[thaumasiotes]

Try looking at the problem from the other direction:

One of your favorite dogs just died. You need to punish someone for this. Who will it be?

Your options are:

(1) The toddler who fed the dog something that it choked on;

(2) The woman of your household who allowed the toddler to do that; or

(3) Any random person who has absolutely no connection to the events.

All three options look plausible to me, but in particular there's nothing ridiculous about picking (2).

[krisoft]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

[krisoft]

> 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.

Only lucky people think that. :)

[thaumasiotes]

> Only lucky people think that. :)

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.

[krisoft]

> 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.

[inglor_cz]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

> There is unfortunately nothing special about Fusiwe breaking the arm of his spouse in anger

That is not one of the events that put Helena's survival at risk.

[inglor_cz]

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.