The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)
agron.iastate.edu
agron.iastate.edu
Agriculture simply multiplied everything. Hunter-gatherers still had and have tribal wars, murder, rape, rapine, torture, high infant mortality, much lower male life expectancy (due to fighting), plus the usual disease, famine, and social inequality of women.
The average college student in a dorm room enjoys greater luxury and comfort than kings of yesteryear; they have climate control, hot and cold running water, antibiotics, corrective eyewear, and of course a far greater selection of food year-round, not to mention a better selection of healthy mates.
Whether people are happier in modern technological society or hunter-gatherer society is almost beside the point; evolution seems to have selected for worried, discontented people -- they outcompete the easily satiated. Even as we precipitate the extinction of traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can imagine them at some point in the past wiping out even less technologically-savvy people who perhaps were even more happy and contented, leading an existence akin to our bonobo relatives. A similar article written then by gatherers might blame the widespread adoption of hunting for increasing societal violence and leading to a new class division: warrior, due to the ensuing upswing in human-human "hunting".
Increased population can be thought of as a tool; it has been exploited for ill much of the time, but it can also be used for the betterment of all. When we start to live in "The Matrix" (a pleasurable one), we may well rely on aquaculture to produce high-yield algae we farm for biofuel and for nutrients for our IV drips. At that point we may instead regard agriculture, regardless of temporary blips, as the best thing to happen to humanity.
http://reddit.com/info/3895/comments
Not only that, but the article itself is 20 years old, and is not an attitude I have read in Diamond's later works like 'Collapse', where he certainly underlines the dangers and problems that face the human race, but does manage to strike a good balance between gloomy and cautiously optimistic about the possibility for improvement.
Harumph.
Besides, I thought this article also relates to startupping, because of the average work hours aspect. But granted, Jared Diamond is not exactly unknown.
Add to that people who didn't see or take part in the original, and while I hope the change will go ok, it will be a lot of work.
Obviously hackers have found this interesting, but I agree it is on the border of being irrelevant. I think it is useful to use PG's rule of thumb that if it's covered on TV news then it's off topic which I think this is an exception to.
I like this new direction that yc is taking, the site was rather boring to me before which I barely frequented until I saw that it changed on reddit.
I shouldn't come here to often because each time I read something by PG I feel like quitting my job and starting a company.
"In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news."
I love reddit, but I loved the old yc news also. I don't understand how this happens. PG says we're changing focus and all of a sudden people start linking and upvoting different stories??
How is this more interesting to hackers than startup news. I don't understand how a rather top-down decree has changed the output of a definitively democratic system.
Anyway, the point is certainly not to recommend going back to a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Although I wonder if startupping is not somewhat akin to hunting.
Neither of which would have been possible if we were too busy hunting for food every waking hour.
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Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).
So I think the point is that with farming you get free time, but also all the bad things mentioned above. What Diamond is arguing is that hunter/gatherers didn't have to deal with most (all?) of the negatives but still had plenty of free time to pursue their leisure. That is, civilization might not have been set back just because we didn't adopt farming. In the end, it was sheer numbers that decided the outcome, not the best method.
2. Yeah, we have overcrowding, inequality, classes, and war. There are bugs in agriculture. Overcrowding just means that most people aren't dying off quickly like they did when there wasn't farming. Inequality just means that some people are now wealthy, where before nobody was wealthy. I'd bet war happened before, too; it just happens on a larger scale now because everything happens on a larger scale now.
3. You can't do most kinds of technology, education, or pretty much any other kind of endeavor if you have to spend all your time near enough naturally growing sources of food to not spend all your time in transport. Most kinds of art and technology come from concentrating appropriate quantities of appropriate kinds of people in one place. That's the point of universities, conservatories, and, for that matter, companies. Most interesting things in the world come from concentrating people.
And he's not wrong; because farming is progress, and progress brings good things as well as bad things. But, as we're an intelligent species, we recognize bad things (yes, it takes generations) and work around them.
It is true that very few today farm, but take into account that, within the past century alone, the yield of farmers has increased by an order of magnitude, not to mention the millennia of domestication and invention before it. For most of agricultural history, the percentage of farmers was much higher than 3%.
For example, from Wikipedia's article on Roman Agriculture:
>In the Roman Empire, a typical family of 3.25 persons would need between 7-8 iugera of land to meet minimum food requirements (without animals). If a family owned animals to help cultivate land, then 20 iugera is needed. There would not be a surplus production on this farm.
You can actually gauge how advanced a post-agricultural civilization is based on the percentage of the population that works in the agricultural sector. Most thresholds of technological advance (most notably, the industrial revolution) have allowed a smaller farmer class to feed an entire society.
FTA... please read it :p
You can make the argument that by increasing population size and crowding, it also made collaboration, partnership, and the growth of ideas easier but the article itself debunks the whole "they spent their entire life looking for berries" argument.
Jared Diamond is awesome.
Also note that the time spent gathering food likely does not include preparing to gather food (e.g.: making weapons). Although they could spend plenty of time playing games, note that games originated to prepare children to spend time gathering food (and practice other necessary survival skills).
"Another misconception is that there is necesarrily a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. In reality, although we frequently develop such a contrast, hunter-gathers in some productive areas, including North America's Pacific Northwest coast and possibly southeastern Australia, became sedentary but never became food producers. Other hunter-gatherers, in Palestine, costal Peru, and Japan, became sedentary first and adopted food production much later. Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction 15,000 years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gathers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.
Conversely, there are mobile groups of food producers. Some modern nomads of New Guinea's Lake Plains made clearings in the jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live again as hunter-gatherers, return to check on their crops, weed the garden if they find the crops growing, set off again to hunt, return months later to check again, and settle down for a while to harvest and eat if their garden has not produced. Apache Indians of the southwestern United States settled down to farm in the summer at high elevations and toward the north, then withdrew to the south and to lower elevations to wander in search of wild foods, during the winter. Many herding peoples of Africa and Asia shift camp along regular seasonal routes to take advantage of predictable seasonal changes in pasturage. Thus, the shift from hunting-gathering to food production did not always coincide with a shift from nomadism to sedentary living."
(<i>Guns, Germs, and Steel</i> p. 106)
To blindly attribute progress to a singular cause such as farming is short sighted. I'm sure there are many different variables (farming included) that influence progress and discovery.
While a few hunter-gatherer societies lived in a place so abundant that they can settle in a single location and gather everything they needed, the vast majority of such societies were migratory, moving to wherever the food was.
In a migratory society, most technological advances are simply not useful. When you only keep the things you can carry on your back, anything that doesn't have a direct use is an active hindrance with a quantifiable opportunity cost. Civilization is only possible when people can settle in one place.
Further, even hunter-gatherer societies that are fortunate enough to settle in a single place have to remain small to survive, or they exceed their food supply. This means that the chance of a given society developing a new technology is much smaller (given a smaller supply of creative individuals). It also means that even if a society does develop a new technology, that technology spreads very slowly, leading to less cross-pollination with other individuals and ideas.
By contrast, agriculture concentrates people together. There are a variety of technologies that increased the productivity of an agricultural society as a whole, and it's very natural for those technologies to spread throughout a society. Furthermore, agricultural societies that are more productive than their neighbors can produce more soldiers (when a smaller percentage of the population can feed the whole society, there is excess labor for armies, as well as other pursuits), allowing them to conquer their neighbors and spread their advances to their newly conquered territories. Basically, in an agricultural society, technology spreads like a virus.
I'm a little worried this site will go the way of reddit...
There are enough reddits and diggs in the world, if hacker news is going the way of reddit and digg I'll probably pass
Obviously it won't interest everybody, but didn't pg say "anything that interests hackers", not only hacking itself?
Anyway, my apologies if it was too far stretched. I hope I will refrain from further submissions in the future. Perhaps I should check out Reddit...
It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short.
Um, Jean Jacques Rousseau? Noble Savage? Only a few decades after Hobbes?
It may not be relevant to the case being made here, but come on. I remember writing "compare and contrast" papers on Hobbes and Rousseau in high school.
http://www.thecourier.com/manifest.htm
It sort of bothers me that this is getting upmodded--not because it's off-topic, but because it's so painfully banal--every high schooler has already thought these things through completely, just like this: