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So far, am I the only person to notice one problem with the original post, even with the post title? What does 10,000 years of human history mean? If you take "history" to mean "written history", then its too much, because I think the general consensus on that is somewhere around 6,000 years, maybe a bit longer for proto-writing. If you are looking at urbanization or agriculture, then probably 10-15,000 years is a good estimate. But people are much older than that: modern humans are 100-250,000 years old. We don't have a lot of evidence for what human's were like before the beginning of writing and a consistent archaeological record, but the date of when different technological advances were first recorded keeps on getting pushed back. There is no particular reason to doubt that people of a quarter million years ago, or 100,000 years ago, had the same sort of complicated cultures and ideas about the world as we do. I mean, yes, obviously without written language and permanent structures, and the populations of urbanization, people were different, but they were still people. And the fact that we are all here is evidence of this: the way that hunter-gatherers emmigrated out of Africa means they weren't just wandering around looking for the next berry bushes. Take the emmigration to Australia, for example: as far back as 60,000 years ago, people had enough social cohesion, and enough technology (in the form of boats able to cross the ocean) to settle Australia. There might be some discussions about the archaeological record, but humans have been doing things proactively and adjusting to change easily 10 times as long as the time between now and the building of the first pyramid. There has been climate change and population bottlenecks before. If anything, knowing how long people have been around, and how much we have already adjusted, makes me feel a lot more optimistic.
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Sep 8, 2018 04:52
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Given how brutish, short, dim and miserable such an existence was, the prospect of humanity having to make a permanent return to that way of life I personally consider horrifying rather than uplifting. Citation needed. I mean, I am not a primitivist, and I know that there were large chunks of history when people probably did live at very low standards of living, but how much do you really know about what life was like in Sundaland 50,000 years ago? Or, consider a time that is much more recent, (although still ancient): the Harappan civilization (also known as the Indus Valley Civilization), which around 4000 years ago, showed evidence of a relatively egalitarian, non-militaristic society where flush toilets were installed in almost every urban dwelling.
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Sep 8, 2018 05:38
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Happiness was invented in New Jersey in 1978 I actually wrote an essay elsewhere about this, blaming my endless games in the Civilization series for distorting my perception of human history. I don't think its a conscious thought, but I do think people tend to think of human consciousness as kind of springing up at the time our historical records begin: I think that on a level, people do tend to think of people who lived before Egypt and Mesopotamia as being somehow "not quite human", that they would have just been passively reacting to their environment, and being static in their beliefs and thoughts. (Needless to say, this also has some really problematic connotations with regards to contact with hunter-gatherer peoples around the world).
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Sep 8, 2018 05:54
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Ytlaya posted:
Could you link us to these polls? Because a cursory search tells me that there are multiple methodologies for trying to find out if people are happy, and while they aren't uniformly positive, I can't find one that says that "most people are not particularly happy". But since you can assure us, a word that means that you are certain, and have evident, solid proof about the complicated matter of how happy people are, you aren't going to just leave it there, but are going to show us what you know. And not just a little bit: you are going to give a definitive explanation of why different methodologies to compute happiness (for example, the difference between measurements of objective well-being and subjective self-perception) both agree about who is happy and who isn't, and that both say, with the assurance that you promised us, that most people are not particularly happy. You will have no conflicting or ambiguous data in your replies. Once you have presented your data, everyone in this thread will admit that the issue is closed because of the polls that you have on the subject, assuredly.
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Sep 8, 2018 19:05
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