do I even need to cover healthcare? Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? Or how the majority of medications we develop don't demonstrate a greater effect than a placebo?

You are really comparing apples with oranges. Here's something you should do: go visit a farm.

" Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? " You are very removed from reality.

The majority of people, even in very poor countries have access to aspirin, antibiotics. As tragic and cruel and "modern", kids that lost limbs to landmines are, they would have died without 20th century medical care, and they are alive today.

Aspirin has been known since antiquity. Health care generally refers to reasonably complete care with practicing physicians, not a few varieties of antibiotics and painkillers.

I don't see your point about visiting a farm, or your point about landmines; there's no lack of people around the world that die from things as simple as lack of drinking water and malnutrition, which I would consider the absolute minimum any kind of health care could provide.

Nature HATES you.

It is beautiful, magnificent and utterly capricious - inured to cries of mercy, fairness or justice.

If you have ever been camping or in a forest or walked through shrubland this fact will be made abundantly clear to you.

Immobile things like plants have edged leaves, burrs and seeds to sink deep into furs, thorns to prevent casual damage, let alone poisons and allergens. Forget mention of the thousands of insects and their colonies.

The environment is inimical to today's civilized primates we call man.

Hunting IS difficult, as is building tools without things like muscle force multipliers. Sharp edges? Want to beat stones together to get edges? Or do you want to move up to the Iron age? Now you have the option of living long enough to die of dysentery.

What you further ignore is that even accrued tribal knowledge is slowly lost if populations don't achieve a certain concentration. Imagine rediscovering the "art" of smithing, only to lose it by the third generation.

Whats dangerous in that society isn't the sharp edges, its the lack of anything else. Sick? Can't hunt? Good luck. Artery sliced open? Sepsis? Need antibiotics? Lets hope the witch doctor has good juju.

Wow. Really? Wow.

No. It doesn't make the Chinese factory look good. [edit: removed because it sounded too mean to me]

I suggest watching some documentaries about Asian nomads or other indigenous peoples. They live a primitive life, sure. But they seem pretty content and stress free. I'm not even sure if I prefer my own pampered life to theirs.

I'd rather kill myself than work in a Chinese factory. From what I hear on the news, I'm not the only one who thinks that way.

"I suggest watching some documentaries..."

And you heard about the Chinese factories on the same documentaries right?

But the Chinese workers have a choice, most of them came from the Chinese countryside willingly.

Now, why did they choose that instead of having a simple, stress free life in the Chinese countryside? It's probably "easier" than being an Asian nomad, and some may have that exact background.

re Chinese factory: you must be aware that millions of people migrate to coastal cities in China in order to work in these factories, have some heating in winter, buy a phone and avoid being farmer? Do you think they all stupid? You must be aware that half of the world (Vietnam, Brazil, India, ...) is trying very hard to get a little piece of the "Chinese factories" cake?

That's essentially average-utilitarian (has the happiness of a random person in the population gone up?); I guess many people are closer to total-utilitarian (ie. the total number of happy/surviving people is also important).

Wouldn't total-utilitiarian then prefer a population of 1000000 mostly unhappy people over a population of 100 very happy people? In that case it would at least be an awkward benchmark, as you just need to procreate as much as possible to get the "best" scenario.

Yes, there's an interesting thing on that here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ I haven't looked at enough philosophy to be able to figure out what I'd place myself as, average-utilarianism also seems to lead to morally-counter-intuitive stuff.

Agriculture is hardly to be blamed for hunger. In modern economics you need to pay to get something. And you need a job to earn money. What this basically means is, hunger is basically a problem of affordability and not food production. No jobs means, no food. Not just that it also means no good shelter, no good clothing and access to health facilities.

The biggest failure should be to look at why we haven't leveraged automation in agriculture to a point where one shouldn't have to work just to survive. But the way I see, in another coming decades this is something which is going to be inevitable.

In my country(India), it suggested all along the years that the biggest struggle for resources is going to be for water. In fact we are already facing a massive water crisis. It is believed there will massive riots, big war like stand off between states and mafia like control over water resources very soon. Much of this is a result of reckless mismanagement of water resources Eg: Waste dumping(both industrial and civic), turning lakes into sites for real estates in cities, over consumption of ground water. Some more time from now and India is all set for a major water crisis.

The miserable back breaking 12-14 schedules making electronics for you, is far better. The alternates are far worse. I can tell you it was more worst in India even in the past. There was rampant caste system. If you weren't born a male in a high caste warrior or priest family you were essentially screwed. And yes at least now people can chose some alternatives, back then it was slave labor bonded through generations. All you could do was slog in the fields for a rich landlord/king and hope you could eat bread twice a day. Or at most die building structures like the Taj Mahal or The Giza Pyramid. And yes there were famines, plagues and epidemics. In short, life in the past was scary.

I would say we are far better off then what we were before.

All the things you cite as the scary parts of life in the past were after the development of agriculture. The article (and my point) is that life for the average person was better in the millenia prior to that. Indeed, the fact that life was so miserably for the people that built Giza or the Taj Mahal is precisely the point - hunter-gatherer tribes of a few hundred people never did such things.

And my point about the endless hours making electronics is that if this is the best we can do for the majority of people in the world today, which is an improvement on the miserable times of earlier civilization/agricultural society, how pathetic is that compared to times of tribal societies when things were much more equal and life (on average) was much better?

And I think you answer your own question about automation - our economic system is the reason we have people starving even when we have enough food to feed everyone. Automation won't change that by itself.

I don't its that plain black and white. The only reason why (we assume) pre agriculture hunter gatherer tribes to be well off is because they were not intelligently aware of their own selves. So no countries, no religions, no color based problems or whatever.

Of course they didn't have medicines, shelter to protect themselves from epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes. Which I also think kept their population growth in check. Imagine getting your hand or a limb fractured then! Or catching dysentery. I am sure when things went fine, they went fine- The problem is basically when you get into a trouble which doesn't a solution at the present.

Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.

Its difficult to say what is better. Agriculture is basically is mass production of a basic element for survival called food .I would consider pharmaceutical companies as mass producers of another (now) basic necessity called health care. What ever you could say about agriculture you could also say about medicine.You could say people with cancer 1000 years back war far better off, at least they would just die instead of spending their life savings on fighting a disease they can't get cured off.

Not intelligently aware of themselves? In what way? There was little difference between what they knew and how they acted - there was their own tribe, and there were other tribes - and people today, where you can see cliques and groups naturally form in schools and elsewhere.

> epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes.

These things were supremely rare. As the article notes, the rise of death by disease at scale was a direct result of higher population and density, as well as likely poorer sanitary conditions.

Let us presume a disease randomly shows up and infects a tribe, killing all of them. Now what? The disease dies out. In fact, our tribal nature is in effect a preventative measure against precisely this, as it causes most human societies to develop boundaries with each other. A deadly disease survives by spreading, which is a difficult thing to do in a world of tribal societies.

> Which I also think kept their population growth in check.

All animal populations are kept in control by basic ecology - when there's enough food to support a larger population, the population grows; when there is not, it does not. Humans are no different (until modern times with birth control/women empowerment/etc.)

> Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.

This is an interesting point. Agriculture has allowed larger societies (tribes are organized societies, and good ones), but not better ones (yet). I don't find this particularly surprising - a highly refined technology or method is almost always better than a newer one, even if the newer one eventually equals and surpasses it. The gun took hundreds of years to replace the sword, the car decades to replace the horse, and today we see new forms of energy production gradually moving to replace oil. Humans and developments in human society are no different - agriculture is the only way to support larger societies, but we have yet to correct for all the problems it brings that tribal societies had long since solved.

This is just silly. Agriculture has allowed the population of the Earth to explode, and that has included increasing the population of poor people. However, technology is also lifting those people out of poverty. The developed world includes more countries today than it did in 1950, or even 1980. In the next 50 years several more countries are poised to join the ranks of countries with wealth similar to that of the G7 today. In all likelihood there will be a swathe of newly minted developed countries including Brazil, Nigeria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, etc. as well as many Eastern European countries by the mid 21st century. And in the meantime many of the most poverty stricken regions of the world will be less so by then.

This is not hope or optimism, it's merely following the trends that have been consistent for the last 2 centuries.

And you will be born today as poor subsistence farmer BECAUSE of the overpopulation that's possible thanks to agriculture.

We develop one advance and instead of using it to be happier, we use it to be just more people, and poorer.

Seriously, we need to stop being more and more just for the sake of it.

"Seriously, we need to stop being more and more just for the sake of it."

I don't think most people would appreciate the demand to stop having children because infant mortality these days is so low.

The article claims it was a catastrophe in many ways, not in all of them.

I'm glad I was born into my time, in a rich country. And why shouldn't I? I live like a king and don't have to put any real effort into anything to maintain my status. All my problems are literally first world problems. But on a global scale agriculture fucked us up something fierce. And while I take a lot of pleasure in the nicer aspects of advanced culture, I wouldn't just assume that it justifies the horrible things that would never have come to be if we would have kept on living in a healthy symbiotic relationship with our natural environment.

Or as Louis CK said at the Beacon Theater (I'm paraphrasing): "God: I gave you everything you need. Why did you put that shit there? Guy: So I can go faster!"

Exactly. But from this ridiculous scenario one good thing could have happened. We wouldn't have Discover magazine.

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