Fearing historical population replacement ignores the fact that prehistoric societies lacked modern state mechanisms to integrate labor. When you treat modern economic migration like a prehistoric invasion, you end up building policies that actively destroy your own society to fight a ghost.
We are seeing the results of this irrationality right now in the agricultural sector. Because we are legislating based on prehistoric fear, the state is deploying unaccountable, militarized enforcement units and holding massive numbers of people in extrajudicial detention facilities stripped of congressional oversight. The consequence of treating a massive economic input as an ex-ante criminal invasion isn't a safer society. It's systemic self-sabotage. Local farming economies are being decimated, crops are rotting, and businesses are failing because the workforce is either locked up or terrified. Building a massive, authoritarian state apparatus to destroy your own labor supply and crush local economies isn't "rational self-preservation." It is an irrational panic that breaks the modern system in a futile attempt to solve a prehistoric problem.
People sometimes misunderstand this, so I'd better add: of course it's fine to use AI tools! We use them heavily ourselves. Just not to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on HN.
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
Just because some behavior made sense in a prehistoric society doesn't mean it does in a modern one.
In all places worth living we overcame those, and it was not something done irrationally.
Why should xenophobia, racism and such not follow the same path?
What people call “xenophobia” these days—which isn’t really xenophobia as properly understood—is just the flip side of ethnic affinity coin. If I come to America and declare that I’m a “proud south Asian” and indicate my affinity for my co-ethnics by joining various “south asian XXX associations,” then what reaction am I going to elicit from the people outside my ethnic group?
If you take a society that has been taught to abandon their own ethnic identity, and introduce into it foreigners with strong ethnic identity and in-group affinity of their own, you’re going to generate counterfeiting response. You can call it “xenophobia” or whatever you want, but the only way to overcome it is to strip subgroup identity altogether.
But when everybody were killed by invading foreigners, you talk about "the ills of xenophobia"??
It is rational to fear needles in the wilds of a back alleyway. Not so rational when we are in a doctor's office.
In present-day Turkey, people typically have 5–15% Turkic ancestry. For the most part, their ancestors called themselves Roman, or Greek, or Lydian, or Phrygian, or Hittite, or whichever culture happened to be dominant at the time. When new conquerors came, they pillaged a bit and put their own people in charge. Most commoners, and even many cooperative elites, would then continue their lives as before. If the new elites managed to stay in power, people would often gradually adopt their language, religion, and cultural identity.
As for the Aztecs, I found it amusing that the previous Mexican ambassador to the US was Esteban Moctezuma. Guess from which ancestor that name came from.
It is easy to reduce people to caricatures when we don't know them. Since we aren't at a happy hour regaling each other over the craziness of lives lived, I'll be brief: there have been periods of life where this assertion wasn't true.
Communities built themselves around food production and child rearing 2000-8000 years ago as they nominally do today. I think you may be overstating the disparity in experiencing the negatives (drought, disaster, and war) and ignoring that these conditions also happen today and sometimes also don't get resolved -- people die, starve, drink poisoned water, and so forth.
Give me an idyllic migration through bountiful pastures 20,000 years ago any day. Many hunter-gatherers work less than 40 hours a week, less than a worker in our modern society, who did not get laid off in past years as so many on this board were.
The original affluent society as it has been called.
Every hunt was fight for life and survival, any injury could be fatal and treatment was practically non existent, broken foot was almost sute death sentence. Winter (and each one was harsh) was barely survived in bitter 24/7 cold and a lot of starvation outside of tropical regions.
You have no actual clue nor imagination with your first world whining about toils of office work which you can easily abandon and not be dead with your family within 2 weeks. You can definitely do better than that.
Perhaps in history. But we humans have the ability to think and adjust our behavior. We didn't kill all the horse-people when we invented the car. It's likely that in the future we could be able to move past all the horrible things we do to each other.
The smallest definition of a tribe is usually 500 people. They can be 10 tines that size. Tribes did not exist until about 10,000 years ago. They were preceded by hunter-gatherer bands.
The inland Papuan group most associated with violence are the Enga, but they are not migratory hunter-gatheree bands. They are farmers who grow sweet potatoes and raise pigs.
What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.
Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.
There is little evidence of behavioral modernity - cave paintings, Venus figurines, hearths, burials etc. prior to 50,000 years ago. There is some evidence so the time could always be pushed back.
Farmers compete for land. Migratory hunter-gatherers are just passing through, so there is less competition for land. Also, bands usually mate with nearby bands, who are often more distant relatives.
There has not been much evidence of hunter-gatherer bands clashing violently then or even in modern times, including observations over past centuries. There is a plethora of evidence of post-neolithic farming and then industrial societies being this way.