[lhorie]

I saw a video on YouTube recently from an independent content creator who went to look for these mythical sea nomads, and apparently what he found was that the idyllic scene of a remote tribe living off the land with highly refined but primitive fishing techniques was largely fabricated.

The locals were alegedly just going along with the westerner film makers, partly because in their eyes, participating in a mockumentary was an amusing opportunity that doesn't come along every day.

He then tried to get them to show him how they really fish, and it turns out they use modern gear like flippers and wet suits but also do incredibly dangerous things like breathing out of a tube connected to a machine on a small boat in the middle of the night.

The video doesn't get into the exact science, but it also looks like the fishing isn't sustainable either, as divers reported needing to progressively dive deeper/take bigger risks over time to find high yields.

[bpodgursky]

Well it's entirely possible both are true; this mutation allowed them to fish more efficiently for thousands of years, and they've shifted to modern techniques for convenience and out of competition.

[yunohn]

Yes, this is most likely. The biological advantage was useful, before humans invented modern technology that allows for actually unsustainable, industrial fishing.

[lo_zamoyski]

I believe something similar happened with Margaret Mead. In "Coming of Age in Samoa", Mead made the wild (and completely bogus) claim that, in the state of "nature", adultery is not a problem. It's all free love, man. She ostensibly drew on what Samoans were telling her, but what they were telling her was apparently the result of their own impish sense of humor. If you look at what actually happened, you find reports of broken jaws and stabbings whenever, say, a Samoan husband discovered his wife in bed with another man.

We can presume that the problem here is a remarkable sloppiness and credulity on the part of Mead, but other scholars note that she was having (or had recently been in) an adulterous affair herself. A guilty conscience needs resolution, and resolution begins with admission of guilt and remorse, but when pride is in the mix, this cannot be. So projection and rationalization become very tempting. Mead appears to have chosen the later.

(Aldous Huxley made a similar point when remarking why he had, in his younger years, taken a nihilistic position with respect to meaning, namely, that he wanted a way to rationalize sexual revolution, licentiousness and lust. If nothing means anything, then why not sleep around and indulge what would otherwise be recognized as depraved sexual desires? Much of ideology involves some pathetic and embarrassingly domestic and mundane moral failing at its core that's been rationalized into a pompous edifice. Communism, for example, sprouts from envy, while rapacious capitalism from greed.)

[aradox66]

Communism sprouts from envy? It sprouts from the majority being economically oppressed by the minority. One need not "envy" the boot on one's neck to fight it off.

It has had its obvious and drastic implementation issues, but its provenance is not envy.

[judofyr]

Do you have the link?

[testmanium]

If it’s the same one that I saw, it’s this one https://youtu.be/qE9pL6XzvAw