Human history in the long run: It was mostly pretty bad

> there’s this new class of people who don’t grow the food and just take stuff

Pretty good summary of the latest "tech" business models as well :-)

The question is: why does this happen? Why do the many typically fail to limit how exploitative the few?

People usually seek answers in morality (or the lack thereof) but morality is a complex emergent phenomenon that is always "too little, too late".

One fundamental factor seems to be the difficulty of communicating and coordinating large numbers of people: The slow diffusion of technical knowledge means a gang of bandits with superior weapons can control an empire. Ineffective general education means vast human potential is wasted and accepts being raw material for stratified societies. Controlling message transmission and obfuscating the state of the world means people live in ignorance and manufactured realities which in turn makes them much easier to exploit.

An interesting question is whether digital technology with its various extraordinary efficiencies and exponential capacities will ever help mitigate the fundamental flaws of large human societies.

Idealistic hopes in this direction by tech visionaries have been promptly crushed, but what is important is indeed the long run effect.

Painkillers are also very very new. People suffered pain much more frequently much more widespread.

(Yet they probably thought the world was less bad than it was!)

The downside of using modern metrics to estimate the happiness of past people is that you won't ever measure the stuff that we've lost. We'll never really know, and you should look at all such comparisons with deep suspicion (especially eyeballing you, Steven Pinker)

No Work, No Food

Hyakujo, the Chinese Zen master, used to labor with his pupils even at the age of eighty, trimming the gardens, cleaning the grounds, and pruning the trees.

The pupils felt sorry to see the old teacher working so hard, but they knew he would not listen to their advice to stop, so they hid away his tools.

That day the master did not eat. The next day he did not eat, nor the next. "He may be angry because we have hidden his tools," the pupils surmised. "We had better put them back."

The day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. In the evening he instructed them: "No work, no food."

Is there any writer who criticizes Marx on his own terms?

Marx agreed that quality of life can improve under capitalism. The whole point was a ethical/social critique of mismatched incentives and power imbalances of such an arrangement.

It doesn't matter if life improves if the only choices one has in life is either live under the power imbalance of wage labor or extract value from those who do.

If folks can be blamed for commenting completely off-base takes on an article they didn't read, the author should also take heat for critiquing on a work they never read.

Friendship ended with Fascist Hacker News, now Primitivist Hacker News is my best friend /s

>It’s commonplace to refer to the slower productivity growth since 1970 as a “stagnation” relative to the 1870-1970 pace, but the 1970-2020 period still features more per capita growth in a 50-year span than was typical in human history. Much more growth. So what’s really the anomaly here?

Energy. All the boons of the Industrial Revolution are downstream of the ability to harness and utilize large amount of energy for productive human purposes.

The 1970s was when Saudi Arabia shut off the flow of cheap oil to the US; I would argue that we never actually recovered from this. We certainly got better at placating Middle Eastern elites enough to keep the oil flowing, but gas prices are still insane relative to pre-crisis levels, especially for a country which built so much car infrastructure[0] that the price of oil is a headline political concern.

This is why I'm bullish on solar, BTW. It's better to have SOME energy, even if it's only daytime, than none at all if the Middle East decides it wants to veto the US again.

>The social media experiment in “connecting people” is in some ways weirder and more contrary to history than I think we sometimes appreciate; until very recently, almost everyone was living in small towns.

Dunbar's Number is the cap on close friendships a human can have. The number 200 is bandied about but I don't think the value matters. What matters is that people continue to organize themselves around this number, and social organizations larger than it tend to either lose meaningfulness or grow deep states[1] that tend to make all the actual decisions.

>Human history is kind of bleak. There’s a lot of talk these days about the “dark parts of our country’s history” and how to think about them. But I’m not really sure we’ve had a conversation about the generally dark trajectory of all this history in general, which seems broadly lacking in uplifting themes about progress until suddenly it’s not.

You want to know what would be even bleaker? Going back to hunter-gatherer societies[2]. Humanity did not adopt agriculture by choice; nor did roving gangs of thieves and self-appointed protectors force people to put seeds into the ground and wait for food to sprout out. Resource exhaustion did. The Earth's carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers is comically low; agriculture spread as hungry humans overhunted and overgathered until it was necessary to intentionally plant and grow energy rather than just rely on the Earth to store it in a form we can naturally digest.

>The whole idea of trying to invent new ways of doing things seems to be perhaps more novel than you’d think. People were flaking stones the same old, same old way for unimaginably long spans of time.

Human progress is a superexponential (arguably, superlogistic) curve. Educated[3] individuals are more likely to produce inventions, more educated people produce more inventions, but agricultural societies eat their own seed corn by treating education as something to be kept to the elites.

[0] And KEEPS building car infrastructure, despite the risk being known for the last 50 years

[1] In the "Tyranny of Structurelessness" sense

[2] That joke about primitivists at the start was foreshadowing.