5 ms·

Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. There isn't any explicit anti-murder training we ne

Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. There isn't any explicit anti-murder training we need to go through that's premised on a flawed understanding of human nature. We've also made it so murder doesn't confer status in our society, which is the opposite case to bullying as per the findings. And that's rather unique to modern society, murder didn't always confer lower status.

Rapzid 6y ago
Here Is Something You Can't Understand
viraptor 6y ago
> Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. That feels like "[citation needed]". What do you mean by "is human nature"? Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them.
- hntrader 6y ago
  It's not accurate that only a very small minority would participate, the murder rate can go as high as 40-60 percent (e.g Waorani, among others). This is what can happen when there's no Leviathan that disincentives murder and when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. It's also part of the nature of our close relatives, the chimpanzee. See "lethal raiding".
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > (e.g Waorani, among others) ... when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. This describes a given culture, including upbringing. It does not describe human nature. (or specifically doesn't prove they are aligned) We've got examples from other extremes too, like pacifism in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      Rape is shockingly common and cultures are human made things, so they express human nature or some variation of it. Picking which cultures you like as examples of "human nature" and excluding others isn't really a sound tactic of argumentation.
      - viraptor 6y ago
        It's not picking cultures I like. It's a counterexample - describing specific culture doing/avoiding X to an extreme level does not prove or disprove X being or not "in human nature".
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        This is from your previous comment: Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them. I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up. In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common. Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape. Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it. Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime. A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim. It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon. I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.
  - Sharlin 6y ago
    However, it's very much not a part of the nature of our other close relatives, the bonobos, whose conflict resolution mechanisms can be literally described as "make love, not war". The difference seems to be more about their respective environments' relative abundance/scarcity than any innate "nature".
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jkhdigital 6y ago
      Indeed, humans clearly have both tendencies in our evolutionary lineage. But I think the point is that humans build societies which enforce behavioral norms independently of what would emerge based on the “natural” environment. Both bonobos and chimpanzees are locked in their strategies for conflict resolution, which may not always be appropriate for the prevailing environmental conditions.
    - hntrader 6y ago
      The difference is definitely not known to be due to current environments' relative abundance. Maybe you got that from the Wiki article on bonobos which includes a deceptive quote of a 2014 Nature article. What the article actually says is that bonobos have a genetic adaptation due to historic evolution in environments with abundance which either allows for phenotypic variation in response to current environment, or which has resulted in biological evolution to less violence as a general policy (which would indeed be "nature"). Personally I'm strongly inclined towards the latter hypothesis because it's the most parsimonious and fits observation better, ie the number of observed bonobo murders is near zero despite varying environments. If we find modern bonobos living in some scarcity who take up murder as a result, then I'll change my mind. Chimps on the other hand are believed to be violent because it confers genetic fitness (as per that same Nature article), and things such as the age and sex of their victims is predictive suggesting they murder in order to eliminate competition. This is their nature in the sense that this behavior is significantly impacted by their genes.
      - Sharlin 6y ago
  - kiliantics 6y ago
    Your understanding of society is behind by about two or three centuries at least... It's supremely unscientific to use chimpanzee social dynamics to understand human ones. And the standard view among anthropologists about prevalence of violence in a given community, is that it arises out of certain conditions (e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers), not because we are innately prone to just killing each other if there is no "leviathan" to stop us. Past research suggesting this kind of thing -- like the single study of a single tribe that you are giving us with your argument -- has been debunked by more nuanced, modern (and less colonial/racist) research. There are far more peaceful societies known to us than violent ones, though unfortunately we are mostly forced to participate in one of the latter.
    - hntrader 6y ago
      It has zero to do with racist research (the same findings apply to historical Europe) and your assertions here are just factually wrong. Here's a study on middle ages Croatia where 20 percent of skeletons showed cranial fractures (which doesn't even include murder by flesh wounds): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083 Here's a study on London cemetaries which found a 7 percent rate (again this excludes murder by other methods): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288 "e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers" Demonstrably wrong in the case of the Waorani. It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So yes, a Leviathan would've stopped it. https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.html https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.h...
      - fuzzfactor 6y ago
        >It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So culturally preserved hatred (which became an outlier over a period of time where other cultures preserved less hatred), not much different than the Hatfields & McCoys.
  - lukeschlather 6y ago
    This is a little like saying that starvation is human nature. Our entire society is organized around minimizing various aspects of human nature, starting with starvation and moving on up to murder, and at some point in the list of things we try to avoid, perhaps because they are part of our nature, is bullying.
  - watwut 6y ago
    One culture with unusually high murder rate does not prove murder is "in human nature". You are literally picking outlier to make general claim.
    - hntrader 6y ago
      No, I didn't bring up that one example to support the general claim that murder is part of human nature. I brought it up to debunk the notion that only a very small proportion would necessarily engage in these activities in the absence of a state. For that purpose, all I needed was a single counter-example. If instead you want evidence for the more general claim, you can look at some of the studies I've referred to in this thread (e.g. the one about London or Croatia), or just look up anthropological surveys of hunter gatherer societies that show murder rates 50x higher on average.
      - watwut 6y ago
        > I brought it up to debunk the notion that only a very small proportion would necessarily engage in these activities in the absence of a state. But, what you brought up is a very small part of world. And that small part of world has own governance structure too. They dont have social "state", but they do have some kind of social structures, culture, hierarchy, traditions and unwritten laws. Also, how do you know those are murders and not wars or executions? Murder is specific thing, killing members of other tribe over resource is not going to be considered murder. Raising child to adult is expensive on food among other things, you do that to other people and you do that less to own.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Murder is generally unacceptable, unless you're high status like Snoop or OJ. However theft and rape are still allowed if one is of high-enough status and doesn't get caught: Wall St., billionaires, Jimmy Saville, or Trump.
  - mnouquet 6y ago
    > Murder is generally unacceptable, ... Yet, we give Nobel prizes to murderers.
airhead969 6y ago
Definitely. The myth of the noble savage. Modern cities are much safer than ancient communities, tribal or agrarian. An interesting book: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Pinker
mnouquet 6y ago
> Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. Only in some case, in other case, we justify it by naming it something else, like taxes, prison/capital punishment, national interest.

Rapzid 6y ago

Here Is Something You Can't Understand

viraptor 6y ago

> Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. That feels like "[citation needed]". What do you mean by "is human nature"? Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them.

hntrader 6y ago
It's not accurate that only a very small minority would participate, the murder rate can go as high as 40-60 percent (e.g Waorani, among others). This is what can happen when there's no Leviathan that disincentives murder and when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. It's also part of the nature of our close relatives, the chimpanzee. See "lethal raiding".
- viraptor 6y ago
  > (e.g Waorani, among others) ... when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. This describes a given culture, including upbringing. It does not describe human nature. (or specifically doesn't prove they are aligned) We've got examples from other extremes too, like pacifism in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Rape is shockingly common and cultures are human made things, so they express human nature or some variation of it. Picking which cultures you like as examples of "human nature" and excluding others isn't really a sound tactic of argumentation.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      It's not picking cultures I like. It's a counterexample - describing specific culture doing/avoiding X to an extreme level does not prove or disprove X being or not "in human nature".
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        This is from your previous comment: Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them. I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up. In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common. Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape. Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it. Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime. A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim. It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon. I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.
- Sharlin 6y ago
  However, it's very much not a part of the nature of our other close relatives, the bonobos, whose conflict resolution mechanisms can be literally described as "make love, not war". The difference seems to be more about their respective environments' relative abundance/scarcity than any innate "nature".
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    Indeed, humans clearly have both tendencies in our evolutionary lineage. But I think the point is that humans build societies which enforce behavioral norms independently of what would emerge based on the “natural” environment. Both bonobos and chimpanzees are locked in their strategies for conflict resolution, which may not always be appropriate for the prevailing environmental conditions.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    The difference is definitely not known to be due to current environments' relative abundance. Maybe you got that from the Wiki article on bonobos which includes a deceptive quote of a 2014 Nature article. What the article actually says is that bonobos have a genetic adaptation due to historic evolution in environments with abundance which either allows for phenotypic variation in response to current environment, or which has resulted in biological evolution to less violence as a general policy (which would indeed be "nature"). Personally I'm strongly inclined towards the latter hypothesis because it's the most parsimonious and fits observation better, ie the number of observed bonobo murders is near zero despite varying environments. If we find modern bonobos living in some scarcity who take up murder as a result, then I'll change my mind. Chimps on the other hand are believed to be violent because it confers genetic fitness (as per that same Nature article), and things such as the age and sex of their victims is predictive suggesting they murder in order to eliminate competition. This is their nature in the sense that this behavior is significantly impacted by their genes.
    - Sharlin 6y ago
- kiliantics 6y ago
  Your understanding of society is behind by about two or three centuries at least... It's supremely unscientific to use chimpanzee social dynamics to understand human ones. And the standard view among anthropologists about prevalence of violence in a given community, is that it arises out of certain conditions (e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers), not because we are innately prone to just killing each other if there is no "leviathan" to stop us. Past research suggesting this kind of thing -- like the single study of a single tribe that you are giving us with your argument -- has been debunked by more nuanced, modern (and less colonial/racist) research. There are far more peaceful societies known to us than violent ones, though unfortunately we are mostly forced to participate in one of the latter.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    It has zero to do with racist research (the same findings apply to historical Europe) and your assertions here are just factually wrong. Here's a study on middle ages Croatia where 20 percent of skeletons showed cranial fractures (which doesn't even include murder by flesh wounds): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.22083 Here's a study on London cemetaries which found a 7 percent rate (again this excludes murder by other methods): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23288 "e.g. famine or other loss of resources, usually man-made by outsiders or despotic rulers" Demonstrably wrong in the case of the Waorani. It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So yes, a Leviathan would've stopped it. https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.html https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090511/full/news.2009.463.h...
    - fuzzfactor 6y ago
      >It was a blood feud going back generations, long before any contact with other societies. So culturally preserved hatred (which became an outlier over a period of time where other cultures preserved less hatred), not much different than the Hatfields & McCoys.
- lukeschlather 6y ago
  This is a little like saying that starvation is human nature. Our entire society is organized around minimizing various aspects of human nature, starting with starvation and moving on up to murder, and at some point in the list of things we try to avoid, perhaps because they are part of our nature, is bullying.
- watwut 6y ago
  One culture with unusually high murder rate does not prove murder is "in human nature". You are literally picking outlier to make general claim.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    No, I didn't bring up that one example to support the general claim that murder is part of human nature. I brought it up to debunk the notion that only a very small proportion would necessarily engage in these activities in the absence of a state. For that purpose, all I needed was a single counter-example. If instead you want evidence for the more general claim, you can look at some of the studies I've referred to in this thread (e.g. the one about London or Croatia), or just look up anthropological surveys of hunter gatherer societies that show murder rates 50x higher on average.
    - watwut 6y ago
      > I brought it up to debunk the notion that only a very small proportion would necessarily engage in these activities in the absence of a state. But, what you brought up is a very small part of world. And that small part of world has own governance structure too. They dont have social "state", but they do have some kind of social structures, culture, hierarchy, traditions and unwritten laws. Also, how do you know those are murders and not wars or executions? Murder is specific thing, killing members of other tribe over resource is not going to be considered murder. Raising child to adult is expensive on food among other things, you do that to other people and you do that less to own.
airhead969 6y ago
Murder is generally unacceptable, unless you're high status like Snoop or OJ. However theft and rape are still allowed if one is of high-enough status and doesn't get caught: Wall St., billionaires, Jimmy Saville, or Trump.
- mnouquet 6y ago
  > Murder is generally unacceptable, ... Yet, we give Nobel prizes to murderers.

airhead969 6y ago

Definitely. The myth of the noble savage. Modern cities are much safer than ancient communities, tribal or agrarian. An interesting book: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Pinker

mnouquet 6y ago

> Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. Only in some case, in other case, we justify it by naming it something else, like taxes, prison/capital punishment, national interest.