I saw a study somewhere (too lazy to look it up) that claimed people who sleep 9 or more hours a night have shorter lifespans than people who only sleep 7-8 hours a night. Maybe it's like caloric deprivation - the more you suffer the longer you live.
Also I feel you on the loss of menwha. I definitely feel dumber and mentally slower generally. My memory has always sucked but I feel it's getting worse. Maybe I need to try one of those stupid online mind exercise thingies.
Not-online, physical exercise is good for your memory. There are lots of studies on that, but maybe that's just for people with dementia. I'm also lazy.
It's very hard on your ankles, which can be a problem.
I'm hitting the gym three times a week and there is certainly a mood elevating effect. I could see maybe other positive effects. It's killing my knee though.
You could try swimming. On the veldt, people who swam got dirt in their faces, but now we can use a pool.
Anyway, I'm sure knee pain is not pleasant, but you should try to look on the bright side. More people with knee pain means more potential research subjects.
I used to think I was getting stupider, but now I've come to the conclusion that I just had the mistaken belief that I was smart.
I have to get back in the groove -- I've slacked off completely on exercise the last week or so. But even exercising a fair amount generally, I've been feeling dumber over the last few years. Memory a bit, but much more attention span -- like, it's an effort to stay focused on reading things.
I've had lots of problems staying focused on reading longer things. I blame you people. My novel-reading efforts were started to counteract this.
Because reading for pleasure is bullshit.
Reading for pleasure is the best. I think I'm a lot more mentally alert and engaged post-breakup, but that's probably counterbalanced by the exhaustion factor. I'm not doing as well as I'd like to in keeping up with three kids and a house, especially all that laundry that never ends. But at least I'm reading for pleasure plenty!
Reading Unfogged has sure helped me fake seeming smarter than ever. "Here's a well-defined position that I just tossed off the top of my head, shamelessly plagiarizing my brilliant secret online community."
I've had lots of problems staying focused on reading longer things.
Reading on my ipad is such a double-edged sword. If I'm not completely engaged, it's so easy to click over to the internet. OTOH, when I am super engaged and want to find out more on some tangent, it's such a pleasure to click over to the internet.
Definitely feel dumber in some respects. I'm better at my job, so some things are improving, but I don't think I have the ability to kick people's asses (verbally/mentally) that I did 10 years ago, and I find reading things with turgid prose, or particularly complex abstract arguments much slower than 10 years ago. A combination of being out of practice, and being chronically* tired, I think.
* it's a rare night when I get more than 6.5 hours.
12: Does Unfogged help you fake seeming smarter, while at the same time make you feel that you're actually stupider? Unfogged -- imposter-syndrome creator?
I saw a study somewhere (too lazy to look it up) that claimed people who sleep 9 or more hours a night have shorter lifespans than people who only sleep 7-8 hours a night.
Without very careful controls (probably the point of undercutting doing the research in the first place) this sounds like the kind of finding that ends up boiling down to "sick people sleep more than healthy people".
Then again I'm biased because even at my best I incline towards the 9ish hours a night figure.
I saw a study somewhere (too lazy to look it up) that claimed people who sleep 9 or more hours a night have shorter lifespans than people who only sleep 7-8 hours a night.
Also too lazy to look it up, but a couple years ago I was involved in litigation where this was at issue. The studies that the government relied on had found a correlation between both too little and too much sleep with increased mortality risk (the sweet spot was clustered somewhere between 7 and 8 hrs I think). No reason to think it was causation though, as opposed to "things that make you sleep a lot also kill you".
All that doesn't kill you, makes you sleepier.
It is well-known that each kid costs you 10 IQ points.
The Duggars used to be geniuses, but not in a way they can understand anymore.
In my case it's just exhaustion. The start of the school year has meant a slightly separation-anxious Calabat, who spent a month waking up two or three times a night shouting "I need my mommy". Add to that shiv coming to bed later and then snoring, so a typical night means sleeping from 10:30-12, waking when shiv comes to bed, waking for the Calabat at 2, shiv starting to snore at 3, Calabat waking at 4:30, then waking up at six.
Lots of stuff that healthy people with jobs tend to do like drink coffee, don't sleep 9 hours etc. tend to show up as life extending.
22: maybe shiv could do something to address his snoring.
Heebie, You most certainly are not "getting dumber." You are currently distracted by multiple, sometimes overlapping but often conflicting, demands on your attention. I am confident you will (eventually, or maybe even sooner: when, say, the kids can make their own lunches) emerge from this phase even smarter. At which point, watch out Planning and Zoning board!
I definitely feel like I've been getting dumber in specific ways. I make more typos in emails or blog comments, substituting incorrect words without thinking about it. Like typing is instead of if, or instead of on. The worst was recently I typed Hellow starting a message- where the hell did that come from? The sequence of typing lo automatically made my brain add a w? I usually just blame autocorrect or phone typing.
I am also getting dumber sitting in an airport where they pipe CNN directly into your brain. Republican flak, talking about Trump's 9/11 comments, said that if anyone is to blame it's Bill Clinton- but it's disgusting that Trump would politicize a tragedy like 9/11. Lighting subsequently failed to strike her.
I definitely feel like I've been getting dumber in specific ways.
Me too.
In addition to the typos that SP mentions, my memory feels much less reliable -- I lose names and specific words often enough to be annoying and rarely but occasionally have the "word on the tip of my tongue" feeling with an entire concept -- there's something I'm trying to remember something and I know that if I could place a part of it then the whole thing would come back immediately but it remains stubbornly out of reach.
Overall, in the vast majority of situations the benefits of experience outweigh the slippage, but . . .
Yes, also what Nick says about memory- I forgot about that. For example, recently I forgot the word allegory, I kept coming up with other synonyms but I knew it wasn't what I was looking for. I guess it won't be really bad until I don't realize that I've forgotten something, although it will also be less stressful.
I'd also say this. If we're talking about completion a specific, well-defined intellectual task, I'd think that me of ten years ago would be better than me now. But me now is much better at spotting problems with or elements missing from the definition of a task.
I feel like I'm getting stupider too, and more forgetful. I blame ABD-itis.
I did want to chime in on the "paleo sleep" article, because I read the link and that study relies on the bullshittiest of bullshit methods ever. Modern "hunter-gatherers" live lives no more like our ancestors on the veldt than we do, and using them to study our "past" both produces crap meaningless data and is kind of racist.
I blame ABD-itis.
I only hurts for the first decade.
The important thing is not to just ghost on your committee.
I remember an SF short story where physical life can be extended indefinitely but everyone gives out mentally sooner or later, and one (unpopular) way to extend continuity is to live in a room that continually rearranges itself and poses puzzles and challenges for you to go through your daily routine.
The important thing is not to just ghost on your committee.
A member of my committee fell asleep during my defense.
In fairness, it was super boring.
There is a whole range of topics which I understand fairly well, but I can't discuss in person, because I can't retrieve enough nouns to be coherent. Things like giving directions to somewhere up in Austin, topics with any technical terms, any government official or agency, math terms from a course that I'm not teaching at that very moment, etc.
My mom has the exact same affliction, so I don't think it's progressive, at least.
Today somebody used "monotonic" in a talk. I couldn't remember what it meant.
I can't ask anybody on my committee because I just stopped emailing them without saying goodbye.
I barely mentioned monotonicity at all, heebie. That's just mean-spirited.
From context, I think it meant a mammal that lays eggs.
All I have is wine from a box and two Yuengling.
Where does he get those wonderful toys?!
In college we'd hang a box of wine from the ceiling of our porch area (on a nail) for any visitors or pasersby. If I had a nail, I could hang a box, if I had a box.
Two different stores, because laws.
You mean hardware and boozes?
Modern "hunter-gatherers" live lives no more like our ancestors on the veldt than we do
Wait, what?
Our ancestors on the veldt evolved in an environment dominated by foreign anthropologists tracking their sleep patterns.
Which is why we all now sleep the same number of hours.
Do they mean like some hipster whose job is gathering wild ingredients for trendy restaurants?
The underlying flaw is the (now unstated) premise of a progressive, teleological view of human development which presumes that humans pass through identical temporally-defined "stages" of increasing civilization, towards some defined endpoint as represented by Western civilization. (aka, Social Darwinism). This view takes the position that people who have a lifestyle that is radically different and generally less reliant on material conveniences are somehow atavistic remnants of a previous stage of human development. Besides being horribly offensive, it relies on a flawed science which is antithetical to the actual theory of evolution, as it posits that some groups are "frozen" at a certain stage of development at a certain point of time, while other groups keep evolving (generally towards some particular end). It's the same sort of logic which has people claim that "humans evolved from chimps" rather than realize that both humans and chimps evolved from some common ancestor. Any contemporary group of people is "modern" and lives a life different from however they lived 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.
Two other major flaws exist, setting the Social Darwinism aside:
(1) While hunter-gathering used to be the default, by this point in time it survives only in highly marginal environments where agriculture is basically impossible (desert, tundra, etc.), and are barely supportive of human life. Even if we thought that modern h-gs could tell us about our past lifestyles, the h-gs today would be extreme outliers, as most h-gs lived in relatively lush environments supportive of human life. Any takeaways about say, diet or time spent gathering food wouldn't really apply.
(2) Even if we thought modern h-gs in marginal climates could say something about our past, the idea that any group is somehow untouched by "civilization" is totally wrong. Most h-g tribes have undergone enormous trauma inflicted by/through contact in the past 50-100 years. This has included major loss of land, forced resettlement on reservations, mandatory schooling, employment in non h-g settings, and tourism. The idea that the San or the Hadza or whoever are living anything like how they lived before meddling from colonial or national governments is a not totally innocent mistake.
You sound like somebody who is writing a dissertation.
Thank you for the "not totally innocent" buttercup, perfect!
haha
Unfortunately it's not on the topic of the idiocy of sociobiology.
Ok, since I really have nothing better to do on a Friday night (it's this, actual work, or buzzfeed), I'll continue.
Any group of people who are h-gs at present are living in this way because they have consciously made the decision to do so in the face of multiple alternatives (most of which are pretty terrible).* In some cases, remaining on the land has required serious political mobilization, resulting in political imprisonment and leverage of international opinion/attention to fight corrupt national governments and multinational corporations. The idea that such group of people are some sort of innocents is offensive and deprives them of the same sort of savvy adult rationality we ascribe to other people.**
*One main reason, at least for well-known groups like the San, is tourism. Being a human zoo animal requires acting as "primitive" or as "exotic" as possible to keep the tourist dollars (or research money) coming.
**Of course this underestimation also allows such groups to keep fooling gullible researchers.
Buttercup's comments are even better if you read "h-gs" as "heebie-geebies".
Buttercup's totally right over all, of course, but I think the line ogged quotes in 51 may not be literally accurate, in that modern hunter-gatherers are at least slightly more like our veldty ancestors than agricultural peoples purely by virtue of being hunter-gatherers.
WHATEVER, FOOLS.
59.2 Except for bits of New Guinea, where the infrastructure is shitty enough to limit friction. There are also uncontacted peoples scattered around there, the Amazon, and the Chaco, according to Wikipedia.
I just made a scientific discovery that there's a link in the post. Since my primitive culture accepts analogies, the logic seems to be that if science learns that life expectancy was lower in traditional societies then we shouldn't worry if people die at younger ages.
61: they are quite like our palaeo ancestors in as much as they murder each other at terrifyingly high rates compared to non-hunter gatherer humans.
I don't think we have any way of knowing that about the paleo ones.
59.2 et al. Modern peoples' hunting and gathering doesn't only differ by being restricted to marginal environments: the San used to make arrow heads out of stone flakes; now they mainly use chopped up barbed wire. We leave the further implications of this to your imagination.
63. As I understand it, many if not most hunter gatherers in the Amazon are "secondary" foragers, descended from whose populations were disrupted and decimated in the 16th century. I'm open to correction on this.
But, as teo says, they do hunt and gather.
Modern peoples' hunting and gathering doesn't only differ by being restricted to marginal environments: the San used to make arrow heads out of stone flakes; now they mainly use chopped up barbed wire. We leave the further implications of this to your imagination.
Hell, the Eskimos use guns. (And that's not just a distractionary tactic by refocusing on a more acculturated society; some Eskimo groups, especially the Nunamiut of northern Alaska, have been used as model hunter-gatherers in a lot of anthropological research along these lines.)
Hey, in Alaska at least they're good Americans with 2nd Amendment rights to defend.
Damn straight. Doesn't help with the murder problem, admittedly. (Also, suicide.)
Yes but the OP link only uses hunter-gatherers to approximate what people's sleep patterns would be like in the absence of electricity. They're not making some grandiose claim about our ancestral state, they're saying, "it's just not true that we'd get more sleep if it wasn't for these darn lightbulbs."
And in fact, if disparate populations all share some feature, then it is sound to hypothesize that the common ancestor did, too. Nobody's making the white mans burden errors outlined in 55.1.
Actually, haha, the op and link call the hunter-gatherers "ancient peoples" and so on. Oopsie-daisy.
Who are the worlds most modernized hunter-gatherers?
Actually, I quite like light bulbs.
74. I would guess one of the Arctic peoples, because they're politically attached to more or less first world states: Greenland/Denmark, Canada, USA, Russia, Finland, Norway. But more exactly than that, who knows?
But I think 71 is right. All you need to make the research interesting is to find a way of life that's very different from our own, not one that's authentically paleo or whatever.
Probably snowmobiles make it easier to chase down seals and polar bears.
Hey, my brother's friend wrote that article! I didn't read it when he linked it on fb either.
I'm getting friend requests from people who are clearly looking for my twenty-something cousin. I'm thinking he had more fun in high school than I did.
Actually, I quite like light bulbs.
Incandescent light bulbs are the only real light bulbs! Fight the tyranny of LED's!
But I think 71 is right. All you need to make the research interesting is to find a way of life that's very different from our own, not one that's authentically paleo or whatever.
Right, San sleeping patterns could be interesting, but it tells us nothing about how our paleo ancestors sleep. If that's your research question, then you have to find a different way to answer it. If you want to put wristbands on modern day hunter-gatherers, then you have to come up with a adequate research question to your method of study.
63
Right. It's hugely wrong to assume that simply because people did something that we classify as belonging to the sort of thing we did 10,000 years ago, they do it in a way that's similar or comparable, and that the accompanying lifestyle is even remotely the same. It's a really unscientific way of thinking that gets beaten out of bio 101 students, when they learn about convergent vs. homologous evolution, except somehow we tolerate sloppiness when it comes to humans* Lots of homeless people in the US forage too, but no one is getting an NSF grant to study them as a mirror into our paleo ancestors. Studying the San or Hadza is basically just as ridiculous, except we've all seen the God's Must be Crazy so we know that they've lived on the veld unchanged since the Dawn of Time. The problem is that it's both bad politics and bad science, but it gets a lot of funding because it tells us what we want to hear on multiple levels.**
*Any marine biologist who declared that their a priori assumption is that whale fins and fish fins are the same because they're both fins and both let them swim through the water, and therefore was going to study fish fins as a proxy for for whale fins would be laughed out of the discipline. As it is, we don't know if
**Most "remote" hunter-gatherers are in the midst of slow motion genocides,*** being killed by drug cartels, oil or mining companies, neighboring farmers, governments, and all the attendant ills of extreme poverty and ethnic/racial discrimination in a developing country. Pretending that these people are happily and blissfully aware of modern society, rather than huffing glue or shooting each other with guns when they're not performing for the camera allows us to assuage our guilty conscience over these things.
***If they're not part of the lucky groups who have turned themselves into hunter-gatherer (TM) tourist and research stations.
Not that you're wrong about the politics or genocide, but this does seem to be an issue where "How do people sleep in the absence of artificial light" is an interesting question, and one that can be answered by looking at modern hunter-gatherers.
They could find somebody with no cell phone to study sleep patterns in people who don't hear little "ping"s at night.
I mean, imagine some sort of dystopian future sci-fi novel where 90% of humans have been killed, 5% have been enslaved, and the remaining 5% flee into the woods to re-form society using the remnants they've scavenged from the detritus of civilization. Now imagine that 50 years later, evil robot-overlord sociobiologists come across these groups of humans and decide to study them as a proxy for how how early humans lived. As readers of the book, we'd assume the evil robot overlords were doing bad science in the name of even worse politics. I'll ban myself now, but this is a not totally off-the-wall analogy of these types of studies.
85
Well, 1) if we assume these hunter-gatherers aren't using electric or artificial lights at all, and 2) if we assume that electric light is the only influence on sleep patterns, at which point it would be much easier to study children at rustic summer camps or back-packers.
People are people so why should it be,
that they can't be comparable in a research study
There is no human subjects research design issue that can't be sung to a Depeche Mode tune.
They sent out an Amber Alert last night at 3am and woke up most of the city (seriously- it's all over the social medias.) Consequently I shut off Amber Alerts on our phones. Kids pick such inconvenient times to be kidnapped.
"How Do People Sleep During a Slow Motion Genocide" is research best sung to Beds Are Burning.
Just wanted to applaud Buttercup for being awesome.
evil robot-overlord sociobiologist
This is definitely going to be my Halloween costume this year.
Although I suppose these days the stores only sell sexy evil robot-overlord sociobiologist.
Typical.
Plus, maybe the most common human condition is slow-motion genocide.
Plus, maybe the most common human condition is slow-motion genocide.
Everybody is on one end of it or the other, given enough time.
This study seeks to investigate slow motion genocide in a laboratory setting. To accurately recreate the veldt setting, hot naked undergraduates (n=25), armed with nothing but atlatls and knowledge of their own mortality, will be set loose in a controlled environment to forage for food.
I'm not buying this objection. Here's the paper.
In these societies, electricity and its associated lighting and entertainment distractions are absent, as are cooling and heating systems.
Great! Let's see how they sleep! Surely we've all seen "since Edison invented the light bulb" stories to explain insomnia. How can it not be interesting that three societies without light bulbs and alarm clocks have similar sleep patterns? Unless someone knows that, until recently, they were all working 9-5 and using the internet all the time, then it seems like an interesting study.
Ok, so I was minding my own business, totally not thinking about this study, and then I saw this on the front page of the NYTimes. It's totally bad science cliche bingo, since they even threw in the "X doesn't even have a word for insomnia!" line
I dunno man:
Our results suggest that the bimodal sleep pattern that may have existed in Western Europe is not present in traditional equatorial groups today and, by extension, was probably not present before humans migrated into Western Europe.
That's a pretty big extension from "now" (2014/15) to 120,000-60,000 years ago, with no supporting data in the middle.
In the current paper, we examine sleep duration, timing, and relation to natural light, ambient temperature, and seasons in three preindustrial human societies
It's subtle, but this sentence contains some of the racist bullshit I mentioned. These societies are not "preindustrial." They may be "non-industrial," but they don't exist in some time warp of before the industrial revolution. Speaking of people as existing in earlier time periods relies precisely on the sort of Social Darwinist thinking that divides history into developmental stages and presumes some people are living in earlier, less evolved stages.
Individuals are exposed, from birth, to sunlight and a continuous seasonal and daily variation in temperature within the thermoneutral range for much of the daylight period, but above thermoneutral temperatures in the afternoon and below thermoneutrality at night.
Yeah no. Living without artificial light during the study =/= being exposed from birth only to natural light, especially since lots of hunter-gather/farmers switch between living in the village and working in larger settlements/cities, and people who still hunt/gather are only a tiny fraction of the ethnic group. If they have people whom they can confirm have never been exposed to artificial light, they're going to have explicitly state/prove that.
Unless someone knows that, until recently, they were all working 9-5 and using the internet all the time, then it seems like an interesting study.
I actually do know someone who works in part with one of the groups mentioned in the study (don't know if it's the exact same subgroup of people, but same ethnic group), and he says they do things like listen to the radio and drink coke, despite living in "rustic huts" and not using electricity. He says that this group frequently gets used as an example of "primitive people," and the researchers/photographers choose to crop out/ignore the signs that these people are maybe less than 100% living in the stone age.
First quote seems appropriately hedged. Second quote is an inside-baseball distinction I don't care about. Third quote I'd have to know more to decide who bears the burden of proof for the claim, but it's also a key issue, I agree. If these people spend some of their lives on a 9-5 schedule (or something like it) then that makes a big difference.
I mean, what makes us sleep and how we could sleep better is really interesting research, and the finding that temperature is more important than light sounds intriguing. The problem is that it's done in this weird, problematic, convoluted, and unnecessary framework of studying the sleep of "primitive man in his natural state," with some really politically suspect conclusions that don't logically follow from the data (no one needs more than 7 hours of sleep, therefore chronic sleep deprivation in the West is not an issue.)
I think we're nearing comity. I do wish they'd drop anything about being "modern" whether they put it in quotes or not, and I wish they didn't try to claim that they're establishing some kind of baseline for the true human need for sleep. Maybe, who knows, being an "information worker" means you need nine hours, or maybe we get much worse sleep because we're not active, or who the hell knows.
It's subtle, but this sentence contains some of the racist bullshit I mentioned. These societies are not "preindustrial."
Given the subtlety, racist seems a bit strong. Eurocentric, perhaps?
I appreciate what you're saying about the racist-in-origin premises of the progressive, teological, stadial theory of human history that you outline above. But this account of human progress didn't only lead to Social Darwinism; it also helped to underpin Marx's understanding of the stages of history (I'm not saying Marx was completely innocent of racist ideas, by the way, but I am suggesting he was not a Social Darwinist).
In any case, does any use of the term "preindustrial" necessarily carry with it the racist baggage of this earlier theorization of human stages of progress?
107
Those are all plausible counter hypotheses. Also, it's possible facing the total annihilation of your way of life causes you to sleep few hours than you otherwise might. To me, "groups undergoing cultural and/or actual genocide" is the more compelling commonality between the groups picked, and I armchair hypothesize that undergoing major collective trauma might play a larger role in sleeping than electricity.*
If I had to sum up my takeaway from the article, The premise of the experiment is bullshit, the research question is bullshit, the data selection criteria is bullshit, the precise methodology (wrist trackers to measure sleep) appears fine, the immediate analysis of the results seems fine, and the conclusions are total bullshit. That they managed to do some science in a pile of steaming bullshit doesn't make it a good study.
*I have yet a different friend who studies a different remote hunter-gatherer group nearish to one of the groups mentioned, and he says that most men are dead from violence or disease by 35. In the 10+ years he's been going there, he says the level of death and dislocation is almost unimaginable, and people are beginning to get really paranoid and despairing about life in general.
Sounds like a letter to the editor is in order!
From the dawn of time, man has yearned to sleep some number of hours related to temperature and light.
Seriously, Anahad O'Connor is on Twitter. A real story would be something along of the lines that you're suggesting: people use these groups as pre-modern stand-ins, but they're more modern than you think, and they're living horrible lives that confound lots of results. It's the Times, maybe they'll fly him out.
In any case, does any use of the term "preindustrial" necessarily carry with it the racist baggage of this earlier theorization of human stages of progress?
Yes.
Although maybe ethnic/cultural rather than racist, in its current versions as "modernization theory" the problem is not so much with the "them" as with the "us," The standpoint or subject position that says "we" are "modern" and "they" have to "catch up." That those cultural aspects or affects they adopt not only improve them but indicate the superiority of our values. Etc.
Current reading example: Watanabe, Osamu Dazai, and Mishima as proving Japan became a first world nation when its artists, tortured by modernity, started committing suicide like van Gogh.
In any case, does any use of the term "preindustrial" necessarily carry with it the racist baggage of this earlier theorization of human stages of progress?
You could use it historically without any obvious problem that I can see. But as soon as you use it for groups of people who are, historically speaking, not remotely before the industrial revolution, like ones walking around right now, then you're doing something else entirely and it turns into a really polite way of saying 'savages'.
Umm, the problem is not necessarily an aesthetic preference for indoor flush toilets, but the bourgeois understanding of toilets as a moral advance, a teleology or eschatology. And mostly because the moral superiority and historical inevitability of "we moderns" tends to lead toward stuff like invading to depose dictators and well, genocide.
There is another level about time and the everyday that I can't remember.
And the anti-moderns, starting maybe with Spinoza, through the giants Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, understood that we weren't riding the Tidal Wave of Moral Perfectibility.
Cold fuckers they seem, to say that gay rights, women's rights, anti-racism, democracy etc aren't any more modern moral advances than flush toilets.
113
Oh man, that is something I would have to think seriously about.
108
My short answer would be: I'm way more willing to accept 19th century economists with a teleological view of history than 21st century biologists. (I would also say the underpinnings of Marx's view of history *are* problematic, but that Marx took them in a much more interesting direction than most of his contemporaries, and people are products of their time, etc.)
There's a different reading of Marx's claim that capitalism is "world-historical" that claims that Marx was giving a history of world stages, and that one cannot speak of any part of the world as being "pre-capitalist" once capitalism exists, as capitalism necessarily changes the relationship between modes of production and their social context. (E.g. handweaving still exists post industrial revolution, but people's relation to the activity is fundamentally changed.)
I wouldn't necessarily think that someone using preindustrial to refer to people living now was racist, but I might tell them it wasn't an appropriate way to refer to people. I don't give the same benefit of the doubt to researchers though.
I'm way more willing to accept 19th century economists with a teleological view of history than 21st century biologists.
Fair enough; and I share that willingness/unwillingness. I'm just not thrilled with the "Social Darwinist" tag for any echo or reverberation of that 18th- and 19th-century teological view of human history, is the point I guess I was trying to make.
Speaking of light bulbs you know that those old -timey Edison bulbs at the hipsters like are actually made out of LEDs now? So only tacky not wasteful
you know that those old -timey Edison bulbs at the hipsters like are actually made out of LEDs now?
Noooooooo!!!
you know that those old -timey Edison bulbs at the hipsters like are actually made out of LEDs now?
No, I did not know. I am cancelling my receipt of the
Schoolhouse Electric catalogue, as a protest measure.
Or: This is evidence that the sleep cycle of the electrified world is being communicated.
I wish they didn't try to claim that they're establishing some kind of baseline for the true human need for sleep.
Right. What bothered me about the recaps of the study were the claim that this was "paleo" or "preindustrial" or whatever; but as a counterexample to the widespread belief that only people who have electric lights, modern jobs, etc., have interrupted sleep.
These have been mentioned before, but I feel obligated to put them together is a single place.
How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb? It's an obscure little number, you've probably never heard of it.
How many Missoulians does it take to screw in a light bulb. Just 1 but there are 400 applicants for the position.
How many UVA grads does it take to screw in a light bulb? 5 -- one to screw in the bulb, and 4 to tell stories about how great the old bulb was.
Night, all.
I spent a big chunk of today explaining light bulbs to hunter-gatherers, so I guess that's relevant to this thread.
(I had a client who owned a hotel in the Caribbean, and found it efficient to have the supply room just issue the staff unlimited light bulbs for their personal use. I'm in the Atlantic time zone tonight, but not quite that third world.)
98 is a very good point. Why should we assume that palaeo populations weren't also in a state of constant slow motion or even fast motion genocide? Isn't it a bit racist to assume "oh, of course everyone lived in blissful innocent harmony with no squabbles until a few hundred years ago when we invented cruelty?"
66: analysis of causes of death from burial sites.
129: famously in the USSR you could buy a burned out light bulb in a street market for five times the price of a new one in a shop. Puzzle question: why?
Well, we can probably assume that the power/lethality differentials aren't as extreme. Also I think you need a fair bit of available societal surplus to really do genocide properly, although that may be just me being optimistic.
66: analysis of causes of death from burial sites.
And how many of those do we have? And, more importantly, how do we know that they're representative of overall mortality rates? Lots of violent deaths are from soft-tissue injuries that would leave no trace after thousands of years.
(That said, I personally have no doubt that the pre-agricultural world was extremely violent, just as the agricultural world has been and continues to be.)
130 My first thought is to imagine how one would construct a vodka still out of burned out light bulbs but of course the answer must be to swap for a working bulb at one's place of work.
If you need a new light bulb because you have a broken one, why buy a broken one to exchange at the office when you already have a broken one? I wonder if the light bulb story is economists' BS.
To sell on the side is what I'm thinking.
There's got to be a good "in Soviet Russia" joke in here somewhere.
132: even in the sense of "driving people off their land"? That is what we're talking about here, not mass murder.
133: but that would lead to an underestimate of violence, not an overestimate.
139 - maybe? I'm just thinking about pre-European Māori warfare: occasionally yes driving off land & occupying it etc, but a lot of tit-for-tat raiding etc just because there wasn't the surplus available to keep combatants in the field for long stretches of time. (Pattern changed when the introduction of industrial military and agricultural technology changed Māori society significantly.) Which isn't to say that sporadic raiding isn't very lethal and unpleasant, it's just not genocidal.
(Māori were agriculturalists prior to contact so this isn't meant to be an analysis of "paleo" life, for that reason obviously as well as Buttercup's general points, just an example of organised violence in the context of a pretty spartan economy.)
139.1 "How do we receive them without killing them culturally or physically? We are learning," Meirelles says. "We have to accompany the process, staying with them so that their entry in our world is less painful. There is no recipe for success."
128 I spent a big chunk of today explaining light bulbs to hunter-gatherers, so I guess that's relevant to this thread.
More than that, I think you decisively win the thread.
If he weren't trying to convince them he was a wizard, sure.
Unfortunately, the demonstration was rendered ineffective by the lack of a socket.
Hate was just a legend. War was never known.
114:Appropriate to "slipping"
Why the fuck do I keep writing or thinking "Watanabe" instead of "Kawabata?" I do it every fucking time.