this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
236 points (90.7% liked)

pics

19395 readers
1 users here now

Rules:

1.. Please mark original photos with [OC] in the title if you're the photographer

2..Pictures containing a politician from any country or planet are prohibited, this is a community voted on rule.

3.. Image must be a photograph, no AI or digital art.

4.. No NSFW/Cosplay/Spam/Trolling images.

5.. Be civil. No racism or bigotry.

Photo of the Week Rule(s):

1.. On Fridays, the most upvoted original, marked [OC], photo posted between Friday and Thursday will be the next week's banner and featured photo.

2.. The weekly photos will be saved for an end of the year run off.

Weeks 2023

Instance-wide rules always apply. https://mastodon.world/about

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

People with poor risk management skills probably serve some useful purpose because we still have them, but they are not the cause of all human progress.

Specifically:

We’d still be living naked in the savanna if it weren’t for people like this.

Processing skins of kills has nothing to do with risk taking behavior, nor do the host of incremental adjustments that lead from skinning to tailored clothing.

Similarly our expansion into areas beyond the savannah has nothing to do with unnecessary risk taking, it's just the result of favourable conditions that increased the birth rate.

floated off to sea... They settled lands

Permanent human settlements aren't founded by rugged loners washing up on a new shore. It takes at minimum ~20 people and new sites are scouted well in advance to make sure they have sufficient resources to support a growing population.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago

It takes at minimum ~20 people and new sites are scouted well in advance to make sure they have sufficient resources to support a growing population.

I guess the argument here would be that the scouts are the risk-takers, which would be true to some extent. But it's not like successful scouts worked alone, and also there's no "discovery" happening in the context of free solo climbing.