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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I'm trying to establish why you think it actually is — Pseudonym
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
... superstition that was originally made adaptive thanks to inadequate nutrition? — VagabondSpectre
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
"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
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
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
...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
you have not shown that egalitarianism actually improves happiness overall. — VagabondSpectre
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
My original post focused on the west's ability to escape disasters which otherwise affect our physical well-being. — VagabondSpectre
Remember the Chumash peoples who experienced massive increases in violence caused by geographic concentrations of migrants and climactic events? — VagabondSpectre
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
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
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
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?Western civilisation has been a disaster because it has exploited, massacred and oppressed millions of people to get where it is. — Pseudonym
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
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
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
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 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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Remember the Nazis who caused a massive increase in violence caused by socio-economic consequences of Western socities? — Pseudonym
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
Yes, a point which is only true if you make the prejudiced assumption that hunter-gatherers routinely carried out FGM. — Pseudonym
. Otherwise how can you argue that Western ethical and legal standards are required to defend against it? — Pseudonym
I've given an example of it being carried out under a western judicial system — Pseudonym
So where are you getting the idea only the west has sufficient ethical and legal standards to prevent it? — Pseudonym
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
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
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.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
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
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
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