The sheer number of people with free time and who are able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests (whether practical or frivolous) seems to often be left out of these discussions. Right now there are a billion people using electronic devices, engaged, productively or recreationally, with other human beings. The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands. So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal (which they are not).
In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.
I was really interested in seeing what's the % of years of human live lived in different historical periods. I wrote a script [0] and it turns out [1], 90% of time was lived after the agricultural revolution (last 10k years) and 50% of time was lived in the last 1000 years. 10% of time was lived in my lifetime!
Now, when we talk about different measures of progress the number above understate the dominance of recent history. For most of human history average life expectancy was 10-12 years, so most of these years lived were as children. Also, ignoring the first 10% of hunter-gatherer years, most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.
Interesting, I've never thought about it in terms of % of years lived and when. I recently saw that 7% of all humans who ever lived are alive today. Wild. And I agree that it really does show the dominance of recent history.
Small point, a life expectancy of 10-12 years does not necessarily mean that the majority of lived years were as children. It depends on infant mortality, which I believe drives those numbers pretty substantially. Example: if three infants die at age 1 and one person lives to 45, average life expectancy is 12 (48/4), but the majority of those years were not lived as children (one full childhood plus 3 additional years of infancy).
Infant mortality is also impacted by decisions of thresholds when to try to save a life. The US for example considers 24 weeks the cutoff, much earlier than other countries, which is why the infant mortality is higher - the % of babies who normally make it after being born at 24 weeks is about 50%. Same thing happens with cancer rescue statistics - the doctors who are considered best, risk doing invasive action when others would not, thus saving normally un-saveable people, and registering higher mortality than others who wouldn’t try. Thus anywhere mortality has a high % you have to also account for total # of cases and % of recovery from severe cases.
Thanks for sharing, I had no idea about this. I have seen infant mortality numbers tossed out as evidence the US sucks and never realized the numbers were not so simply comparable between countries. I shouldn’t be surprised :/
In terms of comparing how countries do at the basics it would probably make sense to only compare the infant mortality for babies that were carried to the full term, or within a few days at least. I'm not sure if there's global data on that specifically, but it would be interesting to see and compare.
The gestation age threshold doesn't really matter across Europe, but a birthweight threshold does somewhat. [1,2] The US doesn't look as bad for infant mortality when only comparing only births at 28 weeks or later, 2nd to last to Denmark in this [3] comparison of Canada, US and the Nordic countries rather than being almost twice as high as the rest if using 22wks as a threshold. However, my understanding is the US has higher pre-term birth rates which is certainly a confounding factor so the difference might not only be due to birth registration differences.
The reason you had no idea about this is because it's complete bullshit. Of course other first world countries don't count it differently just to make the numbers sound better.
Because even with that, related normalized numbers are still shit. It's not just some counting problem.
"Women in the U.S. have long had the highest rate of maternal mortality related to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. In 2020, there were nearly 24 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., more than three times the rate in most of the other high-income countries we studied"
"The U.S. infant mortality rate (5.8 deaths under one year of age per 1,000 live births) is 71 percent higher than the comparable country average (3.4 deaths)"
The < 24 weeks old definition of infant in the US is absolute bullshit. An infant is 1 year or younger across the board. Perhaps you have you wires crossed and are misremembering that some countries don't count live births if significantly premature like Norway (<12 gestation). But US does it like most of Europe.
I remember reading years ago that the US tries very hard to save premature babies, and when they fail, it is counted as infant mortality. Whereas other countries do not act so aggressively, and count it as miscarriage.
This happens all the time with popular statistics, especially when politics are involved.
A few years back, there was a great hue and cry over the fact that half of corporations did not pay income tax. A little digging showed that that half had lost money, and so did not have income to pay tax on.
You share this little nugget of enticing unconventional wisdom without doing the briefest google search to find out you, too, are repeating bullshit.
Most countries, especially the developed countries the US is otherwise most comparable to, use WHO definitions, and any independent sign of life is considered a live birth. In other words if there is any life there to save, it doesn't matter if you try to save it or not, it counts.
It is ironic, because if the US was trying much harder to save babies than other developed nations (which doesn't pass the smell test IMO), that should only result in a lower infant mortality rate, not a higher one, unless their efforts were somehow having a negative impact on survival.
You as well may be mixing up the notion that a few countries don't count births before certain gestational lengths or bodyweights as live births (see [1]), however that has been accounted for in international comparisons and doesn't explain the discrepancy between the US and other developed (and some developing) nations.
Regarding corporate income tax example, you are missing the part where the corporations [2] that 'lost money' at tax time are often highly profitable and paying no income tax was only possible through offshoring of profits and use of accelerated depreciation with some favourable corporate tax breaks and loopholes.
> if the US was trying much harder to save babies than other developed nations (which doesn't pass the smell test IMO), that should only result in a lower infant mortality rate, not a higher one, unless their efforts were somehow having a negative impact on survival.
Think about it some more - it will result in a higher rate because others would classify it as a miscarriage. Your own cite says:
"variations in recording of births and deaths at the limits of viability compromises international comparisons."
Depreciation is a legitimate business expense. You're arguing that corporations really have two sets of books - one for the IRS and then one where we use your definition of profits. They didn't make profits according to the IRS accounting rules. IRS accounting rules on what profits are are the only rules that matter.
My source supports me attempting to steelman your claim by suggesting you mistakenly are referring to live births gestational age thresholds. That's not at all the same as a difference driven by how aggressive attempts to save premee lives are across countries.
I read it about 10 or 15 years ago. I'd google various things like "Canadian definition of miscarriage". I did this for a sampling of various countries. There was wide variation.
At the time America tried to save preemies earlier than anyone else. Of course, this had a high failure rate, and they were classified as infant mortality. Developing techniques to save them can only happen if you're pushing the envelope.
Another way to think about it: with 8 billion people alive, humankind collectively experiences more time in 2 years than the presumed age of the Universe.
Where do you get that average life expectancy of 10-12? I never heard a figure that low, and I doubt humanity would have lasted that long if the average life expectancy was barely enough to reach sexual maturity. Also, I think these life expectancy in the past stats mostly do not distinguish between the extremely high death rate for infants, and the more normal life expectancy for those that survived past 2 y.o. The distribution is so skewed, I guess even the median expectancy would not be really useful.
Agriculture actually gives ample time to do something else, even with labor-intensive crops like rice versus wheat. Ancient people probably worked fewer hours that we do nowadays.
It always seems that we discover artifacts that push history farther back. Göbekli Tepe is 12,000 years old and I doubt hunter gatherers made this. I think sophisticated societies existed well past what we have discovered, but time has made it exponentially difficult to get historical proof except in bits and pieces.
I think of it this way: time is like space. Things far back in time are like things orbiting distant stars. Go too far and telescopes can no longer see.
This is made more real by the fact that the Earth is a boiling cauldron of plate tectonics, weather, and biological processes. It doesn’t take long for all traces of something to be obliterated. Maybe we think the first great civilizations were in the desert just because things decay slower in the desert.
People often make the assumption that everyone was just roaming primitive hunter-gatherer cavemen chasing deer across the plains until one day somebody just happened to suggest "Hey, why don't we stop here, start some large-scale intensive agriculture, and build a city?"
That's beyond extremely unlikely.
People lived in villages sustained by horticulture, fishing, local hunting and gathering, and pastoral herding long before intensive agriculture. Probably at least 5,000-10,000 years before. They could certainly have built other things if they had a use for them, and would use them long enough to make it worthwhile. Those that migrated seasonally from one village to another, year after year, might have done so.
Sure, but the notion that hunter-gatherers built something as large and complex as Göbekli Tepe seems unlikely. Construction required a sustained effort by expert craftspeople over many years. They would have needed a higher level of organization and more surplus resources than primitive hunter-gatherers could sustain.
I mean, I think this is part tautological because you've defined them as primitive and not craftspeople. Couldn't they be non-primitive but largely nomadic craftspeople?
(Gokebli Tepe in particular has evidence of processing of grains, but not large scale farming of them, and they might have only settled there for part of the year.)
How exactly could nomadic people develop advanced masonry skills? Are there any proven examples of nomadic people building large, complex permanent structures? What were all the architects and construction workers eating at the job site?
"How exactly could nomadic people develop advanced masonry skills?"
By being half nomadic. When you move around and set up camp often and build temporary structures out of wood, there is opportunity to learn masonry.
And when you often visit the same places, and evertime you add something permanent and more lasting, then specialists will develope.
Nomadic people were usually not changing place everyday. They changed places, once the game in the area were exhausted or the temperature became too cold/warm. But next year, they come back to a good spot. And so over the years important spots can get sophisticated buildings.
There are thousands of remnant river and ocean rock walled fish traps all across Australia, some were very large and they all received a bit of annual touch up and modification for thousands of years .. until Europeans with river boats blasted many to clear passage and pushed off their traditional owners to reservations or worse.
Or maybe your assumptions about agriculture/surplus/specialization are wrong. I'd start by digging deeper into existing evidence instead of evidence free speculation of complex agricultural societies lost to time.
> Agriculture took roughly 5000 years to be adopted.
Not really, agriculture took thousands of years to breed productive crops, that were worth cultivating. Wild ancestors of modern crops where hardly worth growing, if at all. Like there were many parts of the world where they literally weren't.
Once the crops became more productive, transitioning to to agriculture made a lot more sence.
Graeber and Wengrow contest that take severely with their survey of modern anthro and archaeological research, I recommend their papers or Dawn of Everything
Yes highly recommended. For those not familiar, Dawn of Everything essentially starts with the assumption that people have always been curious, intelligent, flexible creatures, and that smaller core populations let a ton of different societal organizations be tested and tried over the years. They also take aim at the "farming is inevitable and the root of inequality" trope that's prevalent. Since, as they show, a ton of really large societies over the years chose not to become primarily agricultural.
Yes, large societies including many that have been shown to have discovered agriculture much earlier on than expected, and chose not to build hierarchical societies around it / found alternative structures. I particularly liked the several wacky varieties of "police" such as the clown ones
One intriguing line of analysis in _The Dawn of Everything_ is how people in early settlements would often just pack up and leave when their leaders started acting like a*holes (think human sacrifices in Mesoamerica). That reminded me of how many citizens abandoned frontier towns during the late Roman period, often helpfully directing advancing northern tribes where the wealthiest villas might be found.
Maybe the peoples in earlier times were simply less willing to put up with being bullied and exploited. Relatively low numbers and abundant unsettled land gave them more options that many humans have had since. The Nile watershed was a wonder of ancient agricultural engineering: it was also the largest slave society up to that point in history.
Have you read the book? What I remember is that it took 5000 years for the transition to happen, and that human went back in forth with the two systems.
That was far from a black and white transition.
Hunther gatherer knew about farming and were actually farming
Also: trash and bones of the two groups indicate that farming was more subject to instability and shortage of nutrients. ( as backward as it sound for us )
You're missing a lot of nuance. Graebers work is great. Tons of evidence-based discussions and thorough logic. What you've written here is even really deserving of a forum post.
Yeah but that chain of comments was originally talking about James C. Scott "against the grain". A historian specialized in early agricultural history and thus relevant here in that comment section about early human history.
I even got confused and thought that Scott wrote "bullshit job", but it's Graeber.
In regards to jobs: I think it's perfectly conceivable that one job is useful to a few, but generally pointless for society.
The knowledge a person can acquire and bring to next generation is key here. The more organized, free and widespread this knowledge is, the higher the probability it will survive.
Knowledge has been an is still treated as secret and exclusive. If the 2-3 people with this knowledge dies, we have to rediscover it.
This is the bottleneck human kind faces time and time again
Without wisdom, all is for naught. Consider internal combustion engines. Within the ICE is a long range agglomeration of knowledge and techniques ultimately allowing it to be produced in inconceivable quantities. It has also been incredibly harmful in more ways than one, the most salient and widely agreed upon being climate change.
And of course such inventions of knowledge don't act alone, and they independently have large effects, but are also affected by other factors, for instance empirical medicine has had a tremendous effect on population size, and that has in turn spurred more demand for more ICEs which has fed into the gross consumption of fuel products, and in addition obviously the production of byproducts like greenhouse gases. It also prompted what I would classify as a pretty significant terraforming project in the development of infrastructure. It also remodeled society.
Without hazarding inductive error in an ineradicably complex system which exists in in "infinite" timeline both in the context of the fractaline nature (e.g. shoreline paradox) and the sheer quantity of nonparallel time, this is important when considering the probability of black swan events. As an instance of this Benoit Mandelbrot reviewed the Black Monday data, finding that the vast majority of movement in the market occured in a window of about 10 seconds (if memory serves) And Black Monday itself was a small fraction of a year, of a decade, but nonetheless has an outsized effect.
Without meaningful prescience of what will unfold as a product of snowballing knowledge (not to mention the signal:noise) it's very probable that humanity will endure the treadmill or worse be rubberbanded back. Development shouldn't really be looked at in absolute terms, but relative. We increase carrying capacity of some natural resource and just as quickly stack the burden back up. And using a historical lens is dubious, hazarding some calculated risk whose contours we're actually unfamiliar with, and that is something humanity is accelerating with the novel technologies we're wont to spin off.
These things are the result of knowledge, but without some perspective wisdom to guide it, it is dangerous. And I would argue that wisdom is not something that can be transferred. It's the hard-fought and learned but not taught sort of understanding. Humility, compassion, understanding. Knowledge is hubris, dispassionate, and myopic.
All that to say that knowledge isn't the key. It is a tool, but it is not the principal tool. It is also not the principal bottleneck.
I think the most obvious explanation, one that doesn't even require much imagination because it just coincides with the very concept of history and pre-history, is that people lost a lot of stuff when only oral tradition was kept and the threshold of complexity that could be reproduced reliably over generations was rather small and also asymmetric: stuff that could be kept inside of tales of general interest could be carried much further in space and time than things that would be specific or narrow in audience.
Even with written records and history, there were a few events of major destruction of records, as they carried a legacy of power structures, just as they do know.
Within living memory we had to go to privileged structures like the University to feasibly attain specialised knowledge beyond amateurish levels, across the disciplines. Just a little further back, reading and having many sources of information was for the rich in most of the world.
The beauty of it is that most of the trail of the current flow of knowledge and technological advance is very well documented, it happened very recently. What's more, it's well documented how it didn't happen previously for a much, much longer period. Before global trade, people had very little spare time to think of anything outside of their day-to-day, and at most of their local governance and the preservation of their livelihood.
Recorded knowledge, free(r) global(er) trade, communications super-charging each other and undergoing major breakthroughs during the Bronze Age and then the printing press and the industrial revolution, and then the hyperconnected world shortly after.
Can you imagine just how little would subsist if humans couldn't record stuff and communicate beyond locally for just a few generations, and we were too busy just surviving short-ish lives by foraging and hunting?
> So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal
And then even more rapidly with the printing press and regular, reliable mail services.
It's a really good point to bring up in a discussion like this and with agriculture comes and information network along with it (price discovery, crop marketing, weather events, etc etc).
Historically, it has always only taken 'a village' to raise a civilization. Is a million (~1 in a thousand) inquisitive minds (globally) too generous or too low a figure? There has to be at least 100k serious minds and they are networked. That's a lot of brain power. And the trash consumers are definitely serving a purpose. They are both social ballast (providing the necessary inertia for stability of norms) and economic precursors (by fueling the low value economic activities that support high value 0.1% projects and aims). Those n billion eyeballs are the reason the 100K can teleconference in realtime and soon have AI assistants chipping in.
Are they? Shouldn't the place be famous by now where those 100k people meet? I would rather think that those 100k are spread all over the internet and that their innovations are lost like the many Yanomamö innovations that must have happened over time.
Everything is organized in timelines. Things fade into obscurity once the focus shifts. There is plenty of innovation but I doubt that a network of 100k minds can be maintained without everybody else trying to steer it into their directions and thus destroying it.
OpenAI vs Google, Meta's legless avatars, etc. FAANG is known, but are they the village to rise the next level of civilization?
People at FAANG are at the center of our culture. Can they question the foundation of their wealth? Maybe Apple will allow them to sacrifice a cash cow. Otherwise, it takes an outsider like Tesla to facilitate change that had been possible for quite some time.
Unless I misread things, the article is about a hypothesis, that before the current era, many tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans were in a stable population state ("pre-Malthusian"), and so most humans were mostly free of substantial food pressure.
My own conjecture, is that the material/scientific/intellectual process that seems to have started around the time of agriculture, and which has been accelerating ever since until we're all sucked into this global mechanical survival process, is driven mostly by the number of people able to sit around and think about surviving in this runaway process (i.e. they face Malthusian pressure, they want and need more), and also their ease of communicating with each other. People pondering how to feed themselves more in large forums come up with ways to transform the world physically through their collective labour. Such a runaway process would not likely occur in a small stable population without the pressure to do so in the first place.
> tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans were in a stable population state ("pre-Malthusian"), and so most humans were mostly free of substantial food pressure.
Yes, but you left out an important bit of context:
"The obvious reason why the Yanomamö didn't reach a Malthusian condition was their high level of violence. The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down. In practice they ran into violent neighbors long before they ran out of land to farm och game to hunt. For security reasons they had to leave large swathes of land as buffers between villages. These buffer lands made excellent hunting and foraging grounds, which helped feed the population, but any tribe that settled these lands more permanently would most probably be raided and killed by neighboring villages."
So "being free of food pressure" != "living in a utopian paradise".
We've decided violence is only good when carried out by the state, but if you take a look around, it's quite popular. Our entertainments dwell on subjects of human violence, and many of our recreations are forms of simulated violence. It is second only to sex amongst things that occupy our minds.
> [Violence] is second only to sex amongst things that occupy our minds.
This might be a hyperactive, coked-up view of humanity. Ultimately, we're mammals. And, have you ever kept a mammal as a pet? Their favorite things are basically eating and finding cozy places to sleep, whether that's in a pool of sunlight or in someone's lap. Indeed, getting a good meal and a comfortable night's sleep are among my highest priorities. If I had to worry about jungle-tribes attacking me, I'd probably start walking until I'd crossed the Bering Strait -- or I'd build a raft and go set out for Austronesia. A sunny island and some coconut trees, that's all I need. A honey too? Sure, that'd be nice, but I'm not going to swing war-clubs around over it. I'd have to reach an extremely high level of annoyance before anything came to that. I'd much prefer to slowly carve giant stone heads.
Some mammals are warm and cuddly but far from all of them are. Wolverines are mammals but I wouldn't want to have one as a pet. Chimps will quite literally rip your arms out of their sockets if you get on their wrong side. Lions, tigers, bears, hippos, orcas... all mammals, but none of them are good pet material.
Even many (larger) dogs aren't good pets: just like chimps, they'll viciously attack you (or your child) on a whim. I'm not sure why anyone wants a "pet" capable of such destructive power. Even cats can turn violent, but they're so small that they can't hurt people much if they go berserk. Same goes for the "toy" size dogs.
The advantage off agriculture is not quite so clear. Early farming was barely more efficient, one farmer barely producing more than they themselves consumed. And the decrease in diversity of foodstuffs made them each individually less nourished compared to the variety of berries and nuts the foragers would eat. Hunter gatherer societies actually had lots of free time. Finding food wasn't a constant struggle. What farming societies had is organization of force and a concept of land ownership.
>Hunter gatherer societies actually had lots of free time. Finding food wasn't a constant struggle.
If hunter gathers had so much free time, they must have had a lot of sex. And yet despite this, their populations never reached that of agrarian societies. This means that either they didn't live such abundant lives or they did for certain period and either starved or killed each other when their environment reached carrying capacity.
>What farming societies had is organization of force and a concept of land ownership
What farming society had was organization and numbers. It's odd to claim that people who grew up with a hoe or parchment end up more violent than those that grew up with a bow. Until the invention of firearms, hunter gatherers tended to be the better fighters. The way that kings and emperors defeated them was my pitting them against each other, but if they managed to unite, they were unstoppable, like Atila the Hun or Genghis Khan.
The huns and mongols were pastoralists, not hunter gatherers. A hunter gatherer society can’t maintain a large enough population in a given geographic area to compete with agrarian or pastoralist cultures, in terrain suitable to those lifestyles.
Also above a fairly low threshold how many children a woman has isn’t proportional to how much sex she has. One man can have sufficient sex with several dozen women to keep them at a maximal rate of child production.
Many, many animals do also. Tigers inform each other of their whereabouts through complex scent markings that contain pheromones, and they violently defend their territory. The American black bear does so similarly. Male mice are territorial and do not tolerate unfamiliar males within their home range. Many lizards are territorial. Fish territories are generally ruled by a single individual or breeding pairs. Active root segregation and the defence of space by plants indicates that plants are probably also territorial. So "the concept" of land ownership is not remotely a uniquely human trait.
Even many agricultural societies still had seasonal nomadic tendencies during which they hunted and gathered. Many sedentary societies lived and worked communally without much social stratification. The reason we associate agriculture with centralization is that centralized agricultural societies conquered the others, not that centralization is inherent to agriculture.
To elaborate on this point: without agriculture centralization wasn't advantageous (or possible) but with agriculture centralization is advantageous--so centralized societies outcompete and are "selected for" over non-centralized societies and we end up with a "genotype" of societies having the trait of centralization.
If anything, farming made societies more susceptible to famine. Specialization of labor and dependence on a specific plot of land made it much harder to simply move somewhere else when food was scarce. Hunter-gatherers and herders were almost always nomadic and moved to wherever food was available.
I don't think it's about people being able to communicate with each other and enjoy leisure, but people developing the tools to handle larger and larger communities.
One of the oldest written documents we have is a customer complaint
Hammurabi is still one of the most popular characters in history because of his code that planted the seed of the embryo of "presumption of innocence", a huge revolution for humanity. He was also very good and efficient at tax collection, so he could finance huge irrigation projects that made it possible to give cultivable fields to the poorer segment of the population, partially solving land abandonment.
In a sentence. he was good at politics.
So as fire and the wheel are symbols of the birth of the modern man, politics is the tool that bootstrapped modern societies.
The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down. In practice they ran into violent neighbors long before they ran out of land to farm och game to hunt. For security reasons they had to leave large swathes of land as buffers between villages.
That's the result of the lack of politics, what you are referring to is policies that kept the different groups separated based on their choices or caused splits among them.
Hammurabi was a great politician because he reunited the Mesopotamian tribes in a single state city, convincing them to work for a common goal, making them all prosper together.
The Yanomamo were one of probably thousands of different groups that lives in the prehistoric era. One problem in the study of prehistoric human life is that only a few groups kept their way of life consistent from prehistoric times to modern. So these groups have strongly influenced our perceptions of what life was like in the prehistoric era. But this is inaccurate sampling if we want to draw conclusions about prehistoric life. More nuanced looks at the evidence, such as the dawn of everything, find more diversity, including politics among different groups in the prehistoric age.
>> able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests
>> The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands.
This does not require literacy. Culture and society evolve quite easily through word of mouth alone. Traveling people, be them official word-spreaders or not, moved from one place to another very quickly. Songs spread quickly from tavern to tavern. News and culture always moved as fast a horse/runner/ship could carry it. Literacy cannot make a horse run any faster. Literacy only made communication faster once the message could move faster than a physical object. Only with long-distance communication such as semaphore and eventually electronic means. Literacy meant that culture became written down, often literally carved in stone. This codification most likely slowed its previous rapid evolution.
Literacy in itself does not "make a horse run any faster".
But ancient literacy is correlated with more developed and bigger states (empires) whose ordinary inhabitants aren't constantly threatened with wars and enjoy certain protections of the law. Such countries also build roads and engage in extensive internal and external trade. In such a stable environment, culture is easier to cultivate. And horses on well-built roads do travel faster.
Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster. Not many humans can accurately recall the amount of detailed information that can be included on a couple of sheets of paper, and even if they could, unless the messenger is known to the recipient, there's an issue of trust (written/sealed communications are generally much harder to forge).
> Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster.
This is an interesting discussion. My thought is that there are quite a few variables influencing when literacy/writing becomes an important technology:
a) durability and portability of media: most is either light and degrades easily or durable but heavy and harder to transport.
b) manufacturing cost: papyrus was used for millenia in the west but was never widespread because its production was time and labor intensive. Ink and dye would be another cost. Most stuff just wasn't worth the cost of writing down.
c) population size/density and network effects: small populations wouldn't benefit much because it would be more cost effective to trasmit and preserve information orally. Similarly, large but diffuse populations wouldn't benefit much because the cost of scribes and materials would be high relative to the population served. Given that writing is a "two-sided market" (needing both a trained writer and reader) then the value of writing is somewhat proportional to the size of the network of scribes. Given that scribes are expensive, it would take some time to bootstrap the network. It seems only large and dense populations would see an economy of scale for writing.
It seems like a number of factors have to line up before writing presents a favorable economy of scale for information transfer and preservation.
> the amount of detailed information that can be included on a couple sheets of paper
The Iliad / Odyssey was a purely oral story for a long time. Oral traditions definitely included techniques that would allow any person to memorize vastly more than just a couple sheets worth. For that matter, we still have Hafiz around -- people who memorize the entire Koran and can recite it word for word. Or in non-verbal data, London cabbies with The Knowledge.
Not really quibbling with the point that literacy and writing is important, but the human brain is mutable enough that statements about what the average person "can't" do are suspect.
>And it's almost certain the details got changed with each retelling!
As a former Classicist who studied this in grad school, I can say this is unequivocally false. Rhapsodes of the ancient world had a fairly established canon, by the time of Pisistratus it was in the form we know today. The meter and structure of the poem reinforced preserving its structure and contents so that rhapsodes could recite the poems fairly verbatim. I memorized book 1 of the Odyssey in Homeric Greek as a class assignment, it's actually not too hard, esp. if you do learn with the meter.
Hmm, well I'll defer to your expertise then, but if nothing else the language Homer used isn't even in use any more...how many people still read/listen to it in Ancient Greek? And I gather it was still many many centuries since those stories were first told before they were written down at all.
I'd also think memorizing something when you have a written-down text to refer to is one thing, whereas repeating a story you've only heard told verbatim is quite another.
I suspect literacy is a necessary but not sufficient enabling technology for more rapid social and technological change. China has had pervasive literacy longer than anywhere else yet stagnated culturally and technologically due to its political conditions. Conversely the development of moveable type printing in Europe, which can only have a real effect with widespread literacy, lead to an explosion of social and technological change.
You do know that child game where you are told a story, and you have to pass it on to the next, who will have to tell it based on only your story, etc. It doesn’t need much to make absolutely no sense.
It is good for trivial messages (this is dangerous, etc), but not for anything more complex.
Depending on your POV, is it sad that societies and cultures are becoming more homogeneous? Isn't there less diversity as time goes by in the modern world. The speed of development is good but is it at a cost to diversity?
You have it spot on, but I think you are out by orders of magnitude, possibly a million hours back then, maybe more. This is the essence of why things are moving so quickly now.
That power was diminished by the capitalized title appearing right after the first word in the sentence, which thus was also capitalized. Adding quotes would have made it easier to parse I guess.
Not sure, those elites were more literate and educated than even the 1% of today could hope. Collective wankery produces a lot of noise, and more difficult than ever to cut through it
It’s also a bit self serving. Essentially we’re saying, “Yeah it looks as though I’m just doodling around on my phone while I work in online ads, but really, my life is 1000x more valuable to the future of humanity than that of some random Neanderthal, serf or even Caesar. (Oh, and btw, I don’t even have kids.)”
I think this article overstates how "underdeveloped" paleolithic peoples were. For example, regarding shelters: we see teepees, yurts and tents as "primitive" shelters but compared to living in a cave or sleeping in the open it is very advanced.
We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested.
What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.
This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer.
In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible.
Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.
Almost everything has probably been invented and forgotten multiple times before it finally established itself as a widely known thing that could be reliably passed on without going extinct. Memes, not just funny pictures.
For the vast majority of the palaeolithic people were severely underdeveloped compared to even hunter gatherer cultures today. They didn’t have teepees or yurts, or anything much above basic stone tools.
Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc.
By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods.
These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.
Thanks. I didn't realize anthropologists thought that so many human habits and inventions developed so recently. It appears there is some debate about whether this occured suddenly 40,000 years ago or gradually starting more than 80,000 years ago. I will definitely be paying attention to this debate going forward.
It’s true the physical evidence for some of this is fairly spotty because natural materials degrade or disperse, but I think the basic outline is sound. It’s also true the middle Palaeolithic in the region of some 300k years ago represented quite a significant advance in stone tool technology, but material culture was still very elementary for a huge span of time after that.
The 70k to 80k year mark does seem to be significant. You might find this article below interesting. The cognitive basis for these changes seems to date from around then, but it took time for that to translate into broad societal changes in physical culture.
The near simultaneous development of agriculture world wide 10k years ago is still a conundrum. I think it is a bit easier to accept as a coincidence if you view it as the result of a few tens of thousands of years of fairly rapid development, compared to the previous hundreds of thousands of years.
I think it’s likely to be a combination of factors. Parallel a social and technical developments on the one hand and maybe climate change induced crisis. It doesn’t have to be one single factor.
I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.
The Tazmanians are a perfect example of this. They were separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago by rising sea level. In that time they regressed technologically to the point where they had only 24 distinct tools compared with the several hundred available to the mainlanders.
There were cultures thousands of miles apart with their own linen stories and games that all encode linen processing. There are more than these if you look for them:
Rough stones are easy enough to find if they needed to file them but if you've ever seen the hands of someone who does a variety of hard manual work every day it's more likely their nails were just worn and broken naturally with the odd bit chewed off.
If you're careful you can bite a spot and then use a different nail to break the longer part without much hassle
It's a lot less destructive to the teeth and has the bonus of smoothing the nail
I wonder how much traditionalism played a role? Would a person suggesting a teepee instead of a cave or sleeping in the open be murdered for sacrilege?
Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
I imagine you and the GP are imposing an way too modern view into those people.
Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution.
The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
> The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
Exactly. Tradition was this mechanism by which society factory-ized itself. Changes were disruptive because it affected something as simple as another person's ability to repair the "innovated" item. I think people are instinctually sceptical of change because it's deeply ingrained in the evolution of human culture to understand that change can break the socially distributed factory.
Resistance to change is more complicated than this of course. I don't want to get too evolutionary-psychological about it. I think Darwin has a tendency to bring that out in us moderns. Never discount the incredible power that culture has to become self activated and shape human behavior even against our benefit sometimes.
> Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
I think this might be a stretch. I think most group dynamics allow for innovation to some extent.
Yea, if you're weird dick and declare you have "innovated the mighty tent and everyone else is inferior" than you should be rightly thrown out of the tribe.
But, if you can just say "hey I had this idea to put a this animal hide on a couple of branches to keep the rain away, and it's lighter than carrying the cave...I think most people would understand.
We definitely have examples of people just flat out rejecting things because they are new. Even small improvements. I think there is room in history for both leaders who are open to invention as long as it doesn't appear destabilizing and leaders who reject almost any change as a potential threat to the fundamental structure of society.
The same way we would treat someone today who wants to build an engine powered by magnets, gravity or fueled by water. Someone who wants to map personality traits onto the position of the celestial bodies. Someone who wants to build a device to talk with people in the after life. Someone who wants to use remote viewing or channeling to discover useful things. etc etc
It is not that we don't know how to work on those things. We can build things, we can try different approaches. We could perfectly document what has been tried. In stead the proposed work will be shut down by angry emotional responses.
This while in many scientific efforts the useful application of the discovery is unknown. Some efforts look truly nonsensical! Say, what could appear more useless than to document the culture of some primitive unwashed jungle dwellers? That steam engine from Heron of Alexandria! It was completely useless at the time. A seemingly nonsensical effort.
Nothing but emotions is preventing us from spinning up a data center to do astrology. We would all line up to scream how IT MIGHT NOT WORK! which is hilarious if you think about it.
Cultural inertia: same reason society moves slowly today even when a small group of people are convinced they have a much better way. When change requires the whole group, the change has to be clearly advantageous (high reward, low risk, or both). That's because there is a material and information overhead to change, with bigger changes being more costly.
It's easy and low risk to modify an arrow head a bit, so you see a lot of incremental progress in knapping. But moving the band from cave dwelling to tent dwelling would be a paradigm shift.
And most importantly: who controlled that new invention.
Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.
Organic structures tend to not last thousands of years very well. We simply don't know much besides that they were as intelligent and creative as us. Probably had less intellectual shackles about they could organize and run their societies.
I think people take knowledge for granted. It’s really easy to understand something. It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it. Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
> Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
My personal favorite example is clip pens. It's such a simple tool. There is no electricity, steam power or even gears in it. But I think very few people can come up with how it works internally.
The amount of industrial engineering required to make a ballpoint pen is quite substantial the click mechanism isn’t the impressive part making balls which are dimensionally accurate to 0.1 micrometer is the challenging part.
Without that level of accuracy you can’t make a ballpoint pen and without it there is no real advantage of making the click mechanism.
And making these balls is very challenging even today. These are often still used as an example for manufacturing deficiencies in places like China as whilst they tend to make the bulk of the ballpoint pens they still have to buy the balls form German and Swiss manufacturers.
Hmm, there are retractable fountain pens like the Namiki Vanishing Point, and even Sharpies that are retractable. I think it'd be fair to say the clicky ballpoints represent an excellent combination of cheapness and usefulness, but they don't have a monopoly on retractable points.
And all that engineering happened after someone realized that such a thing would be useful. That classic HN comment about how Dropbox wasn't useful because rsync exists - that's more or less the standard response to innovation. "The thing you've created reduces pain points I'm so used to that I no longer see them". Certain inventions only get made because of really determined, persnickety individuals who will not accept the pain point.
That's the point at which it takes real vision and perseverence to see it through.
It's fascinating the lack of imagination people have for a certain level of innovation. They can see the benefit of small incremental changes pretty well but large disruptive changes fall off a cliff very quickly into a chasm of sceptism - "I'm sure there is something wrong with this idea but I can't think of the problems so I will make up some reasons why it won't work". I feel like this sceptical reaction itself must have an evolutionary basis as it seems highly instinctive.
You can look at the current technological changes in play to day and think about them through this lens and it's quite interesting (AI, obviously, then AR/VR/metaverse etc).
I was hit by that thought last week whilst changing a seal in a Geberit (concealed cistern toilet). The engineering that has gone in to making a mechanism that will work under water for decades , and can be entirely disassembled and reassembled through an opening the size of the flush panel, is pretty incredible
And when you really get to details it is even more complex. The bowl is actually hollow in parts. And then consider correctly and effectively routing the water. And then mass producing complex 3d object and essentially perfectly glazing it.
It would be fairly easy to come up with calculus reasoning about mathematics in the way we do today, because the tools we're using to do maths is highly conducive to calculus in particular.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone kid were to intuit a bunch of major conclusions from calculus by just looking at algebra and graphs of plots.
If you start with pre-newtonian mathematics, arriving at calculus would indeed be quite some feat. But then, a lot of Newton and his contemporaries were reasoning about mathematics that's fairly reminiscent of Euclid (and very alien to modern readers).
The Darwin vs Wallace example is completely different from the Newton vs Leibniz.
In both cases, neither stole ideas from the other. However, at least my understanding, is that Newton and Leibniz did the work at the same time, but because Newton already had a reputation, Newton took all the credit. In the case of Darwin vs Wallace instead, Darwin had years and years of research, notes, and writings done but unpublished, but he rushed to publish when he heard that Wallace had similar ideas. So in a sense, Darwin didn't walk away with more credit than he deserved, as he was there first anyway. Newton vs Leibniz doesn't look as clear cut.
(By the way, in before Edison vs Tesla, that's yet another entirely different situation of plain exploiting and stealing of Tesla by Edison)
I don't know if it is that different. Darwin and Wallace still came up with the same radical theory within decades of one another, quite a coincidence. The natural explanation is that the theory was a result of other human developments making their observations possible.
I agree. For reference, the underlying cause of the Darwin and Wallace coincidence was the establishment of modern geology by Hutton (which established the earth was old and naturally mutable), along with the large-scale collection of biological observations by naturalists such as Darwin and Wallace.
Fun unrelated Darwin fact: he's the person who figured out the geology of how and why coral reefs and atolls form where they do.
Yes, I thought using Calculus as an example actually eroded the point they were trying to make since it was independently developed by Leibniz and Newton.
Not to cast any shade on either of those two brilliant people, but it does suggest Calculus was "ready" for 17th-century mathematicians (or, you know, the other way around).
You are looking at this the wrong way. It might have occured much earlier in history, but only after the invention of industrialized book-printing could that knowledge be actually be transfered between different geographies and generations in an efficient way.
Book-printing presses have been one of the most influential inventions ever for precisely that reason.
And for precisely the same reason, the internet is now the most influential invention today. The fact that knowledge is available at a click of your finger tips is astounding. After all, the only thing differentiating humans from animals is the way humans can encode and transmit knowledge beyond their own life times.
I would imagine the next biggest influential invention is AGI.
Because there was no way to make money on it. Before the Age of Discovery, there wasn't much money in being able to find out one's coordinates in the open sea - and Age of Discovery only started because a long, grinding war to liberate Spain and Portugal from Muslims had to finish first to provide both economic base for seafaring, and safety of sailing too. And maths mainly developed for the goal of improving navigation.
Newton was Master of the Royal Mint for something like 30 years and put people to death for clipping coins. He spent decades trying to manufacture gold. I would say money was a very big motivator. Don’t know about Leibniz.
That wasn't his money, though. He apparently received a salary between £500 and £600 per year, While that was a lot more money than it is now, an inflation calculator at the Bank of England suggests that it was the equivalent of around £43,000 today (around $US53,000 at today's exchange rate).
Not starvation wages, certainly, but neither was it vast riches.
IIRC the money motivation for Newton made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful if applied to calculus and physics.
> made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful
You wouldn't have known in Newton's time if alchemical transmutation into gold worked. Certainly, you knew then that some substances could be transformed into other substances, and it was such research that developed into modern high-school chemistry.
I thought the point was made with the comment about the "zeitgeist" (although the word is misused a bit in this context).
In as much as things build upon other things, you were not likely to get Calculus before, say, Algebra. But once all the pieces are in place the field is wide open for the smart people of the time to plunder it.
Or at least bent to purpose, in this case the narrow zeitgeist of the 17th Century European numerate intellectuals .. those were the days of very slow limited copy exchanges of the latest thoughts by mail and by word of mouth via salons.
Somewhat like Mastodon with the bandwidth of a hikers backpack full of parchment.
Neither did Euclid and his stuff survived. There are early not-quite-calculus ideas in Aristotle, which lends even more weight to thinking that they didn't get all the way there- if they had, and the Aristotelian stuff survived, why didn't the fully-worked-out stuff survive?
Yes, but the Romans respected Euclid. Invaders in the east were rarely so gentle - they usually had a habit of suppressing knowledge and burning libraries. (Done by both Islamic and Christian invaders). Colonialism was the final death knell for many works.
Calculus was discovered by several mathematicians in India - unfortunately little survives of several works.
Militant societies successfully preserved their knowledge and kickstarted their industrial revolution. (Relatively) Non militant societies did not and their knowledge was made extinct. But if you had ten thousand copies of works floating around - it could have survived.
Some of Aristotle's proto-calculus survived only in Arabic translation, having been lost along the way in Europe. So there's definitely a huge library of lost works.
My experience in college, trying to figure out how math ideas from the Indian subcontinent and from around Mediterranean fit together was that the only claims for ancient Hindu rigorous math were from Indian sources and they were pretty hand-wavy about rigor.
It reminded me of (a geographically, temporally translated) Tom Lehrer's "Lobachevsky."
Buddhist society was quite non-violent. So were the Jains in India. (Unsure why I am being downvoted though). Both were based on strictly following Ahimsa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa
I'm so glad you bring this up. Folks in the west just assume that large scale non violent societies are not possible. They're definitely possible and are inevitably ruined decades or centuries later by warlike invaders.
Jainism in particular should be given a massive shout-out for being the largest and oldest organized genuine religion of non violence. These are the people who are unhappy about washing dishes as killing the bacteria left of the plate is "kitchen violence".
At the risk of calling for a no-true-Scotsman response, I do not know very much about Jainism, but a quick perusal does not leave me with the impression that its adherents are much less violent when they are in charge.
"His expansion of the kingdom, especially his annexation of the kingdom of Anga to the east, is considered to have laid the foundations for the later expansion of the Mauryan Empire." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimbisara)
"He forcefully took over the kingdom of Magadha from his father and imprisoned him. He fought a war against the Vajjika League, led by the Licchavis, and conquered the republic of Vaishali." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajatashatru)
Another problem is people assume prevailing discovery narratives are truthful. It's harder to do that in the sciences because of the breadcrumbs left behind.
>it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
Newton wasn't first, Calculus was known in India almost 1000 years earlier and it wouldn't be surprising if Newton was a student of work gathered from parts of the world that were illegal to credit with such discoveries at the time.
I think you have your dates confused, as the Kerala school was only a few hundred years before Newton, and pretending that what was discovered in India is the same as what Newton discovered is misleading. If we're crediting whoever first made theorems about infinite sums or derivatives to be the inventor of calculus, then calculus also predates Newton in Europe.
A lot of people contributed theorems over the centuries that would now be considered part of calculus. Developing a mathematical framework like calculus is more of a gradual and continuous building of knowledge than a single event. There's a reason Leibniz and Newton happened to independently create calculus at the same time.
The European Doctrine of Christian Discovery applied to all property including intellectual property that was "discovered" in the rest of the world.
Non-christian origins could not be recognized by western institutions until very recently. Generally the first European christian to relay existing information from the non-christian world was credited with invention or discovery.
In many cases, people still credited with discovery didn't fully understand the source material and failed at relaying it accurately.
I can confirm. Regarding SPA in early days (before XMLHttpRequest): no one is doing that way, we can't find another developer thinking like that to help you, are you sure?.. (and browsers bugs)
I prototyped in Netscape Navigator.. had to fix it for IE.
Couldn't it be <a href="part.htm" target="dst"> just from the beginning ? - but what you got is AJAX, JS addictions and no caching.
Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before, either. Viewing it as "progress" to be able to cause climate change, mass extinction and pollution is a bias that we should check.
This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö. Single point of data as a counterpoint: the Mosuo people, who are a matriarchal society. Viewing other cultures as primitive and current society as "advanced" is a long discarded idea in anthropology due to ethnocentrism and racism.
This is also incorrect:
> The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females.
Male bonobos will have sex with each other as a way to defuse tensions, for instance, and male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other.
> Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before, either. Viewing it as "progress" to be able to cause climate change, mass extinction and pollution is a bias that we should check.
Aside from the fact this is incorrect, it's also rooted in a false assumption. It's a common mistake to believe the ecosystem is in some sort of steady state or equilibrium. It is not and never has been. The climate changes. The geology changes. Invasive species arrive. Someone wins an evolutionary arms race and wipes out the rest. Populations go through booms and busts - or even extinctions - because they consume resources too rapidly. There is no variable that is not in continual flux. Things only appear to be "steady state" on very short timescales, but attentive people have always noticed this - the ancient Greeks were aware of massive geographic changes, for example.
When too many variables change too fast or too far, we see mass extinctions (really just an increase in the extinction rate) as different species don't make it through the selection pressure. Are we causing one now? Sure, absolutely. But not because we're special. Because we're not. We like to believe we are wise, rational technocratic masters of nature. We are not. We are causing climate change and extinctions like every other species that begins to dominate (dominate may not even be the right word - some species that don't dominate produce massive 'destructive' changes.) Probably the earliest known example is the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. No amount of trying to be more 'rational' and 'sustainable' will produce an ecological equilibrium over anything but the very short term.
> Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before
No, but Mother Nature has ample evidence of doing so. If we want to continue as a species we need a way to persist after the next apocalyptic natural disaster. We’re fortunate some ancient peoples lived in environments that forced them to build societies and progress technology - otherwise we might not know we’re one meteor away from extinction!
> male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other.
They band together to fight the male who has the pride so they can get the females.
The difference between humans and other mammals in these fights is that we are much more efficient at killing and that females are fertile all year round.
And if your definition of default must expand in order to include homosexuality then you really need to examine the benefit of saying that it is a "default."
Since you brought up the Mosuo, it’s entirely possible that the harmonious feudal depiction of their society is exaggerated for reasons of national politics; to the same extant Chagnon was accused of exaggerating the Yanomamö.
The Mosuo are _matrilineal_ (figure out which kinship group you're in based on Mom's line) but not _matriarchal_ (women hold most of the political power).
You'll occasionally see it argued that the Mosuo are matriarchal, but what's going on is many people are desperate to try to find an example of matriarchy, and the Mosuo are as close as it gets. So yeah, if you squint, stand on one leg, and crook your head a bit it sort of looks like they might be.
What's really the case is that every single human society we know of has been some flavor of patriarchal.
> This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö.
The article feels very much like a thesis in search of support, which might explain the laser like focus on one particular data point that appeared to support the author's premise. It also explains why criticism of the original research is dismissed as "cancel culture" rather than taken as a sign to at least look for other supporting data.
The motivation makes more sense if you look at the rest of that substack (I wasn't familiar with it, so I poked around a bit). The author evidently has a deep interest in sex and gender role topics viewed through a particular lens. The second post I looked at was basically incel ideology 101, complete with Becky, Chad, and links to Jordan Peterson. I'll save you a click, but apparently teenage girls are depressed because they're not having sex with incel teenage boys.
Given the rest of that blog, it's probably not surprising the author managed to boil down a topic as complex as the development of societies into a simple explanation about sex, backed by a single data point that's out of favor with actual professionals in the field.
I agree. I only skimmed their other work but was curious if anybody here thought so.
It's not a direct analog, but the pacing, attitude and tactics suggest they have a worn and dogeared copy of Allan Bloom's treatise Closing of the American Mind on their desk. Though well written and speckled with reasonable arguments, Bloom plainly argued that 'civilized' 'reasonable' white protestant moral and cultural values are correct, and everyone will be better off once they adopt them. Anecdotally, the vast MRA diaspora also coats toxic ideological bullshit in truth nuggets to muddy the lines between them.
The focus on the Yamomamö appears to be simply to ground the article in something concrete, making it more interesting. He does claim that this once heretical view is now widely accepted in anthropology and it's a description of many tribes, not just one.
And your take on it is so utterly bizarre I can't believe you actually read it. He literally talks about how strange it is that the "Becky" concept exists as it never did when he was a teen (it seems equally weird to me).
Right but the point she (I think the author is actually a woman) seems to be making is that the "Becky" concept is a legitimate reaction to actual (and problematic) societal change, rather than an incorrect belief about the world among incels fostered by people like Jordan Peterson. It's less "Becky is an insult now because people are poisoning the minds of young men" and more "Becky is an insult now because of society and feminism".
The reason I brought that up was less that I think that viewpoint is wrong (although obviously I do), but more that it pervades a lot of the content on that substack, so the original post claiming societal development can also be boiled down to sex (and in particular, more 'primitive' sexual roles) should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.
Ah, yes, of course Tove would be female. I hadn't looked at the name and I thought the picture of Napoleon Chagnon at the top of the article was a picture of the author!
I consider the popularity of arseholes like Peterson to be more symptom than cause but I could be wrong. I'll think about it.
I read it and can confirm that the take is basically the same as my take on it. Totally sexist garbage. Or pro-restrictive gender roles.
Also, charmingly unaware of history. Moving to the cities for free love, gender flexibility, and parties is not some new 2000s thing. That was disco and cocaine in 80s. That was the hippies back when the boomers were young, and that was the 1920s. “How you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen gay Paris”.
Sexism and anti-sexism have neither been newly created nor nearly defeated in the past ten or twenty years.
Really? I read through and it doesn’t seem sexist to me - it’s naïve, sure, but it doesn’t sound like it’s buying into the Stacy/Chad/Petersonian stuff, it’s just acknowledging their existence, and guessing at why they might appeal to people now. It doesn’t seem like it’s pro gender roles.
Pretty sure his version of developed only happened recently is because the climate has been really stable for the last 10k or so years meaning we can actually have agriculture based societies not get screwed when their climate suddenly changes
The Yanomami tell us very l little about human life prior to the year zero, so extrapolating to 300k us a bridge too far.
However this does back up work done by Chris Knight [1] showing that pre-modern societies did in fact organize around fertility rituals and reproduction is the first order game.
The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food. Whether this is because wars attrite the population to such an extent that they remain sustainable is not a rigorously made argument IMO but seems at least plausible.
This also supports my theory [2] that more complex games for reproduction, pushing people into the violence of property ownership, only comes when a food source is persistently scarce to the point of deprivation that can’t be remedied without private property. They seem to be able to prevent monopolists from monopolizing these open hunting grounds, which then in turn does not pressure them to an extent that they need to develop monopoly over resources.
>> The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food.
That was covered. The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources.
>The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources.
Notably the causality runs in both directions here - the fighting over women is what prevents the population from falling into a Malthusian trap.
The next time someone tells you that pre-agricultural populations only spent 10 hours a week on work and the rest on leisure or whatever, you should reply asking what percentage of those populations died do to homicide. The answer might be revealing.
> The Yanomami tell us very l little about human life prior to the year zero, so extrapolating to 300k us a bridge too far.
Did you miss the fact that the same pattern was observed in multiple societies, by multiple researchers, in places as far as Australia and Papua New Ghinea?
Really good article, and yet another newsletter/blog I feel compelled to subscribe to yet probably never read (sigh).
> What Chagnon actually said when he reported about men making war over women, was that man actually is an animal among other animals.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the GPTs. A considerable amount of the sturm und drang around this tech is centered on the question of how close to human intelligence they are, and/or whether or not it 'knows' anything, etc.
All of these questions seem to smuggle in the assumption that we humans are 'special' in some intrinsic sense. I think what the GPTs are beginning to reveal is that they're not reaching some new threshold of 'human-ness', but rather that we humans are not as 'special' - i.e. 'separate' or 'above' nature - as we like to think.
It's not a very good article - it's just a lot of projection based on a single example.
Human societies did develop significantly over that time frame - e.g. the discovery that plants could be cultivated and bred to improve their desirable quantities was one breakthrough that happened >10K years ago, the steady development of more complex language and ultimately the recording of language in written form - it's just that there might not be much of a historical record of these developments. Almost the only thing that's been preserved are the stone tools, which also show a steady improvement over time.
What exactly did you find good about the article? Sounds like the author just over extended observations from one tribe to all of human history. Maybe it’s true but it sure as hell ain’t substantiated. So we invented tools discovered fire and then just went back to dragging women by their hair to caves for 500K years? Or maybe there’s more nuance in it.
As time went by, evidence for Chagnon's claims became too overwhelming to ignore for most anthropologists. Numerous other anthropologists came to the same conclusions as Chagnon, both before and after his work. From Australia to Papua New Guinea to South America, the same phenomenon has been observed: Men kill each other at high rates in conflicts that center around the distribution of women.
Observing the same phenomenon in multiple tribes doesn't imply it happened everywhere all the time. The question the author originally tries to answer is why no large society developed anywhere for hundreds of thousands of years.
It might be if the phenomenon is a result of perfectly reasonable competitive behaviors in a given previously fairly common ecology.
When you consider pre-medieval eastern Europe is basically the same as this primitive dynamics plus a technology to build a wall and ability to temporarily plant some seeds and harvest them outside in between the raids.
Third part of musings of this author gives failry clear path from that dynamic into modern times as new technologies and population densities demanded more and more men to be cast out of warrior role into subservient worker role.
Consider for a second that tribes that stuck to weird cultures like that are the ones that remained insular. It takes a lot of effort culturally to resist the creep of modern civilization. Are you saying every human is innately programmed to look at other humans live a life of great technical prowess and say “nah, I’ll stick to my arrows?” Or is it possible that only particular cultural attitudes make you stick to your “guns” so to speak.
> ere is no "went back". That never stopped, and still continues today.
Rather there is no reason to believe this ever happened. It’s a joke and one that people now toss around as an anthropological truth. Sort of like prostitution being the oldest profession.
Did you believe I meant that it literally continues today in the caves we all live in, or could this joke be a metaphor for the basic drive to reproduce even at the expense of other concerns?
Indeed, I was talking just the other day with someone who mentioned that machines will never do X like humans. I simply had to say that never is a long time. If you are a physicalist who believes that the physical state of the brain determines consciousness and thought, then there really is nothing special about humans that we couldn't replicate given enough technological skill.
The basis of human rights is largely that we fought for them. That's why they seem arbitrary. And why animals lack them entirely in the strictest sense.
Similarly democracy is just an analogy for battle. The bigger group wins, ideally with less blood shed.
No one should be under the illusion that democracy does anything other than try to minimize disquiet (it doesn't select the best by any other metric leadership necessarily). It does not even matter how informed the population is.
Back to the point. Why do we have human rights? Basically they are the things that were either fought for directly or got in at the same time.
They are now expanding but I don't think many realise why they were started and the expansion might reverse what won't is the things people are willing to pick up arms over
It's also interesting to look at the theories of human morals like Kohlberg's model. Very few humans reason with the post conventual moral stages.
In 1987, Alcida Ramos--an anthropologist who had worked with the Yanomami--published a terrific article going over what she recognized about them in other texts, including Chagnon's, but more importantly pointing out the degree to which each ethnographer's selective emphasis yields a very different overall picture. Although not too surprising, it's a useful summary for anyone who only knows the Yanomami from one point of view, and it offers a sense of what an anthropologist sees in other work about a group they've worked with themselves--rare insight. Her article is called "Reflecting on the Yanomami: Ethnographic Images and the Pursuit of the Exotic," and for the moment, it's online at http://webspace.pugetsound.edu/facultypages/bdasher/Chem361/...
Interesting that this post came out only 12 hours after this similar question on reddit was asked (but I suppose coincidences are bound to happen)[0].
The reddit post's top answer corresponds pretty nicely with TFA, as it seems true that until we got the ability to share knowledge and have enough of a baseline to work from, we weren't able to bootstrap our progress. The people in TFA simply have not gotten to the baseline yet it seems, as they're still killing each other. It parallels the creation of life, only one cell needed to have the right conditions to then bootstrap to reproduction, and later on, only one cell needed to absorb another cell to then bootstrap to eukaryotic, multi-celled life.
Humans are the same, we subsist until we are comfortable enough to start bootstrapping our progress. It's also no wonder that civilization only started in a few specific places, the rest simply were not suitable conditions to bootstrap higher order civilizational structures.
This feels a bit like Baader–Meinhof phenomena to me, just after reading on reddit /r/explainlikeimfive earlier today but with a different perspective.
> about 30 percent of Yanomamö men and 10 percent of women died from human violence
That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of male and female birth)
> The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down.
Is 20% loss really enough to keep populations down?
If every woman has 3 children, then populations inceases by 50% in each generation. Losing 20% will not keep the population stable.
What if every woman has more children?
Missing in the pictore presented by the article is the birth rate, and other causes of death.
It is not evident the wars are keeping the Yanomamö population stable.
Also I don't believe animal populatios are stabilized by conflicts within same species.
And I heard from a hunter that the population of wild boars and other hunting animals depends mostly on food availability.
> That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of male and female birth)
Author mentions that primitive societies living in abundance don't have 50/50 most likely to female infanticide. If low number of working women can provide resources it's more important to have more male warriors to defend the group. Excess of women would just get stolen by another group if men numbers in the group got too low.
I think this next post contains many more interesting observations than this one.
In 1970 anthropologist William Divale compiled sex ratio data from 112 primitive societies. He found that among societies practicing war, sex ratios were on average very male-skewed among children and much less male-skewed among adults. The probable explanation Divale found was sex-biased infanticide.
Also the idea that a non-catastrophic reduction in the male population would affect the size of the next generation is probably wrong. If we assume a lack of strict monogamy, that is (probably a reasonable assumption?).
Reduction of number of males results in women getting stolen and probably even more men getting killed in the process. So the population of given group will significantly reduce.
These conclusions only apply to the tropics where you have no seasons are very little seasons and where the loose tropical soil can be easily maintained with hoe agriculture by the women... Up north in Europe where you have harsh Winters where the soil is hard and thick and where it must be plowed requiring strength and so forth, it's an entirely different story. Better notice the author did not say this did not mention this comparison. I wonder why
This article is about the Paleolithic era, before agriculture was developed.
Also, hoe vs plow agriculture tended to do with the availability of domesticated draft animals, not the hardness of the soil. The first plows appeared after oxen were domesticated in Mesopotamia. This did have an effect on the gender distribution of agriculture, not because women couldn't use hoes, but because they couldn't handle plows driven by draft animals.
It is not surprising to me that Chagnon was cancelled over false accusations, which were accepted with undue credulity by his colleagues. As this author alludes, and my own experience has also shown, too much of anthropology seems to have an unfortunate culture of gossip-driven ideological conformity. Dissent from the party line, and it will be discovered, one way or another, that you are a Bad Person.
The author seems to act as if primitive man faced an equal choice: agriculture, or hunting and gathering. He says they chose the latter because it's easier, given the larger land availability.
This is only half the equation: domesticating today's agricultural products took tens of thousands of years. And throughout the interim, that process of learning must have gotten broken dozens of times until it finally resulted in something resembling the plants which can sustain a civilization. Normal wild wheat, for example, is unharvestable. Its seeds just drift away into the wind.
I'm surprised he ignores this, but it's a pretty glaring flaw in his argument.
So many assumptions and biases, even using moral terms like greed. This sounds very smart but to me it has no substance.
The first rule of living is you want to continue living. The author and anthropoligists seem to rediscover this in different ways and marvel at thr fact for some reason. They don't understand that reproduction is a means through which one continues to live. This is true for anything that lives.
Comparisons with chimpanzees and all of that is silly. The core fact doesn't change.
I don't get why they won't ask themselves about belief and how different beliefs contributed to development. Perhaps because in modern western culture that term is synonymous with imagination and fairytales?
The tribe he described had a buffer zone and raided anyone they found threatening. Kind of like the british and japanese with their islands and invasions of the mainland whenever they felt threatened. Yet they are the most developed.
Developlment patterns in the past few thounsand years are such that war and conflict is the fuel of develpment and innovation. Because humans like any creature want to live and continue to live and live well we have conflicts and to gain the upperhand in conflicts new developments are born.
The question that was not answered for me after reading this post is why "300k years"? Because people could afford to just move elsewhere in most circumstances?
Misinterpretation of Chagnon’s work. Read The Dawn of Everything for more on this. So-called “primitive” societies have been experimenting with things other than material technology (e.g. different ways of organizing themselves) for much of that time. There’s a reason colonists often defected to Native American tribes despite their lifestyles being less comfortable in certain material ways.
Female infanticide. Warriors were more valuable than women because they were killed off faster and lack of warriors meant you'll be loosing women too. So they most likely just killed female infants so mother has free capacity for next pregnancy and feeding a boy, future warrior.
Why would the female population runaway? It doesn't matter what they die from, only that enough died of homicide to impact the numbers of pre-reproduction people dying. If you have population X that reproduces 20% y/y, but 20% (avg. of 10% and 30%) are killed before the next generation reproduces, you have steady state population.
There is a distinction between human tribes that lived in permanent locations and human tribes that were nomadic. Over the 300k years that this article cites its likely that the majority of human tribes were nomadic because as the resources of any give location were used up the tribe had to move on likely following a relatively well known seasonal route. During this phase their primary dangers were wild animal rather than other tribes.
The technology made a big change was the domestication of dogs which happened around 70k years ago genetics suggests. This was a symbiotic relationship that worked very well. Dogs could help with defense of wild animals, finding food, guarding infants etc. In return the dogs and humans were more effective hunters than either was on their own.
This relationship was the spark that freed humans' time to progress in many ways. It probably would have happened sooner if the wild dogs of Africa could be domesticated but to my knowledge they could not.
This seems... maybe too handwavy. His core theory is that "intra-culture violence keeps populations down, ergo there's no food pressure, nor impetus to increase food production". And the evidence there is quite frankly really weak. He cites just one number (~20% of the population studied died from violence), and that isn't extrapolated in any way to actual population size estimates.
Also it seems to ignore the Darwinian angle here: it doesn't matter whether or not a culture "needs" to develop agriculture, the second one does its overwhelming size will destroy its neighbors. We see this effect with damn near 100% rates everywhere in the world it happened. So that seems like a poor analysis. Really at best this is just arguing for an unstable equilibrium waiting for someone to start planting.
I dunno. This is heavy on the "feels right" and really light on the analysis. I'd steer clear.
Who is this person and why should I care about their musings? The fields of anthropology and evolutionary psychology have enough controversy and differing opinions among the experts to waste time reading overly confident conjectures from some rando who doesn’t even give their last name.
This is phrased harshly but is a good point. Who is this person and why do their musing merit attention? Have they done decades of research on this field and staked their reputation on this position, or are they another person on the internet with an opinion?
It seems a bit naïf to assume that nothing happened during that time. Gaining a whole lot more sentience is a big adjustment. We have to build language, build teaching methods, figure out how, to cooperate via trade and so on, master parenting of sentient creatures, notice patterns in the year and seasons and maybe decades and so on. I mean maybe nothing happened, but it seems like the first order assumption would be there is a lot that goes into modern society and it took time to develop. We can see for ourselves that new inventions and methods can speed up cultural rates of change and adaptability, so it makes sense the groundwork would be filled in slowly.
"This essay of mine won 1st place and $5,000 in Scott Alexander’s anonymous book review contest, which was hosted at Astral Codex Ten.
It attempts to solve the “Sapient Paradox,” which asks: Given that humans have been around for 200,000 years, why did civilization take so long to get started? Why were we stuck in prehistory for so long?"
Was this written by a large language model? Meandering narrative and logic tenuously connecting related topics rather than a clear thesis and orderly presentation of evidence seems like the LLM style.
I think this is interesting and thought provoking as a framing, but I do think it could be greatly simplified. People will either fight over resources, or they will work on creating more resources more efficiently. They will tend to the former when resources are adequate and the latter when resources are scarce.
Resources can mean mates, food, land, etc. Growth can be just as impeded by fighting over a constrained food supply as by fighting over reproductive partners.
Mimetic desire and external memory. Countless advances would have been erased by conflict, or simply forgotten. Not until we had more developed mechanics of information preservation and ethical systems that could protect against the destructive crises that result from mimetic desire could progress start to compound and accelerate.
I feel like anyone who has ever played the game Civilization on any mode equal to or higher than "Warlord" can understand.
It was probably brutally hard to get a civilization going for long enough to even invent any tech let alone share that knowledge with the rest of the world.
Only marginally relevant, but the people who are in this thread and can answer may overlap quite a bit.
I have always been fascinated with why did so many advancements have been made in the last few hundreds of years, centralized mostly in the “Western countries”? Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely not some “superiority-check” on my side, I have just never heard a convincing argument that made this area special. Was it just a “good place at the good time” event, something related to some side effect of religion/society?
One somewhat convincing argument was the constant battles between small countries?
What is more likely, that this has never happened before ever and we are the very first, or that it has happened before and our expectation that we definitely would find some evidence X years later is simply incorrect?
The author uses the word "develop" a lot without ever defining it. If he tried to, I think it would become more clear that there are a lot of things human societies can get better at, which don't necessarily go together.
I was lucky enough to go to Bora Bora a few years ago. I spent a few hours talking to a native and one of the things he said to me was, "we see someone who's skinny and we think, 'he must be lazy,' since there is plentiful food all around, fish, fruit, etc., and you just pick it up and eat." While their ceremonies and dances all relate to physical feats of prowess and strength. This seems to fit well with the hypothesis laid out in this article.
You possibly came up with the dumbest possible take from reading this article.
Human technological growth in the last few hundred thousand years, for what any one can tell, has zero or nearly zero to do with race and more to do with location and situation.
I mean, evolution of oxygen producing bacteria lead to a great catastrophe that stained the rocks of the planet and brought a new form of life to earth in its wake. The difference between us and this bacteria is we can realize the mistakes that we're making and change our future. In the long run the planet will fry in the sun, so we need to fix our short term mistakes and start looking on longer horizons.
Whether one culture is more "primitive" than another is indeed a disputable value judgement. But there is no dispute that the culture of the Yanomamö is vastlydifferent from the culture of modern industrial societies. There's nothing racist about asking why that might be.
By the way, the word "primitive" occurs exactly once in the article, in a non-central context.
It’s not a value judgment, things like writing systems, time keeping, and various societal structures can be objectively measured since they have an impact on how large a given culture or society can be.
This war over words and language really needs to stop. Anthropology moved from using savages to primitives and now has more and more terms that eventually mean the same thing.
No, it’s not a matter of mere “difference.” Societies that don’t have computers and space ships and cars are more primitive—they live more like humans did originally, and like animals still do—than societies that have those things. It’s a tremendously bad idea to lose sight of the that.
Whether “primitive” is the same thing as “bad” or “good” is indeed a value judgment. There’s certainly benefits to a primitive lifestyle (lesser rates of chronic diseases, etc.)
Yes, in a technical usage of the word "primitive" sometimes encountered in discussions of evolution, it refers simply to something that comes early. For instance, one might ask whether a trait shared by two species is "primitive", meaning it was present in their common ancestor, or instead evolved independently in the two species. There is no value judgement there.
However, in non-technical discussions, "primitive" is often taken to mean "not as good", which is indeed a value judgement, and that's the usage meant in my comment.
If I have a a spaceship and you have a burning stick, you are technologically primitive. Being technologically primitive does not necessarily make you culturally primitive, for example...
If I use that spaceship to explode your technologically primitive culture to little bits because I can, it's highly likely that my culture is underdeveloped when it comes to finding non-violent solutions.
Technology is a facet of culture. Think about how useless a phone would be without the people and knowledge maintaining electrical grids, software, and data infrastructure.
Now consider that if the planet is a burnt out carcass that can't support life beyond bacteria that the project of technology maybe didn't serve us humans too well in the end.
> Now consider that if the planet is a burnt out carcass that can't support life beyond bacteria that the project of technology maybe didn't serve us humans too well in the end.
Sure, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to be.
If you don't feel the need to put a probability on your hypothetical scenario, you can doomsay anything, including what I would guess your preferred strategy to be: "Now consider that if the planet gets struck by a rogue cosmic body and shattered into an asteroid belt that the project of controlled deindustrialization and focus on conservation and social justice maybe didn't serve us humans too well in the end."
I don't see how what you're saying disagrees with the parent. In your first paragraph, no one is disagreeing that technology builds upon itself. In your second paragraph, the parent already concedes that if the technology is used badly, it'll...end badly, which is what you're saying too.
Are you saying that a particular assertion made in the article is factually wrong, or just that making some assertion or using some term to describe the condition of, say, Yanomami society, is immoral in your eyes? In the former case, it would help if you could point out what.
In the latter, well, okay, but you should be clear that you are not disputing the correctness of the theory.
If some cultures aren’t less advanced than others, then we also can’t really talk about some cultures being more advanced, either relative to other cultures or to themselves across the span of time.
That is completely false understanding of the article. What are you saying, if one culture has rockets, and one has sticks, that technology can't even be talked about because it would be racist.
Hard to take this seriously when the author believes the Yanomami represent some kind of pristine culture, untouched by civilization. Instead they are more like refugees -- survivors of smallpox and other European diseases, and also of European colonizers. A few hundred years ago, they moved to some of the least hospitable land on the continent and were forgotten by the outside world.
They are unique, certainly, but hardly representative of prehistoric humanity.
Are you arguing that they were once a lot more sophisticated and then regressed back to the stone age? It seems somehow unlikely given the description. Even if they fled contact with outsiders, they wouldn't have forgotten everything along the way.
Certainly the destruction of their actual civilization, and moving to a new biome with different resources would have entailed the loss of much technology. But I'm mainly saying that the author isn't even aware of their history, and treats them as a stand-in for prehistoric peoples everywhere.
Assuming by developed they mean agriculture and the industrial revolution. Probably because the climate has been unusually stable for the last 10-12k years. Many likely did agricultural but when the climate suddenly shifts it means everything you have learned about growing in that region is lost. Thus agriculture is never sustained and populations never blow up.
I get the sense here that the author is really more of a pop psychologist than a real anthropologist. These kind of plausible sounding arguments are very convincing if you don’t have a background in anthropology- and I don’t, so I’m not going to say he’s wrong, I will just say that based on the tone of the piece, I’m not convinced that he knows much more than I do.
Given a very primal mammalian impusle towards power-structed polygamy, social conditioning around monogamy has to be pretty profoundly integrated into culture. Or you are going to have some very seriously angry young men. And given the numbers being posted, they may be coming back.
Technology develops, but our psychology changes very little. Evolution is slow. Every new idealistic framework for constructing a society inevitably proposes a hypothetical "new man" who lionizes those values and possesses the ideal psychology, so of course the framework fails. And we return to tried and true defaults.
I believe the critical failure point of humanity is that is requires enough humans to act in a "global idealist" manner, eschewing the societal easy fruit of the local maximum for building a global minimum/maximum, while giving up personal energy & opportunities, and taking risks & having personal power to do so.
I used to believe much of the population can and will do that. Now I realize only a very small percentage get to the can + will + do + succeed portion - since there is so much failure along the way.
As we see, in a civilized society - there is little reason for most to do this - and they hence waste away watching Netflix (etc.)
> As we see, in a civilized society - there is little reason for most to do this - and they hence waste away watching Netflix (etc.)
Prime age employment in the US is currently higher than it has ever been in history.
(There are some "people just don't want to work" stories but these are mostly reading the wrong numbers; what they're seeing is society aging causing people to retire.)
> What made human males finally abandon that zero-sum game and develop more complex societies?
I think it's magical mushrooms and religions.
- With religions in the west comes a systematic approach of dissecting things (e.g. from the beginning of natural philosophy to Isaac Newton and so on)
- With religions in the east comes more intense forms of poetry and arts (e.g. I always consider the Chinese language to be more "psychedelic" than English)
The human history has always been about psychedelics.
This is very thought provoking. I think this is going to be one of those foundational pieces that I return to again and again when evaluating a situation. It helps to explain a lot of behavior that seems totally irrational on the surface.
No chocolate, coffee or high calorie foods. Imagine what you would do to get chocolate if you couldn't have it. Peanut butter sandwiches, kornflakes, fueled working people during the industrial revolution. Industry produced foods for workers
Reminds me of that quote about going broke "It happens slowly at first and then all at once". This applies to lots of things and I would argue it applies to both the development of a society, and its downfall.
There is the key TLDR line (and Chagnon's justification for why the lack of development was possible).
"The obvious reason why the Yanomamö didn't reach a Malthusian condition was their high level of violence. The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down. In practice they ran into violent neighbors long before they ran out of land to farm or game to hunt."
The Malthusian condition is what gives us "progress", because you have to fight economically rather than individually (with knowledge, technology, and efficiency rather than with knives and individually) to survive.
My concern over the last decade has been whether in wealthier societies grifting has become more profitable than developing technology or knowledge. One can argue what is better, but not really whether it is "progress". Moore's law is really one of the few things that was dragging us forward.
We certainly,seem to be a more fraudulent society now than when I was a kid (1970s) but that might be a distorted perception. I think there are earlier times when hucksterism was even bigger than now. I guess it is down to the forces of don’t let the government regulate the operations of the market winning since 1980, so there is no one to stop the fraud or label it. But it at least the US has always been caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.
Maybe it is more fraudulent because the internet and fraudsters have gotten more effective and most people have blind spots where they are manipulable; crypto has bilked people of billions; Q Anon has gotten millions utterly divorced from shared reality; YouTube algorithm inadvertently spread flat earther stuff because it has algorithmically desirable features.
Please elaborate. Kids surely don't have a good view on the amount of fraud, but I remember people going to jail and resigning for corruption or illegal schemes more regularly.
Probably because they were just busy enjoying their lives and the wonders of nature and didn’t feel the need to go full speed into whatever we’re going full speed at right now ?
Really fantastic article, love it. If revolutionary stuff wasn't coming by every other week, this would deserve a lot of attention.
Very clearly stated, doesn't overreach, amazing work.
Don't mean to overcomplicate the main point, but human behaviour everywhere lives on that spectrum of Malthus, from survival-driven to sex-driven. Stable and unstable microcosms pop up everywhere.
I'd bet Chagnon was so controversial because the field he was trying to publish in is popularity-based (and therefore sex-driven), and not all that different from the tribe he was describing.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
I've always believed a main weakness of humans are the wide range of emotions many have and their influence on decision making. I've always believed if we could cull out say.... 60% of emotions and get to logical decision making - that humanity could excel. Heck - I'd even wondered if CRISPR could help with that. Clearly doing this is morally wrong, but would be useful.
Then I heard about AGI years ago. The real usefulness for me of AGI - to help the emotional see the error of their ways and possibly use higher level logic, rather than base emotional logic, for decision making.
The reptilian brain often fools intelligent beings into believing they are capable of determining what progress even means.
If one digs deep into noteworthy areas of theoretical change, than one often learns most were ambitious individuals exploiting hapless peers. Society tends to praise ethically dubious ambitious behavior, and punishes those who question conventional wisdom. This fact covers almost all areas of study, and results in irrational mythologies.
Just be impressed a hive of psychotic primates accomplishes anything at all... let alone improve something through arbitrary metrics. =)
Developed into what? The hunter-gatherer bands still roaming the Amazon don't have to worry about unemployment, layoffs, crime or a host of other maladies - their only problem is encounters with murderous gold miners from the "developed" world.
Sociologists found hunter-gatherer bands usually work less than 40 hours a week. They have it made more than Amazon SWE's grinding away on the weekend.
The past 10,000 years of "development" has been a disaster for the majority of people, and a benefit to a small minority.
Seems a little romanticized. Kind of like people who like the idea of homesteading, until they do it.
Everything is a tradeoff of problems, never an elimination of all problems. I'd prefer to have modern societal problems, but power to you if you can make hunter gathering or homesteading work for you.
Or you know, the problem the people in the article encounter is primarily other people of a neighboring tribe who are killing them. 30% of their males died from violence. They worked less than 40 hours a week because food was abundant, easy to get, and their population was low. If food was scarce, they probably die of starvation or war.
> The hunter-gatherer bands still roaming the Amazon don't have to worry about unemployment, layoffs, crime or a host of other maladies - their only problem is encounters with murderous gold miners from the "developed" world.
Isn't that a kind of crime?
I daresay they have other issues too, like tropical or introduced diseases, parasites, disability, famines, substance addiction…
Interesting, but what the heck was this quote all about??
> When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. They chose the latter.
This is hyperbolic, no? Most anthropologists are not Marxists, surely. So why is the author weakening his point by using such loaded language inaccurately?
I have been away from academic anthropology for a couple of decades, but it wouldn't be too ridiculous to say that the social sciences tend to oscillate back and forth between materialist theoretical frameworks (like Marxism) and idealistic ones (which give culture / social practice more weight in explaining how people live, other than competition over resources). With occasional syntheses of the two. So in the context of Chagnon's career it was that he was annoying his mostly-Marxist colleagues (at the time) with his sociobiological explanations.
i dont trust anyone who has a fancy media head-shot. i clicked on the link and before i had a chance to read anything i was confronted by a giant head-shot of a guy who is trying to look sophisticated -- a person who is clearly very concerned with his brand. at that point reading on is pointless because i already know that this person will never say anything that would threaten that brand, nothing that goes against the current societal dogma. and its likely that what he writes optimizes for reader engagement over truth.
even though the headshot is not of the author, everything i said is still true! you cant flag a comment that hasnt broken the rules.
Maybe the biggest advancement in societal development is the idea that in some ways, many ways actually, non-development is the most advanced form of development.
I think we are at an in between stage of development. Some tech but basically primitive tech. Like we have cars, but they are not capable enough to go over most surfaces, so we have to pave over where ever we want to go. Advanced tech would be putting us in more pleasant and natural environments but able to summon a cat bus https://totoro.fandom.com/wiki/Catbus for transportation. And have unobtrusive medical treatment things around in case they are needed. But trees and animals and so on on the surface. Tree houses, sure, but not interstate highways. Floating cities, why not. First we need energy, then we need safe nanotech and then we need a mechanical understanding of biology.
> When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong.
Eyebrow raising statement. As someone with Marxist sympathies I don't agree or know what he's talking about. What is true is whenever it is argued that anthropology points to pre-agriculture humans living surprisingly healthier less labor intensive lives than expected and etc. it becomes a political fight where some reel back and pull out the "Nasty, brutish, and short" Hobbes meme. The Yanomamo and their extreme murderousness are always the go to push-back example. It's obviously a stand in for a left/right "is capitalism right and the natural state of man" thing and I do think it lead to a motivated reasoning to attack Chagnon's character (he just provoked them. They're outliers!), but I don't see where a Marx view is upended.
> This is probably a general rule: In a society where children are difficult to feed, dedicated fathers focusing on feeding their children will have an evolutionary advantage. In societies where mothers can feed their children without much assistance, men who strive for many children with several women will have an evolutionary advantage.
Another interesting and potentially radical line. Maybe a motivator this being posted? One could argue that current society, in a world were single motherhood is increasingly easy, is re-trending towards this way. Which, as pointed out, is actually the norm for mammals. Humans are a weird exception in not being harem maters.
> I absolutely do not intend to single out the Yanomamö as unusually unindustrous. To the contrary, I think they represented a kind of human default. I think that humans have mostly existed in a stage of population equilibrium, ... the result becomes an equilibrium that can go on for thousands of years.
As per the title. I ain't no anthropologist but if we are talking Anatomically Modern Humans vs Behavioral Modernity I think there's another equally or more uncomfortable and unPC answer, rather than this thesis. Just because anatomically modern humans 300k years ago had the same skeletons as modern man doesn't mean they had the same brains. What happened was probably an event horizon brain evolution. Not that men were stuck in an unproductive, antisocial women hording social equilibrium for hundreds or thousands of years until they weren't.
> When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. They chose the latter.
it's not that we didn't develop culture, it's just that the scientific/academic CANNOT accept nothing which is not written down (or which exist as material remnants), and writing is barely over 10 or 12 thousand years old.
meaning that the preceding period of cultural development doesn't exist for them by the 'choice' of relying solely on material artifacts as admissible evidence; which unwritten (oral only) transmission does not have.
I think it has little to do with "science"; it is the westerners who have held science hostage which has led to all kinds of idiocy.
They will accept Egyptians as "civilized" because they can then go on to claim that the ancient Egyptians who lived 2500 years ago, who were more close to Europeans, totally built the pyramids even though nothing suggests that they had the means to do so... and the answer to that obviously is "slavery"... because that is how Europeans would do it and therefore that is how it was done.
And nothing is unknown or open to explanation because western "experts" of course know everything.
I don't think there is much hope for knowing more of human past until the western empire collapses and more intelligent civilizations take over.
Whether he's a tomato plant or not, watch the way he starts out by retelling how the guy who studied the Yanomami had been accused of serious dishonesty, but it has now been conclusively proven that it's the guy who accused him who was the fraud. Right away, he's expected to be taken as an expert, and he knows he's talking to non-experts, but he's telling us, don't listen to those people, listen to me.
And then he goes on with the sort of grand narrative that even I know - though I'm not an anthropologist - that most of them don't want to make, and are deeply sceptical about (also when made by people from the other political side, like Graeber)
For all I know he's even right about his claims. But if you believe them just from coming across his article first (as opposed to those who would no doubt try just as hard to poison the well against him), then what's the point?
Q: Is viewing cultures as ancient or primitive still a popular perspective in academia like anthropology? Why or why not?
GPT: In contemporary academia, especially in anthropology, viewing cultures as "ancient" or "primitive" is no longer a popular perspective. This shift has occurred due to several reasons:
• Critique of ethnocentrism: Modern anthropologists recognize that ethnocentrism—the belief that one's own culture is the standard against which others should be judged—can lead to biased perspectives and misunderstandings. Anthropologists now strive to understand cultures in their own contexts, considering their unique histories, values, and practices.
• Cultural relativism: The concept of cultural relativism emphasizes the importance of understanding cultures within their own context, without imposing one's own values or judgments. This approach discourages the labeling of cultures as "primitive" or "ancient," as it recognizes that each culture has its own complexities and should not be evaluated based on a hierarchy.
• Rejection of evolutionary models: Early anthropological theories often relied on unilinear evolutionary models, suggesting that cultures progress along a linear path from "primitive" to "civilized." Modern anthropology largely rejects these models in favor of more nuanced understandings of cultural change and diversity.
• Decolonizing anthropology: The discipline of anthropology has undergone a process of decolonization in recent decades, which involves critically examining the field's history, assumptions, and methodologies. This process has led to a greater awareness of the power dynamics involved in studying other cultures and has contributed to the rejection of the "primitive" or "ancient" labels.
• Focus on cultural diversity and complexity: Contemporary anthropology values the diversity and complexity of human societies, recognizing that each culture has its own unique historical trajectory, social organization, and belief systems. This perspective discourages simplistic labels like "primitive" or "ancient," as they fail to capture the richness and depth of human cultural variation.
In summary, the perspective of viewing cultures as "ancient" or "primitive" is no longer popular in anthropology and other academic disciplines, as it has been replaced by a more nuanced understanding of cultural diversity, context, and complexity.
More spiritual society is the less stuff it needs to amass.
One of the theories goes that ancient civilizations made progress in non material domains. How else would you explain these thousands years long periods in the history when a table or a spoon looked the same. And nothing visible happened?
Are you just neglecting all the human suffering, pain, and death that was occurring in that nothing visible happening moment? History looks a lot different when you just ignore the parts you don't like.
It doesn't take long for the author's ideological agenda to surface:
> "When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. They chose the latter."
It's such a tediously predictable approach, regurgitating the theme that "Marxists captured academia and distorted science to fit their preferred narrative", which is as much projection as anything else (e.g. the takeover of American economics departments by the Milton Friedman crowd with the assistance of large cash donations from private foundations, etc.).
Fundamentally, the problem with the author's claim is that you can't look at one group of humans living somewhere and then project your conclusions about how that group functions to the entire human species while proclaiming you've discovered some fundamental feature of human nature (that just happens to fit with your own ideological bias).
This kind of bias projection is a huge problem in the social sciences, and is doubtless a main reason for poor reproducibility of studies, data manipulation and selection, and the like. People go in with a story they want to tell, and look for evidence that supports their preconceived notions, and surprise, they see what they want to see.
On academic takeover, the statistics are quite clear that 60 years ago there were far more Republicans in US academia than there are today. Economics departments may have somewhat less skewed numbers but you would certainly expect to see a dominance of left-leaning voters in a department like anthropology.
>> you can't look at one group of humans living somewhere and then project your conclusions about how that group functions to the entire human species
That's his point, not yours. He criticized anthropologists who were (in essence) projecting 19th century Victorian England onto the whole of humanity and its history, and argues that when other anthropologists were faced with indisputable evidence that this generalization could not hold they had a mini melt down and shot the messenger.
Why the meltdown - Marxism takes as a founding axiom the idea that humanity is engaged in a constant war over control of the means of the material production, that it always had been and always would be. This idea is what justified their social agenda.
>> This kind of bias projection is a huge problem in the social sciences
Yup, and that's why the author is criticizing it. Also, is there any evidence the author is a social scientist? I don't see any. Plus the author doesn't claim all anthropologists are Marxists, only that some of them are.
That is because the Republicans 60 years ago believed in science, hard work, truth and building up society. At least the to ones. The party as a whole and especially in its leadership positions have decisively shifted away from science and truth and towards defense of the currently powerful business interests at the expense of most else. Why isn’t the global warming debate a debate about how to solve the actual problem? Why isn’t the debate on how to regulate the big tech monopolies based on factuality instead of ideologically distorted facts? Because the Republicans have retreated from modern society, science, and a commitment to truth. The scientists didn’t filter out the republicans, the Republicans stopped believing in science.
No it's not, because the same effect is seen everywhere but only the US has the Republican party. Which would argue the opposite anyway - it does in fact believe in the scientific method, which is why they criticize academic research so often (because it's not really scientific).
Are you saying there aren’t conservative parties outside the Us or that conservatives worldwide haven’t pushed against science the past few decades? Is UKIP pro-science? Putin? Are there conservative parties that welcome the acceleration of social change due to increased knowledge and technology?
At every time in the history of science, there have been things to criticize. Nonetheless it is been successfully self-correcting for quite a long time. You need to provide some stronger evidence this has broken down other than one anthropologist whose ideas, according to TFA, are now more respected than earlier, which would be an actual proper functioning of science.
OK, let's get one thing straight. Everyone claims to be pro-science. There is literally no political party on earth that stands up and says "we hate science".
When you describe people as pushing back against "science" what you mean is they disagree with you about whether certain claims are in fact true claims, whether they are high quality science or not. They are not saying they reject your beliefs because they reject science, they are saying you should reject those beliefs because they are pseudo-science: something that looks superficially like science, but isn't.
"it is been successfully self-correcting for quite a long time"
It's not self correcting, that's a myth. You asked for more evidence, fine, it exists in abundance. Go research. Consider that people started talking about a replication crisis in psychology more than a decade ago yet it's still a huge problem. Claims are still being made today that clearly won't replicate when the underlying studies are briefly checked. Or look at the recent IPCC report. In the summary for policymakers it introduces a long since debunked graph that doesn't appear anywhere in the actual report itself (because it's wrong). So the IPCC is presenting a document that claims to be a summary of the science yet isn't. Guess what - the point who point out this sort of thing tend to be conservatives, or they get labelled as such, simply because non-conservatives refuse to criticize academia.
It is often said that science changes one funeral at a time, but I have certainly read a lot about efforts to fix the replication crisis. And ten years isn't long to change the behavior of a large number of independent actors. The discourse about the replication crisis comes from scientists and is being fixed by the scientific process. It supports my thesis.
Your next example, one diagram in the non-scientific portion of the IPCC report that you don't like doesn't really invalidate the "science is self-correcting." Perhaps you have more details on this supposed diagram?
If you ever attend a scientific conference, you will certainly hear scientists criticizing each other. More biting than the most wooly eyed back-woods preacher and more informed than the poshest petroleum funded climate sceptic. But they don't argue about perpetual motion, flat earth, evolution, or global warming due to the carbon burn.
"Scientists" and "journalists" are the very people being accused of propagating pseudo-science so who cares what they think? To resolve disputes about whether certain claims are scientific you can't just ask one side and say, "Well? Are you right?".
"The discourse about the replication crisis comes from scientists and is being fixed by the scientific process."
I've also read a lot. Unfortunately, it's not being fixed. There is a small amount of discourse in a small segment of a small set of fields, which has had absolutely no impact whatsoever on common practice in those fields, let alone the wider government research enterprise.
Also, mind that replicability is only one tiny part of the problem. There's also huge problems with papers that misrepresent their own data, use invalid (but replicable) methodologies, abuse statistics, are entirely fraudulent to begin with, are based on logical fallacies, encode extremely ideologically biased ideas into their study design, are based on buggy programs or invalid assumptions, cite documents that contradict the claims being made and so on. Inability to replicate is not the only problem here, even though it's the only one that really gets discussed.
"one diagram in the non-scientific portion of the IPCC report"
It's not a diagram, it claims to be a graph of long term temperature history and is thus the core claim that supports the entire thesis of the summary, and yet it's known to be fraudulent and was previously dropped from IPCC reports for being so. And non-scientific?! The IPCC supposedly a summary of a scientific report, which is itself reporting on and summarizing the science! You don't get to put claims about temperature in the summary that don't appear anywhere in the science, then claim to be summarizing science. Yet they do, and this is just an example. Fraud in apparently scientific claims is out of control, but only conservatives are willing to call it out. Then they get labelled as science deniers. It's actually the other way around though: it's the people who blindly accept anything that looks superficially like science, who are denying true science.
We seem to have become complacent with progress, and don’t make quite the same effort. For example, commercial supersonic flight became available when I was a kid, and we lost it 2 decades ago. We haven’t been to the moon since the 1970s.
Also physics. Supersonic travel is prohibitively expensive because it requires exponentially more energy than flying at ~900 km/h. More efficient engines can't really change that much..
I wouldn't mind a Gothic cathedral if I could get one for cheap and maintenance didn't cost anything.
At the end Concorde failed because it was mainly a status symbol (for the governments, airlines and passengers). As long as subsonic remained considerably cheaper (and it probably would because of physics) I'm convinced most people would still ussually choose it even if supersonic became more affordable.
I mean it's like saying most people would prefer to fly first class if it was more affordable, well.. obviously.
Do you know in the Bible, when Pharaoh took away the strawmen from the Hebrews so they had to make bricks without it?
The Hebrews knew more about building pyramids than we do. There are endless pseudo-documentaries about how we think and surmise and suppose that the pyramids were built, but we don't actually know. So many of the basic and intermediate and advanced processes and materials have been lost, that we literally can't figure it out. Easter Island? Stonehenge? Lots of ink is spilled just on how the ancients moved stones, carved them, and set them vertically in place, without cranes or forklifts or power tools.
Interesting you should mention Gothic cathedrals. Antoni Gaudí built masterful models and plans for the Sagrada Família (which is not a cathedral, but a basilica), and the models and plans were destroyed and pillaged during the Spanish Revolution and Francoist suppression of Catalan culture. So the church which you see being completed in this century is the best architectural guess at what Gaudí intended. The construction is based on reconstructions. And I guarantee that the artisanal methods being employed are vanishingly rare, both in skill and material, and it is more difficult to preserve continuity of training and knowledge through the generations.
My guess would be that a lot of people saw '70s, and eventually enough of them got things mixed up in the same way that the error became self-perpetuating.
> While many guides discourage using an apostrophe in all numbers/dates, many other guides encourage using an apostrophe for numbers or are divided on the issue
No worries, wasn't trying to rag on you, was just curious. More generally for the pattern recognition point, I've tried to get a good grasp of Grammer myself and question why certain phrases are phrased that way. The English Stack Exchange site is one of my most visited ones, I believe, it's pretty nice.
this guy is a impostor. and you are all discussing some crazy charlatan's ideas, and it's too f* funny from the outside.
undeniable proof: a yanomami learned Portuguese and wrote a (extremely beautiful) book to introduce his culture. the book is written with yanomami "language" (well, mannerism and figures of speeches) but Portuguese grammar and syntaxe, comprehensible but too neologism at some points, requiring too much creativity to understand. but a native Portuguese speaker translator/editor did ease the work.
anyway, the first hand author https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davi_Kopenawa_Yanomami don't even mention that impostor, but gives us a complete different picture were you can clearly see everything this fake-anthologist wrote is false.
yanomami rite of adulthood involves walking and meeting nearby "cities" were they often intermarry. so theses sex wars sounds like a lunacy. also the fact they haven't interbreed to extinction is another good proof.
anyway, this guy sucks and published lies for self promoting and financial gain. sorry if his lies were validating some hypothesis you hold (held hopefully) dear.
You may well be right but this comment isn't written in a way that gives your argument a fair hearing. It's too much in the flamewar style and breaks a whole bunch of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - including this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." The latter is reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
If you know more than the rest of us do, that's great—but then please share some of what you know, so we can learn (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) - and please drop the putdowns. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
It would have been much better to take out the flamebait and name-calling bits, and instead add more detailed information—enough to let people make up their own minds, or at least get a good amount of understanding of the other side.
In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.