[FRIAM] Fwd: (not) leaving Twitter

[Steve Smith]

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 <gepropella at gmail.com>
>> To:     Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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)?
>>>
>