[zach_garwood]

How do you figure? Every day they make the choice to live like they do, just like you make the choice to live in your town doing whatever it is you do. If you wanted to live a different lifestyle, you could pick a direction, go there, and live like the people there. They choose not to. That sounds like liberty to me.

[luckylion]

What? Stone age people made "a choice" to live in the stone age? Could they have just chosen to live in the space age instead? How does that work?

[lazide]

I’m not sure how you figure.

In the scenario you’re describing (a walled off preserve), said folks could decide to join ‘the space age’ by walking to the next valley if they wanted to.

And that is someone Stone Age folks did regularly, walk to other valleys.

In the real Stone Age, that means they see another group of Stone Age folks. In the space age scenario, that means they get exposure to some space age stuff.

So they’d be making the choice to stay, by staying, if they don’t do that.

No one is building a fence to keep them in, just like no one was working to keep ‘the man of the hole’ in. If someone does make a fenced off area around them that is impossible to escape, then sure that could be a problem. It’s a prison then.

But that’s not what anyone is proposing I can see.

They were just working to keep others from going in and screwing with him.

He knew there were others out there, he just didn’t want to be bothered - and they were trying to help him do that.

[luckylion]

> In the space age scenario, that means they get exposure to some space age stuff.

But they don't, unless they actually get exposed to it. "They've heard a machine and it was loud and terrible and knocked over a tree" doesn't mean they're making an informed decision, because e.g. they don't know surgery or antibiotics.

> They were just working to keep others from going in and screwing with him.

And that's fine, but he's not making an informed decision to stay in the the forest because he prefers that way of life. He's doing what he knows and doesn't do what he doesn't know. That's not a choice. Before Fosbury developed the Fosbury Flop, other athletes weren't choosing to not jump that way.

[lazide]

Why is this distinction important to you exactly?

By the criteria you seem to be using, I’m not sure it’s possible for anyone to ever make an informed consent about 99% of anything, since practically speaking there are near infinite possible options available for almost every action, almost all of them impractical or pointless to even discuss, and most of them more damaging than they are worth to even bring up.

For example, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable requirement that someone spends a bunch of time doing cocaine so they understand it, in order to not want to do cocaine.

If the tribe wanted to know more about the big scary machines, they are free to try to contact the folks and learn more.

If they want to stay away from the giant shitshow that is modern society, that’s fine too. I can’t necessarily blame them either!

They don’t need to spend a lifetime learning all the myriad reasons why just to not be exposed to all the myriad reasons why.

[luckylion]

It's important because people started talking about choice. What they mean, I assume, is "let them live in peace", which I fully agree with. But this whole "no, they've chosen that lifestyle" is dumb. It implies that they know the alternatives and somehow arrived at that lifestyle as the one they preferred. That's nonsense on e.g. the North Sentinalese islanders. I dislike changing the meaning of words because it sounds nice, it ruins communication.

> For example, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable requirement that someone spends a bunch of time doing cocaine so they understand it, in order to not want to do cocaine.

And I would mostly agree with that, if it weren't for the fact that you can read about drugs and their effect and learn something about it. It's limited, and you should be very aware of the fact that you have a very limited understanding of the alternatives, but it's not comparable to "I don't know that cocaine exists, therefore I have chosen not to consume it". That's just ignorance, not choice.

[lazide]

Ignorance is a choice, when it requires action (or intentional inaction) to maintain it. I’m not sure why you seem to think it isn’t.

In the cocaine example, If I stay away from reading about recreational drugs, and don’t put anything that I don’t know what’s in it in my body, why should I ever have to know or care about cocaine at all? Is that not a choice with the same effect, but also without all the work and risk involved in doing all that research and potentially trying something that is more dangerous to me than would be obvious?

Forcing someone to know something is removing their ability to make those choices.

Having Agency/Self Determination means being able to make that choice, even when others don’t agree with it, or it causes potential problems for someone. That is the cost (and privilege) of ownership.

In a society, we infringe that for members of our society when the society overall thinks it justifies the costs. Vaccinations for kids before they go to school, to stop large scale outbreaks and death for instance. Or mandatory public education.

But that is for folks raised in and part of the overall fabric already, and impossibly intertwined with it.

Doing that for someone outside of it makes no sense.

For one (less extreme) example, The Amish (if they’re devout) aren’t being deprived because they aren’t being forced to learn how to program in C or whatever. They’re making choices to intentionally not go there, for their own reasons. They are free to change that if they want.

If you want to argue that their kids or whatever don’t get to choose, that’s all kids everywhere.

Unless they are offending us in some serious way that we can’t stand by and ignore, we’ve generally all agreed to let everyone live and let live, since otherwise it produces worse abuse and deprives them of their right to live the way they want.

But if you want to say that it’s societies obligation to ‘fix that’, you’re treading a very dark and dangerous path.

The same path that resulted in the ‘aboriginal schools’ in Australia, Canada, etc. and the reservations, missions, forced conversions etc. in the US and their massive and terrible abuses.