I can't help it but I do not trust many of the told events here. Some of the events have as much twists and turns as a childish cartoon show. I can understand people killing for revenge but someone finding reason for revenge because a toddler took a piece of meat to eat and that led to a dead dog just seems so insane to me. Insane because these same people are capable of hunting, socializing and crafting stuff which definetely require intelligence. Yet the leaps of logic and reason they make to put the blame on someone to exact revenge on are enormous. Maybe it is all true but I cannot comprehend it.
While I share your sentiment of not putting too much trust in a single source, I find that particular story complete believable.
It is common display of power, to force everyone to have to accept a post facto explanation for something either directly or indirectly violent. The actual explanation doesn't have to make sense, it exists solely to project power. It's not too far from several contemporary political events.
I have personal experience with people who behave like this. These same behavioral patterns, this same sort of thinking / interpreting the world. The level of violence was different by degree, barely contained by law, by what is commonly accepted, and by visibility.
It so happens that in this case there was a long-time cocaine abuser and addict who I believe also might have
traumatic brain injury. Cocaine and traumatic brain injury have a severe impact on the inflammatory response in the central nervous system – increasing inflammation – which is also behavior-modifying, increasing aggression. Environmental stress also has a similar effect on the brain and behavior.
It’s easy to notice multiple examples of severe head injury in the story. Social and environmental stress is severe as well. (I don’t think cocaine is involved; I mention cocaine in the context because it’s something that’s available in our modern enviroment which causes brain inflammation, cognitive impairment, and violence. These effects are provided by other things in the story.)
In the story I also recognize the violent and “dream logic”-like elements from the onset of dementia. I’m sure that hardships such as these people live in will bring about dementia-like effects and alterations. Bodies wear out, and the brain is part of the body. It is not the fundamental nature of the brain to wear out in silence and grace.
These behaviors are all in our nature. All of them. It’s just a question of latent tendencies, of impairment, and what sort of survival mode is brought about by which sort of environment.
(There is science on the claims I make here. There are papers out on this. Google Scholar suggestions: neuroinflammation + aggression + cytokine, cocaine + tbi + cytokine, cocaine + neuronflammation. Interleukin-6 (IL-6) in particular is an interesting cytokine with profound roles.
There are also parallels with malignant narcissism and the lack of object constancy. “Lack of object constancy” is specific and almost technical. Haphazard take on that: Reasons for senseless actions are not necessarily derived from the grounded reality of memory. Rather, sometimes with humans the reasons for violence are on-the-fly ad-hoc justifications fully experienced as memories by the person, generated “live” by, say, fear and anger and the hunger for power and dominance.
My apologies for not supplying actual citations. I wish I had the oomph. I appeal to your curiosity.)
The concept of zero had to be invented. Inferential logic appears to be a meme that spread early in our development but isn’t an instinctual behavior from our dna.
Without memetic viral ideas like civilization we are very close to our other ape relatives like chimpanzees who live similar to this, in that they live very in the moment with a highly volatile social dynamic. It’s not outside the realm of reason that some random tribe/s of humanity didn’t pick up intellectual technologies that we assume are big standard because of how widespread they are in our civilization.
That being said, I’d also not trust this 100% given the lack of sourcing or veracity and how many human opinions are interjected, I just wanted to point out that the story is plausible
I think the thing to note is that both of her primary partners were chiefs. I think such high-ranking men are probably not representative of the typical Yanomamo man. Rising to the top of such groups likely requires a good deal of psychopathy. A measure of charm, but also a reputation for intolerance of sleights, volatility, and gratuitous violence. The article also explains that she didn't accept any husband except the two men that explicitly threatened to kill her if she refused--so in a sense she was indirectly selecting for this type of man.
An interesting read on this topic is the very book being dissed in the article--Napoleon Chagnon's "Noble Savages". According to this article, Chagnon met the Yanomamo in a state more exposed to our civilization, but even then many of the high-ranking men come across exactly as I described above: charming when they want, but volatile and gratuitously violent. Two episodes from the book stand out in my memory.
- A chief encounters two young men from a rival clan. They are nervous because of this man's reputation, but he calls out to them and offers them food, charms them and puts them at ease. Then he walks behind them and kills them. In his opinion, this is hilarious.
- A man suddenly believes his wife has cheated on him. He drags her out by her hair, punches and kicks her head repeatedly. Chagnon is aghast and almost intervenes. I don't recall whether the woman survives.
I also believe that in a sense she was indirectly selecting for this type of man. The article also mentions that she refused the one man where she found the threat to be unconvincing, which kind of suggests that in contrast, her two "accepted" husbands had made even more convincing murder threats.
"I think such high-ranking men are probably not representative of the typical Yanomamo man. Rising to the top of such groups likely requires a good deal of psychopathy. "
It is not at all that clear to me. The thing with psychopathy at least. We have about 15 per cent of psychopaths up there (compared to the societal average of 1 per cent). Contrary to the general myth, even most high-ranking Nazis were paper-pushing conformists rather than psychopaths like Oskar Dirlewanger. Would the Amerindian society fare very differently?
First, the groups are relatively small. 100 to 150 persons at most, not a whole country like Weimar Germany. Given high mortality and the fact that women didn't become chiefs, your purely numeric chance of becoming a chief was reasonably high if you lived to be 35 or so, just from the fact that you lived and had a lot of valuable experience (in an illiterate society, the elders are a vital knowledge source). Also, this was a fission-fusion society: smaller groups separated under their own chiefs, went their own way, then came back and fused for some time again. Which opened some positions of "junior chiefs" to prove themselves.
Too much eagerness to engage in violence will likely get you killed at a younger age. Serious injuries amount to death in the forest, and even many lighter ones. If you really "optimize for max violence", odds are that you will be killed soon. You cannot win every battle, and some of the deaths described by Valero were basically murders from behind.
There was certainly luck involved, but also a mix of other attributes, including your ability to fight. But it is not clear to me that psychopaths would have a decisive advantage. It is fundamentally physically dangerous to be a violent psychopath in a society with zero healthcare.
I don't think we have to look that deep into this. Fusiwe was a man with a short fuse and bad decisions. His dog died, he got frustrated and he snapped at someone. Helena was the one who he happened to hit. I don't think it was likely to be the result of some complicated calculation.
Similarly the article is asking the question "Why did Helena succeed?" Undeniable all the factors they list are true. She was intelligent, perceptive, sociable, made friends, and calculated risks in her life. But the other very important factor is that she was lucky. Perhaps the most important factor. There are thousands and thousand of other alternate histories where we don't hear about her because the jaguar got her, or the poison arrow kills her, or an infection kills her, or Fusiwe hits her on the head instead on the arm and kills her instantly.
> Similarly the article is asking the question "Why did Helena succeed?" Undeniable all the factors they list are true. She was intelligent, perceptive, sociable, made friends, and calculated risks in her life. But the other very important factor is that she was lucky.
I don't think the role of luck is particularly significant. The article's question isn't interesting. It's not difficult for women to succeed in the sense of the article: she lived and had children. I would guess that she was below average for the society, and the modal Yanomamo woman experienced many fewer attempts on her life than Helena did.
> I don't think we have to look that deep into this. Fusiwe was a man with a short fuse and bad decisions. His dog died, he got frustrated and he snapped at someone. Helena was the one who he happened to hit.
I did say that "any random person" was a plausible choice. But Helena is more likely because there is a real sense in which she was responsible for the problem. The fact that she's part of his household also probably makes her a more likely target. Start breaking the arms of random people from your village and you'll see a lot of your political support start to waver.
> I did say that "any random person" was a plausible choice.
And I'm saying that it was not a __choice__. A violent man committed one more violent act in a life full of violent acts. Calling it a choice and thinking it in terms of pros and cons makes it sound like a much more deliberative act.
> Start breaking the arms of random people from your village and you'll see a lot of your political support start to waver.
Which is exactly what happened with him.
> I don't think the role of luck is particularly significant.
Perhaps, if you just didn't bother reading my comment.
We have someone who was very badly suited to her culture and achieved results that were well below average.
She didn't die, which is the article's metric of success.
Women who fit into the culture better, a large majority of Yanomamo women, also didn't die, and this is unsurprising because our case study didn't die even after screwing up in major ways several different times.
This is why luck is insignificant - even if you do very badly, you'll still succeed. Success is nearly guaranteed, and therefore there isn't a role for luck to play in it.
Luck could have made the difference between Helena succeeding and failing - she might have been eaten by a jaguar. But that was not a risk for a normal Yanomamo woman.
> Perhaps, if you just didn't bother reading my comment.
I assure you I did read your comment. Carefully and multiple times.
I disagree with it as I wrote. Doesn't mean that I didn't read it.
> This is why luck is insignificant - even if you do very badly, you'll still succeed.
I really don't understand your reasoning here. She was lucky. Random things turned out well enough for her so she could tell her story and let us hear it. That is where the luck is significant. You can't argue from the fact that she was lucky, that luck wasn't significant.
If she wasn't lucky and the jaguar eat her, if she wasn't lucky and the poisoned arrow killed her, if she wasn't lucky and the chief she mocked have executed her we would not know about her.
She didn't survive because she was so careful with things. She didn't survive because her environment was free of dangers. She survived because she rolled the darwinian roulette wheel (multiple times) and things happened to work out randomly well enough for her to survive. Therefore the role of luck is significant.
You are basically saying "well it worked out okay, so what is the fuss about it". But some of these things only worked out for her due to luck. I read your comment (multiple times!) and still confused how can you can think that the role of luck is insignificant. Especially when you agree that the jaguar could have killed her.
> But that was not a risk for a normal Yanomamo woman.
Ok? Two things. One: What do we care? We are talking about Helena and the significance of luck in her life. Even if the normal Yanomamo woman were 100% impervious to jaguar attacks wouldn't change anything about Helena. The jaguar is a danger to her. Avoiding it is up to luck for her.
Two: how do you know? Do you have some good data source on the relative probabilities on jaguar attacks on the normal Yanomamo woman? Or just making assumptions? For all we know it might be danger to everyone living in that environment.
Domestic violence is pervasive even today. There is unfortunately nothing special about Fusiwe breaking the arm of his spouse in anger, it could have been some Dr. Frank in Minneapolis in the very same year instead.
The only difference is that tribes living in an open forest don't have much "familial secrets": nothing can happen behind closed doors if you live in a place with no doors to begin with. So everybody knew, and in absence of strong taboos to the contrary, such behavior was normalized.
It absolutely did. A violently broken arm with a stick can result in an open wound where the sharp end of the broken bone sticks out (an open fracture). This, happening in a rainforest with no doctors around, is a recipe for a deadly infection. We don't think about limb fractures per se as being too serious, but this is only true in the context of developed countries of the last 100 years or so.
Fusiwe absolutely could have caused a mortal injury to her, even though it wouldn't have been immediately fatal.
That kind of motivated reasoning is pretty common in history and today. Look at the Salem witch trials, how Jews have been scapegoated throughout history, etc.
This isn't about intelligence, this is about how you view other people. And what are your beliefs about emotion control - is it your responsibility to control yourself, or is it others people responsibility to not make you angry.
Anecdote : your comment striked me, as I was in almost the same situation (but with dead chicken, instead of dog) and my family member, very intelligent, highly respected engineer screamed at the child and hit the mother because "It was their fault". And this was one of the more "sane" reasons for their abuse.
Having a language that generates proper errors, does not try to hold your hand incorrectly and instead tells you you are wrong is always better.
Haskell is one of the best in the world in this. But it also happens to be incredibly complex and also weird in it's syntax, to the point it does make code fringe and unreadable.
There is a real difference here - a language that can help you fact check your logic and reason that you are accessing a potentially null value in this context can be better if it's drawbacks don't outweight it.
Elixir isn't static so it doesn't do this but it does blow up a lot compared to other dynamic languages. It's abstraction of proccesses and threads and what not, does actually make your code more portable and more modifyable. It offers a specific paradigm for programming that works great for multiple proccesses and the whole language is built around it. So if you are going to be using that paradigm anyway it would be a better choice.
Just because it hasn't taken over the world it doesn't mean it's proponents adorations are baseless ?
I agree that the article falls flat on providing descriptive reasons how Elixir compliments machine learning. But that shouldn't be an argument against the product, but rather against it's cult following that does not provide sufficiently detailed and advanced examples and explanations. Something extremely common in tech journalism.
Good ideas and technologies do get underappreciated and wide spread adoption I would wager is not at all correlated to quality. Javascript, c++, java and others are good examples. Yes they have taken over the world at one point, but there are better designed languages out there. It just seems that people don't want to relearn a new paradigm and you can write software on anything.
one simple example: what Jose Valim calls Distributed²
You can have a livebook (similar to notebook, but distributed and live) and distribute your load not only on multiple GPUs on your machine, but on multiple GPUS on multiple machines
You wouldnt use json path as replacement to any language. It might be marginally useful in configurations or passing queries between different services. But the complex syntax limits it in both cases, because you cannot easily automatically modify the query. In the case of configs it would be great to analyze hundreds of configs on different systems and change them automaticaly, same with queries exchanged between services which might even get stored in a database.
I do not understand why domain languages aren't designed with limited syntax in mind. In the style of lisp for instance. Because actually being able to programatically work with the language is a massive advantage that imo far outweights your own frustration with typing a paranthesis or two extra.
Weird for me the phrasing "presents a fundamentally different issue" is so hackernews-like. "Can be equated with theft" also. I feel like I have seen them a thousand times on here from regular old people.
The oversimplified version is Laplac's deamon can't split quantum superposition.
Superposition being inseparable is a large part on why the many words concept is popular with some people. It is about regaining a form of determinism.
A question that came to me as I was reading the article was - what makes us think that all protons are the same ? Can it be that instead of every proton having a superposition of 3 quarks, or 5 quarks or more, we have some protons with 3 and others with 5 ? How did they verify that this is not a case ? I am assuming they never managed to isolate 1 proton and test it twice.
I have never in my life felt that countries matter. That a person might be better off in one country than another. As such I cannot understand the feelings in this article even though I am Bulgarian and know the events by heart.
My parents spent 15 years of their life in Spain and hated every second of it. They hated it so much because I wasn't there with them. And they had a horrinle opinion of the culture and daily life there.
While in opposite my 2 uncles that went with them and took their own kids with them, like it there and have never went back.
I with half the life span of my parents believe that personal issues and events completely eclipse any effect the political and cultural environment has. For me political and/or cultural events were just a new conversation topic in my social circles. Something to be part of because well everyone is part of it.
All my life I've been told that there is opportunity abroad, there is opportunity in the capital, in X large city. But opportunity isn't somewhere it just arises sometimes. I know for sure that opportunity doesn't come while sitting in one place you don't like.
But what I am trying to say is that: cities and countries aren't really colored in a specific way. They aren't dull, closed, eventful and such, they just are places. They have as much effect on an individual as does a single individual on them. Even so undoubtedly some places have a personal color to us - my parents will never again try to work in Spain and it would not end well if they did. I myself will never go back to the town of my high school, but others like it there.
I am a Czech with a Bulgarian father and I understood the feelings in this article perfectly. The 90s were pretty similar all across the former Eastern Bloc, excluding Russia proper; a time of massive change and also hope for a better future.
Well, better future is here, but there is nothing more to aspire to anymore. No radical improvement to hope for. All changes are now marginal and usually translate to "more stuff in shops".
Also, I would say that countries and cities are plenty colored. There is a world apart between, say, cosmopolitan St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. If the mentality of the former held sway in Russia, there probably would be no war.
(And yeah, I know that Putin's rise to power happened in Petersburg first, but he didn't really fit into the spirit of the city and now dwells elsewhere.)
Ofc those Russian people who are unhappy with the status quo in Putin's Reich will shut up right now. The propaganda that streams into the world is coordinated and one of the prevailing motifs is "united Holy Russia against all the enemies".
But Putin's mafia is still somewhat afraid to start mobilization in Petersburg and Moscow. Both cities are a potential mutiny threat, full of young people including students, and not easy to subdue if shit hits the fan.
Peterburg is the more global of those two, as contact with Sweden, Finland and Estonia was extensive prior to the war, while the location of the city with respect to the core of Russia is a bit peripheral. The ports of Helsinki and Tallinn used to have a thick schedule of ferries there.
Russia as a whole cannot become part of the EU, not in 30 years at least, possibly ever. But, in the improbable case of St. Petersburg seceding from the empire, we could integrate them a lot better than some Balkan states.
I live in St. Petersburg but my family and friends live in Moscow, in the South and elsewere.
The last thing I desire is having a border with passport control and customs between them and me. No amount of kissing with your Swedish and Baltic friends would compensate for that.
Russians are no longer fools, they now understand how that particular meat grinder works.
> I have never in my life felt that countries matter. That a person might be better off in one country than another.
I think the people walking across central America to escape violence only to risk more of the same at borders, or taking rickety boats across the sea knowing full well that many of them sink killing everyone aboard, would strongly disagree with you.
> I with half the life span of my parents believe that personal issues and events completely eclipse any effect the political and cultural environment has.
I see where this is coming from, but sometimes events beyond our control - whether it's a lahar coming down a mountain, tanks firing rounds through your house, or a revolution that means your family are suddenly pariahs - can eclipse absolutely anything else, because suddenly those people who you have personal issues with are no longer people, but just meat that's no longer breathing or thinking. And some countries tend to have significantly fewer volcanic eruptions, or violent uprisings, or transfers-of-power at the end of a gun.
For my taste Yt music has almost everything, but spotify hardly has half my playlist.
I've found most of the music I listen to through youtube. So it's not suprising.
But I'd wager that almost every song on spotify is uploaded to youtube as a video. Then it should be available on yt music unless they have flagged massive amounts of videos as not musical.
