It always piques my interest when I hear of something economically valuable that "cannot be cultivated", as in, I wonder how much "cannot" means "not enough tinkering has been put in to figure out how to cultivate it in a cost-effective manner" as opposed to "impossible". I remember talking to a wasabi farmer in Oregon who claimed to have been one of the first to grow a crop "that can't be cultivated outside Japan" outside Japan.
It seems doubly worthwhile to experiment with in this case since it would both keep a food tradition viable and protect the orchid species from disappearing. When I google Orchis mascula I do find info about cultivation (though cultivation on a commercial scale might be a different matter).
Wild orchids are like wild mushrooms. They generate tiny spores that cannot grow on their own, and require help from a third party in the soil.
Wild orchids require fungi in the soil to help them grow. They are not self-sufficient in terms of chlorophyll.
Wild orchids have the weirdest pollination requirements. They require specific species of insects (bees, wasps) and the common bee cannot help. As they do not have enough nectar or pollen, they are trying to attract insects through trickery. Either pheromones, looking like a female insect of the same species, faking nectar, you name it.
I took the time to borrow Schwartz's book from Libgen, skim through it, and read the parts that seem relevant to that claim (it didn't look worth reading in full--lots of fluff about "quantum theory rehabilitating the basic premise of moral philosophy" etc. etc.). I also took a glance at a few of the cited studies. Schwartz's main point has nothing to do with the brain "naturally resisting change"; the book argues rather that our brains remain malleable and are continually shaped by our behavior, and the studies he highlights are in support of those points. In his own words, he is arguing for "the brain’s astonishing power to learn and unlearn, to adapt and change"--so it looks like the article-writer drew a very different conclusion from the same undiscussed studies.
The article also mentions neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps's research to support an attendant claim that "When the prefrontal cortex is under stress, our capacity for learning, memory, and decision-making is compromised". But her research on stress's effects on cognition that I can find actually suggests stress is often beneficial to learning and performance, and her work on fear response conditioning focuses on timing of interventions, not energetic expense or discomfort.
What's so worth hating about this kind of vacant-eyed patronizing crap, this "neuroscience-based approach" and "blueprint for L&D professionals", is how it authoritatively name-drops experts and science-y words as an appetizer, without inviting any actual engagement or understanding, and proceeds to dish up warmed-over PD workshop slop for the next 9/10ths of the article. Those L&D professionals may have no substantive understanding of neuroscience, but they know that you need to feel "discomfort" and bear "energetic expense".
Well, I am not the former. And here's a lecture for you: comparing human beings to diseases and insects subject to eradication is plain old racism when the latter do it as much as when the former do.
You know what is totally, totally irrelevant here? Your (incorrect) presumptions about my nationality and ancestry.
"Racism" in popular usage includes ethnic and religious hatreds ("racism against Muslims" etc.). I agree this usage is sloppy. Would "virulent bigotry" be more precise?
Suppose for argument's sake your claim that nomads "would gladly enslave your ancestors and congratulate it [sic]" were historically supportable -- let me lay out for you why your "malaria/tsetse fly" comparison is still plain old unilluminating bigotry. In short: a) you can generalize tsetse flies and malaria organisms but not human members a group; b) you can relate to the latter, but not the former, on human terms.
Were there periods of positive coexistence between nomads and settlers, and were there cases of successful peace agreements between the two during conflicts? Were there members of nomadic ruling elites who championed or protected sedentary subjects from their peers? Were some nomadic people themselves slaves, religious ascetics, children, etc. who would not "gladly enslave" anyone? Did some nomads even transition to sedentary life? Do they have human descendants alive now? The answer in each of these cases is a well-attested "yes". Do any of these cases apply to malaria or the tsetse fly? No.
By comparing a human group to parasites or vermin, you can generalize them and dismiss any possibility of relating to them on human terms. If some group would gladly enslave me, I'd have no problem condemning it or resorting to force. But unless I mainly wanted to enjoy treating them as inferiors I wouldn't liken them to diseases or insects like you are doing.
Nomads did make these lands uninhabitable due to danger of death, not unlike malaria; and these lands did undergo the relevant nomad displacement/swamp draining before they could be settled by peasants. The comparison is apt, and if you have moral issues with the metaphor, compare that to moral issues with raiding and slavery.
Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.
"Not unlike [insert pathogen or reviled insect here]" (in quotes b/c I can't seriously compare humans to such things without revulsion; just an instructive parallel).
The "Great" Wall of China, interestingly, walls in vast areas of steppe and former Xiongnu grazing land.
Eurasian nomad wealth was overwhelmingly the "spoils" of trade, not raiding – and countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors. Eventually, Eurasian trade patterns shifted from overland (the "silk road") to maritime routes, and the interior of the continent fell into a terminal recession. Until then (e.g. the Jungars) nomads continued to play an outsized role.
Some of the smarter nomad communities are still nomads. And 99% of developed/developing world population (including those with nomad ancestors) resemble pre-modern sedentary populations just as little as they do pre-modern nomad populations in their modes of life.
> Settled cultivators basically made huge swaths of Eurasian land uninhabitable to nomadic pastoralists because your grazing lands were settled (often completely unsustainably) until they ceased to exist.
Sure - it was a Hobbesian war of all against all, until the settled cultivators made a better world.
> countless nomad-settled conflicts were cases of settled polities cutting off their noses to spite their faces by closing off trade with nomadic neighbors.
If the nomads make war on you unless you "trade" with them then that's blackmail, not voluntary trade.
And if A and B voluntarily engage in mutually beneficial trade, and C who rules over B (and holds trade and aliens both in contempt for ideological reasons) obstructs B and A from trading in order to weaken A, what is that?
Well, is C's rulership over B legitimate or not? We generally recognise that legitimate governments have the authority to block their subjects from trading, even today (e.g. try buying something from Cuba).
Were anything like modern notions of political legitimacy and just war current across Silk Road era Eurasia, or not? And didn't you just say it was a Hobbesian war of all against all anyway?
More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in certain comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation than essentializing them as "parasites"?
> Were anything like modern notions of political legitimacy and just war current across Silk Road era Eurasia, or not?
Was the content of what's considered politically legitimate or just war similar to what it is today? No. Did they have notions of legitimate-or-not based on the standards of the time (and that evolved dramatically as times changed)? Yes, absolutely.
> And didn't you just say it was a Hobbesian war of all against all anyway?
In the early days yes. If A and C are both imposing their will on B and each other by violence and neither has established more legitimatcy than that, there's not much more to say in moral judgement; all's fair in love and war, and to the victor go the spoils.
Like, I'm fully on board with saying that the first kings and tax collectors were of a piece with, and no better than, the bandits of that era. But that doesn't mean they were worse either (on the whole; no doubt you can find examples of spectacularly nasty agrarian rulers, but there were spectacularly nasty nomadic pastoralists too), and the difference is that eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support labour saving technologies and medical care and all the other things we enjoy.
> More to the point, supposing C has a robust pattern of responding to a trade overtures from nomadic A by violence towards A's representatives, and of justifying the response using an intransigently chauvinist characterization of A (the ahistorical "good peasants vs. bad nomads" construct alive and well in certain comments in this thread) – without imposing anachronistic comparisons or non-relevant standards, is there a better way to understand A's retaliation than essentializing them as "parasites"?
Hmmm... I'm gonna go with no. "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory, that entitles you to stop going there, not to kill and plunder. If whose territory it is is disputed, by all means fight it out, but that doesn't make you some noble free trade advocate.
> notions of legitimate-or-not based on the standards of the time
> "Retaliation" is a huge stretch: if your trade and your trade representatives are consistently unwelcome in someone else's territory
To clarify, trade missions conducted according to established protocols of the time and in the context of precedents of mutual trade, and retaliation in keeping with loosely-shared notions of legitimate-or-not, so much so that chroniclers of sedentary urban peoples could invoke their own concepts of legitimacy in recording them. These details are well attested in the historical record.
> eventually the kings and tax collectors did evolve into systems of governance with accountability that could support ... all the ... things we enjoy.
Sedentary agrarian societies evolved. Nomadic societies evolved. (Seafaring societies evolved. Urban mercantile societies evolved.) They all interacted with each other and some branches of each adopted some ways of the others. Our modern world with its particular triumphs and failures, freedoms and limitations, emerged from that interaction and is radically different from all of these pre-modern societies. Certain enduring elements of governance with accountability (or at least the conditions for them) were, by many accounts, a major contribution of nomadic states. It's incredibly complex and there is room to disagree -- as we do -- ideally without dehumanizing human beings as diseases or insects.
The more I think about this, the more it rings true. Implicit in the phrase "I have nothing to hide" is an assumption that everything is open to inspection by default, and concealment is deviance. In most situations, nobody assumes anything close to that. When they do, they're taking a supine position, like an animal submissively exposing its belly.
For a careless user, or one who does not bother to learn about the risks, having one's account stolen is more of a danger. On the other hand, for a reasonably cautious user with a basic understanding of the risks involved, and whose life varies at all from predictable (affluent) norms, losing account access due to Google's protective measures is a bigger danger – and more of a hassle to guard against – because these protections are so easily triggered
