Comment by marojejian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marojejian | Hacker News Reader

Having read the book:Pro:It's a great question and mission.I'm sympathetic to their general critiques and main points e.g.:

- prehistoric human were just as smart and creative as us

- there's a ton to learn from them.

- there is not enough evidence to accept an inevitable path to a state with ever growing power.

- prehistoric people tried a bunch of different societal types we can hardly conceive of.

- We should strive to be as experimental and playful.

- There is interesting new evidence in there (e.g. about potentially non-authoritarian per-historic societies)

Con:

- Evidence / word ratio very low

- Authors have a HUGE Ax to grind. even if I like some portion of that axe, I can't afford to trust them, they are more biased than the folks they attack (not that I like Yuval Harari so much either...)

- Poor reasoning processes: 1)X is conceivable 2) Y might be evidence of X, 3) (Much later) As we demonstrated: X is True

- Super repetitive

So net, I'd say read a few reviews (e.g. Tides of History) and skip the actual book, and hope we can find some better avatars for this mission. Go listen to some Mike Duncan podcasts.

> prehistoric human were just as smart and creative as us

This. The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time. Maybe thats because it is conflating it with knowledge accumulation and never bothering to make a clear distinction.

In fact its very plausible that 30000 years ago some homo sapiens had a discussion around a campfire that was as intelligent as your average HN thread :-)

Not individual human intelligence as in capability, but certainly in terms of culture, the knowledge has grown exponentially since then. 30,000 years ago people weren't sitting around the campfire talking about deep learning models, quantum mechanics, or how long the ancestors of Native Americans lived in Beringia.

I agree with your sentiment, but I think you're under-emphasing the power granted our reasoning ability from knowledge (theoretical concepts) and writing (seekable communication).

Part of what I know about basic statistics I got from an old book. I would not be able to draw on those concepts and present a coherent argument if my experience and communicative tools were limited to what they would have been 30,000 years ago.

That said, they may have had very intelligent and nuanced discussions about specific topics, like immediately human experiences such as illness, politics, fashion, love, etc.

30'000 years ago politics didn't exist, doubt very much they would had discussion about it.

Instead perhaps the local priest might have discussed the next sacrifice needed to bring the rains.

> 30'000 years ago politics didn't exist, doubt very much they would had discussion about it.

Why do you say politics didn’t exist long ago?

> Instead perhaps the local priest might have discussed the next sacrifice needed to bring the rains.

So… politics?

Politics emerges naturally when a group of people in constrained by time to perform only a subset of a large selection of activities; children are political about what to play.

For as long as there has been humans, there has been politics.

> I agree with your sentiment, but I think you're under-emphasing the power granted our reasoning ability from knowledge (theoretical concepts) and writing (seekable communication).

The 2 party corrupt form of politics that is the mainstay in US does not require reasoning ability beyond the ability of a 30'000 Homo Sapien?

It might my definition of politics but I doubt very much that what our ancestors were practicing 30k years ago wasn't politic in any sense that we could understand.

Communally sharing knowledge about watering holes and what the next door tribe was doing was probably more along the lines of what was discussed.

Societal informational interchange isn't politic. Politic is, for me, a group of people coming together (I.e. The ruling class) and deciding what the group as a whole (i.e. Everyone else) should be doing.

This is quite a statement. How do you suppose these anatomically modern humans would have made group decisions? Mind control by a warrior king?

The starting point is that our brain was (probably) more or less as today, hence in principle capable of cognitive tasks of similar "quality" or complexity. But there is no doubt that what these capabilities were applied to might feel very exotic or even uncomfortable to us. E.g., Graber makes this point in particular in relation to social relations. A lot of modern society would probably look like totally brain damaged to them in terms of emotional / social intelligence. We have also the examples of very elaborate religious / theological discourse, which seems to have been a major preoccupation for the longest time.

On the other hand there are definitely cultural inflection points (like writing or numeracy) that seem to have reshaped the ability of a trained brain in a very short period of time. E.g. if you compare writings from the same civilization / region just several hundred years apart (Homeric poems vs Classic Athenian philosophy) its hard to believe its even the same species...

> The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time.

Grade inflation has a lot to answer for. It's a serious problem in the UK but understandable, all statistics are designed to bolster the image of the organisation producing them.

I detect a parallel with the monotonic, cumulative evolution depicted in the typical image that has man at the apex of a pyramid of evolution. As pointed out in "Wonderful Life" (about the Burgess Shale), evolution has been very different from this.

>This. The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time.

Several remarks here. It is growing with time. Average IQ grows every year such that they have to re-normalize it all the time. This is on a very short timescale though.

Second, there is logic behind an actual theory that prehistoric humans were actually SMARTER then modern day humans. A human back in the day had much more to deal with in order to survive. Nowadays you can get away with working at menial and repetitive jobs. This implies that there is less recent evolutionary pressure for maintaining high intelligence indicating at the possibility of humans becoming stupider in modern times.

Like I said in another comment, I'm only halfway through. I'm not sure what the denouement is going to be or where they are going to take the evidence that there have been urban civilisations that were not ruled by kings or other hierarchical power arrangements and resolve it with the present, but their goal to show how the Hobbesian and Rousseauian views of human history are not supported by evidence only needs a single counter example and I feel they've supplied plenty.

I think their mission of puncturing the grand narratives of the evolution of human society is a good one, and I think they have the evidence, but I'm not sure it's going to have any effect in the long run.

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