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Comment by 082349872349872 | Hacker News Reader

Having enjoyed Durant & Durant's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization in short doses, I once tried to read through multiple volumes of them in a row; after a certain point it just becomes a blur of people being awful to each other.

(and that's less than 2% of human history)

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Blame mainly awful people who liked to brag how awful they were and what awful things they did to other people. When writing down the history of stuff and people, it was too expensive for ordinary folks to engrave on stone how they optimized their crops or how they improved weaving.

While awful by today's standards, they recorded their feats because those awful actions allowed their civilization to thrive, even at the cost of others' perishing. Plus, by boasting of your awful deeds, you're more likely to dissuade would-be challengers.

It would be lovely if we had knowledge from the common man from throughtout history, but the common man wasn't typically the reason for domminance.

> after a certain point it just becomes a blur of people being awful to each other.

I suppose the internet is a fairly accurate reflection of human history. What a depressing thought.

Humans will weaponize anything. If AI is trained on human data, it will most certainly extinguish us. How can we use the behavior of all animals to train AI? I’d rather have a smart dog (retriever?) to talk to than a human. I could trust it

Be careful what you wish for. The (nonhuman) animal world is much more ruthless than the human one, despite all our own ruthlessness.

Prey animals in the wild often die more awful deaths than what even slaughterhouses see.

And even predators in the wild don’t die under professional care in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones. It’s probably a violent death or starvation.

I did falconry once and found it impressive that the captive birds had a mean life expectancy of 22 years while the wild ones had just 9. The reason was starvation. You get injured and can't hunt? You starve. You age a bit and aren't quite fast enough to catch mice anymore? You starve.

Civilization's ability to let us specialize, combined with private property, really allows humans to achieve amazing lives compared to the often romanticized other options.

I did the other side - I’ve had pet house rabbits. A wild rabbit is apparently lucky to make it to 2 years. High probability it gets gruesomely torn apart and eaten alive by predators.

Meanwhile a house rabbit can live on average 8-10 years, even as long as 12-15.

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