Hunter gatherer times were certainly not superior to today. That's a pervasive myth.
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/55101875...
https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
I concede that people adjust their expectations to norms that surround them. But I also feel there are certain floors in the human condition -- the death of a child being one of those rock bottoms.
If you want to explore the other side to that old essay, try this: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Worst+Mistake+in+the+His...
"After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands." - Wikipedia
Do you dispute his position on women in science? Or, should we take his position as correct for the same reasons that you list.
I did not say his only credit was popularity. I said he's a pop-writer, as opposed to, say, a peer reviewed expert in the domain.
In any case, my primary request is that people consider the long list of refutations to the claims in his mass-market publications.
And history has also shown some experts can be wrong when the paradigm change of new ideas is too big.
However, and I say this is particularly important: all refutations I have read about his work focus on some particular detail, they are of the type: 'this number is wrong'. Of course it can be, he's speculating. And that's the easy part to fix! Just change the number in his argument with the correct one. Be constructive.
But I have never read a refutation that says: 'this line of reasoning is wrong'.
In fact, his work has been cited as an inspiration for 'Sapiens', which is a current best seller and it follows the same modus operandi.
Or, try googling. For example, here is a relevant discussion on NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-do...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118
(Tichy’s karma is just 110 short)
For example, perhaps certain facts have been more/less passionately supported after 10 years. Also aspects like tone.
To further your analogy, would you prefer to be a diabetic paraplegic in the modern era, or the medieval? Because you're not going to be able to medicate yourself with the insulin you need, and there's not much work for paraplegics to do if they're not born into money.
> Our 60 years of wage slavery in windowless offices might seem unconscionable to a medieval peasant drinking mead all day by a stream with his friends, even if he ends up dying at 50.
We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism is the whole reason why this site exists. For a medieval peasant, they can't move into the nobility, their inventions are not protected, they frequently aren't allowed to move around, travel is dangerous, communication with anyone outside the area they grew up in is more difficult due to language differences, hobbies are limited largely to what you can build yourself, since trade for items is difficult and expensive... the list of restrictions goes on and on.
In any case, the peasants of yesteryear are analogous to the working class of today, and they don't work in offices, windowless or otherwise.
> We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism
Entrepreneuralism often is just another form of slavery. You exchange serving your boss 8 hours a day for serving your customers (and/or investors) 16 hours a day. Most businesses are not innovative problem solving endeavours, they're mundane servitude in highly competitive markets. If you're lucky, it may lead you to significantly more wealth than your dayjob; if you're not, you just wasted years of working 16h/day for less reward than you'd get working 8h/day in a regular job.
The slavery only ends when you don't have to do work for other people in exchange for resources necessary to live a decent life. As a society, we're nowhere near that yet.
(Thinking that starting your own business is freedom from the man is confusing irrelevant freedoms, like the ability to choose your customers, choose your logo, choose your working machine, with actually important freedoms, like choosing whether to have customers at all.)
A person today is less of a slave to his environment than in the past, although this is more the case in Canada and Scandinavian countries, than in the US.
Now you could say that people worked less in past times, but you could also work half a year and enjoy the rest of your time labour-free, so long as you sacrifice a lot of luxuries (running water, police service, paved roads, fire department, any means of connectivity, etc.)
You wouldn't be sent to prison in the first place.
"The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls."
Mead was expensive since it require lots of honey and was mostly used for special occasions. Most they did drink weak beer because they had learned that in some places peoples drinking water did die more often than the peoples drinking beer. The beer was weak because they did not know how east works and it was probably flat. So don't confuse it with what we know as beer now.
I do also have a hard time believing they in general had more freedom, maybe the top 10% had more freedom than what many have now? Which is far from what the top 10% have now