5 ms·

When the Elders die in large numbers, unexpectedly, the cultural knowledge of a people takes a rather large hit. Preserving that cultural knowledge is so impor

When the Elders die in large numbers, unexpectedly, the cultural knowledge of a people takes a rather large hit. Preserving that cultural knowledge is so important because the removal will negatively affect their lives because of the holes left.

oneoff786 4y ago
Like what
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Don’t build housing on that flood plain, it floods. Don’t invest in airlines for the long haul. You absolutely must be planning on timing the popping of the bubble. Brazil was the country of the future when your grandfather was young, when your father was young and when you were young. By induction it will also have massive unfulfilled potential when you have grandchildren too. There are an awful lot of things that people are really bad are learning from books, and only slightly less bad at learning from people.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    I’m laughing at the idea that you think the elderly have the best insights in future economic trends.
- clsec 4y ago
  Things like language, spiritual practices, and traditional knowledge are lost. It can cause generational trauma, among other things. "Kill the Indian, save the man" - the statement has been attributed to Richard Henry Pratt, an Army officer who developed the Carlisle Indian School
  - protomyth 4y ago
    Which all caused an amazingly high suicide rate that definitely did not "save the man". Never mind the number of children killed at the boarding schools[0,1]. Now, we are dealing with elders dying (even when fully vaccinated[2]) that has created holes in our language, history, and cultural teachings. We have been trying for years to document everything, but living examples are so much better. 0) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indian-boarding-school-deaths-interior-department-report-rcna28284 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indian-boarding-school-... - 'The report notes the investigation will likely "reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”' 1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57325653 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57325653 2) Tribe paid everyone $500 to get vaccinated - that did an amazing job
- Mezzie 4y ago
  My example is a bit odd, but the gay male community lost basically an entire generation of people, and it's one reason that the current queer community is such a shithole: The adults in the room are usually people my age (~30s-40s) who have zero idea of how to be queer adults. A lot of the perpetual adolescence in the queer community is a direct result of queer Millennials being basically feral children/only connecting with other queer kids, whereas before the difficulties in getting involved in the queer communities meant you were likely to interact with a wide age range and get some idea of what, for example, a 50 year old gay man was like and how he should interact with a 20 year old. A complete lack of strategic, long-term thinking, of preserving any kind of survival tactics during bad times, lack of people to guide you through normal issues in your community, etc.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    As a straight dude with a handful of gay friends I don’t think I agree that they’re feral children.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      Feral children (affectionate). I'm a lesbian who was born in 1988, and my first introduction to queer culture was queer teenagers/young adults online from when I was in elementary school. (They're why I knew it was okay to be gay!) However, I don't recall many, if any, people over 30 around. It was very much like one of those stories where everybody above a certain age is wiped out. Hence my affectionate dubbing of us as feral children.
  - Geonode 4y ago
    You're right, but then what explains the exact same phenomenon in all people our age, gay or not?
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      I'd say that's probably because we made an information system change very suddenly so most adults in the Gen X+ generations were basically soft-locked out. A lot of our cultural problems come from the fact that we have millions upon millions of people who have gotten online in the last 10 years and a new generation that's grown up in a radically different information paradigm. There are just way, way fewer 'adults/elders' than 'kids/novices' online, and since so much of our lives and culture have moved online, it's a shit show. I'm 34 and I was one of the first people to be raised with the Internet in the modern sense: I had continuous, assumed, free (in the sense that I wasn't censored) access since I was 4, but among my cohort there's very few of us. Even people who did access the Web in the 90s as children often didn't have a modern experience: Most other online Millennials had to access the Web at school, with adults looking over their shoulder or had some really strict controls that were more possible before everybody had a smartphone and the time they could spend online was restricted (you had to have some really nerdy parents to pay for unlimited Web access in the 90s). I tried deriving approximate numbers once and on the high end there MIGHT be a couple thousand of people my age with experience/context to offer advice to current younger people. And the numbers get worse as you go older: Before at home Web service existed, the only people who could really grow up online were academics' kids. So you're getting into 3 or even 2 figure numbers if you go back to Gen X. SOME of the gay men survived, there just weren't enough of them to be an actual generational resource. Same thing: There ARE people out there with the socio-cultural knowledge, but there's about ~5000 of us compared to over 100 million relative newbies, based on American numbers. Luckily, the numbers should level out as the 100 million newbies grow to have 20+ years online and start growing a culture and heuristics to deal with it. There's also that, much like the current generation of gay 30 and 40 somethings, that those of us who were in the first few generations of kids who grew up in the digital age (and therefore have a first-hand understanding of how your informational models evolve differently through puberty, adolescence, young adulthood, etc) had zero guidance when it came to 'pay attention to these things; future generations will care' since most of the adults online pre 1995ish were mostly just there to play with computers or be nerds.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  Lots of things, but war especially. “When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    This quote comes from a guy who personally lived through two world wars. Maybe not as predictive as it is poetic.
    - SkyMarshal 4y ago
      Haha, well technically he wasn't wrong in that way (the contrapositive). He didn't say, "As long as there remains alive at least one man who remembers the horrors of the last great war, the next great war can't happen."

oneoff786 4y ago

Like what

barry-cotter 4y ago
Don’t build housing on that flood plain, it floods. Don’t invest in airlines for the long haul. You absolutely must be planning on timing the popping of the bubble. Brazil was the country of the future when your grandfather was young, when your father was young and when you were young. By induction it will also have massive unfulfilled potential when you have grandchildren too. There are an awful lot of things that people are really bad are learning from books, and only slightly less bad at learning from people.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I’m laughing at the idea that you think the elderly have the best insights in future economic trends.
clsec 4y ago
Things like language, spiritual practices, and traditional knowledge are lost. It can cause generational trauma, among other things. "Kill the Indian, save the man" - the statement has been attributed to Richard Henry Pratt, an Army officer who developed the Carlisle Indian School
- protomyth 4y ago
  Which all caused an amazingly high suicide rate that definitely did not "save the man". Never mind the number of children killed at the boarding schools[0,1]. Now, we are dealing with elders dying (even when fully vaccinated[2]) that has created holes in our language, history, and cultural teachings. We have been trying for years to document everything, but living examples are so much better. 0) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indian-boarding-school-deaths-interior-department-report-rcna28284 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indian-boarding-school-... - 'The report notes the investigation will likely "reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”' 1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57325653 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57325653 2) Tribe paid everyone $500 to get vaccinated - that did an amazing job
Mezzie 4y ago
My example is a bit odd, but the gay male community lost basically an entire generation of people, and it's one reason that the current queer community is such a shithole: The adults in the room are usually people my age (~30s-40s) who have zero idea of how to be queer adults. A lot of the perpetual adolescence in the queer community is a direct result of queer Millennials being basically feral children/only connecting with other queer kids, whereas before the difficulties in getting involved in the queer communities meant you were likely to interact with a wide age range and get some idea of what, for example, a 50 year old gay man was like and how he should interact with a 20 year old. A complete lack of strategic, long-term thinking, of preserving any kind of survival tactics during bad times, lack of people to guide you through normal issues in your community, etc.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  As a straight dude with a handful of gay friends I don’t think I agree that they’re feral children.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    Feral children (affectionate). I'm a lesbian who was born in 1988, and my first introduction to queer culture was queer teenagers/young adults online from when I was in elementary school. (They're why I knew it was okay to be gay!) However, I don't recall many, if any, people over 30 around. It was very much like one of those stories where everybody above a certain age is wiped out. Hence my affectionate dubbing of us as feral children.
- Geonode 4y ago
  You're right, but then what explains the exact same phenomenon in all people our age, gay or not?
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    I'd say that's probably because we made an information system change very suddenly so most adults in the Gen X+ generations were basically soft-locked out. A lot of our cultural problems come from the fact that we have millions upon millions of people who have gotten online in the last 10 years and a new generation that's grown up in a radically different information paradigm. There are just way, way fewer 'adults/elders' than 'kids/novices' online, and since so much of our lives and culture have moved online, it's a shit show. I'm 34 and I was one of the first people to be raised with the Internet in the modern sense: I had continuous, assumed, free (in the sense that I wasn't censored) access since I was 4, but among my cohort there's very few of us. Even people who did access the Web in the 90s as children often didn't have a modern experience: Most other online Millennials had to access the Web at school, with adults looking over their shoulder or had some really strict controls that were more possible before everybody had a smartphone and the time they could spend online was restricted (you had to have some really nerdy parents to pay for unlimited Web access in the 90s). I tried deriving approximate numbers once and on the high end there MIGHT be a couple thousand of people my age with experience/context to offer advice to current younger people. And the numbers get worse as you go older: Before at home Web service existed, the only people who could really grow up online were academics' kids. So you're getting into 3 or even 2 figure numbers if you go back to Gen X. SOME of the gay men survived, there just weren't enough of them to be an actual generational resource. Same thing: There ARE people out there with the socio-cultural knowledge, but there's about ~5000 of us compared to over 100 million relative newbies, based on American numbers. Luckily, the numbers should level out as the 100 million newbies grow to have 20+ years online and start growing a culture and heuristics to deal with it. There's also that, much like the current generation of gay 30 and 40 somethings, that those of us who were in the first few generations of kids who grew up in the digital age (and therefore have a first-hand understanding of how your informational models evolve differently through puberty, adolescence, young adulthood, etc) had zero guidance when it came to 'pay attention to these things; future generations will care' since most of the adults online pre 1995ish were mostly just there to play with computers or be nerds.
SkyMarshal 4y ago
Lots of things, but war especially. “When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”
- oneoff786 4y ago
  This quote comes from a guy who personally lived through two world wars. Maybe not as predictive as it is poetic.
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    Haha, well technically he wasn't wrong in that way (the contrapositive). He didn't say, "As long as there remains alive at least one man who remembers the horrors of the last great war, the next great war can't happen."