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"Our way of life is better." The fact that this has so many upvotes /really/ lowers my high opinion of the HN readership.

by DanI-S 16y ago

AngryParsley 16y ago
The natives might disagree if they saw our lives, but they can't reply here. They don't know the Internet exists and they're illiterate. I doubt many of us would desire to live in an uncontacted tribe. People in uncontacted tribes spend most of their time getting food to avoid starvation. Sometimes they get injured or ill, but they don't have painkillers or medicine. Sometimes a kid gets appendicitis. They don't have surgery, so the kid dies. Sometimes a child is born with a cleft palette. Charities do this procedure in developing countries, but in uncontacted tribes the child is deformed for life. Based on evidence from other tribes, they're almost certainly a patriarchal society. Sorry girls, you can't be leaders when you grow up. You'll have to have birth children without painkillers or medical supervision. (Oh and there's no birth control.) Breech baby? Tough luck. And don't get attached to your kids early on; infant mortality is pretty high. Granted, their quality of life isn't going to be great even if they're contacted. And arguing on the Internet isn't going to change the outcome of this situation. But our way of life is better. There are very few places on earth where quality of life is worse than an uncontacted tribe. The list is pretty short: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and a couple other countries. Eventually, even those failed states will progress, whereas the uncontacted tribes won't.
ugh 16y ago
Here is another way of looking at it: If you compare the way of living in the United States today to the way of living in the United States at any other point in time, do you think that you would be able to roughly order those ways of living from superior to inferior? If you think that’s possible, wouldn’t it be very weird indeed if you couldn’t similarly order geographically separated cultures?

"Our way of life is better." The fact that this has so many upvotes /really/ lowers my high opinion of the HN readership.

by DanI-S 16y ago

"Our way of life is better." The fact that this has so many upvotes /really/ lowers my high opinion of the HN readership.

AngryParsley 16y ago

The natives might disagree if they saw our lives, but they can't reply here. They don't know the Internet exists and they're illiterate. I doubt many of us would desire to live in an uncontacted tribe. People in uncontacted tribes spend most of their time getting food to avoid starvation. Sometimes they get injured or ill, but they don't have painkillers or medicine. Sometimes a kid gets appendicitis. They don't have surgery, so the kid dies. Sometimes a child is born with a cleft palette. Charities do this procedure in developing countries, but in uncontacted tribes the child is deformed for life. Based on evidence from other tribes, they're almost certainly a patriarchal society. Sorry girls, you can't be leaders when you grow up. You'll have to have birth children without painkillers or medical supervision. (Oh and there's no birth control.) Breech baby? Tough luck. And don't get attached to your kids early on; infant mortality is pretty high. Granted, their quality of life isn't going to be great even if they're contacted. And arguing on the Internet isn't going to change the outcome of this situation. But our way of life is better. There are very few places on earth where quality of life is worse than an uncontacted tribe. The list is pretty short: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and a couple other countries. Eventually, even those failed states will progress, whereas the uncontacted tribes won't.

ugh 16y ago

Here is another way of looking at it: If you compare the way of living in the United States today to the way of living in the United States at any other point in time, do you think that you would be able to roughly order those ways of living from superior to inferior? If you think that’s possible, wouldn’t it be very weird indeed if you couldn’t similarly order geographically separated cultures?