Comment by primer42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by primer42 | Hacker News Reader

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Humans have been on this earth for 300 millennia

Most of that time, we were nomadic hunter gathers.

No one really knows what is "intrinsic" to human nature.

We only have records for the most recent 1-2% of our time on this planet. And that 1-2% of "recorded time" is by far one of the most abnormal periods not in human history (300,000 years), but probably one of the most abnormal periods in the history of life on our planet (4,500,000,000 years).

Your perceived "intrinsic" need may be true to our nature, but it's more likely a result of the strange environment we find ourselves in.

If you could talk to 100 people from all of human history, the majority of them would be hunter gatherers. You'd be lucky if you got a single person who even understand the concept of "history".

On the last point I feel obligated to point out that 120 bn people are estimated to have ever lived on the planet, of those a 100 bn lived before 1750, 60 bn before 1 CE, 10 bn before 8000 BCE.

That means that if you took 100 people from human history, 15 of them would have heard of press, 50 of writing, 90 of agriculture. Not so many humans in a state of nature there.

That's a great correction. I was absolutely not taking into account the population sizes at each part of human history.

Are your numbers assuming that everyone in the world knew about each "invention", for example writing, at the same time?

If writing existed in a society at a particular time, I'm not sure how to estimate if or how well an average person (likely without much education unless part of a privileged class) would know about it.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that a random human experience today is very abnormal compared to the average human experience at any time previously in history. So I guess the more accurate way to demonstrate that would be to choose 100 random years from the last 300 millennia, and then grab a random person from each of those years.

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