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0 pointsPittleyDunkin1y ago0 comments

> I think that minimizes the fact that people were deliberately curating and designing perennial food forests, historically and contemporarily.

I don't see this minimization (after all, we currently do this unintentionally today and nobody sees this as lack of intelligence and I certainly hope I never implied that people in the past were in any way less capable than ourselves) but I do affirm that people were just as capable of understanding the causes and effects of plant reproduction as they are today.

I'm just freely speculating on how to find the most minimal path to explanation and it's easier to explain the differences in the rise of civilization in the middle east vs the new world with other factors rather than something cultural or genetic or otherwise abstractly geographically-bound factors. And besides, I like the idea that people in the past wouldn't have just sat around ruminating how to maximize crop yields but had more fruitful activities to attend to. I don't celebrate the egyptian engineer who figured out how to haul a multi-ton brick up a high slope, I mourn for him (or her)!

EDIT: softened wording a bit

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5 comments · 1 top-level

hosh1y ago· 4 in thread

I've been on a quest to find out what went wrong with modernity. Looking through the history, I found out the Renaissance was not what I thought it was. The history of the Silk Roads were not what I thought it was. And I haven't revisited the history of the industrial revolution, but it looks so far, that is where the obsession with maximizing productivity, gains, and work all come from. It is very likely when I look at it again, it is not what I thought it was either.

The significance of perennial food forests is that it's a practice that comes from a very different world view than our normative one that came from the industrial revolution. Yet there's a tendency to evaluate something like a perennial food forest from the world view of maximizing productivity. Maybe we're talking past each other a bit -- I have not put a lot of thought into the difference in how civilizations arose in the old world vs the new world. The patterns of design for something like the perennial food forests in the Americas have shown up in the Old World as well.

I haven't found Occam's Razor very effective in explanatory powers. Treating the minimum path as the floor is one thing; treating it as the most probable theory (and then making decisions based upon it) is something I have concluded for myself as folly. Just my personal opinion; I'm aware I don't hold a popular opinion.

PittleyDunkinOP1y ago

> treating it as the most probable theory (and then making decisions based upon it) is something I have concluded for myself as folly.

Sure, but your tools reasoning about the past are quite limited. Occam's Razor helps us identify where narrative elements are unnecessary for an explanation, and in that it's quite useful. For most of history we must rely on Occam's Razor to even construct any sort of probability model. After all what's easier to believe—acting like the historical record was fabricated with the intent of deceiving us, or acting like the people who wrote the historical records generally had rational reasons to do so? The basis for preferring the latter is inherently an application of Occam's Razor.

underlipton1y ago

You're misusing Occam's Razor because of a misunderstanding about indigenous people's capacity for engineering.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24712701

https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-8/targeted-interventions...

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/indigenous-peoples-have...

Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest actively encouraged the formation of geological structures in order to increase shellfish yield and sustainability. You seem to think that the simplest explanation is that people just copied happy accidents, when the level of sophistication of these systems combined with the documented propensity of humans to actively engineer their way out of problems leads to the simplest explanation being that what we see with both the food forests and mariculture is such active engineering.

The only way to come to a different conclusion is to assume that something is fundamentally different between Old World and New World populations just because one group's processes are relatively well-documented and the other's isn't. However, that conclusion would be colored by your relative inexperience with the shape of New World solutions. We're just discovering these phenomena because we didn't have the vision to see that they existed, biased as we are to the Eurasian perspective. If all you know are wheels, you won't recognize llama tracks, as it were.

hosh1y ago

It's been my experience with myself and observing people that beliefs can form in both reasonable and unreasonable ways. While people often times have reasons of their own, I've learned not to take it for granted, or even assume that my reconstruction of those reasoning is correct.

alganet1y ago

> I've been on a quest to find out what went wrong with modernity.

The late bronze age collapse. Humanity fucked up so bad we don't even know what happened. Everything since then has been meh. Future humans might still see us as in some form of iron age.

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