You seem to have reverted to just making prejudiced statements about these cultural differences without doing any research first. The modern Western diet does not contribute to our longevity, it detracts from it. — Pseudonym

You seem to have just reverted to calling me prejudiced instead of comprehending or addressing the points I make. Not everything I say is a put down of hunter-gatherers.

As I already stated in my previous post hunter-gatherer life expectancy is reduced almost entirely by infant mortality (and, to a lesser extent, accidents and warfare). There is no evidence supporting the idea that they had worse diets, none that they "overworked their bodies", certainly none that they slept less well. So what has the fact that these things (indicated by longevity) could contribute to happiness got to do with the debate? This is the reason I brought up the fact that adult hunter-gatherers do not live significantly less long than adult westerners. All these issues you mention affect adult longevity. It takes serious malnutrition to affect infant mortality, no infant has ever had their life foreshortened by lack of sleep or overwork. — Pseudonym

I was strictly speaking of longevity as a possible proxy for these things regardless of which society you're in, but since you insist, infant mortality has a lot to do with nutrition. Are you saying that when an HG people kill twin babies it's not a superstition that was originally made adaptive thanks to inadequate nutrition?

To get at what the cause of longevity is by eliminating possible suspects and see what remains. You keep implying (the above quote being just one example) that the increase in longevity in Western societies can be linked somehow to happiness in a way which is the equal of (if not better than) the suicide statistics. The reason I took away infant mortality is to show that there is no such link. Take away infant mortality and you have no further difference in longevity to account for, so all your further talk of nutrition, stress, fear, security, diversity etc is not having the net effect on longevity you claim. The increase in longevity of modern westerners is caused almost entirely by better medical care in birth, and antibiotics. Beyond that, westerners seem to suffer from more non-bacterial disease, and hunter-gatherers seem to be more likely to be killed in warfare, but the two clearly balance one another out otherwise there would be a difference in the adult life expectancy and there simply isn't. — Pseudonym

Well, actually, even when we shave off infant mortality, life expectancy is still higher in the west. My life expectancy in Canada is 82 years, and that's including infant mortality rate. Ten extra years on average has to be indicative of something right?

43% of nomadic hunter-gatherers die before reaching age 15....

I don't understand what you are saying here, on the face of it, this is simply not true. If my parents could have had 3 children but instead had two, is that "less successful" because some potential life has been missed? This idea of maximising 'life' as being a measure of success seems bizarre to me, and as I mentioned, leads to the Utility Monster version of success. — Pseudonym

So dying at age 15 isn't "unsuccessful" just because some potential life has been missed? I'm not talking about utility monsters...

The fact that you're even questioning this really shows you're clutching at straws. "Hunter-gatherers might be committing suicide in secret without anyone noticing", "suicide might have nothing to do with unhappiness". How many more obscure and unlikely scenarios are you going to come up with to avoid having to admit that the high suicide rate of Western cultures is a serious failure? — Pseudonym

I've never denied that suicide is a problem, but you're using it as the lynch pin of your argument that hunter gatherers are more than twice as happy as westerners because A they commit less suicide and B suicide is representative of overall societal happiness..

Fine.

"We find a strikingly strong and consistent relationship in the determinants of SWB [subjective well-being] and suicide in individual-level, multivariate regressions. — Pseudonym

"Individual-level"... Meaning in the analysis of a particular case of suicide and subjective-well-being, and preferences, which is different than suicide rate indicating overall average happiness/saddness.

Did you actually read the paper you "cited"? (you're supposed to paraphrase and explain rather than pasting a single sentence from the abstract). It concludes that suicide and SWB data can predict preferences, and also that micro-level multivariate regressions show correlation between SWB and suicide within given individuals, but also concludes that societal average SWB and happiness/saddness do not covary with suicide rates and that people should be very cautious when making such inferences from suicide data. You've misrepresented the entire thrust of this paper; it's about preferences, not the ability of suicide to function as proxy for average expected utility (the only statements it makes on that matter are that there are no direct correlations and that such inferences should be made with caution).

"In this paper, we compare and contrast the empirical patterns of SWB and suicide data. We find that the two have very little in common in aggregate data (time series and cross-sectional), but have a strikingly strong relationship in terms of their determinants in individual-level, multivariate regressions."

"An obvious concern regarding suicide data, however, is that the preferences of suicide victims, who arguably are at the extreme lower tail of the well-being distribution, may not be representative of the overall population. "

"At the root of our study is an interest in knowing whether the two data series capture the latent variable on well-being that would allow one to infer preferences from their relationships with other variables"

"Previewing our results, we find essentially no relationship between the suicide rate and the subjective well-being data in the aggregate time series patterns. We find a weak relationship between suicide in the aggregate cross-sectional results, but it is inconsistent across variables. In contrast, at the micro level, we find a strikingly strong relationship between the relative risks on the variables associated with greater suicide risk and higher likelihood of unhappiness. Our results suggest that while researchers should be cautious about inferences based on time series data from SWB surveys or suicide rates, the findings from micro data on SWB and suicide appear to be quite reflective of typical preferences in society."

"Comparing trends in the suicide rate to those in subjective well-being reveal little co-movement across these series. The suicide rate has mostly moved independently, trending down over time. Other investigations suggest that this downward trend is more likely related to improvement in and
access to antidepressants rather than to any underlying changes in the happiness of the population."

"Overall, we find a weak relationship between the cross-sectional aggregate patterns in the suicide and
SWB data. The low association between these series both in the time series and across several aggregate correlates is worrisome, and raises concern that either suicide data or SWB data, or both, may not be good indicators of the latent variable that they are often used to measure—utility of a typical member of the population. With this in mind, we consider how these data compare in individual level, multivariate analyses. "

"The micro data results show a strikingly strong association between the results obtained from suicide and SWB data. The similar pattern found in both data sources cross-validates the value of these alternative data sourcesfor assessing determinants of latent well-being in general and supports the findings of diminishing marginal utility and the importance of relative income in particular."

"The micro results suggest that the same factors that shift people down the happiness continuum also increase their suicide risk. These results suggest that suicide data may be a useful way to assess the preferences of the general population, not just those in the extreme lower tail of the distribution."

(paraphrasing the above: individual level analysis of why people do commit suicide (multivariate correlates at the micro-level) can be useful to determine the general preferences of the overall population, but says nothing of "suicide utility threshholds" or the average societal level of experienced/expected/reported utility)

"There are three key findings that emerge from the empirical patterns uncovered in this analysis. First, there is little relationship between the suicide rate and subjective well-being in the time series. Second, there is a weak and inconsistent relationship between the correlates of the suicide rate and subjective well-being data in the aggregate cross-section. Finally, there is a strikingly strong relationship between the correlates of suicide risk and unhappiness/happiness in the multivariate micro analysis. The micro results cross-validate the usefulness of subjective well-being and suicide data for individual-level analyses. The results suggest that prior work using micro subjective well-being data to address relative income status questions are robust to concerns raised about reporting errors. However, we also find that caution is warranted when making inferences from the time series patterns in the subjective well-being data, at least those obtained from the GSS. Going forward, we see the results of this study as supportive of additional and complementary work on preferences using both subjective well-being and suicide data."

------

"Suicide might have nothing to do with unhappiness" isn't an unlikely scenario. Suicide is often the result of the mental illness known as depression. Sometimes it is carried out for medical reasons (e.g: reduced quality of life from illness or accident) whereas in an HG society without access to medicine these individuals might not have survived their illness/accident long enough to even consider suicide. Do such suicides actually reflect negatively on western society whereas the higher mortality rates of HG society (which prevents the opportunity for such suicides) is by this virtue a benefit? These are the kinds of confounding variables which make overall suicide rates non-representative of average utility.

"Suicide in secret...". If you live with a small group of people in a vast wilderness, and you intend to commit suicide, are you going to do it in front of them? Are you going to do it where they will find you? If someone no longer wishes to live in that environment, they can functionally disappear completely into the wilderness. From the perspective of the group you left behind, how can they tell the difference between suicide and accidental death/disappearance?

Really? Then you have a very different view of a successful society to me. One in which most people are quite happy but at the expense of one percent who are so miserable they kill themselves, is not a successful society by any measure I can think of, no matter what the 'average' hedonic intake. — Pseudonym

So you admit that suicide does not represent average societal happiness?

Different strokes for different folks. You look on dead infants as a non-problem because the average hunter-gatherer who makes it into adulthood has decent longevity. If anyone here is the utility monster it's you for suggesting that since dead people cannot experience utility we need not include them in our assessment of lifespan (it's special pleading; "the average HG who makes it past age 15...)

But why do you think that the 1% who commit suicide are made unhappy so that the rest can be happy (as if there is an exploitative exchange happening between them)? That's very strange.

One of the few consistent positions you've tacitly held in this discussion is that it is better to be dead than to be unhappy, so perhaps you would prefer a society where more than half of us die but none of the leftovers are unhappy, as opposed to all or most of us living but 1% being unhappy?

Your use of suicide as a measure of societal happiness is highly questionable, but suicide as a proxy for injustice is just absurd. I'm reluctant to actually take up the negative position given the absence of evidence pointing to the positive, but you've left me no choice:

Suicide rates actually positively correlate with average societal happiness with the best explanation being relative differences in happiness can cause people to subjectively feel worse. So if you have a society that gives people more life satisfaction on average, the few people who are unable to achieve it will be more likely to commit suicide.The solution to this under your view would be to arbitrarily reduce the upper levels of happiness that average people experience such that those who are unable to achieve it don't feel as bad by comparison. This would also be in line with some of the norms enforced by altruistic punishment (or rarely murder) in many HG societies; if you do not conform you do not belong and you cause problems (jealousy).

If reducing relative inequality of any kind is the only thing that matters toward societal success (because it reduces suicide), then it doesn't matter how many people die at any age for any reason, other than suicide, so long as we're all subject to the same circumstances in life. Suicide as your proxy for societal success (happiness) only appears to measure the existence of a lower extreme (and indicates the presence of an upper extreme of happiness) while saying almost nothing about the overall distribution of average happiness or how one society actually compares to another in terms of average expected utility. If you're now making an argument based on the ethics of a society which fails to prevent suicide (arbitrarily so given we might also focus on the ethics of a society which fails to save the lives of infants), I'm happy to move on to that, but do you then cede that suicide is not useful as a metric regarding overall or average societal levels of SWB/life-satisfaction/happiness because they don't inversely correlate? (in fact they positively correlate)

I don't understand your argument here at all. Yes there are egalitarian societies who are nonetheless unhappy for other reasons, but not because they're egalitarian. If you're going to argue like that, I could just say that nothing in Western society brings happiness because some groups within western society are still unhappy for other reasons. If we're not even going to bother averaging and comparing then what's the point? It just becomes an exchange of anecdotes. — Pseudonym

Egalitarianism reduces happiness inequality, that much is shown, but you have not shown that egalitarianism actually improves happiness overall. While wealth stratification will almost certainly lead to reduced subjective happiness in some, it will also lead to increased subjective happiness in others. The wealth stratification that inherently emerges from property rights, free trade and, industrialization does actually produce wealth in ways which can improve the objective living standards of everyone (not only by keeping more people alive, but by keeping them alive with access to novel comforts and pleasures which people do seem to enjoy (entertainment, medicine, travel, education, retirement, etc...).

Gather enough anecdotes and you've got the makings of an argument. Maybe that's all I've been doing but I've sure as heck gathered more, and more persuasive anecdotes, than egalitarianism and suicide rates

I'm trying to establish why you think it actually is — Pseudonym

Because a cursory glance at the living conditions enjoyed by HG's and contemporary westerners shows immediate and vast disparities. High risk births, lack of comparable medical ability, lack of comprehensive education, lack of geographic/social/economic upward mobility, career choices, physical security (from elements and violence) etc... The difference is so obvious that as soon as any HG people get a cursory glance at the boons the west has to offer, they're thrown into relative/subjective unhappiness if they cannot reliably get them (knives, motors, tobacco, dogs, medicine are typically desired among the elderly, and dwellings, education, money, and travel are typically desired among the young).

Here you might actually say that the existence of an affluent west is unjust or unethical because their success causes jealousy and unhappiness (uncertainty and fear too) in the groups it contacts (even where it does not "exploit"). I would simply say that this makes HG way of life less robust, and therefore less successful.

I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but you make it hard not to just conclude that you're just cherry-picking evidence. The study you cite here concludes that happiness is more homogeneously distributed in wealthier societies, but that, to quote directly from the study, "None of our analyses of countries over time reveal a significant relationship between GDP growth and average happiness.". You've literally just argued that suicide statistics in wealthier countries might indicate "a very high average level of happiness but also has more outliers at the upper and lower extremes", then you cite a paper that says the exact opposite? Which is it that you believe? Or are you just believing whatever is convenient to defend your argument? — Pseudonym

Wow... I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know the difference between happiness inequality and happiness...

You stated that it is certain that when one portion of a population benefits from something that the portion which does not will be significantly less happy. I challenged this idea by citing a source which found that as GDP steadily grows, happiness inequality can be reduced (i.e: become insignificant) even as wealth inequality grows. Average happiness has nothing to do with this particular point. As far as being accused of cherry picking sources goes, I might as well accuse you of the above errors in regards to the happiness/suicide study with which you only bothered to quote a single sentence from the abstract without comprehending it or reading the article.

Firstly, what do you think the mode is if not a form of averaging? Secondly, even if we were to use the mean, we'd add up all the current ages within a community and divide by the number of people in that community. Either way, the 'average' age would be somewhere in the mid to late thirties. What maths are you doing that gets any different answer?

That they have a lower chance of getting to be that age than a westerner does seems pretty unambiguous to me, perhaps you could explain a bit more about why you're confused by these statements. — Pseudonym

I was talking about the expected number of days the average HG will live. This is the number we need to use if we're going by your just less than twice as happy standard/formula/goal-post, not current average number of days lived among the living. But what you're really saying by trying to negate child mortality is that HG way of life is far less successful for some (those who die young) and much more successful for others. It's still egalitarian because the dead aren't around to complain.

So what is well-being then, as opposed to self-reported happiness. It seems to me at this stage that the only difference is that self-reported happiness is what people actually strive for and well-being is what you think they ought to want. — Pseudonym

Physical health, physical security (freedom from death war and disease), access to information, and the freedom to pursue individual desires which may diverge from the mainstream are things I personally value, but the first two (health and security) are things which are nearly universally desired by all humans. My original post focused on the west's ability to escape disasters which otherwise affect our physical well-being.

No, that's just restating the same argument, I asked you for evidence to back it up. Hunter-gatherers have lived everywhere from the Sahara desert to the Arctic ice sheets, they've lived through interglacials and the ice-age. They have done all this for 190,000 years longer than any Western society. Where is your evidence that all the transitional phases involved mass loss of life? — Pseudonym

We've already been over the evidence. Remember the Chumash peoples who experienced massive increases in violence caused by geographic concentrations of migrants and climactic events? Remember the endless list of existing HG peoples whose ancient ways of life are being utterly decimated by the introduction of new technology or germs or outside pressures? Being robust means more than just surviving, it means the ability to thrive across a wider range of environments. HG practices might be required to survive an ice-age, but they can only support low population densities and naturally give way to or are out-competed by groups who develop agriculture in environments which are not harsh enough to prevent them. HG society is the most successful during an ice-age (assuming come the next one we don't have sufficient technology to endure it) and in any environment where hunting and gathering is the only way to stay alive, but that is evidently not most environments.

I'm really starting to get offended by your casual prejudice. Please try to do at least the bare minimum of research before making your baseless assertions.

https://www.28toomany.org/blog/2013/feb/19/what-are-the-origins-and-reasons-for-fgm-blog-by-28-too-manys-research-coordinator/

http://www.fgmnationalgroup.org/historical_and_cultural.htm

FGM probably originated with the Egyptians and spread via slavery. There is no evidence at all of it being a traditional practice of nomadic hunter-gatherers. There is, however, direct evidence of it being used in Western societies right up until the late 19th century and is still used in many Arab countries even now, all of which have/had full judicial systems. So where is your evidence that the lack of judicial system encourages FGM?

I don't know if you're just making this stuff up out of ignorance or prejudice, but it's tiresome. Which nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes kill witches exactly? And who carried out the mass slaughter of possibly up to 10,000 European women during the late medieval period? Did those evil hunter-gatherers sneak in and do it? — Pseudonym

I think you might be the prejudiced one actually. It's the only explanation for you continual misrepresentation of my statements and reliance on racism as a constant fallaciousappeal (other than you having no good arguments...). I never said that FGM originated as a nomadic tradition, I said that the absence of contemporary western ethical and legal standards leaves groups vulnerable to such practices in ways that the contemporary west is not. You've either prejudged me as a racist or you're unwilling to entertain any possible truths which you think may reflect negatively on non-white groups..

Many pastoralist groups in Africa have practiced FGM for backward reasons (isn't any reason for non-consensual FGM backward?), and while you don't consider pastoralists to be successful, there are still a few examples of HG's practicing FGM such as the Okiek people in Kenya (who were surely taught it by some neighbors) and also the Hadza for whom it has come to have significant cultural relevance (source). My point was that these are extreme sorts of behaviors which are eliminated by a fair and functional justice system along with the freedom and duty to question and improve our existing values, traditional or otherwise. The beast of superstitious tradition in human culture is being successfully slain by modern access to education and information.

Regarding the killing of sorcerers, among the tribes in Papua New Guinea, belief in sorcery and the killing of witches is a problem that persists even to this day. Spirits, spells, and other superstitious and animistic explanations can lead to people doing some really stupid and horrible things. This was just an extreme example to show the importance of education and reason based justice, not a challenge specifically against nomadic hunter-gatherers, but here you go,

I don't know why you're bringing the word "evil" into this (I'm not a witch!), but the late medieval European murders of innocent "witches" could have been prevented if they had any modicum of good education, scientific understanding, or an impartial reason based justice system.

How on earth do you twist that into an ethical success? If I go on a murdering spree, am I to be congratulated when I finally stop for my ethical success? This seems to be your entire argument in favour of western culture - we may have completely destroyed almost everything in our path to here; enviroments, cultures and billions of individuals at the bottom of the ladder, but we're doing a lot better now so that makes us morally worthy. — Pseudonym

If the west can perpetuate itself without exploiting or destroying people or nature, will it be more successful? Ethically or otherwise? It's a pretty simple question and I think you fear answering it because you know the west no longer directly enslaves and exploits the rest of the world; we have ever improving standards of fairness and justice, and we're more concerned than ever with not doing any harm to anything or anyone else (your own ethical disposition as case in point). Whether or not the west is continuing to exploit and destroy would make for a good discussion but perhaps the above is already too big a mouthful...

You seem to have just reverted to calling me prejudiced instead of comprehending or addressing the points I make. Not everything I say is a put down of hunter-gatherers. — VagabondSpectre

So why did you mention those specific measures of happiness which contribute to longevity in a debate about hunter-gatherer lifestyles vs Western ones? Either they are irrelevant because they are no different in either society, or you have prejudicially presumed that they are lower in hunter-gatherer societies without actually checking first. If there's some third explanation for your bringing them up that I've missed then please explain, but your posts are littered with examples where you subtly (or not so subtly) imply that the hunter-gatherer way of life is deficient in many areas in which there is no widespread evidence of it being so, and then when I challenge you on it you either say you were simply using it as an example or you ferret out some single source which backs it up (but which clearly was not the origin of your opinion). If the only expressions of prejudice we were entitled to call out were the of the extremely obvious "group X are awful because they're all black" sort, then society would hardly progress at all in the field. Prejudice is presuming a negative about a particular culture just because they are different from your own; you presume hunter-gatherers have poor diets, you presume hunter-gatherers have 'backward' traditions, you presume hunter-gatherers perform FGM, you presume hunter-gatherers have a secretly high suicide rate, you presume hunter-gatherers have no fair justice system, you presume hunter-gatherers burn witches, you presume hunter-gatherers kill children out of superstition, you presume hunter-gatherers get ill all the time, you presume hunter-gatherers get wiped out by the slightest change in their environment. All of this without a scrap of evidence first. The fact that you can look some up later does not change the fact that these negative views of a culture that differs from your own were presumed prior to that investigation. Anything other than prejudice would motivate you to look at a wide range of sources (not just those that support your argument), anything other than prejudice would motivate you to give other cultures a fair benefit of the doubt until such time as the evidence was incontrovertible, anything other than prejudice would motivate you to try and understand how other cultures work rather than presume they're all 'backwards', based on a single example.

Your latest example is this;

... superstition that was originally made adaptive thanks to inadequate nutrition? — VagabondSpectre

You presume that the practice of twin killing has to be a 'superstition' that's evolved biologically because you just can't bring yourself to credit these people with the intelligence to actually work it out rationally each time. One of my colleagues in anthropology has actually had direct conversations with bushmen about infanticide and is is both heart-wrenching and definatly carried out with the full knowledge of the actual practical necessity. The stories around it are just there to make the whole thing slightly more bearable. The fact that you have to keep caricaturing these intelligent and caring people as backward savages driven by unquestioned superstition is what I find offensive.

So yes, I think your position is prejudiced. If you want to speak authoritatively about the practices and motivation of other cultures then at least do them the respect of a minimum threshold of research, not just the first negative ethnography you can lay your hands on and a popsci interpretation of what motivates them.

infant mortality has a lot to do with nutrition. Are you saying that when an HG people kill twin babies it's not a superstition that was originally made adaptive thanks to inadequate nutrition? — VagabondSpectre

This is another common tactic of yours which I don't know if it is deliberate or just poor argumentation. You take the specific logical point of an argument and then move it out of context to highlight the negative aspects of hunter-gatherer culture. The point I was arguing against was your assertion that hunter-gatherers might have been more unhappy because a good diet causes happiness and westerners obviously have a better diet because they live longer. This is not true because the surviving hunter-gatherers do not face a poor diet, so that poor diets cannot then go on to make them unhappy. This has nothing to do with the fact that total calories are often scarce enough to warrant infanticide. You were arguing about the link between diet and happiness, not the link between total available calories and infanticide. If it will make things simpler for you I will make it clear now - Hunter-gather lifestyles are not a bed of roses, calorie restriction leads to infanticide and this is an awful thing. In western societies children die from preventable causes too. According to UNICEF 25,000 children die every day from diseases largely related to poverty such as pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases (both of which we have good reason to believe were absent in hunter-gatherer societies because newly contacted tribes seem to have little immunity to them), or poor nutrition. Again you're accusing me of seeing hunter-gatherers through rose-tinted glass, but you're consistently arguing in favour of this mythical version of western culture that you think we're headed towards, not the one we're actually in. Hunter-gatherer-societies kill infants because of low calorie availability. Western society causes the deaths of infants because of rapid population growth and poor resource distribution. You could argue that if we continue on our current trajectory these infants will survive, I could argue that if hunter-gatherers lived in the lush environments now dominated by western cultures instead of the most harsh environments know to man, they might not have to kill so many infants due to calorie restrictions, so where does that leave us?

"Individual-level"... Meaning in the analysis of a particular case of suicide and subjective-well-being, and preferences, which is different than suicide rate indicating overall average happiness/saddness. — VagabondSpectre

Did you actually read the paper you "cited"? — VagabondSpectre

paraphrasing the above: individual level analysis of why people do commit suicide (multivariate correlates at the micro-level) can be useful to determine the general preferences of the overall population, but says nothing of "suicide utility threshholds" or the average societal level of experienced/expected/reported utility) — VagabondSpectre

I don't know how much statistics you've done, but there's really no need to cite the whole paper if you didn't understand the difference, you could have just asked, rather than get snarky about it. You've misunderstood the nature of multivariate analysis. What the paper is concluding is that individual measures (not individual people) correlate with suicide well, but aggregate measures (when you put all the individual measures together in multivariate analysis) correlate weakly, which means they still correlate, just not so much. What this means is that suicide is well correlated with causes of unhappiness (i.e the link between suicide and unhappiness is strong), but that the reasons in individual cases vary widely such that no conclusions can be drawn about a general connection between all the measures. This makes the aggregate score of Subjective Well-Being a poorer correlate of suicide than the connection between suicide and unhappiness would suggest. The paper is an fact arguing that suicide is even more strongly correlated with unhappiness than the weak correlation between SWB and suicide rates would at first imply, it's just that the specific nature of the unhappiness varies widely making it difficult to measure across societies. This means that the suicide rate remains a very strong measure of a society's happiness (at least at one end of the scale), but the link will be masked if one aggregates all the different reasons for unhappiness.

But why do you think that the 1% who commit suicide are made unhappy so that the rest can be happy (as if there is an exploitative exchange happening between them)? That's very strange. — VagabondSpectre

How is that strange. If we have two societies, one in which there is virtually no suicide, and one in which there is 1% suicide, the most parsimonious explanation is that the nature of that second society is causing the suicides rate to rise. If the remainder of that second society are really happy (although your own cited paper reveals they're not in our case, but lets go with it for now), then again, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are being made happy by the nature of that society. It therefore stands to reason that a change to that second type of society from the first has made one group of people happy at the expense of another which it has made unhappy. It might not be the actual case for all sorts of reasons, but I can't see why you're having trouble understanding the theory.

The solution to this under your view would be to arbitrarily reduce the upper levels of happiness that average people experience such that those who are unable to achieve it don't feel as bad by comparison. — VagabondSpectre

You haven't answered my question on this from my previous post. It's hard to argue against your position when you keep changing it. Are you saying that happiness in rich western societies is unevenly distributed (which you seem to be saying here) or evenly distributed (as concluded by the paper you cited in support of the link between GDP and happiness). It can't be both as and when it suits you. Pick one position and we'll discuss that. At the moment I'm not prepared to engage in a debate about whichever position suits you at the time.

...do you then cede that suicide is not useful as a metric regarding overall or average societal levels of SWB/life-satisfaction/happiness because they don't inversely correlate? (in fact they positively correlate) — VagabondSpectre

Again, you're missing the statistical conclusion of these papers. It's not that suicide is not caused by unhappiness, no-one in any of these papers is arguing that, so I don't know where you're getting that impression from. It's that our measures of unhappiness do not seem to work in aggregate. The papers are all arguing that we might have our measures of happiness wrong, not that happiness is not related to suicide at all. The paper you cite here opens with "Suicide is the ultimate act of desperate unhappiness" and their tentative explanation is that "...suicide is more likely in response to short-term unhappiness." (although they caveat that strongly), or that "Life evaluation may refer to the long-term outlook, or to achievement as conventionally measured – education, income, marriage, and good health "[my bold]. Nowhere does it say that suicide might not be related to unhappiness at all. It's questioning how we measure happiness.

you have not shown that egalitarianism actually improves happiness overall. — VagabondSpectre

Not to your satisfaction maybe. Many of the studies I've previously cited have indicated a link between average happiness and income inequality. What's interesting about modern research in the field is that as income inequality goes up, average happiness goes down, but happiness inequality goes down also, indicating that even those at the top do not gain happiness from their privileged status, but very few people are challenging the concept the wealth inequality leads to unhappiness.

Because a cursory glance at the living conditions enjoyed by HG's and contemporary westerners shows immediate and vast disparities. High risk births, lack of comparable medical ability, lack of comprehensive education, lack of geographic/social/economic upward mobility, career choices, physical security (from elements and violence) etc... — VagabondSpectre

... are all the advantages of Western culture (though I disagree with some, like comprehensive education, and upward mobility, which is a joke). Since when has anyone ever carried out an analysis based on looking only at the advantages of only one side. What about the disadvantages? Inequality, chronic disease, lack of community, poor diet, suicide rates, a history of violent oppression and genocide, environmental degradation. The whole point of this debate is to assess the degree to which Western civilisation has been a sucess. You seem to just want to list its advantages, and bury its disadvantages in a load of wishful thinking about the future and self-congratulatory zeal about how we're not violently oppressing quite so many people as we used to.

My original post focused on the west's ability to escape disasters which otherwise affect our physical well-being. — VagabondSpectre

What ability? Colonial famines, dictatorships, two world wars, the great depression, the potato famine, the aids epidemic in Africa, diphtheria, influenza A, measles, mumps, pertussis, smallpox, tuberculosis, the black death, global warming, clean water shortages, cigarettes, toxic smog, obesity... Are you so blind to the west's shortcomings? Of course, we're still here, but so are hunter-gatherers.

Remember the Chumash peoples who experienced massive increases in violence caused by geographic concentrations of migrants and climactic events? — VagabondSpectre

Remember the Nazis who caused a massive increase in violence caused by socio-economic consequences of Western socities?

Remember the endless list of existing HG peoples whose ancient ways of life are being utterly decimated by the introduction of new technology or germs or outside pressures? — VagabondSpectre

But they've not been utterly decimated. They're still here. They're certainly under a monumental attack by forces hugely more well-resourced than they are, and yet reserves are being won, rights are being written into law. Small groups of individuals with nothing but spears are fighting the entire might of government backed multinational companies and occasionally they're winning. What exactly do you expect these people to do to prove their worth to you. They've survived the ice age, they've survived being pushed into the world's most inhospitable environments, they've survived genocide, they've survived epidemics, they've fought off entire armies and now fight the multinational companies. And they're still not robust enough for you?

I said that the absence of contemporary western ethical and legal standards leaves groups vulnerable to such practices in ways that the contemporary west is not. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, a point which is only true if you make the prejudiced assumption that hunter-gatherers routinely carried out FGM. Otherwise how can you argue that Western ethical and legal standards are required to defend against it? You've given an example of FGM being carried out in hunter-gatherers (though as you rightly say, not from their own tradition). I've given an example of it being carried out under a western judicial system. It is not practiced by the overwhelming majority of traditional hunter-gatherers (and there's no evidence it ever has been) and it is not carried out by the overwhelmingly majority of modern Western democracies. So where are you getting the idea only the west has sufficient ethical and legal standards to prevent it? All the evidence you have (without prejudice) indicates that hunter-gatherers have perfectly adequately prevented it for 200,000 years. You keep doing this. You say Western society is better because it doesn't do such-and-such a terrible thing, I say that it's prejudicial to presume such practices were widespread among traditional hunter-gatherers and you then either find a single isolated example, or claim you weren't talking about hunter-gatherers at all (in which case, what was the point?).

Really, if all you're going to do is take the very best example of Western civilisation and compare it to the worst possible practices in hunter-gatherer tribes then yes, you win. The very best practices in Western civilisation are definitely better than the very worst practices in hunter-gatherer tribes. I had hoped to have a more nuanced discussion than that.

If the west can perpetuate itself without exploiting or destroying people or nature, will it be more successful? Ethically or otherwise? It's a pretty simple question and I think you fear answering it — VagabondSpectre

Not at all, I just have. The very best practices of Western civilisation, if practiced in the absence of the worst, would obviously count as successful. But in what way does that not apply to hunter-gatherers too? Their best practices and achievements, taken apart from their worst, would seem very successful.

I feel like we're just getting nowhere here and I think you think I'm arguing something I'm not. My argument really is quite simple - Western civilisation has been a disaster because it has exploited, massacred and oppressed millions of people to get where it is. It has destroyed and degraded entire ecosystems to get where it is, and something about it still causes a significant minority of its people to kill themselves rather than continue living in it. It has slums, homelessness, widespread disease (caused by its own pollutants). It has people starving to death while others buy yachts. It's generated apartheid, the gas chambers, slavery and cigarette advertising. I think hunter-gatherers demonstrate that none of these things are necessary. I think some quarters of modern Western culture also prove that these things are unnecessary too. So if all that is unnecessary, how can it possibly be labelled a sucess?

Western civilisation has been a disaster because it has exploited, massacred and oppressed millions of people to get where it is. — Pseudonym

If I may interrupt for just a little question: do you think that other cultures would have been better, especially if they would have enjoyed similar technological advantage in the 18th - 19th Century? Or would they have been similar disasters?

Comes to my mind the Chinese advisors who succeeded in reasoning to their Mongol overlords that killing absolutely every human being in some vast area and turning the whole land to pasture to their horses wasn't such a great idea and far better idea would be to leave some people alive to be taxed.

do you think that other cultures would have been better, especially if they would have enjoyed similar technological advantage in the 18th - 19th Century? Or would they have been similar disasters? — ssu

I certainly think it's possible. Unless some biological evolution in neurology has occurred, then the people who care enough to advise against such practices today, much like your Chinese advisers, must have always existed. So the question is, how much power they have to control the direction of society relative to those with fewer moral scruples, and whether that power balance is any different in other cultures.

Obviously this whole area is highly speculative, but current psychological thinking is that about 30-50% of what psychologists label as 'personality' traits are genetic, the rest are generated by upbringing and the environment. I'm gathering (correct me if I'm wrong) that what you're asking is whether other cultures would have acted differently in response to the same environmental stimuli as the early western cultures had. So at a cursory analysis the answer seems to me to be an obvious yes, because 30-50% of the factors determining a response would have differed (although perhaps only slightly) as other cultures would have a different mix of genetic personality traits, and a substantial (although unknown) proportion of their response would have been the result of their child-rearing practices, which again would have been different. The environment, which in our example is the one factor we're keeping constant, plays the minority role, albeit a very large minority.

The huge caveat I would add to that analysis, is that it hinges heavily on the genetic differences in distribution of personality types making any aggregate difference to the culture's response. It may well be that different cultures have a different genetic mix of personality types (highly unlikely today given the widespread cultural mixing, but possible 10,000 years ago I suppose), but that does not automatically mean that such difference would have been in important factors. If one culture was more generally extroverted than another, for example, I'm not sure I can see how that would have affected their response to the environmental stimuli around at the birth of western civilisation in any significant way.

I'm much more confident, psychologically, in the effect child-rearing practices have on personality, and I think it highly likely that cultures who rear their children differently would have adults who react very differently indeed to the same environmental stimuli and so would perhaps have taken a very different path had they been at the same place as western civilisation when it began.

So why did you mention those specific measures of happiness which contribute to longevity in a debate about hunter-gatherer lifestyles vs Western ones? — Pseudonym

As I said, because I'm attempting to persuade you to accept longevity as a proxy for physical well-being. This isn't critical to my argument, but insofar as you get to use suicide as a proxy for societal unhappiness I still don't see why I can't use longevity as a proxy for physical well-being.

Either they are irrelevant because they are no different in either society, or you have prejudicially presumed that they are lower in hunter-gatherer societies without actually checking first. If there's some third explanation for your bringing them up that I've missed then please explain, but your posts are littered with examples where you subtly (or not so subtly) imply that the hunter-gatherer way of life is deficient in many areas in which there is no widespread evidence of it being so, and then when I challenge you on it you either say you were simply using it as an example or you ferret out some single source which backs it up (but which clearly was not the origin of your opinion). — Pseudonym

It is my position that the average westerner is objectively better off than most humans throughout all of history. Get over it already. I'm making the argument that the west is the most appealing society to live in, and that entails the position that other societies are less appealing to live in. It's not prejudiced against hunter-gatherer way of life to point out that the longest average lifespans ever recorded are of the contemporary west, and that things like access to quality medicine and good physical security are direct contributors of that. Nutrition will be addressed below.

f the only expressions of prejudice we were entitled to call out were the of the extremely obvious "group X are awful because they're all black" sort, then society would hardly progress at all in the field. Prejudice is presuming a negative about a particular culture just because they are different from your own; you presume hunter-gatherers have poor diets, you presume hunter-gatherers have 'backward' traditions, you presume hunter-gatherers perform FGM, you presume hunter-gatherers have a secretly high suicide rate, you presume hunter-gatherers have no fair justice system, you presume hunter-gatherers burn witches, you presume hunter-gatherers kill children out of superstition, you presume hunter-gatherers get ill all the time, you presume hunter-gatherers get wiped out by the slightest change in their environment. All of this without a scrap of evidence first. — Pseudonym

You've raised the idea that hunter-gatherers have better diets than westerners, but we've also been discussing how infanticide (twin killing specifically) is not uncommon among HG groups due to the heightened nutritional requirements of the mother (the superstitious associations as evidence of lack of equitable justice aside). On the surface it seems that while HG's may have diets lacking in many of the bad things like sugars and processed fats, they also have fairly rigid upper limits on the amount of nutrition they can gather in a short period of time (hence the nomadism). They may have better diets ("better nutrition"), but we surely have more reliable nutrition (hence the ability of mothers to refrain from pragmatic infanticide).

You presume that the practice of twin killing has to be a 'superstition' that's evolved biologically because you just can't bring yourself to credit these people with the intelligence to actually work it out rationally each time. — Pseudonym

The stories around it are just there to make the whole thing slightly more bearable. The fact that you have to keep caricaturing these intelligent and caring people as backward savages driven by unquestioned superstition is what I find offensive. — Pseudonym

So I'm confused. Why do many hunter gatherers practice infanticide while the contemporary west does not practice it at all and utterly forbids it? Is it because hunter-gatherer lifestyle yields inadequate nutrition to support nursing two infants? And they know that? Is superstition involved or isn't it?

Heaven forbid an intelligent, caring, non-white individual should ever adhere to superstition. That would be racist...

So yes, I think your position is prejudiced. If you want to speak authoritatively about the practices and motivation of other cultures then at least do them the respect of a minimum threshold of research, not just the first negative ethnography you can lay your hands on and a popsci interpretation of what motivates them. — Pseudonym

As opposed to your oh so well defended view that the west is an abominable and exploitative disaster... My original position wasn't actually shitting on hunter-gatherers you know... It was pointing out that every human society has been vulnerable to disasters of various kinds in ways which western progress has allowed us to reduce or eliminate entirely. But you had to also say that hunter-gatherer way of life was better, and to defend that you've been taking nothing but unsubstantiated meta-shits over myself and everything I say. Accusing me of racist presumption, demanding evidence only to then accuse me of cherry-picking; characterizing it all as racist. To satisfy you I will have to prove beyond a shadow of a statistical doubt that the contemporary west is measurably superior in every conceivable way to every hypothetical HG society that could ever exist...

This is another common tactic of yours which I don't know if it is deliberate or just poor argumentation. You take the specific logical point of an argument and then move it out of context to highlight the negative aspects of hunter-gatherer culture. The point I was arguing against was your assertion that hunter-gatherers might have been more unhappy because a good diet causes happiness and westerners obviously have a better diet because they live longer. This is not true because the surviving hunter-gatherers do not face a poor diet, so that poor diets cannot then go on to make them unhappy. This has nothing to do with the fact that total calories are often scarce enough to warrant infanticide. You were arguing about the link between diet and happiness, not the link between total available calories and infanticide. If it will make things simpler for you I will make it clear now - Hunter-gather lifestyles are not a bed of roses, calorie restriction leads to infanticide and this is an awful thing. In western societies children die from preventable causes too. According to UNICEF 25,000 children die every day from diseases largely related to poverty such as pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases (both of which we have good reason to believe were absent in hunter-gatherer societies because newly contacted tribes seem to have little immunity to them), or poor nutrition. Again you're accusing me of seeing hunter-gatherers through rose-tinted glass, but you're consistently arguing in favour of this mythical version of western culture that you think we're headed towards, not the one we're actually in. Hunter-gatherer-societies kill infants because of low calorie availability. Western society causes the deaths of infants because of rapid population growth and poor resource distribution. — Pseudonym

Why are you only now giving a more nuanced description of "nutrition"? (Oh, it was something different all along! Forgive me). Short term food availability... Or something... I'm not exactly sure how we could measure this, except in terms of it's detrimental impact (infanticide). This kind of resource availability issue is something I've been on about from the get go, and you've been denying it up until now. If the only way I can get you to even slightly move your position toward a reasonable middle is to force you to choose between superstitious infanticide (and its implications on "justice") and pragmatically necessary infanticide (and it's implications on "resource availability/reliability"), then so be it.

Western society causes the deaths of infants because of rapid population growth and poor resource distribution. You could argue that if we continue on our current trajectory these infants will survive, — Pseudonym

The expansion of western society (Aside from the initial wave of disease related death) actually improves child mortality rates though, it doesn't cause them per se.. The west does an objectively better job at saving the live of infants, and it is objectively doing a better and better job.

I could argue that if hunter-gatherers lived in the lush environments now dominated by western cultures instead of the most harsh environments know to man, they might not have to kill so many infants due to calorie restrictions, so where does that leave us? — Pseudonym

This smacks of foolish romance. "Lush environments"? Yes our forests and plains aren't what they used to be, but they were never any free lunches (because they're quickly gobbled up).

But, where environments tend to be more and more "lush", sedentary ways of life (valuable and interesting cultures which you are basically racist toward out of hand by considering them inferior to HG peoples) then tend to emerge because if people don't have to pack up and leave due to resource depletion, guess what? They don't. Population density ensues, civilization happens (with all its boons and burdens), et cetra et cetra..

What the paper is concluding is that individual measures (not individual people) correlate with suicide well, but aggregate measures (when you put all the individual measures together in multivariate analysis) correlate weakly, which means they still correlate, just not so much. — Pseudonym

No, what the paper is concluding is that the correlates of suicide risk also effect SWB, and are therefore representative of societal preferences. "Individual level" or "micro level multivariate analysis" of suicide and SWB correlates is actually comparing the correlates of suicide and SWB at the individual level. The actual comparison they made showed that the correlates of suicide among individuals are the same as the correlates of SWB among individuals. They showed that things which make people commit suicide also make them unhappy. The correlation at this individual or micro-level also worked as a kind of cross-validation for using individual level data in assessing SWB and suicide risk (that at least reporting errors and other possible spurious factors are not a necessary issue).

The paper several times articulated that explicit caution be used when making inferences from aggregate/time-series data on subjective well-being (in other-words, don't assume that overall suicide risk correlates with average subjective well-being)

What this means is that suicide is well correlated with causes of unhappiness(i.e the link between suicide and unhappiness is strong), but that the reasons in individual cases vary widely such that no conclusions can be drawn about a general connection between all the measures. — Pseudonym

The bold: Yes, at the individual level,according to the micro-level multivariate regressions and comparison.

The italic: No. It means that there is a link, but there is no evident direct strong link (not the kind your argument hinges on).

The underlined: No. There is correlation among the reasons in individual suicide cases (that's what the correlates are in the micro-level regression) and they're strikingly similar to SWB correlates. What varies are the number of individuals who actually commit suicide and the reported amount of overall SWB (there's no strong link). At best, there is a "weak and inconsistent" link.

This makes the aggregate score of Subjective Well-Being a poorer correlate of suicide than the connection between suicide and unhappiness would suggest. The paper is an fact arguing that suicide is even more strongly correlated with unhappiness than the weak correlation between SWB and suicide rates would at first imply, it's just that the specific nature of the unhappiness varies widely making it difficult to measure across societies.This means that the suicide rate remains a very strong measure of a society's happiness (at least at one end of the scale), but the link will be masked if one aggregates all the different reasons for unhappiness. — Pseudonym

The study shows that suicide is not a measure of average subjective well being and advocates caution about making such inferences from aggregate data. The study does show that the nature of happiness has some consistency (the things which make us unhappy also make us commit suicide) but again, it explicitly does not show that the more people commit suicide, the more people are unhappy overall.

The lack of correlation in the aggregate and time series data was not only due to inconsistency among individuals and how they experience happiness, it is also likely due to the forces which make people unhappy being inconsistently applied to individuals across society (things which make people unhappy can be more concentrated in a few individuals which pushes them over a hypothetical suicide threshold, while the rest of of society may tend to have a much higher level of SWB). This article just doesn't prove what you say it proves. You've misunderstood it.

How is that strange. If we have two societies, one in which there is virtually no suicide, and one in which there is 1% suicide, the most parsimonious explanation is that the nature of that second society is causing the suicides rate to rise. If the remainder of that second society are really happy (although your own cited paper reveals they're not in our case, but lets go with it for now), then again, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are being made happy by the nature of that society. It therefore stands to reason that a change to that second type of society from the first has made one group of people happy at the expense of another which it has made unhappy. It might not be the actual case for all sorts of reasons, but I can't see why you're having trouble understanding the theory. — Pseudonym

Trouble understanding the theory :lol: ...

I'm capable of making direct comparisons (that's what my original post was an attempt at). Are you?

You brought up suicide to show that HG life has better year-for-year utility, but all it shows is that the lower tail of expected utility is larger in western society, not that the average year-for year utility is lower. I guess you can attempt to make an ethical argument out of it, but the same ethical argument would apply to child mortality rate (i.e: HG's enjoy their happier existence at the expense of dead infants).

You haven't answered my question on this from my previous post. It's hard to argue against your position when you keep changing it. Are you saying that happiness in rich western societies is unevenly distributed (which you seem to be saying here) or evenly distributed (as concluded by the paper you cited in support of the link between GDP and happiness). It can't be both as and when it suits you. Pick one position and we'll discuss that. At the moment I'm not prepared to engage in a debate about whichever position suits you at the time. — Pseudonym

I never denied that happiness is unevenly distributed in rich western society; it's implied with wealth stratification... I denied that when happiness is unevenly distributed that overall happiness is less. In fact it can be greater. The paper I cited on the issue showed that as relative income inequality rises, happiness inequality can shrink. Again, it has nothing to do with overall average happiness.

Now you answer my question, Is your solution to happiness inequality and higher suicide rates to put a social upper limit on happiness (even risking reducing average overall happiness) to eliminate relative happiness inequality? (which does seem to make people feel subjectively worse when they're on the lower end).

Again, you're missing the statistical conclusion of these papers. It's not that suicide is not caused by unhappiness, no-one in any of these papers is arguing that, so I don't know where you're getting that impression from. — Pseudonym

Individuals who commit suicide are desperately unhappy. Yes.

It's that our measures of unhappiness do not seem to work in aggregate. The papers are all arguing that we might have our measures of happiness wrong, not that happiness is not related to suicide at all. The paper you cite here opens with "Suicide is the ultimate act of desperate unhappiness" and their tentative explanation is that "...suicide is more likely in response to short-term unhappiness." (although they caveat that strongly), or that "Life evaluation may refer to the long-term outlook, or to achievement as conventionally measured – education, income, marriage, and good health "[my bold]. Nowhere does it say that suicide might not be related to unhappiness at all. It's questioning how we measure happiness. — Pseudonym

The papers argue different things you know :D (I know you know ;) )

One of them questions income inequality as a measure for happiness inequality. Another questions aggregate SWB data as a measure for overall suicide risk (and by extension, vice versa, which is exactly how you're trying to use suicide as a measure).

I'm well aware of the psychological relationship between happiness and suicide, and thanks to the research you've forced me to do, I'm also well aware of the absence of a statistical correlation between the overall happiness of a population and its suicide rate (except the most recent article I cited which indicates that as average SWB rises in a society, so too does suicide, which may be a relationship spurred by wealth stratification interacting with with relative happiness, or depression being relatively more severe in societies with very high average levels of happiness, and many other possible factors).

Not to your satisfaction maybe. Many of the studies I've previously cited have indicated a link between average happiness and income inequality. What's interesting about modern research in the field is that as income inequality goes up, average happiness goes down, but happiness inequality goes down also, indicating that even those at the top do not gain happiness from their privileged status, but very few people are challenging the concept the wealth inequality leads to unhappiness. — Pseudonym

If any of the articles you've cited show a link between income inequality and average happiness, please link me once more.

What about the disadvantages? Inequality, chronic disease, lack of community, poor diet, suicide rates, a history of violent oppression and genocide, environmental degradation. The whole point of this debate is to assess the degree to which Western civilization has been a success. You seem to just want to list its advantages, and bury its disadvantages in a load of wishful thinking about the future and self-congratulatory zeal about how we're not violently oppressing quite so many people as we used to. — Pseudonym

My original position asked the ethical question of whether or not we're morally obligated to deconstruct and disband western society. If it is a disaster, then should it not be ended? Yes the west has a terrible past, but that's the rub, it has a terrible past, and a less terrible present; she ain't what she used to be. If I'm going to bother judging the west, it will be the living and breathing one that we live in, not the patriarchal or colonial past you're so convinced I adore and intellectually inhabit. The fact that the west is still changing is something that must be taken into account, as is the fact that HG lifestyle is something largely unchanging.

Death is pretty much what I'm personally most concerned with from an ethical perspective. I could care less about the environment if its mismanagement didn't threaten life. Oppression and genocide are at historical lows as far as I'm concerned. Maybe during an ice age there is less oppression because there's nobody around to oppress (oppression is a population density thing), but the contemporary west does very well ethically speaking. A lot of people have crappy diets, that's true, but we're getting better in that department too (and we have a more reliable food source allowing us to escape famine more easily and nourish all or most of the infants).

What ability? Colonial famines, dictatorships, two world wars, the great depression, the potato famine, the aids epidemic in Africa, diphtheria, influenza A, measles, mumps, pertussis, smallpox, tuberculosis, the black death, global warming, clean water shortages, cigarettes, toxic smog, obesity... Are you so blind to the west's shortcomings? Of course, we're still here, but so are hunter-gatherers. — Pseudonym

Colonial famines aside, dictatorships are antithetical to western democracy (the thing the society I hail as the best is founded on). We've had big wars but fewer wars, and our wars are becoming far less deadly. We have novel diseases but we've defeated more than we've created to the benefit of lifespan. Global warming will not end us. It will slow us, maybe even cause intolerable disaster, in which case, you were right, but I don't think so. Clean water can be an issue for nomads too. Cigarettes could be hedonically worthwhile. I don't know much about toxic smog. In some cultures obesity is a sign of wealth and is considered attractive (at least according to my racist colonial stereotypes).

Remember the Nazis who caused a massive increase in violence caused by socio-economic consequences of Western socities? — Pseudonym

Are you blaming Hitler on bad weather? :D

You asked for evidence that environmental changes were accompanied by loss of life (that changing circumstances leads to bloody adaptation), and the Chumash ethnographic/archeological records are evidence of that . WW2 and Nazism are quite different sorts of problems. WW1 and WW2 unique in the scope and scale of violence seen in the west and I think it unlikely we will ever see another world war. Regardless of cause, the contemporary west does less war on average, or at least there are fewer violence related deaths.

But they've not been utterly decimated. They're still here. They're certainly under a monumental attack by forces hugely more well-resourced than they are, and yet reserves are being won, rights are being written into law. Small groups of individuals with nothing but spears are fighting the entire might of government backed multinational companies and occasionally they're winning. What exactly do you expect these people to do to prove their worth to you. They've survived the ice age, they've survived being pushed into the world's most inhospitable environments, they've survived genocide, they've survived epidemics, they've fought off entire armies and now fight the multinational companies. And they're still not robust enough for you? — Pseudonym

There's some irony here...

For starters, they've been more than decimated, (they've been reduced much more than 1/10th their number), but listen to yourself:

"under attack by forces hugely more well resourced"
"reserves are being won"
"rights are being written into law"

As you may know, I'm Canadian (with a heritage rich in hunter-gatherer lifestyle as it so happens). It's in my programming to care about all other humans, so it doesn't really matter how robust people are, I think they have a right to exist (and I even think we should offer assistance to the less robust). Here's a post I made detailing Canada's unique position when it comes to the ethical implications of hunter-gatherers vs the west. It's jam packed with all kinds of information I did unbiased research for, and I was quite disappointed that it generated very few responses (I guess Canadian politics really are by default uninteresting).

Canada is in the process of writing in to law reserves and rights to indigenous groups despite it being hugely more well resourced . Progressive contemporary western ethics and its sophisticated legal institutions (which have aspects both good and bad) are making that happen, which is a very very good aspect of the contemporary west.

Yes, a point which is only true if you make the prejudiced assumption that hunter-gatherers routinely carried out FGM. — Pseudonym

"I said that the absence of contemporary western ethical and legal standards leaves groups vulnerable to such practices in ways that the contemporary west is not"

My point is that without well reasoned and ethical formal legal institutions groups can be vulnerable to horrible practices which go unchecked. I never said FGM is routine or common among hunter-gatherers, nor does the point I made hinge on it.

. Otherwise how can you argue that Western ethical and legal standards are required to defend against it? — Pseudonym

It's not required, but it does defend against FGM (and many other practices we consider unethical).

I've given an example of it being carried out under a western judicial system — Pseudonym

Which western judicial system? If it's not secular then it's not western.

So where are you getting the idea only the west has sufficient ethical and legal standards to prevent it? — Pseudonym

FGM was cited as an extreme example of practices which progressive ethics and formal legal institutions prevent, there are other practices that it also prevents, such as marriage prior to age of consent, infanticide, and revenge killing (though it doesn't not work perfectly, it does a better job than informal institutions like altruistic punishment.

You keep doing this. You say Western society is better because it doesn't do such-and-such a terrible thing, I say that it's prejudicial to presume such practices were widespread among traditional hunter-gatherers and you then either find a single isolated example, or claim you weren't talking about hunter-gatherers at all (in which case, what was the point?). — Pseudonym

The point, originally, and enduringly, is to show that certain (bad) things which the contemporary west is nigh immune to, are things which are more common in every other known type of society (i.e: they're not immune). I don't need to show that they're widespread if they're practically non-existent in the contemporary west.

I feel like we're just getting nowhere here and I think you think I'm arguing something I'm not. My argument really is quite simple - Western civilisation has been a disaster because it has exploited, massacred and oppressed millions of people to get where it is. It has destroyed and degraded entire ecosystems to get where it is, and something about it still causes a significant minority of its people to kill themselves rather than continue living in it. It has slums, homelessness, widespread disease (caused by its own pollutants). It has people starving to death while others buy yachts. It's generated apartheid, the gas chambers, slavery and cigarette advertising. I think hunter-gatherers demonstrate that none of these things are necessary. I think some quarters of modern Western culture also prove that these things are unnecessary too. So if all that is unnecessary, how can it possibly be labelled a sucess? — Pseudonym

Only a minimalist or a perfectionist would say this. Survival is the only necessity, which may include some minimum level of happiness, but what of thrival?

The growing pains of technology have been worth it in my opinion because there are more people alive and they have a better shot at survival, but the gamble that is future potential is irresistible to me; I'm not that conservative.

We've dominated the planet, (which will be disastrous only if we dominate her too much) and this is a success. So long as the present keeps getting better (which it has by all of the metrics you just mentioned, perhaps save one or two) then we keep getting more successful.

What rate of suicide is an acceptable margin to be considered successful? What rate of chronic disease? Of relative poverty?

P.S: Cigarette advertising is illegal in Canada.

We're going round in circles repeating the same arguments rather than refining, contrasting or altering the ones we have so I'm thinking that this has definitely run its course now. Given your extensive investment I thought it fair that I outline my reasoning.

I understand your argument to be, as expressed in your first post, that Western civilisation is a success because the average modern westerner is better off by any available metric than the average member of every other (or most other?) culture in history.

I counter that I believe suicide rate, egalitarian distribution of resources and opportunity, sustainable resource management and personal autonomy are metrics of success by which the average Western society is not better off than other cultures, specifically hunter-gatherers.

You argued that those measures are complicated and might not be good measures of success, but I think the same applies to your preferred measures. I think for any measure, demonstrating how it should rightly be considered a measure of 'success' is complicated. The simplicity (or otherwise) of the actual metric is not relevant, it is the difficulty with which it can be rationally tied to 'success' that matters, and I think here we just disagree in a manner too fundamental to resolve by discussion.

You also argued that Western societies actually are better off by some of those metrics, but I find the breadth of your knowledge of hunter-gatherer tribes too narrow to be persuaded by your arguments here. Your arguments, particularly with reference to justice, diversity, fragility and personal freedom are highly speculative and based on a very small subset of cases deliberately chosen for that specific purpose. I'm not interested in those kinds of arguments.

Your argument with regards to violence and infant mortality are sound as measures of the failings of many hunter-gatherer societies. We've already covered how I do not believe the success of the west in reducing these two things is enough to claim the whole enterprise a success considering the many failings I think should be accounted for. You evidently think they do.

You make the case that the success of Western society should be judged only by its current practices, with regards to exploitation. I don't believe that a society which is still benefiting from the rewards of such previous exploitation can be fairly judged without including the actions which gave rise to its current wealth. Conversely when it comes to sustainability, you'd prefer Western society to be judged not on its current practices, but on what you hope it will be able to achieve some time in the future. Again, it seems we have a fundamental disagreement about what factors should be taken into account when judging 'success'

There's obviously been some arguments about coherence, consistency and the accuracy of evidence where engagement in discussion is of value, but they're not worth resolving whilst we fundamentally disagree about the main issues outlined above.

So at a cursory analysis the answer seems to me to be an obvious yes, because 30-50% of the factors determining a response would have differed (although perhaps only slightly) as other cultures would have a different mix of genetic personality traits, and a substantial (although unknown) proportion of their response would have been the result of their child-rearing practices, which again would have been different. The environment, which in our example is the one factor we're keeping constant, plays the minority role, albeit a very large minority.

The huge caveat I would add to that analysis, is that it hinges heavily on the genetic differences in distribution of personality types making any aggregate difference to the culture's response. — Pseudonym

Well, it's certainly obvious that you look at this from the genetical and from child-rearing practices. Fair enough, but I would point out that the reduction from societies to individuals and their genetical background etc. brushes aside what sociology is about. And sociology (and history) can tell us a lot even if they surely aren't natural sciences. Reductionism (or methodological reductionism) has it's pitfalls.

What is very typical to every country, people or "culture" that has gained a dominant position usually through winning wars against others is that they don't see their success due to applying new technology, having a better organization or simply because of their superior numbers and resources. No, what they see as the key to their success is their inherent traits of the people themselves. They have been simply better, the people themselves are special and are different from others. Some would call it racism, but that negative term doesn't capture so well what I'm going for. No dominant country wants to accept that it's success is because of something else than the exceptionality of it's people.

Basically the point is that classic Western Imperialism doesn't differ so much from Japanese Imperialism even if the cultures do differ. And so don't the Muslim conquests differ so much from the Roman ones. The differences are actually quite minor in the end. And this is because every nation or culture that has gained dominance has always learned and adapted things from others and has had various relations with other cultures and people. Hence it's no wonder that the cultures have been similar and only when there has been absolutely no interaction before, has it happened that one "culture" has been totally superior in technology to another. Trade, ideas and interaction in general make us similar.

I understand your argument to be, as expressed in your first post, that Western civilisation is a success because the average modern westerner is better off by any available metric than the average member of every other (or most other?) culture in history.

I counter that I believe suicide rate, egalitarian distribution of resources and opportunity, sustainable resource management and personal autonomy are metrics of success by which the average Western society is not better off than other cultures, specifically hunter-gatherers.

You argued that those measures are complicated and might not be good measures of success, but I think the same applies to your preferred measures. I think for any measure, demonstrating how it should rightly be considered a measure of 'success' is complicated. The simplicity (or otherwise) of the actual metric is not relevant, it is the difficulty with which it can be rationally tied to 'success' that matters, and I think here we just disagree in a manner too fundamental to resolve by discussion. — Pseudonym

I've rigorously debunked suicide rates as a metric of societal happiness and its primacy as a metric of success (In recent posts I've gone so far as to show the opposite). Despite my constant objections and rebukes, you continued on with suicide as your primary metric under a utilitarian framework, within which I have also shown that suicide rates are also not indicative of societal unhappiness. As my original position is heavily concerned with the preservation of life (assuming it's a nearly universal human desire, and nearly universally among the most important desires), I still find it much more appropriate to include death by suicide in the overall mortality rates under a "better-off" description rather than a happiness-utility model.

Egalitarianism is something you floated initially but haven't bothered to substantiate. Your original evidence was a link to a google search which you elected not to modify. At this point the only thing left for me to do would be to attempt to prove the negative, like I've recently done with suicide. Your main rebuttal to infant mortality rate and longevity has been utilitarian, so it's strange that you mostly consider the issue of egalitarianism from a justification perspective rather than a utilitarian one.. To the extent that egalitarianism does prevent certain injustices, it can be considered successful, but egalitarianism does not obviate injustice (especially in the execution of justice where there are no clear standards of evidence or punishment. e.g: being ostracized or worse for an action you did not actually commit would be unjust).

Opportunity and personal autonomy are things which I've brought up as merits of the contemporary west, given that the average westerner has more geographic mobility, more career options, and more and better protected rights (like property and habeus corpus). Hunter-gatherers basically have very few lifestyle choices to make given that they must hunt and forage on a constant basis, and given that their environment and technology demands they do so in specific and efficient ways (opportunism, nomadism, egalitarianism, etc...). There's less room for individual autonomy and instead a demand for conformity. I would also rate the societal autonomy of hunter-gatherers to be worse-off than the west. Formal democracy allows us to actively question and improve upon our traditions and faults while hunter-gatherer social autonomy and culture is a more rigid result of natural selection. In a propertyless egalitarian society, the individual autonomy to start a farm doesn't exist because it is expected that everything is shared. Autonomy on the individual and societal level (the freedom to do more things) is generally what breaks HG lifestyles (as HG people become sedentary or are out-competed by sedentary groups when they can gain much more resources by doing so, and the extra food and fuel translates to personal freedom of a certain kind).

You've offered evidence (a pay-walled article) that the transition from hunting/gathering to agriculture entailed nutritional deficits and the creation of new diseases, which is certainly true, but the medicinal and agricultural prowess of the contemporary west is able to prevent more death from malnutrition (or pragmatic infanticide) and disease in general. While if we look at the average health of an individual in a functioning HG society (that is to say, one not beset with novel pressures brought on by western presence) they are probably healthier than the average living westerner, this will to a large degree be the case because injury and illness is much more often fatal outside of the contemporary west. Certain diseases such as obesity and influenza were indeed less common, but despite these ills the west is still able to prolong the average lifespan much more effectively than a natural HG diet and lifestyle will. The ability of western medicine to treat chronic pain and offer corrective surgery is also something that I would not discount out of hand. Anecdotally, I've seen many documentaries featuring HG tribes where some members have severe injuries which they have to deal with on a daily basis which would otherwise be correctable (or treatment for pain offered) in the contemporary west. Shoulder, hip, and leg injuries are common dangers for a hunter, and broken bones that aren't set properly and allowed to heal can be a source of lifelong pain.

Sustainable resource management is something we've not gotten a chance to discuss, and it's true that hunter-gatherers traditionally do not overtax their resources (they wouldn't have stable practices if they did). It's also true that the west has been known to overtax resources, but we're not yet hopelessly in the red. We're running out of oil, but we're running toward alternative energy sources and storage technologies. We've damaged the environment, perhaps irreparably for the foreseeable future, but we also have more direct control over the environment (or ability to manage our affairs despite changing norms) than ever before. The west is in the process of emancipating itself from a reliance on nature and replacing it with a reliance on technology, and if we can successfully do so entirely then I think the whole endeavor will have been a success (because we ill be more robust than ever before)

You make the case that the success of Western society should be judged only by its current practices, with regards to exploitation. I don't believe that a society which is still benefiting from the rewards of such previous exploitation can be fairly judged without including the actions which gave rise to its current wealth. Conversely when it comes to sustainability, you'd prefer Western society to be judged not on its current practices, but on what you hope it will be able to achieve some time in the future. Again, it seems we have a fundamental disagreement about what factors should be taken into account when judging 'success' — Pseudonym

Where we're headed is an important aspect of our current practices; change is fundamental to the west while it is not to static HG lifestyles. But you speak of sustainability and the west as if the west is already doomed or has no chance of overcoming the obstacles that are before it. It's proven you wrong up until now, with it's slow but steady improvements. Why will the west fail tomorrow?

What I thought we set out to compare were the trends and practices of the contemporary west and typical HG peoples, not their average happiness or the sins of their fathers. Reflecting back on my original position(s), it hasn't changed much. I have a better understanding of why certain things afflict hunter-gatherers less frequently than most other societies (less war, less tyranny), but my overall thrust still holds.

It's been an interesting discussion despite some obvious difficulties, and I'm sure any readers will get quite a bit of good information from it.

Cheers!