Violence and killing isn’t really the correct metric though, right? If I say humans are shitty then being shitty is probably more appropriate.
What % of people positively support vicious acts of the state? Of those who say they disagree w/ the viciousness of the state, what % are willing to disengage from the state (i.e. go live as a forager in the woods or something similar)?
Yeah, the most isolated and uncontacted people on Earth are known for murdering anybody who tries to visit their idyllic tropical island.
That idea would suggest that modern people are worse. But, I don’t think people are different. People just aren’t that thoughtful and are easily manipulated by society and propaganda. People act worse because of things like patriotism. That’s not an innate change in humanity though. People need to be smarter in this case more than better. In fact for the most part this is them trying to be good!
This is painful. They are the most isolated and uncontacted precisely because they are extremely unusually violent. How about a list of all the peoples throughout all of history who haven’t killed everyone who approaches?
Later, a prominent pacifist culture emerged; this was known as the law of nunuku , based on the teachings of the 16th century Moriori leader Nunuku-whenua.[11] This culture made it easier for Taranaki Māori invaders to nearly exterminate them in the 1830s during the Musket Wars. This was the Moriori Genocide, in which the Moriori were either murdered or enslaved by members of the Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama iwi,[12] killing or displacing nearly 95% of the Moriori population.
I don’t get the hostility here. I’m willing to read any interesting links you have. “You’re wrong, go watch a documentary” doesn’t add much to the convo.
That is an interesting story that I hadn’t heard, but as you well know, an anecdote, selection bias as being a known part of recorded history, and it doesn’t say as much about the nature of people as it does the nature of societies. Very different things.
These seems like good Clovis questions, I don’t know specific numbers.
I feel like I’m making a ridiculous conversation even more ridiculous, because I’m not trying to convince anybody. It’s not even possible to convince anybody of something so abstract and subjective. It’s like, it’s seems self-evident to me but if it’s not to somebody, then they win, I got nothing else.
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You can answer the second question.
It is a difficult thing to discuss. You might be able to drill down to some testable specifics like “leave a hundred wallets lying around and predict how many get returned” (or 17000 wallets as the case may be), but can’t really do any murder experiments.
But, even with, say the Milgram experiment, I find it weird that so little attention is given to the people who say “nah, fuck that, I’m not shocking anyone.” But anyway, that’s a test of human strength, not goodness, certainly not just goodness.
You want me to quantify precisely how violent is “violent?” C’mon.
You seemed to be calling cultures violent when you were suggesting that there’s a danger of romanticizing them. Don’t have to be precise, but if you think ~15% of people being murderers makes them a violent people and it turns out to be 0.15% or 0.015% it might change your idea about whether or not there was any dangerous romanticizing.
The problem is he has no focus and goes off on wild tangents that derail threads. The fuck are we even talking about now? Thread needs moar Scamazon Monopoly and less philosophy.
It matters quite a bit in a political context. The suck/no suck, violent/peaceful discussion is kinda limited and dumb, but the larger thing being indirectly discussed is what sorts of human societies are possible. You can’t limit yourself to all the good things people do and hope they’ll just keep doing more of that if only the right structures can be found. You also need to stare directly into the abyss and make allowances for all the horrible things people do, because we do an awful lot of them in between the good bits, and pretending we don’t doesn’t make them go away.
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Since we’re talking about violence and murderers I’m just gonna say that Jeff Bezos is top 5 value in a “most likely to actually play The Most Dangerous Game” draft (obv [undrafted] is a slamdunk #1)
Edit: maybe we should actually hold this draft
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My main point from yesterday was the the concept of human nature is incoherent. Once we’re discussing humans across a long enough time period (as we were yesterday) then the very idea of an immutable human essence is incompatible with a belief in natural selection/evolution. I can go dig up some links but probably not one cares.
It’s not actually possible to convince someone of anything.
That’s ok