On 11/18/22 12:03 PM, glen wrote:
Took me a minute to find it. But I previously mentioned this re: Sapiens:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari
Thanks, this was interesting...
I'd love to eavesdrop on a conversation between people who've read
Harari's work. But I doubt I'll read it.
I don't find Harari particularly worse as a *populist* historian than
most any other *populist* history/science/technology/culture writer I've
read. I recently read Graeber/Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything" as well
and before that Scott's "Against the Grain" and "The Art of not being
Governed" which all cover similar territory with differing perspectives.
In fact Graeber/Wengrow seem to take acute exception to some of Scott's
premises/judgements about the role of becoming agricultural. Harari
seems to take a somewhat middle road, supporting Scott's idea that
shifting from being Foragers to Farmers was not entirely an upgrade to
lifestyle and in many ways was the opposite. He made a point I didn't
hear in Scott which was that the overall evolutionary pressure toward
sedentary agriculture was more about increasing the total productivity
of a given region than improved security or nutrition for those
participating. Deliberate monocropping yields more calories per
hectare than foraging but is also more prone to blight/drought/etc
catastrophes which yield acute malnutrition/starvation for the (now
larger) populations depending on them. He also shared Scott's opinion
that sedentary agriculture fostered warfare by creating an "attractive
nuisance"... something worth stealing, and no way for those being
attacked to withdraw from conflict without giving up things they acutely
depended on...
I took minor issue with many of Harari's points and some of them are
probably worth discussing if anyone else has read him and cares. The
main takeaway for me was reinforcement of the accelerating rate of
technological (including political/administrative/etc.) changes and some
of the implications for how *relevant* those arcs/combinatorics are for
my lifetime and for the choices I am making for myself and those I care
about (which ultimately includes "everybody" in some sense)...
- Steve
On 11/17/22 13:11, Steve Smith wrote:
Of course I did... doh!
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] (not) leaving Twitter
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2022 09:22:48 -0800
From: glen <[email protected]>
To: Steve Smith <[email protected]>
I think you intended to send this to the list?
On 11/17/22 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:
On 11/17/22 9:32 AM, glen wrote:
IDK, man. I feel like this is the same homogenizing force as
Spotify, or influencers on Instagram, driving us all into the same
gravity well. What I'd *like* ... what I've looked for and failed
to find, are ways to invest "locally", to bet on strangers'
enterprises, sure, but strangers that satisfy a locality predicate,
local in space mostly, but perhaps local in ethos (like B corps or
co-ops), or domain (not the useless "tech" or "life sciences" but
something more refined).
Does your play with etoro suggest that's possible there?
I do envy your succinctness... if I read this first I could
probably have avoided the long-circuitious virtue-maunder in my last
post.
Anyone else read(ing) Harari's _Sapiens_? His description of how
Homo Sapiens has gone from millions of Dunbar-sized tribes to one
giant global "community" was fascinating... The roughly 5 or 6
universes of 500 years ago even (Eurasia, Subsaharan Africa,
Australia, Pacifica, MesoAmerica) which collapsed with the European
Explo(it)ration eruption.
The inevitable pulse of differentiation/re-integration seems to be
(one of the?) pump(s) of complex adaptive systems (evolution in all
domains)?
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