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The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

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Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#11

Post by veritas »

arhar wrote: post #7
veritas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. FTA... please read it :p You can make the argument that by increasing population size and crowding, it also made collaborat…

It still does not make sense. Humans were in a hunter-gathering mode for quite some time. If they were so much healthier, AND had more free time, why did the society start rapidly progressing only with the advent of agriculture? Did they just magically become smart? I'm sorry, but no. While this article is certainly interesting, and thought provoking, the thesis doesn't hold.

They didn't suddenly become smart and you certainly cannot attribute all the developments to the adoption of agriculture. Progress has been very... erratic (can't find the right word) throughout history.

To blindly attribute progress to a singular cause such as farming is short sighted. I'm sure there are many different variables (farming included) that influence progress and discovery.

Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#12

Post by ecuzzillo »

veritas wrote: post #8
ecuzzillo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. If you compare the average member of a hunting-gathering society to the average farmer , then sure, the hunter-gatherer has more time. That's because the farmer farms very intensively, and feeds everybody else in the society. If you take the average member of a farming society , on the other hand, probably about 1.5% of his waking time is spent farming. (3% of the population farms, and each farmer ma…

Not to pick a fight here or anything but in your original message, you implied something completely different. You implied that the hunter/gatherers would have no time to make any discoveries since they'd be off looking for food all the time. Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding,…

1. I didn't write the original message.

2. Yeah, we have overcrowding, inequality, classes, and war. There are bugs in agriculture. Overcrowding just means that most people aren't dying off quickly like they did when there wasn't farming. Inequality just means that some people are now wealthy, where before nobody was wealthy. I'd bet war happened before, too; it just happens on a larger scale now because everything happens on a larger scale now.

3. You can't do most kinds of technology, education, or pretty much any other kind of endeavor if you have to spend all your time near enough naturally growing sources of food to not spend all your time in transport. Most kinds of art and technology come from concentrating appropriate quantities of appropriate kinds of people in one place. That's the point of universities, conservatories, and, for that matter, companies. Most interesting things in the world come from concentrating people.

Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#13

Post by ecuzzillo »

Darmani wrote: post #9
ecuzzillo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. If you compare the average member of a hunting-gathering society to the average farmer , then sure, the hunter-gatherer has more time. That's because the farmer farms very intensively, and feeds everybody else in the society. If you take the average member of a farming society , on the other hand, probably about 1.5% of his waking time is spent farming. (3% of the population farms, and each farmer ma…

You might want to be careful about anachronism when stating facts. It is true that very few today farm, but take into account that, within the past century alone, the yield of farmers has increased by an order of magnitude, not to mention the millennia of domestication and invention before it. For most of agricultural history, the percentage of farmers was much higher than 3%. For example, from Wikipedia's article on…

Well, all right, so agriculture sucked for a long time. It's still the case that the precursors to many of the good things we have today (e.g. computers) come from concentrating people in cities, which comes from farming.

Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#14

Post by veritas »

corentin wrote: post #10
veritas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to pick a fight here or anything but in your original message, you implied something completely different. You implied that the hunter/gatherers would have no time to make any discoveries since they'd be off looking for food all the time. Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding,…

> Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc). And he's not wrong; because farming is progress, and progress brings good things as well as bad things. But, as we're an intelligent species, we recognize bad things (yes, it takes generations) a…

Again you're equating farming with progress. Can you say that if we hadn't adopted farming that wouldn't have made progress?

Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#15

Post by veritas »

ecuzzillo wrote: post #12
veritas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to pick a fight here or anything but in your original message, you implied something completely different. You implied that the hunter/gatherers would have no time to make any discoveries since they'd be off looking for food all the time. Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding,…

1. I didn't write the original message. 2. Yeah, we have overcrowding, inequality, classes, and war. There are bugs in agriculture. Overcrowding just means that most people aren't dying off quickly like they did when there wasn't farming. Inequality just means that some people are now wealthy, where before nobody was wealthy. I'd bet war happened before, too; it just happens on a larger scale now because everything h…

Sorry, you're right... you didn't write the message. My mistake :)

Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#16

Post by davidw »

Ok, time for a bit of hand wringing. I said I'd wait a week, but this needs to be pointed out. In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news.

http://reddit.com/info/3895/comments

Not only that, but the article itself is 20 years old, and is not an attitude I have read in Diamond's later works like 'Collapse', where he certainly underlines the dangers and problems that face the human race, but does manage to strike a good balance between gloomy and cautiously optimistic about the possibility for improvement.

Harumph.

Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#17

Post by Darmani »

veritas wrote: post #4
run4yourlives wrote: post #2

>Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Neither of which would have been possible if we were too busy hunting for food every waking hour.

>>It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. FTA... please read it :p You can make the argument that by increasing population size and crowding, it also made collaborat…

I think it is moreso the ability to settle in one place that caused the growth of technology. The hunter-gatherers, no matter how numerous, certainly did not spend their free time building forges and experimenting with metal.

Also note that the time spent gathering food likely does not include preparing to gather food (e.g.: making weapons). Although they could spend plenty of time playing games, note that games originated to prepare children to spend time gathering food (and practice other necessary survival skills).

Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#18

Post by corentin »

veritas wrote: post #14
corentin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc). And he's not wrong; because farming is progress, and progress brings good things as well as bad things. But, as we're an intelligent species, we recognize bad things (yes, it takes generations) a…

Again you're equating farming with progress. Can you say that if we hadn't adopted farming that wouldn't have made progress?

If we had stick with hunting/gathering, obviously it would not have been progress.

Re: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

#19

Post by Tichy »

davidw wrote: post #16

Ok, time for a bit of hand wringing. I said I'd wait a week, but this needs to be pointed out. In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news. http://reddit.com/info/3895/comments Not only that, but the article itself is 20 years old , and is not an attitude I have read in Diamond's later works like 'Collapse', where he certainly underlines the dangers and problems that face the human r…

I don't read reddit, anyway, I guess it takes time to find out what is considered appropiate for the new hacker news. I went by the definition of "is not shown on TV". It's 20 years old, but old articles have been posted before, and I only found it today... If nobody is interested, nobody will mod it up?

Besides, I thought this article also relates to startupping, because of the average work hours aspect. But granted, Jared Diamond is not exactly unknown.

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