15 ms·

The sheer number of people with free time and who are able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests (whether practical or frivolous)

• leobg 4y ago
  Didn’t Wait But Why post something along those lines recently?
  • charlieflowers 4y ago
    That is hard to parse. Eventually I realized you are saying: Didn't a person we refer to as "Wait but Why" post something along these lines recently?
    • astrange 4y ago
      That's the power of capitalization for proper nouns.
      • leobg 4y ago
        That power was diminished by the capitalized title appearing right after the first word in the sentence, which thus was also capitalized. Adding quotes would have made it easier to parse I guess.
        • charlieflowers 4y ago
          I wasn’t trying to be disparaging. Just informing the poster, sharing a bit of proofreading feedback in the hope they found it helpful.
• soared 4y ago
  How does this apply to the article?
  • retrac 4y ago
    Unless I misread things, the article is about a hypothesis, that before the current era, many tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans were in a stable population state ("pre-Malthusian"), and so most humans were mostly free of substantial food pressure. My own conjecture, is that the material/scientific/intellectual process that seems to have started around the time of agriculture, and which has been accelerating ever since until we're all sucked into this global mechanical survival process, is driven mostly by the number of people able to sit around and think about surviving in this runaway process (i.e. they face Malthusian pressure, they want and need more), and also their ease of communicating with each other. People pondering how to feed themselves more in large forums come up with ways to transform the world physically through their collective labour. Such a runaway process would not likely occur in a small stable population without the pressure to do so in the first place.
    • abetusk 4y ago
      I think the next article by the author addresses this point directly and, as far as I can tell, comes to largely the same conclusion as you [0]. [0] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-develop?sd=pf https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-devel...
    • IIAOPSW 4y ago
      The advantage off agriculture is not quite so clear. Early farming was barely more efficient, one farmer barely producing more than they themselves consumed. And the decrease in diversity of foodstuffs made them each individually less nourished compared to the variety of berries and nuts the foragers would eat. Hunter gatherer societies actually had lots of free time. Finding food wasn't a constant struggle. What farming societies had is organization of force and a concept of land ownership.
      • 4y ago
• wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Graeber and Wengrow contest that take severely with their survey of modern anthro and archaeological research, I recommend their papers or Dawn of Everything
  • DasCorCor 4y ago
    That book is amazing!
  • jvanderbot 4y ago
    Yes highly recommended. For those not familiar, Dawn of Everything essentially starts with the assumption that people have always been curious, intelligent, flexible creatures, and that smaller core populations let a ton of different societal organizations be tested and tried over the years. They also take aim at the "farming is inevitable and the root of inequality" trope that's prevalent. Since, as they show, a ton of really large societies over the years chose not to become primarily agricultural.
    • wahnfrieden 4y ago
      Yes, large societies including many that have been shown to have discovered agriculture much earlier on than expected, and chose not to build hierarchical societies around it / found alternative structures. I particularly liked the several wacky varieties of "police" such as the clown ones
      • ncphil 4y ago
        One intriguing line of analysis in _The Dawn of Everything_ is how people in early settlements would often just pack up and leave when their leaders started acting like a*holes (think human sacrifices in Mesoamerica). That reminded me of how many citizens abandoned frontier towns during the late Roman period, often helpfully directing advancing northern tribes where the wealthiest villas might be found. Maybe the peoples in earlier times were simply less willing to put up with being bullied and exploited. Relatively low numbers and abundant unsettled land gave them more options that many humans have had since. The Nile watershed was a wonder of ancient agricultural engineering: it was also the largest slave society up to that point in history.
• dopidopHN 4y ago
  Agriculture took roughly 5000 years to be adopted. I don’t think it can be qualified of fast. Their was back and forth and things did not change rapidly for the better automagically. For milenaries, hunter gathered were better fed than village dweller ( from bones structures and trash analysis) Source : Grabber & scott. Mostly “against the grain” and “debt, a history”
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > Agriculture took roughly 5000 years to be adopted. When the question is why human society changed so little in 300,000 years, 5000 years is fast.
    • jaggederest 4y ago
      If human society was a day, agriculture has been around for 24 minutes.
      • mongol 4y ago
        What defines a society?
        • ddalex 4y ago
          A society is any framework that allows humans with no direct affiliations to collaborate.
  • monero-xmr 4y ago
    It always seems that we discover artifacts that push history farther back. Göbekli Tepe is 12,000 years old and I doubt hunter gatherers made this. I think sophisticated societies existed well past what we have discovered, but time has made it exponentially difficult to get historical proof except in bits and pieces.
    • api 4y ago
      I think of it this way: time is like space. Things far back in time are like things orbiting distant stars. Go too far and telescopes can no longer see. This is made more real by the fact that the Earth is a boiling cauldron of plate tectonics, weather, and biological processes. It doesn’t take long for all traces of something to be obliterated. Maybe we think the first great civilizations were in the desert just because things decay slower in the desert.
• api 4y ago
  > Right now there are a billion people using electronic devices, engaged, productively or recreationally, with other human beings. Some are engaged but how many are just mindlessly scrolling addictive algorithmically curated trash?
  • eternalban 4y ago
    Historically, it has always only taken 'a village' to raise a civilization. Is a million (~1 in a thousand) inquisitive minds (globally) too generous or too low a figure? There has to be at least 100k serious minds and they are networked. That's a lot of brain power. And the trash consumers are definitely serving a purpose. They are both social ballast (providing the necessary inertia for stability of norms) and economic precursors (by fueling the low value economic activities that support high value 0.1% projects and aims). Those n billion eyeballs are the reason the 100K can teleconference in realtime and soon have AI assistants chipping in.
    • slushh 4y ago
      >100k serious minds and they are networked Are they? Shouldn't the place be famous by now where those 100k people meet? I would rather think that those 100k are spread all over the internet and that their innovations are lost like the many Yanomamö innovations that must have happened over time. Everything is organized in timelines. Things fade into obscurity once the focus shifts. There is plenty of innovation but I doubt that a network of 100k minds can be maintained without everybody else trying to steer it into their directions and thus destroying it.
      • MichaelZuo 4y ago
        > Shouldn't the place be famous by now where those 100k people meet? What gives you that idea?
        • slushh 4y ago
          If that place is the origin of many good and new ideas, how could it be hidden?
• johnnymorgan 4y ago
  And then even more rapidly with the printing press and regular, reliable mail services. It's a really good point to bring up in a discussion like this and with agriculture comes and information network along with it (price discovery, crop marketing, weather events, etc etc).
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• weaksauce 4y ago
  > So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal reminds me of universal paperclip in a weird way. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    Well there goes my evening
  • spacetime_cmplx 4y ago
    Thanks, I just wasted (?) 3 hours on this when I have so much work lol
    • weaksauce 4y ago
      heh sorry. did you beat it/get to the end?
• piuantiderp 4y ago
  Not sure, those elites were more literate and educated than even the 1% of today could hope. Collective wankery produces a lot of noise, and more difficult than ever to cut through it
• mmoskal 4y ago
  I was really interested in seeing what's the % of years of human live lived in different historical periods. I wrote a script [0] and it turns out [1], 90% of time was lived after the agricultural revolution (last 10k years) and 50% of time was lived in the last 1000 years. 10% of time was lived in my lifetime! Now, when we talk about different measures of progress the number above understate the dominance of recent history. For most of human history average life expectancy was 10-12 years, so most of these years lived were as children. Also, ignoring the first 10% of hunter-gatherer years, most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else. [0] https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/b6d8d2c73ec4fe56df9714d8435a234e https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/b6d8d2c73ec4fe56df9714d8435a... [1] https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/58e7c9ee4d716f91f1e7438660b7e715 https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/58e7c9ee4d716f91f1e7438660b7...
  • anbende 4y ago
    Interesting, I've never thought about it in terms of % of years lived and when. I recently saw that 7% of all humans who ever lived are alive today. Wild. And I agree that it really does show the dominance of recent history. Small point, a life expectancy of 10-12 years does not necessarily mean that the majority of lived years were as children. It depends on infant mortality, which I believe drives those numbers pretty substantially. Example: if three infants die at age 1 and one person lives to 45, average life expectancy is 12 (48/4), but the majority of those years were not lived as children (one full childhood plus 3 additional years of infancy).
    • whirlwin 4y ago
      Sapiens is a great book here. Long story short: The agricultural shift required more people to work in farms
      • xapata 4y ago
        And as _Against the Grain_ points out, working in farms was not always better for the farmers.
      • 4y ago
• sandworm101 4y ago
  >> able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests >> The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands. This does not require literacy. Culture and society evolve quite easily through word of mouth alone. Traveling people, be them official word-spreaders or not, moved from one place to another very quickly. Songs spread quickly from tavern to tavern. News and culture always moved as fast a horse/runner/ship could carry it. Literacy cannot make a horse run any faster. Literacy only made communication faster once the message could move faster than a physical object. Only with long-distance communication such as semaphore and eventually electronic means. Literacy meant that culture became written down, often literally carved in stone. This codification most likely slowed its previous rapid evolution.
  • wizofaus 4y ago
    Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster. Not many humans can accurately recall the amount of detailed information that can be included on a couple of sheets of paper, and even if they could, unless the messenger is known to the recipient, there's an issue of trust (written/sealed communications are generally much harder to forge).
    • ramblenode 4y ago
      > Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster. This is an interesting discussion. My thought is that there are quite a few variables influencing when literacy/writing becomes an important technology: a) durability and portability of media: most is either light and degrades easily or durable but heavy and harder to transport. b) manufacturing cost: papyrus was used for millenia in the west but was never widespread because its production was time and labor intensive. Ink and dye would be another cost. Most stuff just wasn't worth the cost of writing down. c) population size/density and network effects: small populations wouldn't benefit much because it would be more cost effective to trasmit and preserve information orally. Similarly, large but diffuse populations wouldn't benefit much because the cost of scribes and materials would be high relative to the population served. Given that writing is a "two-sided market" (needing both a trained writer and reader) then the value of writing is somewhat proportional to the size of the network of scribes. Given that scribes are expensive, it would take some time to bootstrap the network. It seems only large and dense populations would see an economy of scale for writing. It seems like a number of factors have to line up before writing presents a favorable economy of scale for information transfer and preservation.
• leobg 4y ago
  It’s also a bit self serving. Essentially we’re saying, “Yeah it looks as though I’m just doodling around on my phone while I work in online ads, but really, my life is 1000x more valuable to the future of humanity than that of some random Neanderthal, serf or even Caesar. (Oh, and btw, I don’t even have kids.)”
• peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  I don't think it's about people being able to communicate with each other and enjoy leisure, but people developing the tools to handle larger and larger communities. One of the oldest written documents we have is a customer complaint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir Hammurabi is still one of the most popular characters in history because of his code that planted the seed of the embryo of "presumption of innocence", a huge revolution for humanity. He was also very good and efficient at tax collection, so he could finance huge irrigation projects that made it possible to give cultivable fields to the poorer segment of the population, partially solving land abandonment. In a sentence. he was good at politics. So as fire and the wheel are symbols of the birth of the modern man, politics is the tool that bootstrapped modern societies.
  • jvb1000 4y ago
    Politics existed long before. The decision to embrace or avoid agriculture were political decisions too.
    • peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      as the article points out The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down. In practice they ran into violent neighbors long before they ran out of land to farm och game to hunt. For security reasons they had to leave large swathes of land as buffers between villages. That's the result of the lack of politics, what you are referring to is policies that kept the different groups separated based on their choices or caused splits among them. Hammurabi was a great politician because he reunited the Mesopotamian tribes in a single state city, convincing them to work for a common goal, making them all prosper together.
      • jvb1000 4y ago
        The Yanomamo were one of probably thousands of different groups that lives in the prehistoric era. One problem in the study of prehistoric human life is that only a few groups kept their way of life consistent from prehistoric times to modern. So these groups have strongly influenced our perceptions of what life was like in the prehistoric era. But this is inaccurate sampling if we want to draw conclusions about prehistoric life. More nuanced looks at the evidence, such as the dawn of everything, find more diversity, including politics among different groups in the prehistoric age.
• signalToNose 4y ago
  The knowledge a person can acquire and bring to next generation is key here. The more organized, free and widespread this knowledge is, the higher the probability it will survive. Knowledge has been an is still treated as secret and exclusive. If the 2-3 people with this knowledge dies, we have to rediscover it. This is the bottleneck human kind faces time and time again
  • brnaftr361 4y ago
    I disagree. Without wisdom, all is for naught. Consider internal combustion engines. Within the ICE is a long range agglomeration of knowledge and techniques ultimately allowing it to be produced in inconceivable quantities. It has also been incredibly harmful in more ways than one, the most salient and widely agreed upon being climate change. And of course such inventions of knowledge don't act alone, and they independently have large effects, but are also affected by other factors, for instance empirical medicine has had a tremendous effect on population size, and that has in turn spurred more demand for more ICEs which has fed into the gross consumption of fuel products, and in addition obviously the production of byproducts like greenhouse gases. It also prompted what I would classify as a pretty significant terraforming project in the development of infrastructure. It also remodeled society. Without hazarding inductive error in an ineradicably complex system which exists in in "infinite" timeline both in the context of the fractaline nature (e.g. shoreline paradox) and the sheer quantity of nonparallel time, this is important when considering the probability of black swan events. As an instance of this Benoit Mandelbrot reviewed the Black Monday data, finding that the vast majority of movement in the market occured in a window of about 10 seconds (if memory serves) And Black Monday itself was a small fraction of a year, of a decade, but nonetheless has an outsized effect.
    • simonh 4y ago
      Ok, but what are you disagreeing with?
      • brnaftr361 4y ago
        Without meaningful prescience of what will unfold as a product of snowballing knowledge (not to mention the signal:noise) it's very probable that humanity will endure the treadmill or worse be rubberbanded back. Development shouldn't really be looked at in absolute terms, but relative. We increase carrying capacity of some natural resource and just as quickly stack the burden back up. And using a historical lens is dubious, hazarding some calculated risk whose contours we're actually unfamiliar with, and that is something humanity is accelerating with the novel technologies we're wont to spin off. These things are the result of knowledge, but without some perspective wisdom to guide it, it is dangerous. And I would argue that wisdom is not something that can be transferred. It's the hard-fought and learned but not taught sort of understanding. Humility, compassion, understanding. Knowledge is hubris, dispassionate, and myopic. All that to say that knowledge isn't the key. It is a tool, but it is not the principal tool. It is also not the principal bottleneck.
• hyperthesis 4y ago
  When population peaks, will innovation-rate also? https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth Singularity-Kurzweil claims ongoing "increasing returns", but some papers showed population explains.
• andrei_says_ 4y ago
  This makes me think about how collaborative thinking and building upon the ideas of others, is exponentially more productive in terms of progress. Also, you have my vote for establishing “hour of collective mental wankery” as a measurement unit.
• landswipe 4y ago
  You have it spot on, but I think you are out by orders of magnitude, possibly a million hours back then, maybe more. This is the essence of why things are moving so quickly now.
• muyuu 4y ago
  I think the most obvious explanation, one that doesn't even require much imagination because it just coincides with the very concept of history and pre-history, is that people lost a lot of stuff when only oral tradition was kept and the threshold of complexity that could be reproduced reliably over generations was rather small and also asymmetric: stuff that could be kept inside of tales of general interest could be carried much further in space and time than things that would be specific or narrow in audience. Even with written records and history, there were a few events of major destruction of records, as they carried a legacy of power structures, just as they do know. Within living memory we had to go to privileged structures like the University to feasibly attain specialised knowledge beyond amateurish levels, across the disciplines. Just a little further back, reading and having many sources of information was for the rich in most of the world. The beauty of it is that most of the trail of the current flow of knowledge and technological advance is very well documented, it happened very recently. What's more, it's well documented how it didn't happen previously for a much, much longer period. Before global trade, people had very little spare time to think of anything outside of their day-to-day, and at most of their local governance and the preservation of their livelihood. Recorded knowledge, free(r) global(er) trade, communications super-charging each other and undergoing major breakthroughs during the Bronze Age and then the printing press and the industrial revolution, and then the hyperconnected world shortly after. Can you imagine just how little would subsist if humans couldn't record stuff and communicate beyond locally for just a few generations, and we were too busy just surviving short-ish lives by foraging and hunting?
• pleb_nz 4y ago
  Depending on your POV, is it sad that societies and cultures are becoming more homogeneous? Isn't there less diversity as time goes by in the modern world. The speed of development is good but is it at a cost to diversity?