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If Sapiens were a blog post

263 points by alltakendamned 7y ago

JadeNB 7y ago
> It’s the original text, edited to ensure it still flows like the book. This blog post seems to start off with the premise that you understand what's going on, which I don't. Is the author summarising his own impressions of Sapiens (surely acceptable), or literally lifting the original text of the book and taking it as his own, as this quote seems inadvertently to suggest?
- OneFamousGrouse 7y ago
  That's quite unclear, yep. He also uses affiliate links to the book on Amazon. Seems shady.
  - latexr 7y ago
    The footnotes in the links point out that they are affiliate links.
    - menacingly 7y ago
      I think the shady comment was about profiting from another’s work (even if you’re upfront about it)
      - latexr 7y ago
        I’m not familiar with Amazon’t affiliate program, but it’s my understanding that these don’t typically take money from the author, their commission coming from the platform’s cut instead. Given that, and seeing as the blog post author was upfront about it, I don’t see a problem with it unless the book’s author objects. Affiliate links don’t even steal credit — they give an author’s work more visibility to people who might be interested in it without cutting into their revenue. A commission is an incentive to share work you enjoy.
        menacingly 7y ago
        Oh I don’t really care about the ethics of any of this I was just pointing out that you seemed to be misunderstanding which aspect the parent was calling shady. It’s not that the affiliate links were poorly labeled, it’s that they were for profiting from the (in the context of the comment) questionably sourced material
- ablation 7y ago
  I understood it to be the latter: an edited (abridged?) version of Sapiens.
  - vectorEQ 7y ago
    from the title that would be the goal i think.
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    Indeed, me too. It seems a little bit untoward to me to post vast swathes of someone else's words literatim publicly, even if edited down, even with credit. If you want to make such notes for your own private use, then I see no objection to it.
- latexr 7y ago
  > This blog post seems to start off with the premise that you understand what's going on, which I don't. From the top of the blog post: > The goal? Future-me should be happy to read this once future-me forgets how we evolved. The post isn’t for you, but a reference for the author. It seems to be one of those “I’m making this for me, but if it’s useful for anyone else, so much the better” cases.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Why not quote the sentence before that? The actual first sentence is: > I spent over 25 hours building a cut-down version of Sapiens. Unless OP is on HN and added that after comments here.
    - latexr 7y ago
      > Why not quote the sentence before that? Because however many hours were spent making it is irrelevant as to why it was made, which was the point.
      - OJFord 7y ago
        I don't mean the hours, I mean the "cut-down version of".
        latexr 7y ago
        Similar reason. Explaining how it was made (by cutting it dow) has no bearing on the why, which was the point.
        OJFord 7y ago
        No it wasn't, you were replying to: > Is the author summarising his own impressions of Sapiens (surely acceptable), or literally lifting the original text of the book and taking it as his own [...]? The first sentence about cutting it down answers that.
dalbasal 7y ago
The book was originally a college course (introduction to world history). I wouldn't be surprised if you could scare up class notes/handouts that summarise it all in bullet points. They'd probably be in Hebrew though.
petermcneeley 7y ago
This is a great summary. Someone suggested to me this book but , in reading this summary, I now realize that this book is just a regurgitation of the neo liberal manifest destiny.
- d3ckard 7y ago
  I haven’t read Sapiens, but I read other books of the author. Calling him neo-liberal is the last thing that crossed my mind.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  I genuinely don't understand how you could come to this conclusion.
  - petermcneeley 7y ago
    I am comparing parts of the summary to what I understand of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama
    - solidsnack9000 7y ago
      Fukuyama’s recent books are genuinely scholarly and thorough.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  I'm at 2/3 of the book Sapiens (so I haven't finished it yet). Thus far, I can highly recommend the book in order to understand more of the current world politics and history. Heck, I believe this book great material for high school (though it does fit with many history lessons I had). I fully disagree the book is "just a regurgitation of the neo liberal manifest destiny". I don't understand how you can get to that conclusion. I haven't seen Harari trying to support any of -ism. From [1] you can read he is Israelian (therefore probably Jewish though I did not confirm), historian, openly gay, vegan. I did not see any specific support for any of these -isms. All I read is explanations on why humankind and humanity is the way it is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari
youdontknowtho 7y ago
I personally found Sapiens to be just like this blog post. It seemed to gloss over major historical factors in a way that presented them as accepted wisdom. This often hides implicit assumptions about those historical factors that reinforce modern systems. I just didn't find Sapiens to be that interesting once it got out of discussions about pre-history. The rest of it's views on human development seem to really be focused on explaining the "rightness" of how we currently already see the world. I'm probably not explaining myself well here. The overwhelming praise for Harari also makes me suspect. The people praising Sapiens are people that I don't trust. So...yeah, that's me being a weirdo.
- mirceal 7y ago
  definitely overhyped. definitely presented speculations as fact. definitely too ambitious for its own good (what it tried to cover is insanely large) and does a mediocre job at best. i know a lot of people that loved it and recommend it (and later books) left and right. my best guess is that it’s trendy and some sort of status symbol. i wish people could look past the hype
  - sametmax 7y ago
    Harari keeps repeating "this is just an hypothesis" or "we can't be sure of what happened at that time" during the whole book. He highlights multiple hypothesis as well in all chapters, to compare them. Actually the blog post literally shows that, by repeating "We’re not sure". I can imagine many critics to the book, but presenting speculations as fact is definitely not one of them.
    - sixstringtheory 7y ago
      This is what impressed me the most about the book, and why I’m so confused as to how this can be the main criticism of it that I see. I’d like to see a speculation stated as fact, but have yet to see a satisfactory example.
    - mirceal 7y ago
      ha. sure, one can see it this way. or you can read it, think that it makes sense and take it as a fact. i can tell you all day that's a hypotesis, when I'm focusing on the hypotesis you're going to go with it. i also fundamentally disagree with speculating on what might have happened 10000 years ago. If you're going to speculate present at least 2-3 plausible scenarios.
aogaili 7y ago
When I read Sapiens, the real shift in perspective was not in the details but in the perspective the author was using to view humanity. The boldness and firmness in answering the big questions is what I enjoyed the most. Things like what made humanity dominant, the big trends on human cultures, the subject/object and intersubjective realties, the important role of fiction etc..
- devoply 7y ago
  In the end what he's telling is half fact half myth, in that he's making a narrative to justify things which though convincing may not be entirely true or the entire truth. So as with all history to be taken with a grain of salt. But yes it was a very good narrative and I have read other books by him that are as captivating such as Homo Deus.
  - ulises314 7y ago
    As I was reading it I was thinking "is it even legal to have this many misconceptions about human history?"
    - mfoy_ 7y ago
      Gross generalizations aside, do you have any examples of things he gets really wrong?
      - justin66 7y ago
        "All humanists worship humanity..."
        mfoy_ 7y ago
        I mean, that's obviously a "gross generalization".
        justin66 7y ago
apo 7y ago
Great idea as a way to benefit readers and the author of the post. The first ~half of the book (prehistory) was much better than the second. Even then, I recall the author missing some rather significant points. For example, the hypothesis that megafauna die-offs were related to the appearance of humans minimized one of the biggest, non-human contributors - the recession of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age (Pleistocene). The accompanying environmental dislocation is enough on its own to explain the extinction, but you'll find almost nothing about it in the book. It's almost certainly no coincidence that the early phases of what we think of as civilization begin to appear very soon after the end of the last ice age. Yet the author seems to blithely skip over that looming detail as well.
- 323454 7y ago
  Ice ages occur every 50-100KA, both the mammoth and the sabre toothed tiger evolved around 2.5MA ago and survived the end of dozens of ice ages before going extinct during the end of the last one, just as humans showed up. This pattern holds for numerous other megafauna species. If humans had nothing to do with it, why didn't previous ice ages make them go extinct?
- Epholys 7y ago
  There is a lot of evidence indicating that the megafauna extinction was principally due to the human hunters. Here is a very good (but long) Twitter thread by a biologist explaining it in detail: https://twitter.com/DRMegafauna/status/1084896526151942145 https://twitter.com/DRMegafauna/status/1084896526151942145
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
rimher 7y ago
After having read Sapiens I realized that there's something deeply disturbing about it all, though. The fact that Harari seems to think that everything is just a 'story' that we tell ourselves, is way too nihilistic. Maybe, taking this external perspective, we can understand better the direction in which we're going, but it doesn't resolve a fundamental question: why do we live the way we do? In the long(human timescale) run, this is unsustainable and depressing, it takes away from the ethics and the aesthetics that have made human life what it is, that have brought us to live the way we do.
- TelmoMenezes 7y ago
  > The fact that Harari seems to think that everything is just a 'story' that we tell ourselves, is way too nihilistic. I find that the great challenge that confronts our species is precisely the search for meaning. There are myriad options for sale in the marketplace of ideas, many coming with pre-packaged meaning. This is the typical case with Judeo-Christian religions, where some external authority dictates meaning to us. But let's suppose that there really is an Anthropomorphic God in the Sky that created everything and has rules for us. Ok, good for him I guess, but you have to lack a bit of imagination to not see the absurdity of that situation. It's just a parent-child relationship, with an imaginary parent, that spares the followers the pain of confronting existential questions, provided that development remains arrested. The same is true of Atheists and Materialists. Ok, there's only atoms. Everything can be explained as a cold mechanism that progresses from the Big Bang, through evolution, to us and all of our preferences and inclinations. Of course, given that the scientific model of reality is so useful, it is easy to forget that it is just another story when it comes to meaning. To actually reach adulthood, I believe that one has to confront the scary reality that one is one's own source of meaning. In one sense the universe is made of atoms, in another it is made of stories. Both of these models are useful, but no model can ever spare you from the task of becoming your own source of meaning.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    You are correct on all points. Finding your own purpose can be hard especially for those who have lived by the ideas of others well into adulthood. Living on the modern economic treadmill also makes it harder. You have to find purpose within the world you live.
tw1010 7y ago
It's insane to me that Sapiens seems to make up the entirety of many engineers' humanitarian education. And not only that, that you're basically shamed if you haven't read it, but on the other hand seen as overambitious and/or not interested enough in tech if you've opted to read a more traditionally accepted scholarly tome instead.
- dymk 7y ago
  Do you have an example of somebody being shamed for not reading Sapiens?
  - tw1010 7y ago
    Personal experience.
- weeksie 7y ago
  You shouldn't be getting downvoted. Sapiens is pretty mainstream anthropology repackaged in a well written narrative. It's everything that pop intellectualism aspires to be. Sapiens also frames a ton of issues in a way that doesn't assault the STEM ego, so that certainly helped its reception. Most engineers have an atrocious understanding of the humanities, but it's hard to blame them. Most people in the humanities are woefully undereducated in regards to science. Being steeped in one field it's easy to believe you've got it all figured out. Engineers, of which I am one, are notoriously bad about speaking with confidence from a position of ignorance, but all of us do it.
  - ardy42 7y ago
    > Sapiens also frames a ton of issues in a way that doesn't assault the STEM ego, so that certainly helped its reception. Can you describe that framing and how it "doesn't assault the STEM ego?" I haven't read the book, but I'm genuinely curious about sociological observations like this.
- srverma 7y ago
  Not disagreeing with you, but what are some books on more accepted scholarly tomes?
____Sash---701_ 7y ago
Sequel: Homo Deus
0xCMP 7y ago
Interesting bit about money since it's mentioned in there: Most economics give the same version in the notes which is that money just kind of _sprang up_ out of no where to solve this problem of trade, but it's actually very likely that Credit, and therefore also Debt, is the source of "money". That money only became more important as trade extended from tribes and to strangers we didn't trust. Also that the world goes through cycles of being currency heavy and credit heavy in their transactions of which right now we're living through a new credit heavy cycle which is hard to predict the outcomes of. Recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192 https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/...
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Yeah, that narrative isn't new; its being covered in various documentaries and books, including this cartoon [1] Harari gives very good examples of how money is useful for trade in his book. These examples underline how money is useful for trade. Its downright impractical to trade goods for goods because of multiple factors: fluctuation of value, different values for different people, lack of preference of the item from one of the parties. Perhaps there was not one reason why money is useful. There surely isn't one now. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AC6RSau7r8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AC6RSau7r8
- photojosh 7y ago
  I read 'Debt' a few years ago. Am currently reading Niall Ferguson's 'The Ascent of Money' which dives more into the details of how our banking and monetary systems arose. Only two chapters in, but I would recommend already. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money
astazangasta 7y ago
Like most grand theories of history most of this is only works as a result of approximation. For example, the Unification stuff appears to me to be pure garbage. There is no moment in history when people went from cleanly separating outsiders from insiders. The examples given are both wrong; Egypt was likely ruled by a dynastic elite that came from outside (a common pattern across many cultures in Asia throughout history); the Romans, ironically, are the ones who gave us the word "barbarian". People still rail about foreigners; cf. Brexit.
daxterspeed 7y ago
Unrelated to the primary content and purpose of this post but this was actually a pretty interesting use of an image map. Sadly the polygons don't seem to align that greatly with the image, nor does it seem like mobile Chrome applies the tap-helping algorithm it uses to help you tap the link you "intended" to tap (rather than were your finger actually registered its coordinates). I was also surprised to find that there's lots and lots of text stowed away in the HTML comments. Perhaps it's a peak into how this particular article evolved?
- neilkakkar 7y ago
  Hey, yep, that's exactly right. I wanted to keep the artefacts, and regarding the image-map, sadly they aren't responsive, yet. They work perfectly fine on every screen with width > 700px though. I haven't figured out a nice way to make them responsive yet.
mjollnir 7y ago
"The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using a new type of language." The genetic mutation story is not the most commonly accepted view in anthropology, regardless of what Harari suggests. Perhaps it was more popular at one time when archaeological evidence for "behavioral modernity" abruptly ceased beyond ~50 kya, but if anything, it has been waning as a convincing hypothesis as alternative interpretations[0] and evidence for modernity continues pushing back the ~70 kya date[1]. This isn't to say that a real uptick in complex behavior and cognition didn't happen in the Upper Pleistocene; of course it did. But an absence of archaeological data is a pretty poor basis for inferring a single mutation that caused artefact data to go from sparse to abundant/ complex. Beyond the obvious (simply lacking data), it also seems to gloss over, for example, the possibility of cultural evolution, demographic shifts, etc., all of which require no "Tree of Knowledge mutation". [0] http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202021 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- gdubs 7y ago
  Haven’t read the parent post yet, but in his book from the 1970s (outdated in numerous ways by now but still very interesting) “Dragons of Eden”, Carl Sagan presents the argument that it was our ability to use tools. Essentially, tools shaped us as much as we shaped them, and as our tools became more advanced, so did our minds.
- curious_fella1 7y ago
  Yeah that timeline of ~40,000 years being responsible for the large majority of our complex behaviors sounds ridiculously short?
anbop 7y ago
From a strict legal perspective, isn’t this a derivative work of the book?
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  I figured there must be some precedent involving Cliffs/Sparks/Coles Notes, but all I could find was this: [1]. Unfortunately it just talks about an upcoming lawsuit, not the result. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/prof-sues-note/ https://www.wired.com/2008/04/prof-sues-note/
numbers 7y ago
wow this blog post is amazing b/c oftentimes I want to refer to a specific part of the book and since I don't have an ebook version, I don't have it readily available! Thank you so much for putting this together!
- dmix 7y ago
  Every book should come with a free ebook, especially the non-fiction ones. This is something the publishers should get in on.
- neilkakkar 7y ago
  Thanks for taking out the time to let me know! :)
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
As a side note, the author of the blog post clearly states this at the beginning: > You can get the book here 1 And the "1" footnote says it's an affiliate link. I exactly hoped and expected that to be the case, and I plaud him for being so explicit about it. He has gained my trust immediately. I wish more people were this gentle and transparent about things on the Internet.
- neilkakkar 7y ago
  Thank you, Simone :)
  - simonebrunozzi 7y ago
    You deserve it :) By the way, I think several people (including me) have been tempted to do what you did, but never did it because it takes a long time to do it properly! Kudos for the perseverance and stamina! I hope I'll be able to return the favor one day by doing a similar thing of some of my favorite books ("1491", "1493", "Debt: the first 5,000 years", "Atlantide" (book by Renzo Piano and his son Carlo, only in Italian) etc).
    - neilkakkar 7y ago
      Thanks, looking forward to it! Another monster book I just finished reading and want to do a summary of is Guns, Germs and Steel, which is similar, but focused on one time-section. I found writing down a mind map of what the author wants to convey really helps distill down the ideas. More than once, I'd read through one section of the book (again) - and be unable to make the connection to the overall theme. This post (and any summary I want to read) aims to solve that - do the hard work once of figuring out the progression, how things connected together, so I can draw upon them for future use.
      - simonebrunozzi 7y ago
        I've read it; I vastly preferred "the third chimpanzee". Guns, Germs and Steel was a bit on the weak side in terms of data to support his claims.
jsshah 7y ago
Here is a series of videos that Yuval Harari (author) did that is enjoyable to watch https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfc2WtGuVPdmhYaQjd449k-YeY71fiaFp https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfc2WtGuVPdmhYaQjd449...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
novaleaf 7y ago
> If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. LOL, such a succinct rebuttal-yet-affirmation of the "Paleo diet"
qwerty456127 7y ago
I wish more books were written/rewritten this way. I haven't read the post so far, perhaps it's a little bit too short to fit all the interesting stuff from the book, but I am pretty sure at least 80% (if not 99%) of books are at least 80% water. I hope you are going to summarize the rest of the books of the same author and go on to other nonfiction authors perhaps. I would read such a blog regularly.
- neilkakkar 7y ago
  Indeed, that's the plan! You can find others I've done already tagged "Notes" - https://neilkakkar.com/categories/ https://neilkakkar.com/categories/ I realise now I should make that more explicit in my posts!
  - neilkakkar 7y ago
    Oh, also, for some more interesting stuff that doesn't fit into the overall flow of the blog post - you can have a look at the HTML comments! There's usually some more interesting one-off gems in there!
    - qwerty456127 7y ago
      Thanks for the clue! I thought nobody writes HTML comments any more.
hanniabu 7y ago
Thought this was going to about the Sapiens indie game that's been in development the past 4 years. https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave
sharadov 7y ago
I was not impressed with Sapiens, especially Hariri's belief that the agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud, and his belief that hunter-gatherer societies were better ( I don't know, how when 90% of your time was spent foraging for food and fighting for survival). Everyone agrees the agricultural revolution was the most dramatic event, allowed us to farm and afforded us the leisure time to pursue art, science and make the big discoveries on which modern civilization is based on.
- rc_hadoken 7y ago
  His arguments are agriculture's health and societal effects. We wanted X from agriculture but we got X+1 (what human achievement doesn't result in this?) where +1 is some unwanted consequence (having to have more children to maintain a farmstead, rotting teeth, increase in belly size, the loss of the tribe (maybe alluding to dunber's number) His points make sense, in my opinion. He understands the pros are great but his argument is we did not foresee (or adjust very well to) the cons that come with the agricultural revolution.
- quotz 7y ago
  Theres actually research around this, the average daily time spent hunting and foraging (working) in order to survive and the daily time we spend now working in order to survive, also the daily time people spent 1000 years ago. The conclusion was something like people today actually spend more hours working than in hunting and foraging times
  - sharadov 7y ago
    Yes as long as there are enough animals to hunt and plants to forage for? Not sustainable long term.
- philwelch 7y ago
  How good of a deal hunting and gathering were depends on the abundance of resources. Hunter-gatherers in abundant areas lived happy lives and resisted civilization (eg the Comanche) if not outright conquering it so they would leave their hunting grounds alone (eg the Mongols). Hunter-gatherers who faced scarcity adopted agriculture as a means of survival and lived in fear of hunter-gatherers for centuries.
V-2 7y ago
"Proletariat = collective noun for working class people." Thanks, footnote. I was completely stumped.
- neilkakkar 7y ago
  hahaha, I was too! (and I wanted to save people a google search :P
nexus2045 7y ago
There seems to be a lot of hate on Sapiens every time it's posted here in HN. From what I gather, the criticism of his book comes from getting a lot of things wrong, or pushing some incorrect narrative. I assume that those who critique his book have read far more than myself and so have a stronger foundation to assert this critique, because as someone who just hasn't read that much nor has the appetite for digging through more dry tomes related to these subjects, Sapiens was very readable and reshaped my perspective a lot. Many people cite it as one of the best books of 2015(?). So is the criticism here just incessant nitpicking without respect for a palatable narrative, or are there books that provide another perspective that I'm seriously missing out on?

> It’s the original text, edited to ensure it still flows like the book. This blog post seems to start off with the premise that you understand what's going on, which I don't. Is the author summarising his own impressions of Sapiens (surely acceptable), or literally lifting the original text of the book and taking it as his own, as this quote seems inadvertently to suggest?

OneFamousGrouse 7y ago
That's quite unclear, yep. He also uses affiliate links to the book on Amazon. Seems shady.
- latexr 7y ago
  The footnotes in the links point out that they are affiliate links.
  - menacingly 7y ago
    I think the shady comment was about profiting from another’s work (even if you’re upfront about it)
    - latexr 7y ago
      I’m not familiar with Amazon’t affiliate program, but it’s my understanding that these don’t typically take money from the author, their commission coming from the platform’s cut instead. Given that, and seeing as the blog post author was upfront about it, I don’t see a problem with it unless the book’s author objects. Affiliate links don’t even steal credit — they give an author’s work more visibility to people who might be interested in it without cutting into their revenue. A commission is an incentive to share work you enjoy.
      - menacingly 7y ago
        Oh I don’t really care about the ethics of any of this I was just pointing out that you seemed to be misunderstanding which aspect the parent was calling shady. It’s not that the affiliate links were poorly labeled, it’s that they were for profiting from the (in the context of the comment) questionably sourced material
ablation 7y ago
I understood it to be the latter: an edited (abridged?) version of Sapiens.
- vectorEQ 7y ago
  from the title that would be the goal i think.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  Indeed, me too. It seems a little bit untoward to me to post vast swathes of someone else's words literatim publicly, even if edited down, even with credit. If you want to make such notes for your own private use, then I see no objection to it.
latexr 7y ago
> This blog post seems to start off with the premise that you understand what's going on, which I don't. From the top of the blog post: > The goal? Future-me should be happy to read this once future-me forgets how we evolved. The post isn’t for you, but a reference for the author. It seems to be one of those “I’m making this for me, but if it’s useful for anyone else, so much the better” cases.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Why not quote the sentence before that? The actual first sentence is: > I spent over 25 hours building a cut-down version of Sapiens. Unless OP is on HN and added that after comments here.
  - latexr 7y ago
    > Why not quote the sentence before that? Because however many hours were spent making it is irrelevant as to why it was made, which was the point.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      I don't mean the hours, I mean the "cut-down version of".
      - latexr 7y ago
        Similar reason. Explaining how it was made (by cutting it dow) has no bearing on the why, which was the point.
        OJFord 7y ago
        No it wasn't, you were replying to: > Is the author summarising his own impressions of Sapiens (surely acceptable), or literally lifting the original text of the book and taking it as his own [...]? The first sentence about cutting it down answers that.

dalbasal 7y ago

The book was originally a college course (introduction to world history). I wouldn't be surprised if you could scare up class notes/handouts that summarise it all in bullet points. They'd probably be in Hebrew though.

petermcneeley 7y ago

This is a great summary. Someone suggested to me this book but , in reading this summary, I now realize that this book is just a regurgitation of the neo liberal manifest destiny.

d3ckard 7y ago
I haven’t read Sapiens, but I read other books of the author. Calling him neo-liberal is the last thing that crossed my mind.
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
I genuinely don't understand how you could come to this conclusion.
- petermcneeley 7y ago
  I am comparing parts of the summary to what I understand of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama
  - solidsnack9000 7y ago
    Fukuyama’s recent books are genuinely scholarly and thorough.
Fnoord 7y ago
I'm at 2/3 of the book Sapiens (so I haven't finished it yet). Thus far, I can highly recommend the book in order to understand more of the current world politics and history. Heck, I believe this book great material for high school (though it does fit with many history lessons I had). I fully disagree the book is "just a regurgitation of the neo liberal manifest destiny". I don't understand how you can get to that conclusion. I haven't seen Harari trying to support any of -ism. From [1] you can read he is Israelian (therefore probably Jewish though I did not confirm), historian, openly gay, vegan. I did not see any specific support for any of these -isms. All I read is explanations on why humankind and humanity is the way it is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari

youdontknowtho 7y ago

I personally found Sapiens to be just like this blog post. It seemed to gloss over major historical factors in a way that presented them as accepted wisdom. This often hides implicit assumptions about those historical factors that reinforce modern systems. I just didn't find Sapiens to be that interesting once it got out of discussions about pre-history. The rest of it's views on human development seem to really be focused on explaining the "rightness" of how we currently already see the world. I'm probably not explaining myself well here. The overwhelming praise for Harari also makes me suspect. The people praising Sapiens are people that I don't trust. So...yeah, that's me being a weirdo.

mirceal 7y ago
definitely overhyped. definitely presented speculations as fact. definitely too ambitious for its own good (what it tried to cover is insanely large) and does a mediocre job at best. i know a lot of people that loved it and recommend it (and later books) left and right. my best guess is that it’s trendy and some sort of status symbol. i wish people could look past the hype
- sametmax 7y ago
  Harari keeps repeating "this is just an hypothesis" or "we can't be sure of what happened at that time" during the whole book. He highlights multiple hypothesis as well in all chapters, to compare them. Actually the blog post literally shows that, by repeating "We’re not sure". I can imagine many critics to the book, but presenting speculations as fact is definitely not one of them.
  - sixstringtheory 7y ago
    This is what impressed me the most about the book, and why I’m so confused as to how this can be the main criticism of it that I see. I’d like to see a speculation stated as fact, but have yet to see a satisfactory example.
  - mirceal 7y ago
    ha. sure, one can see it this way. or you can read it, think that it makes sense and take it as a fact. i can tell you all day that's a hypotesis, when I'm focusing on the hypotesis you're going to go with it. i also fundamentally disagree with speculating on what might have happened 10000 years ago. If you're going to speculate present at least 2-3 plausible scenarios.

aogaili 7y ago

When I read Sapiens, the real shift in perspective was not in the details but in the perspective the author was using to view humanity. The boldness and firmness in answering the big questions is what I enjoyed the most. Things like what made humanity dominant, the big trends on human cultures, the subject/object and intersubjective realties, the important role of fiction etc..

devoply 7y ago
In the end what he's telling is half fact half myth, in that he's making a narrative to justify things which though convincing may not be entirely true or the entire truth. So as with all history to be taken with a grain of salt. But yes it was a very good narrative and I have read other books by him that are as captivating such as Homo Deus.
- ulises314 7y ago
  As I was reading it I was thinking "is it even legal to have this many misconceptions about human history?"
  - mfoy_ 7y ago
    Gross generalizations aside, do you have any examples of things he gets really wrong?
    - justin66 7y ago
      "All humanists worship humanity..."
      - mfoy_ 7y ago
        I mean, that's obviously a "gross generalization".
        justin66 7y ago

apo 7y ago

Great idea as a way to benefit readers and the author of the post. The first ~half of the book (prehistory) was much better than the second. Even then, I recall the author missing some rather significant points. For example, the hypothesis that megafauna die-offs were related to the appearance of humans minimized one of the biggest, non-human contributors - the recession of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age (Pleistocene). The accompanying environmental dislocation is enough on its own to explain the extinction, but you'll find almost nothing about it in the book. It's almost certainly no coincidence that the early phases of what we think of as civilization begin to appear very soon after the end of the last ice age. Yet the author seems to blithely skip over that looming detail as well.

323454 7y ago
Ice ages occur every 50-100KA, both the mammoth and the sabre toothed tiger evolved around 2.5MA ago and survived the end of dozens of ice ages before going extinct during the end of the last one, just as humans showed up. This pattern holds for numerous other megafauna species. If humans had nothing to do with it, why didn't previous ice ages make them go extinct?
Epholys 7y ago
There is a lot of evidence indicating that the megafauna extinction was principally due to the human hunters. Here is a very good (but long) Twitter thread by a biologist explaining it in detail: https://twitter.com/DRMegafauna/status/1084896526151942145 https://twitter.com/DRMegafauna/status/1084896526151942145
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

rimher 7y ago

After having read Sapiens I realized that there's something deeply disturbing about it all, though. The fact that Harari seems to think that everything is just a 'story' that we tell ourselves, is way too nihilistic. Maybe, taking this external perspective, we can understand better the direction in which we're going, but it doesn't resolve a fundamental question: why do we live the way we do? In the long(human timescale) run, this is unsustainable and depressing, it takes away from the ethics and the aesthetics that have made human life what it is, that have brought us to live the way we do.

TelmoMenezes 7y ago
> The fact that Harari seems to think that everything is just a 'story' that we tell ourselves, is way too nihilistic. I find that the great challenge that confronts our species is precisely the search for meaning. There are myriad options for sale in the marketplace of ideas, many coming with pre-packaged meaning. This is the typical case with Judeo-Christian religions, where some external authority dictates meaning to us. But let's suppose that there really is an Anthropomorphic God in the Sky that created everything and has rules for us. Ok, good for him I guess, but you have to lack a bit of imagination to not see the absurdity of that situation. It's just a parent-child relationship, with an imaginary parent, that spares the followers the pain of confronting existential questions, provided that development remains arrested. The same is true of Atheists and Materialists. Ok, there's only atoms. Everything can be explained as a cold mechanism that progresses from the Big Bang, through evolution, to us and all of our preferences and inclinations. Of course, given that the scientific model of reality is so useful, it is easy to forget that it is just another story when it comes to meaning. To actually reach adulthood, I believe that one has to confront the scary reality that one is one's own source of meaning. In one sense the universe is made of atoms, in another it is made of stories. Both of these models are useful, but no model can ever spare you from the task of becoming your own source of meaning.
- phkahler 7y ago
  You are correct on all points. Finding your own purpose can be hard especially for those who have lived by the ideas of others well into adulthood. Living on the modern economic treadmill also makes it harder. You have to find purpose within the world you live.

tw1010 7y ago

It's insane to me that Sapiens seems to make up the entirety of many engineers' humanitarian education. And not only that, that you're basically shamed if you haven't read it, but on the other hand seen as overambitious and/or not interested enough in tech if you've opted to read a more traditionally accepted scholarly tome instead.

dymk 7y ago
Do you have an example of somebody being shamed for not reading Sapiens?
- tw1010 7y ago
  Personal experience.
weeksie 7y ago
You shouldn't be getting downvoted. Sapiens is pretty mainstream anthropology repackaged in a well written narrative. It's everything that pop intellectualism aspires to be. Sapiens also frames a ton of issues in a way that doesn't assault the STEM ego, so that certainly helped its reception. Most engineers have an atrocious understanding of the humanities, but it's hard to blame them. Most people in the humanities are woefully undereducated in regards to science. Being steeped in one field it's easy to believe you've got it all figured out. Engineers, of which I am one, are notoriously bad about speaking with confidence from a position of ignorance, but all of us do it.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > Sapiens also frames a ton of issues in a way that doesn't assault the STEM ego, so that certainly helped its reception. Can you describe that framing and how it "doesn't assault the STEM ego?" I haven't read the book, but I'm genuinely curious about sociological observations like this.
srverma 7y ago
Not disagreeing with you, but what are some books on more accepted scholarly tomes?

____Sash---701_ 7y ago

Sequel: Homo Deus

0xCMP 7y ago

Interesting bit about money since it's mentioned in there: Most economics give the same version in the notes which is that money just kind of _sprang up_ out of no where to solve this problem of trade, but it's actually very likely that Credit, and therefore also Debt, is the source of "money". That money only became more important as trade extended from tribes and to strangers we didn't trust. Also that the world goes through cycles of being currency heavy and credit heavy in their transactions of which right now we're living through a new credit heavy cycle which is hard to predict the outcomes of. Recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192 https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/...

Fnoord 7y ago
Yeah, that narrative isn't new; its being covered in various documentaries and books, including this cartoon [1] Harari gives very good examples of how money is useful for trade in his book. These examples underline how money is useful for trade. Its downright impractical to trade goods for goods because of multiple factors: fluctuation of value, different values for different people, lack of preference of the item from one of the parties. Perhaps there was not one reason why money is useful. There surely isn't one now. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AC6RSau7r8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AC6RSau7r8
photojosh 7y ago
I read 'Debt' a few years ago. Am currently reading Niall Ferguson's 'The Ascent of Money' which dives more into the details of how our banking and monetary systems arose. Only two chapters in, but I would recommend already. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money

astazangasta 7y ago

Like most grand theories of history most of this is only works as a result of approximation. For example, the Unification stuff appears to me to be pure garbage. There is no moment in history when people went from cleanly separating outsiders from insiders. The examples given are both wrong; Egypt was likely ruled by a dynastic elite that came from outside (a common pattern across many cultures in Asia throughout history); the Romans, ironically, are the ones who gave us the word "barbarian". People still rail about foreigners; cf. Brexit.

daxterspeed 7y ago

Unrelated to the primary content and purpose of this post but this was actually a pretty interesting use of an image map. Sadly the polygons don't seem to align that greatly with the image, nor does it seem like mobile Chrome applies the tap-helping algorithm it uses to help you tap the link you "intended" to tap (rather than were your finger actually registered its coordinates). I was also surprised to find that there's lots and lots of text stowed away in the HTML comments. Perhaps it's a peak into how this particular article evolved?

neilkakkar 7y ago
Hey, yep, that's exactly right. I wanted to keep the artefacts, and regarding the image-map, sadly they aren't responsive, yet. They work perfectly fine on every screen with width > 700px though. I haven't figured out a nice way to make them responsive yet.

mjollnir 7y ago

"The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using a new type of language." The genetic mutation story is not the most commonly accepted view in anthropology, regardless of what Harari suggests. Perhaps it was more popular at one time when archaeological evidence for "behavioral modernity" abruptly ceased beyond ~50 kya, but if anything, it has been waning as a convincing hypothesis as alternative interpretations[0] and evidence for modernity continues pushing back the ~70 kya date[1]. This isn't to say that a real uptick in complex behavior and cognition didn't happen in the Upper Pleistocene; of course it did. But an absence of archaeological data is a pretty poor basis for inferring a single mutation that caused artefact data to go from sparse to abundant/ complex. Beyond the obvious (simply lacking data), it also seems to gloss over, for example, the possibility of cultural evolution, demographic shifts, etc., all of which require no "Tree of Knowledge mutation". [0] http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202021 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

gdubs 7y ago
Haven’t read the parent post yet, but in his book from the 1970s (outdated in numerous ways by now but still very interesting) “Dragons of Eden”, Carl Sagan presents the argument that it was our ability to use tools. Essentially, tools shaped us as much as we shaped them, and as our tools became more advanced, so did our minds.
curious_fella1 7y ago
Yeah that timeline of ~40,000 years being responsible for the large majority of our complex behaviors sounds ridiculously short?

anbop 7y ago

From a strict legal perspective, isn’t this a derivative work of the book?

jonny_eh 7y ago
I figured there must be some precedent involving Cliffs/Sparks/Coles Notes, but all I could find was this: [1]. Unfortunately it just talks about an upcoming lawsuit, not the result. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/prof-sues-note/ https://www.wired.com/2008/04/prof-sues-note/

numbers 7y ago

wow this blog post is amazing b/c oftentimes I want to refer to a specific part of the book and since I don't have an ebook version, I don't have it readily available! Thank you so much for putting this together!

dmix 7y ago
Every book should come with a free ebook, especially the non-fiction ones. This is something the publishers should get in on.
neilkakkar 7y ago
Thanks for taking out the time to let me know! :)

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

As a side note, the author of the blog post clearly states this at the beginning: > You can get the book here 1 And the "1" footnote says it's an affiliate link. I exactly hoped and expected that to be the case, and I plaud him for being so explicit about it. He has gained my trust immediately. I wish more people were this gentle and transparent about things on the Internet.

neilkakkar 7y ago
Thank you, Simone :)
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  You deserve it :) By the way, I think several people (including me) have been tempted to do what you did, but never did it because it takes a long time to do it properly! Kudos for the perseverance and stamina! I hope I'll be able to return the favor one day by doing a similar thing of some of my favorite books ("1491", "1493", "Debt: the first 5,000 years", "Atlantide" (book by Renzo Piano and his son Carlo, only in Italian) etc).
  - neilkakkar 7y ago
    Thanks, looking forward to it! Another monster book I just finished reading and want to do a summary of is Guns, Germs and Steel, which is similar, but focused on one time-section. I found writing down a mind map of what the author wants to convey really helps distill down the ideas. More than once, I'd read through one section of the book (again) - and be unable to make the connection to the overall theme. This post (and any summary I want to read) aims to solve that - do the hard work once of figuring out the progression, how things connected together, so I can draw upon them for future use.
    - simonebrunozzi 7y ago
      I've read it; I vastly preferred "the third chimpanzee". Guns, Germs and Steel was a bit on the weak side in terms of data to support his claims.

jsshah 7y ago

Here is a series of videos that Yuval Harari (author) did that is enjoyable to watch https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfc2WtGuVPdmhYaQjd449k-YeY71fiaFp https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfc2WtGuVPdmhYaQjd449...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

novaleaf 7y ago

> If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. LOL, such a succinct rebuttal-yet-affirmation of the "Paleo diet"

qwerty456127 7y ago

I wish more books were written/rewritten this way. I haven't read the post so far, perhaps it's a little bit too short to fit all the interesting stuff from the book, but I am pretty sure at least 80% (if not 99%) of books are at least 80% water. I hope you are going to summarize the rest of the books of the same author and go on to other nonfiction authors perhaps. I would read such a blog regularly.

neilkakkar 7y ago
Indeed, that's the plan! You can find others I've done already tagged "Notes" - https://neilkakkar.com/categories/ https://neilkakkar.com/categories/ I realise now I should make that more explicit in my posts!
- neilkakkar 7y ago
  Oh, also, for some more interesting stuff that doesn't fit into the overall flow of the blog post - you can have a look at the HTML comments! There's usually some more interesting one-off gems in there!
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    Thanks for the clue! I thought nobody writes HTML comments any more.

hanniabu 7y ago

Thought this was going to about the Sapiens indie game that's been in development the past 4 years. https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave

sharadov 7y ago

I was not impressed with Sapiens, especially Hariri's belief that the agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud, and his belief that hunter-gatherer societies were better ( I don't know, how when 90% of your time was spent foraging for food and fighting for survival). Everyone agrees the agricultural revolution was the most dramatic event, allowed us to farm and afforded us the leisure time to pursue art, science and make the big discoveries on which modern civilization is based on.

rc_hadoken 7y ago
His arguments are agriculture's health and societal effects. We wanted X from agriculture but we got X+1 (what human achievement doesn't result in this?) where +1 is some unwanted consequence (having to have more children to maintain a farmstead, rotting teeth, increase in belly size, the loss of the tribe (maybe alluding to dunber's number) His points make sense, in my opinion. He understands the pros are great but his argument is we did not foresee (or adjust very well to) the cons that come with the agricultural revolution.
quotz 7y ago
Theres actually research around this, the average daily time spent hunting and foraging (working) in order to survive and the daily time we spend now working in order to survive, also the daily time people spent 1000 years ago. The conclusion was something like people today actually spend more hours working than in hunting and foraging times
- sharadov 7y ago
  Yes as long as there are enough animals to hunt and plants to forage for? Not sustainable long term.
philwelch 7y ago
How good of a deal hunting and gathering were depends on the abundance of resources. Hunter-gatherers in abundant areas lived happy lives and resisted civilization (eg the Comanche) if not outright conquering it so they would leave their hunting grounds alone (eg the Mongols). Hunter-gatherers who faced scarcity adopted agriculture as a means of survival and lived in fear of hunter-gatherers for centuries.

V-2 7y ago

"Proletariat = collective noun for working class people." Thanks, footnote. I was completely stumped.

neilkakkar 7y ago
hahaha, I was too! (and I wanted to save people a google search :P

nexus2045 7y ago

There seems to be a lot of hate on Sapiens every time it's posted here in HN. From what I gather, the criticism of his book comes from getting a lot of things wrong, or pushing some incorrect narrative. I assume that those who critique his book have read far more than myself and so have a stronger foundation to assert this critique, because as someone who just hasn't read that much nor has the appetite for digging through more dry tomes related to these subjects, Sapiens was very readable and reshaped my perspective a lot. Many people cite it as one of the best books of 2015(?). So is the criticism here just incessant nitpicking without respect for a palatable narrative, or are there books that provide another perspective that I'm seriously missing out on?