[marc_abonce]

> the mariners who found themselves on the island did not make a very good first impression as representatives of the larger outside world and that this contributed to the hostility towards outsiders that the Sentinelese exhibit.

The bad reputation that us outsiders have probably traces all the way back to the British intrusion into the island back in the XIXth century:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/north-sent...

[doodlebugging]

Thanks for that link. It doesn't reflect well on the British. A lot of colonial powers had similar interactions with people they encountered leaving large parts of many cultures destroyed by the changes they were forced to make.

[crossroadsguy]

Well unlike some invaders like Mughals to Indian subcontinent, the Brits never intended to settle overseas, definitely not in India. They went everywhere to loot, destroy, and leave when there was nothing more to loot or it was too tough to maintain control.

> doesn't reflect well on the British

Shocking!

[oa335]

> Brits never intended to settle overseas

What about Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and several Caribbean Islands?

[OJFord]

I think GP's definition of 'settle' that excludes 89 years of British Raj^ must certainly also exclude Australia, penal colony.

^which comprised many atrocities yes, but also expat rulers/officials, and building/development.

[dyauspitr]

It probably means never intended to settle overseas where they couldn’t exterminate the natives first.

[gosub100]

The fact that their level of innovation is on par with (ours - 2k years) reflects poorly on them, doesn't it? What is the end game, keep living like neanderthals until sea levels rise and they all swim or paddle away?

[doodlebugging]

There is no requirement that every culture evolve at the same pace and reach the same level of sophistication. Many cultures have reached a quiet, local equilibrium with their environment, having gained an understanding of everything around them and how best to utilize it for the success of the group.

Unfortunately some are extinct now because of the idea that they are somehow less advanced than they should be considering the environment that their culture occupied upon first contact with their more technologically advanced human relatives.

OT:

Gosub100, that's pretty BASIC and gave me a chuckle. It's been a long time since I thought about BASIC. The days where you would buy a computer and pick the programming language and OS that you want to use with it passed a long time ago. Maybe it's what we really need today though.

[wruza]

On one hand this, on the other, being born there is a live sentence. The thought that somewhere exists a kid just like I was, but his fate is to pick roots and other local equilibrium things, all his life… bitter. He’ll never learn about gosub or for-next. If I were among the people who send aid, the first thing I’d send was ‘80s-style OS tablets with infographic manuals how to make games and bulky batteries with solar panels to run these. Because parents have taken me on an “island” in the summer and there was nothing to do except to socialize with clearly criminal peers and the internet was not a thing.

[liamwire]

Yet it was exactly this line of thinking that led to, as one example, the Stolen Generations in Australia, and similar atrocities around the world. Maybe they don’t need our saving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations

[wruza]

Oh, that slippery slope again! First you give them tablets, and next day their

children were forcibly taken from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970

Excuse me, but this is pretty much different line of thinking from mine. I’m confident that they don’t need children forcibly taken from their families, sure. But tablets are okay.

[jodrellblank]

It was this line of thinking which lead to the One Laptop Per Child failure. See "Why do Western Designs fail in Developing Countries" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGRtyxEpoGg

OLPC is discussed from ~9 minutes in, but the whole thing is relevant. OLPC started when Seymour Papert and Nicholas Negroponte went to Senegal to teach people to code, and found that there was no good reason to learn to code if you live in rural Senegal and people were not interested. They decided they knew better and doubled down, making the OLPC project, and when presenting their laptop to the world the African delegation at the conference objected to spending money on laptops instead of infrastructure, schools, water. Negroponte decided the target users didn't know better than him what they needed, so he ignored them.

"One of the things people told me is, look Nicholas you can't just give a kid a laptop and walk away. Yes you can". he said. And he did. And almost none of the kids did any coding on the laptops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

[crossroadsguy]

I assume you mean modern tablets. Shall we pick Android or iOS? Because since we are in the business of civilising why the hell not! And if Android, then can we begin with an e-ink display? :)

[doodlebugging]

Still OT but a nice segue that jogs my memories of the first PCs that I had available. A friend's Dad bought him a Compaq Deskpro that looked a lot like a portable sewing machine with QuickBASIC and my parents bought me a 128k Mac and QuickBASIC for the Mac. We jointly developed software using QuickBASIC that ran under Apple's System5? OS and various DOSes in PC land (DRDOS, OS/2, DOS2-5, Windows 286 and 3.1, etc).

I think that if you initiated your plan to send those tablets, etc that you should consider sending late 90's model tablets (there weren't many tablet style computers until the 90's I think) with period correct software since a lot of the personal computers, OSes and programming languages available for the 80's rigs required use of multiple disks due to memory and hard drive space constraints.

Far too many times I would be in the middle of an operation and be met with a prompt to load a specific disk from the set of disks for the software that I was using so that the software could perform some operation that wouldn't fit in memory on the disks that had already been read. If you passed them around to kids today they might quickly lose interest in the process. You could of course use those old school PCs to help teach them something of computer architecture and operations so that they can more easily grasp the functionality than if they were handed modern rigs with huge hard drives and zero disk space issues so that things run so quickly there is no time to teach about Disk I/O, clock speeds, etc.

Anyway, thanks for this.

[wruza]

Yeah, I meant “style”, not literal 80s tech. I’m just used to subtracting a few years due to growing up in the location that had everything too late. I think that for learning the pre-IBM-PC spirit would be the best. Basically a ROM BASIC style “OS” with an SSD chip as RAM+ROM and some mainstream embedded CPU chip. Flat everything, but in abundance. The key idea here is to give them INKEY, LINE,BF and PSET before they learn to integrate a payment widget into their wordpress deployment.

[MrVandemar]

> On one hand this, on the other, being born there is a live sentence. The thought that somewhere exists a kid just like I was, but his fate is to pick roots and other local equilibrium things, all his life… bitter.

You're judging the possible happiness of someone in a completely different geography and culture according to your own.

Just because you depend on wifi for your happiness, that doesn't mean everyone does.

The hypothetical kid probably has excellent, fulfilling relationships with his family and friends, probably feels satisfied with a meal of fish that you couldn't even imagine how good it tastes, is content with the sounds of nature, singing, staring into a fire and telling stories. Perhaps he can trap, kill and prepare an animal for eating and enjoys the esteem of his peers for doing so.

He doesn't owe rent. He doesn't need insurance. He doesn't worry about getting to work 5 minutes late, or working overtime, or whether the apples are "organic" or contaminated with pesticides, his parents are always home -- and probably his whole village or tribe are his family and teachers.

That kid has his own way of being happy and fulfilled and content, just as valid -- and perhaps more so -- than yours.

[wruza]

You got it backwards. I’m not judging him if that’s the case. I’m just empathetic to the ones that may exist as described.

And no, I don’t believe in the happy-life-in-the-forest. The first thing “aboriginals” do is to get themselves sneakers, t-shirts and soap. Although I’m not gonna defend or explore this further, believe what you believe.

As far as I’m informed, particularly Sentinelese don’t even have a constant fire to enjoy that tasty fish I couldn’t even imagine.

[jodrellblank]

> And no, I don’t believe in the happy-life-in-the-forest.

Jon Jandai moved from a village in rural Thailand to Bangkok, and took up a fulltime labouring job. He struggled to afford enough food to eat, slept in a shared room which was too hot, saved for a month to buy a pair of jeans to wear and realised he was still the same person and still unhappy, and he saw house prices out of reach with educated high-earners working for 30 years to pay a mortgage.

He didn't like it, and moved back to his village. He spends a month planting rice and a month harvesting rice and gets enough rice to feed his family of six for a year, and several times more than that leftover to sell at the market. 2 months a year work, ten months free time. He spends fifteen minutes a day tending a half-acre garden and gets enough vegetables for six people to eat, and more to sell at the market. And he fishes. He built a house with earthen building in 3 months.

He self-reports being much much happier, whether you believe it or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21j_OCNLuYg

[doodlebugging]

>As far as I’m informed, particularly Sentinelese don’t even have a constant fire to enjoy that tasty fish I couldn’t even imagine.

Actually they apparently do have a constant fire if they are anything like the related groups living on neighboring islands.

From the link describing technologies available in the region [0] please see the part about fire. If you follow the link back to other chapters fire is also mentioned so that it becomes apparent that it is an important thing in their culture. One link somewhere had an entry that described them as preferring to remain in their camps at night and being afraid of the dark.

Anyway, enjoy the chapters in that book if you have. There's a lot there.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20070715023903/http://www.andama...

[MrVandemar]

That's an excruciatingly blinkered opinion.

Ignoring the fact that our own level of "innovation" as you call it is built on centuries of brutal exploitation of land and resources and people.

And the "sea level rise" you mention is a consequence of that "innovation", and our enlightened culture keeps building houses next to the sea using energy sources that contribute to the rising sea-level.

Very little of what you buy these days is what it costs (a) to manufacture it and (b) to dispose of it. Where are those costs bourne? Slaves for (a) and the future and other-peoples-back-yards for (b).

So, I would say that their culture is sustainable, and doesn't have even one percent of our own self-inflicted, self-destructive, intractable problems.

[aqueueaqueue]

They wait out the great AI war then repopulate the planet. Maybe?