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.