Fashion, art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition

Again, not finished with the book, but the central thesis of the book that large scaled human endeavors (and society as a whole following the agricultural revolution) does not require hierarchical organization. I do not believe I have made it to the meat of that thesis yet but, up to this point, I have not been convinced by his evidence that there were long-lasting, large-scale human organizations (think city scale and higher) that operated without some hierarchy.

That said, there are some things that stand out that I am spending a lot of time contemplating as a result of the book so far:

* I now agree with him that there were likely societies operating at a reasonable level of scale (larger than the Band/Tribe stereotype) that were significantly more egalitarian than current societies or any others in the Greco-Roman/Western civilization lineage.

* There was likely significantly more experimentation around social structures in early human history than I had thought of or imagined.

* There were societies which operated with different types of governance based on the time of year and activities associated with that time of year. This is interesting to me since I believe there is no "best" political system, but I had not considered how to take advantage of multiple types without trying to recombine them in some way. I particularly want to think about this more in the context of corporate organizations, since they already do this in some ways without being as explicit about it. For example, I have worked with an organization that operated like a collective of empowered product teams for large portions of the year but operated more like a standard hierarchy during annual planning season or when there was inter-organizational conflict. At the time I perceived it as a faux front for a top-down organization, but now I'm not sure that's fair.

* This one is probably more philosophically obvious, but, there is an opportunity for me, personally, to rethink the version of "freedom" I value. In doing so I think I will reconcile some conflicts I have between my social and economic views. The book didn't give me a new definition for freedom that I want to use, but it presented at least one alternative definition that I think is valid and interesting.

It's an interesting idea but I'm seeing whispers of No True Scotsman fallacy.

It's true, of course, that the end result will be a subset of the people leading and most not (which is an outgrowth of basic specialization theory: if everyone's in charge of coordination and leadership, nobody has time to do the work that needs coordination and leadership). But was the new elite always apart from the followers and supporters, or are the rulers overthrown and during that process some subset of the overthrowers become a new elite due to the needs of specialization? Or, to say it another way: would the "new elite" have ever been an elite if they hadn't won?

George Washington was never commissioned in the British army. Fidel Castro was the bastard son of an immigrant. Had their revolutions not succeeded, would history remember them as elite?

The whole premise is broken to me so the more he tries to dig in it just feels like deeper and deeper bs to me.

Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the employee. Jobs exist because the employer feels that the wage is a good trade for the person's time. The employee's perception of their contribution has essentially 0 importance in this interaction. A better definition of a bullshit job from the employee's perspective is one where the wage isn't worth it for the bullshit they have to put up with. In that case they should find a new one. If they can't, than putting up with that specific bullshit is still their best choice. If they keep showing up to work and taking that trade, apparently they don't think it's bullshit. And if the employer keeps thinking that the money is a good trade for their time, they apparently also don't think it's bullshit, otherwise they'd fire them.

So if two people freely engage in the same trade of time for money everyday for years on end, then simply calling it bullshit isn't that profound. It starts to sound a lot like some way to intellectualize whining about not liking your job.

So yeah, no amount of writing is going to save a totally broken premise.

I also thought of this; this explanation is like a more complicated and nuanced, but probably less empirically testable, version of the "CDS" mechanism proposed by the study's authors. I scrolled to the bottom half-expecting to see Scott get an acknowledgement.

This is also nicely illustrated in CGP Grey's rules for rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs