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David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

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Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#71

Post by ruined »

amar-laksh wrote: post #53

Recently had a throwaway thought while reading The Dawn of Everything. The formation of cultural norms fundamentally sit on the idea of recollection of the distant past and not of that which has just happened in front of you. Example: The reason for wearing ties is part of the western cultural code not because each person distinctly and has first-hand witnessed how it started, it's just being shaped by historical pre…

This has happened to some extent forever, through oral tradition, but manufactured media certainly accelerates the process. If you’re interested in this kind of thing i’d recommend Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, in which the author analyzes the way nationalism developed with the invention of the printing press. It's a classic text of anthropology and absolutely blew my mind when i read it as a teenager.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#72

Post by d3nj4l »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #70
JasonCannon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend Debt the first 5000 years as well as The Democracy Project. Both of which were absolutely fascinating to me. Solidarity forever and rest in power Graeber.

I've seen quite a bit of criticism of the Debt book of basically being a giant exercise in cherry-picking and sort of a politically motivated narrative. However, history and economics are topics where neutrality and objectivity of authors are hardly the norm.

It's an interesting read despite that IMO. When I first read it as a teen it blew my mind, and over time I read a bunch of critiques that corrected beliefes I'd had based on it, but I still think it was a good read, because even a cherry picked tour through history and philosophy is a tour through history and philosophy.

For those looking for a left-wing critique, I like Aufheben's: https://libcom.org/library/5000-years-or-debt

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#73

Post by thoughtstheseus »

rsj_hn wrote: post #68
jhbadger wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And note that the domain name of the St. Louis Fed is ".org" rather than ".gov" like official US government agencies like the NIH, FDA, USDA, etc.

Go look at: https://www.federalreserve.gov/default.htm Of course the Fed is an arm of the government. The member banks have the "form" of private banks, but they are not really private banks. They are government created, backed, run, and funded entities. Think of a Port Authority, and decide whether it is part of the government or not. Of course it is. The member banks also have no power in Fed decision making, which…

This is a bit of off. The Federal Reserve executes policy decisions through the member banks. Mainly the NY Fed. The member banks have an antiquated structure where they are “owned” by private banks but are not controlled by them. It’s complicated and annoying. We should just make the member banks an official part of the federal government.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#74

Post by rsj_hn »

thoughtstheseus wrote: post #73
rsj_hn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at: https://www.federalreserve.gov/default.htm Of course the Fed is an arm of the government. The member banks have the "form" of private banks, but they are not really private banks. They are government created, backed, run, and funded entities. Think of a Port Authority, and decide whether it is part of the government or not. Of course it is. The member banks also have no power in Fed decision making, which…

This is a bit of off. The Federal Reserve executes policy decisions through the member banks. Mainly the NY Fed. The member banks have an antiquated structure where they are “owned” by private banks but are not controlled by them. It’s complicated and annoying. We should just make the member banks an official part of the federal government.

Policy decisions are implemented via OMO at the NYFed. That doesn't mean the member banks actually set policy. The policy is set by the Chairman, who is appointed along with the rest of the Board of Governors by the President.

Neither the member banks nor the shareholders of the members banks have policy input. But I'll grant that "antiquated" is an improvement over my use of "quaint".

> We should just make the member banks an official part of the federal government.

If it gets people to stop arguing that the Federal reserve is "private", then I guess it would be an improvement. That would be the only effect of this change, though - cosmetic - as it is a cosmetic feature in the first place.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#75

Post by AussieWog93 »

hacksnewer wrote: post #37
paulpauper wrote: post #18

He epitomized, embodied how and what public intellectuals should be, should aspire to: the a willingness to ask hard questions, to challenge conventional preconceived notions. It seems like academia these days is more about maintaining the status quo. If your ideas are engineering debate, it means you're doing your job.

This is a very HN way of looking at academia. The vast majority of academics aren't looking to be "public", they quietly do great work for decades, passing their knowledge down to their students. You don't hear about them because their main job is to educate not bloviate. Not saying Graber does this, but there are academics (I can think of a Canadian professor) who are very much "public intellectuals" but whose entir…

>I can think of a Canadian professor

If we're thinking of the same professor/Kermit the Frog impersonator, he was definitely somewhat of a public figure before he got involved with the C-16 controversy.

If you look at his public appearances from before this viral clip (and even for a year or two after), most of it is fairly well grounded and uncontroversial (or at least, not controversial for controversy's sake).

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#76

Post by culi »

Robotbeat wrote: post #42
culi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a way to go to. The book, cowritten with archeologist David Wengrow, ties together so many different developments within archeology and anthropology that are driving some major paradigm shifts. These massively important paradigm shifts have mostly been confined to academia so far and I don't there's been such a broad attempt to tie them altogether like this. Especially not one geared towards the public This book…

Can you summarize three of these paradigm shifts?

Lol this sounds like a class assignment.

E.g. the origins of agriculture. It's going from the idea of having a single point of origin to multiple (~15-20) points of origins around the world.

Another major shift in thinking about agriculture is realizing it wasn't so much of a technological advancement (indeed agricultural people had radically reduced lifespans, less leisure time, more disease, etc) as something people were likely forced into. And most people around the world grew at least part of their food or at least had the knowledge to do it so people shifted in and out of agriculture commonly.

Another major shift in thinking is around cities. In anthropology the concept of cities have actually been defined by hierarchical social structures. We have more and more examples of many very large rural places that very much go against the idea and drive a big hole in the idea that hierarchy is a natural biproduct of increasing populations.

I could go on. One that I wish got covered more in the book was the relationships between cultures and ecologies. This is more of a major shift in archaeobotany and will probably take a while to be fully fleshed out and reach the wider public, but archeologists are increasingly seeing, for example, the Amazon rainforest as a manufactured landscape. One that was very heavily shaped by the indigenous peoples that lived in them and would not be around in the way that it is without them. Same for California and it's deep dependence on cultural burning practices and also for most of Australia that early colonists often described as looking like a "giant well-managed park".

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#77

Post by socialdemocrat »

hacksnewer wrote: post #37
paulpauper wrote: post #18

He epitomized, embodied how and what public intellectuals should be, should aspire to: the a willingness to ask hard questions, to challenge conventional preconceived notions. It seems like academia these days is more about maintaining the status quo. If your ideas are engineering debate, it means you're doing your job.

This is a very HN way of looking at academia. The vast majority of academics aren't looking to be "public", they quietly do great work for decades, passing their knowledge down to their students. You don't hear about them because their main job is to educate not bloviate. Not saying Graber does this, but there are academics (I can think of a Canadian professor) who are very much "public intellectuals" but whose entir…

Very different perspective from the debate here in Norway . Here is is seen more as a duty of academics to engage with the public and a push to get them to do that more. What value is knowledge if it is not known? We live in a media world increasingly dominated by quacks and pseudo science. The need for real experts to make themselves heard is bigger than ever.

Thus at least hear in Norway the academics who popularized knowledge and engage with the public are celebrated. Politicians have started to put more pressure on academics to speak up.

I know from a mother who was a life long journalist that it was always very hard to get experts to talk to media. They are so focused on a level of accuracy and formality that often is entirely unsuitable to address the public at large. But that does not mean that the alternative is to let quacks dominate public discourse.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#78

Post by culi »

diego_moita wrote: post #17

Began "The Dawn of Everything" about a week ago, still on chapter 3. Chapter 2 was very, very good. Worth the whole book alone. It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture. It is very well argued, soli…

I'm not as familiar with how anthropologists feel about Yuval Harari, but fwiw Graeber is far from unique amongst academic anthropologists in his distaste for Jared Diamond's work and the misconceptions and myths that it spread

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#79

Post by socialdemocrat »

orthecreedence wrote: post #4
ncmncm wrote: post #2

My pre-ordered copy of "The Dawn of Humanity", hot off the press, just arrived yesterday, from Bookshop.org, right on schedule. I am preparing to experience all my cherished preconceptions exploding.

I'm ashamed to admit I've never actually read any of Graeber's books, even though I'm fairly anarchist-leaning. I really need to change that. I didn't even know that he finished another one before he died, so I guess I'll have to add that to my list as well.

I am not an anarchist at all but I think he has some very good criticisms of a lot of fundamental beliefs among modern day economists. Economics as a profession is built upon a set of axioms or premises about human nature and society. Graeber cannot go toe to toe with modern economists with their equations but he does a brilliant job of tearing apart the assumptions of economists within the classical school of though.

I lived “Debt: first 5000 years” and “Bullshit jobs”

Both challenge a lot of truthisms about our modern capitalist world. I am surprised the ideas in these books have not become more widely known on the political left.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#80

Post by advertising »

agumonkey wrote: post #23

How do people on HN deal with the potential disappearance of work altogether ? physical labour -> boston dynamics office labour -> ~cloud + smartphones (i'm in an office job right now, and it's near zero work, it's full on redundancy, ambiguous and contradictory information, political friction.. any computer could replace the entire building and operate faster 24/7) it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of ta…

The book - Fabric of Civilization takes an informative dive on what happened as cotton/wool fabric technology evolved and different bottle necks in the process changed, along with who was compensated more and who lost their jobs in the process.
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