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..
I personally found Sapiens to be just like this blog post.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
After having read Sapiens I realized that there's something deeply disturbing about it all, though.<p>The fact that Harari seems to think that everything is just a 'story' that we tell ourselves, is way too nihilistic.<p>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?<p>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.
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.
As a side note, the author of the blog post clearly states this at the beginning:<p>> You can get the book here 1<p>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.<p>I wish more people were this gentle and transparent about things on the Internet.
Great idea as a way to benefit readers and the author of the post.<p>The first ~half of the book (prehistory) was much better than the second. Even then, I recall the author missing some rather significant points.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
"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."<p>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].<p>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".<p>[0] <a href="http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf</a><p>[1] <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202021" rel="nofollow">https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...</a>
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.<p>Recommend this book: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/...</a>
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.
Here is a series of videos that Yuval Harari (author) did that is enjoyable to watch<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfc2WtGuVPdmhYaQjd449k-YeY71fiaFp" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfc2WtGuVPdmhYaQjd449...</a>
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?
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.
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).<p>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?
> It’s the original text, edited to ensure it still flows like the book.<p>This blog post seems to start off with the premise that you understand what's going on, which I don't. Is the author <i>summarising</i> 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?
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!
> 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.<p>LOL, such a succinct rebuttal-yet-affirmation of the "Paleo diet"
Thought this was going to about the Sapiens indie game that's been in development the past 4 years.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave</a>
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.