On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > > I agree that the Noble Savage probably never existed. But it is also true > that the idea that pre-agriculture societies lived short and brutish lives > is probably bullshit. >
The Pirãha tribe that you like so much is pre-agriculture , and I don't know how long they live but I'm sure it's shorter than those in the first world. And the Pirãha have no concept of number, in their language there is a word for one and a word for many and that marks the limit of their mathematical knowledge; that may not be brutish but I don't think it's exactly noble either . Do you? > > > For example, there is very little evidence for the often repeated trope > that life expectancy was 30, or that you had to spend your life afraid of > predators. > You can tell how old somebody was when they died by examining their bones, and although there were exceptions who lived to be 80, until about 500 years ago you didn't find many bones from people who were older than 30, and when you did you can tell from the grave goods that the person must have been rich. > > I love science and technology, but I came to realize that the ideology of > "progress at all costs" places some abstract notion as more important than > human happiness. > The primary reason the stopping of the Thirty Meter Telescope gave the native Hawaiians pleasure is that it gave them a sense of power, they destroyed the magnificent Thirty Meter Telescope because they could. > > > Notice that I am not saying that I am anti-telescope or anti-progress > So you keep saying, and yet you still insist on making lame excuses for these barbarians. > > > What I am saying is that we have to be wise, and play with the card we > were dealt. > Yes. Like most platitudes that's true. But forget generalities, much more revealing is what somebody advises in particular circumstances. > > > There are now rovers in Mars. I'm sure space exploration will survive the > temporary set-back with the Hawaiian mountain. > This is not a trivial matter, the Thirty Meter Telescope was vastly more important than all the mars rovers put together. Look at all the surprises that were made in fundamental physics in the last 45 years, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, Dark Matter, Dark Energy; all were discovered by telescopes, particle accelerators just confirmed the existence of things that theoreticians already expected were there , but nobody predicted the discoveries made by telescopes, and the accelerators cost many times as much. Who knows what the Thirty Meter Telescope would have found ; thanks to Hawaiian numbskulls we may not know in your lifetime. Why do you defend these people? > > > Real life is made of trade-offs. > Other than the disasters incurred by the wrath of Mother Earth and Father Sky by having their home atop that mountain disturbed what exactly would have been the negative trade off of the Thirty Meter Telescope ? > > What is the life expectancy of a homeless person in NYC? > I don't know but Malawi and greater NYC have about the same number of people in them, the 60,000 poorest people in NYC are homeless, and I would bet money they live a lot LOT longer than the 60,000 poorest people in Malawi, the poorest country in the world. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
