[andyjohnson0]

"Question: What does his nationality have to do with it though? Seems like an odd addition to the headline."

Seemed strange to me too. There was another instance of this a few days ago with the article "How British satellite company Inmarsat tracked down MH370" [1]. Is this a journalistic practice?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7463181

[stygianguest]

It was especially funny when Andre Geim won the Nobel prize and the Brits, Dutch and Russians all claimed him. Science and those who practice it know no borders.

Scientific funding, however, does. This is one reason why it is crucial that taxpayers can connect with scientific success. For ESA this is problematic because their success gets distributed, consequently most Europeans might not even know it exists.

[rayiner]

It lends human interest. Humans are inherently tribalistic, and one of the key ways we understand and categorize other humans is according to tribal affiliations.

[nitrogen]

This is an aspect of humanity that should be fought, not embraced and exploited.

[rayiner]

I strongly disagree. Tribalism is what allowed humans to survive into the modern age, and is a force that in this era of individualism keeps societies from unraveling. Humans will be tribal, it's just a matter of how tribal lines are drawn. In the era of globalization, tribal lines are increasingly being drawn along lines of wealth, class, and education which is in my opinion worse than drawing them along geographical boundaries.

In practice, the alternative to geographic tribalism isn't some broadly-inclusive egalitarianism. It's relatively wealthy and educated folks like us receding into circles with other relatively wealthy and educated folks.

[meric]

Very much agree. Taken to the extreme, complete suppression of tribalism would not only be extremely difficult but also extremely harmful to society, as even the love between children and parents will be destroyed in favor of egalitarian love. Our biological nature causes children to prefer their parents more than any other parents, and in doing so, prefer their siblings (their parent's other children), more than any other children, and prefer their parents' siblings and parents more than any other elderly persons and adults. It is this nature, as it radiates outwards, that causes one to feel greater love to those who are similar than those who are different.

I don't want to live in a world where children are taught to betray their parents in favor of their state, where children are taught to report on their parents for their crimes, where brothers treat each other as strangers, where husband betrays wife and vice versa, at the same time. I've already read about it in 1984.

The harm in suppressing this aspect of humanity comes from having to involve the state. It takes the state to educate children to report on their parents crimes. It takes the state to force children to attend schools to study the same subjects. It takes the state to extract wealth from parents to distribute it to other children. It takes the state to enact taxes on children to distribute their income amongst other parents. Taken to the extreme - you'll get a very big, very powerful state, because it must involve itself in everyone's personal relationships, to ensure equality amongst all. And with a big state, you get corruption, you get misallocations of capital, you get a concentration of power, all of which would lead to a state that would monitor its citizens every communication, to protect its power in actuality, and to maintain equality and protect its citizens in name. And, as you reduce every person's natural relationships, people will form relationships with others, leading to divisions not amongst genetic or even geographic lines, but amongst other arbitrary lines such as class and wealth, government and private. As a group of people gain control of state, the actions of the state will begin to benefit some, but not others, arbitrarily, so that in actuality equality (in wealth, status, whatever) will always only be an illusion, and inequality will always manifest itself in other ways, so that all those resources supporting a very big state to maintain equality, are mostly wasted, except in so far as it provides an illusion of equality, which it can maintain for only so long.

Oh, wait.

[gshubert17]

> Taken to the extreme, complete suppression of tribalism would not only be extremely difficult but also extremely harmful to society

I see part of the problem as the intensity of tribalism or reactions to it. People getting together because of shared preferences, locations, or ideas seems okay. Getting carried away causes problems.

[saraid216]

Presentism: making sure one doesn't have to acknowledge history in order to advance one's own tribal ideology. Good job!

[meric]

You've dismissed someone's carefully thought out reply with not arguments but with a one-liner with a word of jargon, an accusation of someone advancing an ideology through making comments buried many levels deep in random hacker news threads and a dash of sarcasm thrown in for good measure.

Go ahead and feel proud you've defended your mind from reasoning another person's thoughts and thinking up a rebuttal based on reasonable arguments. lol. :)

[andyjohnson0]

I agree that tribalism probably was one factor that allowed humans to survive to reach the modern era. However, that doesn't mean that it is still a desirable survival trait now that we're in that era. The world is vastly more populated than it was 30,000 years, or even 100 years, ago and the tribes are bigger and have more opportunities for conflict now.

[bdamm]

Tribalism is fine. It's nationalism that has proven disastrous.

[rayiner]

Nationalism is responsible for some of the most technologically advanced societies in recent history (the U.S. and Great Britain). Nationalism is a powerful force for motivating people across class divisions to work together to build things.

[throwaway7808]

I would very much agree. Tribalism should stand alongside the greatest achievements of humanity, like Religion, the discovery of War or "the invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them".