Australian aborigines
Article
Australian aborigines is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 01, 2025 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Conception beliefs among Australian aborigines”; “Australian Aborigines are a polygynic gerontocracy with infant betrothal”. It most often appears alongside America, Arguments About Aborigines, Aboriginal.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 01, 2025
- Last seen: July 15, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Arguments About Aborigines (2 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal society (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigine (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines of Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Afrobarometer (1 shared issues)
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
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- AI 2027 (1 shared issues)
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- AI Safety Institute (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
45: Conception beliefs among Australian aborigines. Did you know that pre-contact aborigines didn’t know that sex caused conception? Wait, no, what if they did know it, and were just pretending not to? Wait, no, what if they sort of deliberately suppress the knowledge as a way of defusing paternity conflicts after traditional wife-swapping rituals? Wait, no, what if it’s racist to accuse aborigines of not understanding something obvious like this? Wait, no, what if it’s ethnocentric to call Western beliefs “obvious”? Wait, no! . . . this comes from a book called Arguments About Aborigines, which I have ordered on the strength of this chapter.
Inline links: Conception beliefs among Australian aborigines
The Australian Aborigines are a tempting battleground for this conflict. Even as we’re not supposed to dub them noble savages, so we definitely aren’t supposed to call them “the oldest society in the world” with a “fifty thousand year history” - just because they arrived fifty thousand years ago doesn’t mean their culture has been stagnant during that time. Still, certain decamillennia-old rock art appears to depict some of the same beings mentioned in Aboriginal mythology during colonial times and into the present. And on a very literal interpretation of cultural evolution, the longer you’ve been in a specific niche, the more adapted to it you get. We are citizens of an industrial society that gets five or ten years to adopt to each new paradigm before the technologists throw out something new to knock us off balance again, heirs to a Judeo-Christian tradition barely three thousand years old and a Greco-Roman-Indo-European tradition hardly any older. What does something really ancient look like? The Aborigines, whose culture can seem impossibly complex at times (is this an illusion? we’ll discuss that later!) give a feeling of something over-optimized, a genetic algorithm run for 999,999,999 epochs until it ends up at weird edge cases that break the reward module and get assigned infinite utility.
Australian Aborigines are a polygynic gerontocracy with infant betrothal.