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Comment by gtsnexp | Hacker News Reader

Just a very superficial comment/thought after reading the review: There seem to be an underlying implied correlation between complexity and failure (or collapse). If that premise is, indeed, part of the book's thesis then, in this context, would be fair to say that "simple" societies are less prone to collapse?

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Primitive societies do not collapse or grow much. They just stagnate. It might be nice living (I would surely enjoy some hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle), but there is basically no progress over centuries or even millennia.

To look at one extreme example, Neanderthal stone tools (Mousterien) haven't changed very much over 100 000 years of their existence.

It's profoundly incorrect to say that nomadic societies "stagnated". They adapted to incredibly variable and harsh conditions from the equator to the Arctic and invented much of the technology of the modern world like agriculture.

Archaeological horizons and the lack thereof are only partly related to the societies that produced them.

If you're just getting into the subject of what ancient societies looked like and how diverse they could be, I'd recommend Dawn of Everything as an approachable instruction to the topic.

The delta in comparison to the timescale was extremely small, though. Stagnation does not necessarily mean "nothing ever changes at all", just a very small rate of change compared to the modern era.

A life of a person in 8000 BC was not that different from life of a person in 7000 BC. For a person from 1000 AD, the world of 2000 AD would be wholly unrecognizable.

Highly organized societies tend to transform their environment very thoroughly - just look at all the Roman buildings and facilities that still dot the landscape from Spain to the Levant. A rural society wouldn't be capable of building something like that.

Don't mistake the limitations of the archaeological record for the underlying reality. Humans are distinctive from most animals precisely because they have adaptations like culture that are perfectly suited to high speed adaptations to changing conditions. Someone born thousands of years would have found quite a lot different, just like you would if you were born in the Roman empire.

Suitable, yes. I don't doubt that cultures can develop extremely quickly when the conditions are ripe. The Japanese dismantled their feudal structure and transformed into a major industrial and military power within a single generation.

But that happened under a strong, merciless pressure from other industrialized nations. Nature acts way more slowly that Commodore Perry did and the adaptations are much slower, too.

> A life of a person in 8000 BC was not that different from life of a person in 7000 BC

What about Çatalhöyük? 7000 BC puts you around the zenith. Not far away in Mesopotamia, 7000 BC would also be about the start of the Hassuna period, the first development of pottery in the region [1]. In general, 8000-7000BC is seeing major progression in the Neolithic Revolution, so the life of a person in 7000 BC is perhaps as different from 8000 BC. as 2000 AD would be for someone in 1000 AD.

[1] And it's worth noting that pottery is, archaeologically speaking, basically the best tool we have for identifying changes in illiterate societies. Pre-pottery, there usually isn't enough surviving remnants of society to make good guesses as to the cultural practices of that society.

lol please catch up on modern research, wengrow for instance. you’re repeating a colonialist distortion

There is nothing colonialist about the fact that less complex societies don't develop as quickly as more complex ones.

It is not even about ethnicity. For example, the Incan empire developed very fast and reached Roman-like levels of complexity and political power in mere decades after its founding, in fact much faster than the Romans themselves once did.

In the meantime, hunters and gatherer's way of life in other parts of the world, including Europe (such as the Sami in Lappland), barely changed over centuries.

you’re still repeating outdated histories

You might care to demonstrate more substantive discussion by detailing your reasoning and linking and citing sources.

I gave one

Sorry, I missed that.

Dawn of Everything, or something other?

yes or their papers

Is it a "fact" though? Human civilization now is arguably more complex than it's ever been in the past, yet I'm not sure we could argue the pace of change in the last few decades is the most rapid/transformative it's ever been (which Tainter would presumably see as evidence of the reducing gains of increased complexity). Or perhaps like in politics, there are decades where nothing happens and weeks (well, years at least) where decades happen... And we should definitely question the assumption that a faster pace of technological change is actually a good thing.

In the same way that a boulder at the bottom of a valley is unlikely to roll downhill.

To be more exact, primitive societies can still collapse demographically (e.g. through a widespread plague or famine), but they don't have any extra complexity to lose.

I think there might be room for misreading/misinterpretation of that part.

I read that part of the review as saying complex societies have 'bucked the trend' by not being -as- prone to collapse; but with a big caveat that it looks like complex societies may operate on longer time scales, so the collapse might be staved off for longer. It's an open question about what 'long enough' would look like though, one that's probably beyond the author's scope.

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