[HN Gopher] Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts int...
___________________________________________________________________
Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because
of culture
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 140 points
Date : 2025-04-17 02:31 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| antics9 wrote:
| And no mention in the article of the ways of culture that managed
| the systems.
| lurk2 wrote:
| There was a lot of insistence that the indigenous method was
| better, but no actual evidence that it was, nor even arguments
| as to why it would be (besides some vague allusions to it being
| "more flexible").
|
| A lot of these noble savage narratives emerge from Latin
| American studies (history, archaeology, literature, etc.),
| particularly among Mexican and American-educated academics.
| There is truth to the idea that the complexity of indigenous
| systems is unappreciated by the general public, but there's
| always this underlying fetishization of a pseudo-magical
| indigenous "way of knowing" contrasted with the (historically
| far-better performing) European scientific method. Indigenous
| cultures are redeemed from European military conquests by
| insisting that the European way of knowing is myopic and
| selfish (being focused on profit over sustainability, the
| individual over the community, etc.) in contrast to the
| indigenous way of knowing, which is holistic and communitarian.
|
| The author does have publications related to these irrigation
| systems, though, so maybe she has a valid point to make and the
| article just didn't land for me.
| syspec wrote:
| Very well stated.
|
| It's really weird to come across such articles, because they
| always add this mystic to these cultures that actually ends
| up coming across as the generic "in touch with nature" noble
| savage archetype
| mstipetic wrote:
| I mean, weren't they? My kids can name more superheroes and
| Pokemon than animals and plants. My neighbors don't notice
| when it doesn't rain in March and April (when there should
| be 22 rainy days) and get annoyed when it does because it
| ruins the nice weather.
| Jensson wrote:
| The Spanish colonists would have no problems with those
| things though, they just were out of their element there
| but people were in touch with nature almost everywhere
| until very recently.
| luckylion wrote:
| Why would your neighbors worry about rain, unless they
| are farmers or otherwise directly impacted?
|
| We've generally abandoned "being in touch with nature"
| for focusing on specific niches, and it's so incredibly
| more efficient that you can have large groups of people
| who focus on systems based on purely made up things, like
| sports.
|
| If they both needed the probability of rain three days
| from now, who do you think would fare better, the
| ancients with their ancient wisdom, or your neighbors
| with modern sensors and meteorological models?
| reycharles wrote:
| I would say they would worry if they were even remotely
| in touch with nature.
| jorgen123 wrote:
| You may be thinking about a short term need only. Longer
| term (annual and more) if you are in a state that is
| susceptible to drought and wildfires, you would worry
| about the lack of rain during a period when it is
| supposed to rain. The rain fills aquifers and increases
| soil moisture content which carry you through the dry
| season.
| luckylion wrote:
| In general, yes. But most advanced societies delegate
| these topics because it's very inefficient if you and
| everyone else studies wild fires, rain patterns, deer
| impact on soil compression and what not -- it'll be much
| more efficient if a few study it deeply and then present
| the results and concrete actions.
|
| Division of labor goes for division of scientific labor,
| too.
|
| Granted, there seems to be an increasing trust issue in
| taking those results as true, but that's a separate
| issue.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Oooh yes let's be efficient. Only thing that's important.
| No curiosity, sense of awe or belonging to something
| greater. Let's do away with art unless it's funded by
| Netflix and has a direct effect on subscription numbers.
| We could and should have both.
| luckylion wrote:
| > We could and should have both.
|
| Sure, but one is much more important than the other. You
| can commit 50% of your resources as a society towards art
| and religion and the other half to science and
| production, and your standard of living will be much
| lower than if you committed 10% towards art and religion.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Define standard of living
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| The disconnect between observation and understanding is
| the whole point; without western ideas like trends,
| records, and measurement, you can have no better
| understanding than, "sometimes wet, sometimes not".
|
| The only part in tune with nature is that in bad periods
| the population dies back.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| It fits today's narrative better.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| If you study this stuff in the americas it's depressing as
| the Spanish in particular slaughtered people and culture so
| completely and unimpeded for so long. The evil and barbarism
| of this colonial episode is difficult to fathom. The 20th
| century horror show of slaughter ran in relatively short
| episodes... this imperial era ran for hundreds of years.
|
| Because you're left with archeological evidence, whose
| interpretation is always very conservative, and limited oral
| tradition, it's easy to veer into legend, because honestly
| that's that who have to work with.
| tomrod wrote:
| The Spanish, the Portuguese, and most importantly, diseases
| that killed massive proportions of the population.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Diseases imo are empathized because they contribute to
| the body count and have an "act of god" nature to them.
| It's an easier story than to describe a type of
| industrial genocide.
|
| Read about the Mit'a system that was perverted by the
| colonial government to essentially improve the return on
| assets of the colony versus slaves or other means of
| cheap labor. It broke down the society of the native
| population completely and made it impossible for them to
| respond or react to disasters.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The disease aspects are inseparable from colonialism.
| Here's a quote from a recent survey on the matter [0]
| that describes the current understanding much better than
| I would: The contours of Indigenous
| depopulation were shaped not only by disease but also by
| complex colonial factors including violence, forced
| labor, exorbitant taxation, malnutrition, and
| dislocation. Archaeology has shown that Native
| populations were not destined to be decimated but were
| made vulnerable through the policies, choices, and
| behaviors of colonists.
|
| [0] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9
| 7804292...
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| but then why romanticise what was destroyed ? Why not go at
| the world with a realistic view, which is that the "new
| world" was exactly the same as the old with dominant
| landempires holding colonies and tributories, aristocrats
| holding slaves, that where the landbound spaniards to their
| neighbors. Just because they have been genocided into a
| blank slate and you rightfully despise the acts of the
| genociders, does not mean you get to paint a utopia on the
| disfigured corpse. The hideaways of chaco canyon speak of
| slavers expeditions.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| As bad as the Spaniards were, the Aztec's neighbors
| despised the Aztecs and their brutality so much that they
| willingly and gladly allied with the first viable
| challenger to their rule.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I didn't. Why do you feel compelled to engage in "both
| sides" fallacy?
|
| The Spanish Empire killed about 55M people or 90% of the
| indigenous population in a hundred years. That's a scale
| of slaughter and suffering unprecedented even by the
| murderous ways of modern society, greater than even the
| Roman slaughter in Gaul.
|
| Why is it so difficult for you to imagine that perhaps
| some of those 50 million people perhaps knew something?
| We'll never know for sure, as everyone was killed and
| most aspects of their societies were destroyed.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I see your point and I agree. Grabber "the dawn of
| everything" comes to mind on that "noble savage" phenomenon
|
| That being said : there is something to be said about the
| Spanish cargo culting those canals in that specific plain...
| and failing to maintain it.
|
| While we know it was fertile for generation before.
|
| The article hint at private ownership being a factor? I could
| see that.
|
| But 100% agree : I spend the article asking "ok, what is the
| culture then"
|
| But it looks like it happen: irrigation work Spanish take
| over irrigation it stop working
|
| I suspect sabotage was a bit factor, too.
| elif wrote:
| Can you point to an engineering feat in modern times which is
| still functional after hundreds of years of neglect?
|
| Even if academia is swinging to a "too respectful" position
| (which I would dispute), the lack of respect in your position
| is certain.
| Jensson wrote:
| > the lack of respect in your position is certain.
|
| Pointing out there are other possibilities isn't a lack of
| respect. If you believe A or B could have happened, you see
| someone say B happened, it is fair to say that A might have
| happened as well, that doesn't mean you believe B couldn't
| have happened.
| handwarmers wrote:
| perhaps "modern times" are modern because they adapt to the
| times, innovate, and replace what is old with what is new
| in pursuit of improvement.
| scythe wrote:
| You might look no further than Spain. There are dams built
| by the Romans which are still operating.
|
| Of course nothing that's literally from the modern period
| is centuries old, but that's a tautology!
| luckylion wrote:
| > Can you point to an engineering feat in modern times
| which is still functional after hundreds of years of
| neglect?
|
| Why would anyone build something only to neglect it? If one
| of the requirements was "it shall work for 500 years and
| never be maintained", then I'm sure you could get plenty of
| things designed and built for that requirement. It's just
| that it's a lot more expensive and not particularly useful,
| so nobody bothers.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Can you point to an engineering feat in modern times
| which is still functional after hundreds of years of
| neglect?
|
| Off the top of my head:
|
| 1. Various aqueduct systems constructed by the Roman Empire
| are still in use today.
|
| 2. Persian qalats.
|
| 3. The Grand Canal in China.
|
| 4. Roman Roads
|
| 5. Hawaiian aquaculture systems
|
| 6. Aboriginal Australian fish traps
|
| Monumental architecture (e.g. the Pyramids) would make the
| list substantially longer.
|
| > Even if academia is swinging to a "too respectful"
| position
|
| The issue isn't that they are attributing accomplishments
| to these civilizations, but instead that they are
| attributing these accomplishments to a way of knowing that
| is purportedly superior to that of the Europeans, which is
| just farcical when you consider that every modern
| technology has either been invented or scaled based on
| European models of thinking (e.g. the scientific method,
| mass production, free market capitalism, etc.)
|
| Like I said, this is mostly just a product of Mexican and
| American humanities departments being populated by people
| with an axe to grind; there aren't any STEM graduates in
| South America concerned with the mystical knowledge that
| their ancestors are purported to have possessed.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I am not sure of their operational status today, but in
| Medieval Western Europe, it was Carmelite communities who
| built aqueducts; even as they struggled to reform
| themselves during the Counterreformation, religious
| communities were undertaking large-scale engineering
| projects, because they controlled enough labor workforce,
| as well as technology and supply chains, to make that
| happen.
|
| I would be unsurprised if the Carmelite Orders likewise
| invested significant maintenance in the old Roman
| construction, and learned from it as well.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| It seems like that's an impossibility, since you would need
| to find something in the current era that has been
| abandoned, rather than decommissioned...
|
| There are a few examples that might fit, some earthworks,
| (tunnels, breakwaters, dams) and navigation markers come to
| mind (costal, but we also put retro reflectors on the
| moon).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking about Vauban's fortifications, but
| if any of those had been abandoned, it's specifically
| because they would have been mostly useless after WW1 (=
| non-functional).
|
| Hmm, any Vauban-like fortifications in Ukraine that would
| have suddenly found a new use since 2014 ?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Modern is tough because it isn't hundreds of years ago.
|
| Around me, The High Bridge between Bronx and Manhattan was
| built pre Civil War and abandoned for decades and still
| standing (and now is use again). The Hell Gate Bridge was
| built by the NY Central Railroad and will probably outlast
| the US.
|
| Lots of 19th century infrastructure will be around for
| centuries, if you look at the the path of the Erie and
| Lackawanna railroad routes, many bridges and other
| infrastructure will be standing hundreds of years from now.
| Lots of interstate infrastructure will function for
| hundreds of years in rural areas with low traffic, well
| beyond their engineered lifespan.
|
| Stone is the most durable material and structures are
| overbuilt. Steel is much cheaper but requires maintenance.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > in modern times
|
| > hundreds of years of neglect
|
| Hundreds of years, whether of neglect or not, means that it
| wasn't "in modern times". And, in modern times, hundreds of
| years of neglect is hard to come by. Either it's
| maintained, or it's torn down, because we haven't had
| civilization-ending catastrophies in modern times. So I
| would not expect to be able to show you many examples,
| because the pool of candidates is so small.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| The claim actually made was that culture, not just
| technology, is what made these irrigation systems successful.
| It's an interesting insight.
|
| Perhaps we _can_ learn lessons from ancient cultures about
| how we might be able to efficiently manage our resources and
| achieve more with what is available. Is that so far fetched
| an idea?
| lurk2 wrote:
| I understand what you're saying. I'm not sure that the
| distinction is all that important, however. Culture is just
| a form of technology.
|
| > Perhaps we can learn lessons from ancient cultures about
| how we might be able to efficiently manage our resources
| and achieve more with what is available. Is that so far
| fetched an idea?
|
| I don't mean to imply that European models get everything
| right, but I think it would be far-fetched to bet against
| these models; historically, they've worked, and they've
| worked far better than any other model. The author does
| have a paper she linked to (which I missed on my first
| reading), so she might have a more compelling case to make
| than I originally assumed.
| suavesito wrote:
| I would say it reversed. Technology is _just one_ form of
| culture.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| I imagine this is just a symptom of infallible
| argument/humanities departments rewarding group think
| narratives (colonialism = definionally ultimate evil) with
| grant money. Doesn't take long for academics to understand
| the game.
|
| Same thing with climate change, i've come across a pile of
| random definitely-not-climate-science papers (macre econ
| development divergence in hipanola, property rights in
| subsaharan africa, unrelated culutral anthropoly etc) that
| allude to climate change as the key driver for the phenomenon
| observed. Clearly NSF and NIH wanted a very certain set of
| content published.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Same thing with climate change, i've come across a pile
| of random definitely-not-climate-science papers
|
| The author describes herself in these terms:
|
| > While I'm an archaeologist, I consider my research to be
| directed at the modern-day climate crisis. I investigate
| how resilient farming systems emerge and adapt to climate
| change and natural disasters. My fieldwork takes place on
| the north coast of Peru, where I study ancient irrigation
| in arid farming zones.
|
| She doesn't have any other social media profile so I don't
| want to be overly cynical about her motives. Anyway, I
| think the climate angle is potentially huge in a lot of
| these fields.
|
| There has been a trend in academia in the last few decades
| to focus on holistic analysis. This has led to a lot of
| academics trying to tie their research to disparate issues
| for both grant money and social status, but I also suspect
| that a lot of it is born of a genuine to come up with a
| grand unified theory of all the world's problems. You see
| it with figures like Aldous Huxley around the mid-20th
| century (Huxley's conclusion in his final novel, Island, is
| that "Nothing short of everything will do,"). The new wave
| that seems to have started in the 2010s has taken on a
| considerably more political bent ("Everything is
| political," "Climate change is a product of white
| supremacy," intersectional feminism, etc.).
|
| These theories aren't necessarily "wrong," but the
| scholarship they produce is so bad that they are hard to
| take seriously.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| _Episteme_ vs _metis_ ?
|
| https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/
|
| (The free market does sound closer to _metis_... but is also
| EXTREMELY focused on the short term, see : negative
| externalities. )
| suavesito wrote:
| I think that most people that are "scientific" are unable
| (because of our education) to _try_ to think about the
| validity of this way of _understanding_.
|
| I like to think that societies in Latin America (and,
| importantly, all around the world) survived thousands of
| years not because of luck, but because the cultures
| (language, traditions) they developed had ingrained the
| "scientific knowledge" necessary to survive in the conditions
| that lived in. An important part of it was that they did not
| see only as rulers and owners of the world, but only as one
| part of it. That is one of the basis of what people call
| magical thinking, but it is sound once you stop disqualifying
| it just because the word "magical" is in it.
|
| And, I mean, literally, only those who could adapt and
| understand their world to survive, survived. The knowledge
| maybe was not as fast evolving as the scientific methods
| allows to be, but it is, ultimately, the same method. Try,
| fail, and repeat. Those who were successful survived.
|
| The knowledge ingrained in the culture, traditions and
| understanding accompanying it was, and _is_, a fundamental
| part of the solutions that allowed them not to only survive,
| but to thrive in their environments.
|
| The first comment in this post says that you do not need the
| culture to carry out the solutions. That may be true, but it
| does miss that our culture is the strongest (after "basic
| necessities") incentives we have to choose some things over
| others. Or understanding of the world is our culture, and our
| understanding of the world is what makes us take some actions
| instead of others. You might be able to mimic technical
| solutions, but to fully understand them, you need the culture
| that developed them, as it is _literally_ the understanding
| of the world that allowed the solutions to exist.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| > The Moche and Chimu canal was tied to a complex labor system
| that synchronized cleaning and maintenance and prioritized the
| efficient use of water.
|
| There's also a link which points to more details but it doesn't
| look to be accessible:
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
| like_any_other wrote:
| That single sentence, which is the totality of the
| description given in the long and winding article, doesn't
| actually explain anything - the efficient use of water is the
| obvious goal of any irrigation system, especially in a
| desert. But _how_ did it efficiently use water? The only hint
| of information is "synchronized cleaning and maintenance",
| and not a word on synchronized how or with what, or why this
| should help.
|
| It's like describing how a car works with just "it is
| efficiently designed to help you travel faster, and uses
| skilled maintenance workers".
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I know nothing about the subject, but it only took me a few
| minutes to follow references to find what looks like it
| might be the answer that you are looking for ?
|
| https://www.proquest.com/ openview/768dad5fa2923211ed1128cf
| a33d5a29/1?cbl=18750&diss=y&pq-origsite=gscholar
|
| (It does sound like a great idea for a layman-focused
| documentary, and I would be surprised if none exist yet.)
| like_any_other wrote:
| Oh sure - but given that that is what the article is
| purportedly about, it would be nice if it had been
| included in the text itself.
| elif wrote:
| The inca aqueduct network is seriously impressive even in the
| current age. Some of it almost a thousand years old and still
| transporting spring water miles with no pumps, without a
| civilization to maintain it.
| Rover222 wrote:
| How doesn't it just immediately become overgrown with
| vegetation?
| Jensson wrote:
| By having constant flow like a river, they didn't go on and
| off like modern pipes.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Meanwhile the average lifetime of modern infrastructure is
| what, 50 years ?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Part of the shorter lifespan is that our cities grow much
| faster. Why build infrastructure that last 200 years if it
| needs to be ripped up in 50 due to no longer meeting
| population demands?
| Retric wrote:
| When they transported 100% of the output of a spring
| there's no need to update the infrared as a city grows
| there was no way to go past 100%. Dams have the same kind
| of limits and are regularly designed for 150+ year
| lifetimes. The Hoover Dam is just about to turn 90 and it's
| likely to last another 100 years.
|
| Quite a lot of the built environment is designed for 100+
| year lifespans. When it isn't there's often very good
| reasons. It's kind of amazing we get road bridges to last
| as long as they do when you consider the physical and
| chemical assault they're constantly under all while trying
| to minimize weight and cost.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| This is true. I was thinking of things like roads, water
| mains, sewer pipes, and even homes.
|
| Yeah a house that lasts 200 years sounds good in
| principle, until you think about the kind of material and
| energy efficiency advances we've had in just the last 25.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Modern concrete could last as long ad Roman concrete, if not
| for the fact that we use rebar which inevitability corrodes
| and is the limiting factor in how long those structures can
| last. But that same rebar allows us to create structures that
| the Romans never could have. Concrete structures with huge
| spans and thin walls.
|
| It's not that we don't know how to build things which last
| long. Rather, we choose not to because building that way has
| tradeoffs we usually don't want to make. This is also the
| reason we make things out of concrete and rarely out of
| meticulously stacked rocks.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Some of the water mains that bring water to New York City,
| from Upstate, are probably 200 years old.
|
| Many of them are made from wood.
| xeromal wrote:
| IDK if it was inka but I was in a town called Ollataytombo or
| something like that for a week and they had this adorable
| little aqueduct that ran straight through town and people
| washed their clothes and whatnot in it. Loved how a lot of
| those mountain towns had them.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Ollantaytambo. A beautiful ancient town
| stormfather wrote:
| Yeah Ollantaytambo was Inca. They say it was constructed as a
| vacation estate for Pachacutec (?) after he conquered the
| Sacred Valley.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| If there was a genius ruler, it was Pachacuti, seriously, dude
| was the Caesar of South America, extremely underrated in how he
| managed the Incan Empire and all of the infrastructure that was
| built in his reign.
|
| He also directed the creation of the road system in the
| empire... it would have been interesting to see how he instead
| of his descendants would have dealt with the Spanish had they
| arrived when he was alive, I think that the outcome might have
| been different, at least for the initial wave of Spanish
| scythe wrote:
| >While they may be identical in form, a Spanish canal isn't a
| Moche canal.
|
| >Spanish canals operated in a temperate climate and were managed
| by individual farmers who could maintain or increase their water
| flow. The Moche and Chimu canal was tied to a complex labor
| system that synchronized cleaning and maintenance and prioritized
| the efficient use of water. What's more, Moche canals functioned
| in tandem with floodwater diversion canals, which activated
| during El Nino events to create niches of agricultural
| productivity amid disasters.
|
| The second paragraph belies the previous: Spanish canals
| obviously were not "identical in form" when you can point out so
| many differences.
|
| But it would also be pretty unreasonable to equate the early
| Spanish colonists, who were a few pirates and scoundrels that
| used iron and horses to conquer and control an empire where they
| were outnumbered by a thousand to one, to the modern Peruvians.
| Many lessons have been learned since then and modern Peru's
| political problems pale in comparison to the brutality of the
| sixteenth century.
|
| The more likely reason that the situation is different today is
| just that Peru's population density (34 million in the country)
| and agricultural production vastly exceeds anything that existed
| under the Inca (maximum about 12 million across an empire that
| included parts of modern Ecuador and Bolivia). The Peruvians
| themselves are no stranger to attempting to copy the pre-colonial
| infrastructure practices, with mixed results. Of course if you
| grow less, you can better avoid running out of water. But this is
| no solace.
| 627467 wrote:
| > Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms - what archaeologists call
| culture - were fundamentally integrated into technological
| solutions in this part of Peru in ancient times. Isolating and
| removing the tools from that knowledge made them less effective.
|
| Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms may have helped indigenous
| people perpetuate the solutions/technologies. Studying and
| understanding those may help people - today - to more quickly
| understand those solutions. But it's not like a thorough
| understand ing and application of these technologies - today -
| require us to "maintain technology and culture coupling" as this
| _archeologist professor_ implies.
|
| The Spanish may have made wrong assumptions at first and failed
| to replicate the solution, but if we still see it being used
| today, that's because the colonist eventually learned - without
| perpetuating the culture (not to the same extend as the
| indigenous)
| mock-possum wrote:
| Exactly - just because they used culture, or religion, to
| underpin that stuff - doesn't mean we need to. Doesn't mean we
| need to use the same culture, or even the same religion, for
| that matter. "This is what works, and this is why it works, and
| this is the benefit, and this is why it's worthwhile" can be
| enough, with a minimum of pretense.
| hosh wrote:
| Permaculture design was developed out of systematically
| studying indigenous methods from around the world, and one of
| the insights is that how humans inhabit the land -- the
| culture -- matters a lot. If something is not aligned to
| human interests and norms, they won't do it.
|
| It goes with what Christopher Alexander understood about
| living architecture. How people use it matters. The whole
| point of pattern languages was the creation of a grammar
| where all possible ways in which patterns come together
| develop a valid, architecturally cohesive design. This allows
| the inhabitants themselves to make changes as their life and
| circumstances change, and as long as they follow the grammar,
| it will come out as a cohesive, functional design. Alexander
| also systematically studied indigenous architecture and went
| in with a background in mathematics. There is a reason his
| work influenced people working with software architecture and
| human-computing interactive design (but our computer systems
| and products does not realize the full potential of
| Alexander's ideas).
|
| There is a kind of bias at play, where we think the culture
| itself is rigid, and becomes out of date, and therefore,
| impedes progress. It does not have to be that way, and often
| time, the culture itself encodes ideas that are crucial.
| Furthermore, cultural practices can be understood or designed
| such that it is flexible and versatile -- similar to Peru's
| pre-Hispanic system of canals. If anything, it's the bias of
| our modern worldview that tries to fix culture into the rigid
| structures just as it tries to create rigid solutions.
|
| For a deeper reading on why that might be, I suggest:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-
| call...
| 627467 wrote:
| > if something is not aligned to human interests and norms,
| they won't do it.
|
| I won't litigate strongly against this statement because
| its obvious this matters, but human interests and norms are
| not immutable and the mechanism to change it definitely
| involve doing things (at some scale) that can be seen as
| abnormal or against (some) human interests. This tension
| and how it's resolved is the evolutionary pressure.
|
| > where we think the culture itself is rigid
|
| Well, the article cites the example of the Spanish failing
| for decades to irrigate the land because they dismissed the
| existing culture. Seems like the author has a rigid view of
| culture, because it seems clear to me that the syncretic
| culture post-conquest (Spanish ruled) was one radically
| different to indigenous or european ones.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| I've been saying for a while that "Religion is a social
| technology". Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as universal a moral
| as you'd like to believe, and the other commandments are also
| good life advice. Even "Thou shalt have no other gods before
| me" serves an important purpose in keeping everyone on the
| same page.
|
| Nearly every culture has a tradition of parables; Tales that
| reveal important truths by metaphor. Whether they be about
| how to interact with others, how to motivate and treat
| yourself, or of outside dangers.
|
| Religion serves an important teaching purpose. Most have
| converged a lot; There's a lot of truths that are universal.
| Still, they're not all created equal. You probably shouldn't
| hate someone just because of their religion... Unless they're
| part of a death cult.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| We use culture now.
|
| "Culture is just the way things are done around here"
|
| Peer review is culture. Work place legislation is culture.
|
| The article argues that trying to extract technology and
| reapply it, without the culture, is a fools errand.
|
| It's trivially true: you can't just teach some people to code
| and expect them release an app that can scale to millions of
| users. It requires culture to function and deliver.
|
| We need to understand the culture required to deliver the
| technology, not just the technology itself.
|
| I for one would be very interested to hear about how
| different types of labour organisation were required to
| deliver their water.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| problem of today is not having enough knowledge, books, ... for
| storing that stuff or for generating more appropriate stuff to
| work with modern knowledge they did not had, but problem is not
| having workforce big enough to do this stuff AND live in
| current economic system on top of physical/planetwide system.
|
| there is just too may people and only two things can solve that
| problem - A) what stalin, hitler, did [ graph in GIF
| https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH_C_MORTACRACIES.GIF ] B)
| culture of not having 4 children and having need to live energy
| expensive life.
|
| after hitler in west, reforms were made. after lenin in east,
| stalinist came.
|
| so without having everybody on board choosing B)... what is the
| answer? and you can not be peruan-style farmer when you have
| terrorists pumping oil from ground , building tanks, drones,
| paying people to burn buildings, cars, writing nonsense "red-
| pilling" people ...
|
| USA was lucky not having wars, and not having war in USA was
| 99.999% because of geography - no land bridge. and 0.001% of
| "tyrrany" of state not allowing mass murder in rest of the
| world (yes redpill-ing oil here). but culture is changing,
| state no longer cares about that 0.001% (or atleast seem so ).
|
| we do not care about transporting muck into our fields so we do
| not need to manufacture fertilizers. so yeah culture is not
| important but it is. he means culture as a "we do care about
| sitting next to your field and thinking about it [but that
| means not spending time programming healthcare system systems]
| and we do care about earth" [even without hippie drugs]
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| I think a lot of differences between populations can be explained
| by differences in culture values. I don't see too much research
| on this ever.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| A language is a map to reality, a survival strategy in a changing
| world. More languages equals more chances of surviving (and
| thriving!).
|
| The depth of intelligence in a human language developed and
| tested over millennia is truly incredible, more than I believe
| most of us can appreciate. In a language there exist
| tactics/knowledge lying dormant waiting for the right
| circumstances for application. Human languages are not developed
| in a world favoring local maxima, but in a chaotic world favoring
| true robustness and antifragility. We would be fools to surrender
| a time-tested model of nature, to allow languages to die.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms - what archaeologists
| call culture_
|
| I've always referred to that as "Social Infrastructure."[0]
|
| [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/#social_inf
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-19 23:01 UTC)