Why human societies developed so little during 300k years
woodfromeden.substack.com
woodfromeden.substack.com
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.
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.
[0] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-devel...
And some societies decided to ditch agriculture or only use it partially.
Finding food wasn't a constant struggle but when it happened it was an extinction event.
A farmer can rely on extra food created to sustain them in fallow years, and is much more stable than chasing deers around.
Agriculture and farming were more stable/predictable source of food and shelter. Especially during winter.
Sure you can move, but nothing guarantees another tribe/predator isn't in the new place.
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.
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.
That one. Also true of farming societies. Up until the industrial revolution, humanity was stuck in a Malthusian trap.
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.
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".
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.
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.
I don’t think it can be qualified of fast.
Their was back and forth and things did not change rapidly for the better automagically.
For milenaries, hunter gathered were better fed than village dweller ( from bones structures and trash analysis)
Source : Grabber & scott. Mostly “against the grain” and “debt, a history”
When the question is why human society changed so little in 300,000 years, 5000 years is fast.
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.
(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.)
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.
eg:
To your question, the pyramids structure of poverty points, in norther Louisiana have been built by nomadic people
The architect and construction worker seems to have eat a mix of fishes, primitive rice and a local tubercule close to sweet potatoes.
( from the poverty point excavation )
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.
Poverty Point in Louisiana is another example of temple complex without the city to sustain them.
Why do you assume hunter gatherer could not archive this level of complexity?
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.
Can you source your claims?
That’s as polite as I can be at this point :)
Some are engaged but how many are just mindlessly scrolling addictive algorithmically curated trash?
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.
What gives you that idea?
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.
They're on Zoom meetings in Fortune 100 companies.
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).
reminds me of universal paperclip in a weird way. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
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.
[0] https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/b6d8d2c73ec4fe56df9714d8435a... [1] https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/58e7c9ee4d716f91f1e7438660b7...
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).
[1] https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1471-...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[3] https://bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12887...
"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)"
Number of children who died before the age of 5 is 6/1000 in the US, compared to 4/1000 in France and Denmark for example.
What's your source on 'cancer rescue statistics'?
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.
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.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[2] 55 of those on the S&P or Fortune 500 were profitable in 2020 and payed no tax https://itep.org/55-profitable-corporations-zero-corporate-t...
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.
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.
Is that actually the case? Or are numbers still out of whack when you combine deaths from miscarriages?
Age of death is bimodal, so its most like most people die as infants or live decent lives.
> most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.
I don't think that's actually true - subsistence farming has a lot of down time.
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.
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 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! I wonder if Homer would event recognise much of our modern version of it.
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.
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.
Songs did not spread as far nor as easily as they do it now.
It is good for trivial messages (this is dangerous, etc), but not for anything more complex.
One of the oldest written documents we have is a customer complaint
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
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.
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.
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.
Singularity-Kurzweil claims ongoing "increasing returns", but some papers showed population explains.
Also, you have my vote for establishing “hour of collective mental wankery” as a measurement unit.
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?
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.
https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made
Ridiculously complicated. And there were oral folk tales passed along for years to keep the cultural memory of it.
Eventually Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrote their versions down.
Andersen: https://fairytalez.com/flax/
Grimm: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mothe...
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:
https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf
https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-disc...
Like, by the time you have metal you can have scissors, but when you’re still working with flint that’s not really an option.
Flint could make a blade sharp enough to carefully carve your nails back if you really wanted
They didn't. Probably like felids don't cut their claws.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a fascinating exploration of this anthropological phenomenon through the medium of musical theater, I recommend Team Starkid's "Firebringer".
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.
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.
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.
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.
They fixed this problem by 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
The article only says that it took some research facility 5 years.
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).
Unless you're Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Or Darwin and Wallace.
Which suggests these ideas might be a product of their zeitgeist with a number of contempories bording on being the first to publish.
Not starvation wages, certainly, but neither was it vast riches.
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.
Book-printing presses have been one of the most influential inventions ever for precisely that reason.
I would imagine the next biggest influential invention is AGI.
So why not earlier? Because the others didn't have Fermat to learn from.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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).
Calculus was discovered by several mathematicians in India - unfortunately little survives of several works.
https://iks.iitgn.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Developme....
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.
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".
"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)
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."
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can confirm, I have been trying to do/understand something but since I ain't seen it, I cannot just tell you what it is.
less stubborn people (and people with other's depending on them) would have given up already.
I think provable academics for academics sake is far more recent than Newton.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I consider the popularity of arseholes like Peterson to be more symptom than cause but I could be wrong. I'll think about it.
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.
Now, social media on the other hand…
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.
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.
Not necessarily: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/gay-lions-ma...
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."
You hear that, in movies and books. It basically means that, because it is is asserted in textual form, it is authoritative.
Which is absurd of course.
But it that how we think?
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!
The pleistocene megafauna would like to have a word with you.
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.
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.
How could that not be progress?
If we've never been able to do that before, but now can, we've moved from a state of inability to a state of ability. That is progress.
Now, if you view "progress" as something that is inherently positive, that is a bias you should check.
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.
That was covered. 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.
It only tells us about the Yanomami, we can't extrapolate from before they were around
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?
> 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.
this premise, which indeed does operate largely without conscious acknowledgement, is the basis of belief in human rights.
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.
There 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.
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/08/08/caveman-cou...
The article claims otherwise:
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.
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.
Not necessarily true. Train a GPT on monkey sounds and you'll get a completely different result.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6...
ELI5: If humans have been in our current form for 250,000 years, why did it take so long for us to progress yet once it began it's in hyperspeed? https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6oz1/...
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#child-mortality-i...
And as close as my grandparents' generation, half of their siblings died before ten.
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.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-devel...
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, 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.
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.
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?
> According to Chagnon’s calculations about 30 percent of Yanomamö men and 10 percent of women died from human violence.
So, given abundant food, and no obvious limit on the size of a man's "harem", what kept the female population numbers from runaway?
Also, what were the proximate causes of the female deaths by violence?
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.
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.
Here's an excerpt from the intro, for context:
"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?"
The ancient Sanskrit epic "Ramayana" is also centred around a war that stemmed from kidnapping of a bride.
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.
But, it is provocative as stated!
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.
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?
They are unique, certainly, but hardly representative of prehistoric humanity.
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.
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.)
You're on to something. Thats the way I believe.
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.)
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.
Related:
[1] Soma siddhas and alchemical enlightenment: psychedelic mushrooms in Buddhist tradition https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8583800/
[2] The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East https://www.amazon.sg/Sacred-Mushroom-Cross-Christianity-fer...
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. =)
Humans essentially domesticated themselves.
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.
Isn't that a kind of crime?
I daresay they have other issues too, like tropical or introduced diseases, parasites, disability, famines, substance addiction…
> 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?
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.
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.
Ok, I laughed.
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.
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.
For starters, humans are animals. Major change, evolutionary speaking, can take tens of thousands of years or more...
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.
> "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.
Also I found many of the author's points (in the follow on article) to fit quite cleanly into what I know of Marxism.
>> 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.
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.
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.
https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1967/08/deception-t...
But the conservative party has a history of ignoring science.
The scientists asserting this:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-reason-some-r...
The mainstream media asserting this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-gop-has-a-long-hi...
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.
"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.
https://climateaudit.org/2021/08/11/the-ipcc-ar6-hockeystick...
Half of US homes didn’t have electricity until 1925.
https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/kidsyouth/the-electric-light-...
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.
Nope. We just don't bother, because we have better use of the necessary resources.
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.
Yes, that's an origin myth with no basis in fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Exodus
> Mainstream scholarship no longer accepts the biblical Exodus account as historical for a number of reasons.
For example, many people say “anyways” instead of “anyway” for this same reason.
I will correct my mistake. Thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Numbers_and_symbols
> 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
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.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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.