I might be wrong,but as someone that read the original Hebrew book, I feel there is missing context for the English readers. The biggest struggle in Israel is between religion and liberalism. The Arab states around us are falling (or in high risk of falling) into Muslim paradigms, and Israel is in the midst of a similar process where Jewish rules is considered superior to democratic/liberal rules by larger part of the population. This book comes as fresh air showing the strength of science, over the laws of God - given a wide enough time perspective. It's the secular Bible if you wish, something to hang on to while more people around you believe in hatered disguised as faith.
> Jewish rules is considered superior to democratic/liberal rules by larger part of the population
I don't think it's a larger part of population, just much better organized.
Also, you're forgetting that a lot of "right" is pretty secular and is driven not by religion, but by the nature of conflict itself — it's much harder to cling to democratic and liberal values for all when you're afraid for your life every day. (I'm not expressing my personal opinion on the issue here, just describing different political forces and motivations behind other people as I see them).
> I don't think it's a larger part of population, just much better organized.
Point accepted, but those are the ones driving much of society, when the others are just watching on the sidelines. In such diverse things as elections to getting a beating, the passive bystanders don't matter.
Sapiens was a good book overall - it put together the high-level facts fairly well into a coherent and entertaining story. However, that story was also very zeitgeist-y and ideologically skewed, he really tried hard to work the "Out of Eden" story whereby the human race has fallen from our great past into our miserable modern life.
In fact, he had to contradict himself to push that story. In one case, he describes how agriculture is worse for the farmer, because he was sedentary and if the crops failed, he could not move and faced a famine, whereas hunter-gatherers could move. In an earlier part of the book, he describes how hunter-gathers moved over a relatively small area (20x30km IIRC?). But of course, if there was a drought in a world of hunter-gathers and they had to move, they would just move where there is another tribe already, so the drought would cause war, rather than famine. That was never mentioned, it's just assumed there was random free land everywhere.
But the biggest weakness of the book seemed to be his very weak appreciation of the physical sciences, ie he tried to tell the 75,000 year history of humanity, without bothering to spend any time on the context. Much of history is tightly coupled to ecology, advances in tech, demographics etc and his just glides over that. In one particularly idiotic part, he seems to imply that one day, someone just randomly invented math for no particular reason. Hard to tell if he was being glib or actually believes it.
I'll probably give his one a go as well, even though it'll probably suffer from the same issues. For example, it's very in-vogue to view the development of intelligent systems as inventions of capitalist who seek power over the people, rather than the discoveries about the nature of reality. I find the latter much more interesting.
It's not a bad book, but imo it starts off very strong and then quickly goes downhill throughout. This was the general (and unsolicited) criticism from most everyone I've shared it with. The stuff from prehistory, up to the agricultural revolution, seems to cover a lot of recent discoveries and is both fascinating and informative. The rest is, as the parent comment states, a very simplified summary of the author's favorite topics, a few paragraphs spent on each one, and clearly showing certain cultural biases (it honestly felt optimized for appeal to a TED audience). A good assigned read for early high schoolers, less useful to many beyond that point.
By the time you're at part four, on the current era and emerging technologies, it literally reads like a bunch of newspaper clippings from the Science section of the NYT. While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived) problems, it seems unlikely to contain better or more profound commentary regarding trends in changing humanity and emerging technology than books like Superintelligence, Age of Em, etc. At best perhaps a "lite" version of the same concepts sanitized for a broader audience. Of course I look forward to, upon publication, hopefully having been mistaken about it.
>(it honestly felt optimized for appeal to a TED audience)
Funny that you should say that because TED is extremely popular here in Israel (the book was originally published in Hebrew a couple of years before the English translation).
>While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived) problems...
Don't get your hope up. It's basically:
- the singularity is near and that's not necessarily a good thing
Discounting the fact that the author's previous foray into writing was one of those "grand" books that everyone loves to read to make themselves feel they're smart, and which was actually laughed out the door by real historians (just look up /r/askhistorians), lets take the argument that the author makes on its own merit.
The argument goes something like this: Because we'll be able to deconstruct the human body/mind via Scientific Insights provided by Big Data, it will pose an "existential challenge" to our freedoms. The author uses the word "algorithm" liberally to describe any biochemical process that occur in the human body and thinks that that automatically means that human beings are somehow devoid of free will. [0]
What the author has forgotten about is that data has nothing to do with the fundamental of the problem at all. We have known for centuries that human biology is a thing and every decade has brought more insights about how it works. The fact that we fundamentally understand the composition of DNA didn't pose some big 'existential threat' to free will. Neither will Big Data.
It's the age old question about Consciousness in new dressing.
Frankly, I'm getting a bit tired of all these doomsday prophets, first the author who wrote the Singularity book and now this. I read the FT article based on this. It almost feels like a self-promotion. Say something controversial about a trendy topic (Big Data), make an ominous prediction, write blogs, get enough of a following, write a book, then write another one. Watch the $$ roll in.
I am currently reading Sapiens and for me the takeaway thought from this book is that large scale social transformations (like agricultural or industrial revolutions) immeasurably increase the power of humanity as a whole while bringing hitherto unknown woes for the individuals.
I am quite convinced that invention of computers and the internet marks the beginning of the revolution on the same scale. Why should it be different then? Interesting and not quite pleasant times lie ahead.
One criticism I have of Sapiens is that he regards the hunter-gather lifestyle as ideal, a sort of Garden of Eden from which we descended when we invented agriculture.
The few Amazon, New Guinea and Kalahari hunter-gather tribes anthropologists have discovered live in what most modern humans would regard as terrible poverty and fear of violence.
There is definitely some of that (but then he spends some time discussing why modern hunter-gatherers can be a poor representation for prehistoric ones). May be an overreaction to the old sentiment about "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives of prehistoric humans.
Also, there is little surprise that different value systems provide different value judgments. According to hunter-gatherers our lifestyle would surely be described as terribly sedentary and full of anxiety about tomorrow.
As for me, I find evidence that human brain could actually decrease in size throughout history a good reason not to be so smug about all-encompassing knowledge and abilities of modern humans.
> about all-encompassing knowledge and abilities of modern humans
I agree. The reason we achieve so much more is the network of human cooperation in space and in time (with the ancestors who pass down to us knowledge, methods, culture, technologies, items, infrastructure). I have not ever seen any substantiated claims individuals got better apart from better software gotten through soft programming, the stuff I mentioned as passed from ancestors. With "better" I mean this: Would a baby created today and immediately given to hunter-gatherers (now or 10,000 years ago by "magic") do better then their babies? I doubt it.
>I am quite convinced that invention of computers and the internet marks the beginning of the revolution on the same scale. Why should it be different then?
However, a criticism of induction is that the past cannot always help predict the future. We were given an example of the turkey that learns if he sticks his neck out the farmer will feed him. He keeps sticking his neck out and being fed every day, until one day he sticks his neck out, and where the past has told him to expect food, the farmer instead chops his head off and before he knows it he’s on the Christmas table.
The turkey metaphor rests on the premise that there is an end goal with the turkey; the farmer wants to eat it. Even before the story is fully told, we already know what's going to happen to the turkey.
Since we don't know the end goal for humanity, we don't know if "reaching our head out" is bad or not.
>we don't know if "reaching our head out" is bad or not.
as long as we're staying inside the cage, we're slaves to that guessing game. This is why breaking out of whatever cage we're in - and as we don't know what nested, probably infinite, "russian doll" style set of cages we're in - that means the continuous expansion and envelope pushing in all directions is the key for continuing species existence.
>The turkey metaphor rests on the premise that there is an end goal with the turkey; the farmer wants to eat it.
No, it really doesn't. The same thing could have happened to the "empiricist dog".
The only reason it is a turkey is for the added emphasis and "foreshadowing" the reader would get.
But the gist of the parable is not about "this is what happens to turkey", it is "this is the problem with induction", whether there is an end goal or not. The slaughter here is just "whatever lies ahead".
Note also that in the case of the real world, we ARE like the turkey in the parable, and are as oblivious to thanksgiving as any turkey is. That is, in the course of the parable is that you shouldn't identify with the reader, but with the turkey.
Oh yes, the past is often a poor predictor for the future. But then a turkey that has received an unpleasant electric shock each time it did some thing and then expects that this time it should be different is just stupid!
I don't know if this is a quote from the book being reviewed, but this line leapt out at me: "famine is rare". I find it hard to reconcile this statement with information like this statistic from a UNICEF web site: "Every 3.6 seconds one person dies of starvation. Usually it is a child under the age of 5."
Starvation does not require famine. Quite possible for there to be plenty of food created, but withheld from those who need it. Possible, and common.
Reading further in your link, I find:
> Some 300 million children go to bed hungry every day. Of these only eight per cent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 per cent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.
The article appears to draw on a 2005 UNICEF report, which suggests this information may be somewhat out of date.
In the developing regions, the prevalence of undernourishment - which measures the proportion of people who are unable to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has declined to 12.9 percent of the population, down from 23.3 percent a quarter of a century ago
Obviously it's far from eradicated, but amazing progress has been made.
Now, that said, I still wouldn't characterize 800M people with chronic undernourishment as "rare", but... it's not as common as you'd think, either, based on a statistic like that cited by UNICEF.
Between seven and nine million people dying of starvation every year is still a pretty big deal The rate stat is a slap to the face, sure--but it should be, yeah? Progress being made doesn't mean there isn't a lot further to go, and this sort of middlebrow dismissal doesn't help.
The technology we have today can feed 7bln people, it can feed even more.
Distribution is another issue, there isn't famine today that we cannot deal with.
There are cases that we choose not to, there is a huge difference between famine that is induced or maintained due to political instability than due to "natural" causes.
If you want to see famine you don't need to go back more than 150 years to the great potatoe famine, events like this simply cannot happen today.
If you take the 7bln people of today and try to feed them even with circa 1900 agro tech then you will see what famine is.
Within a century we have solved famine and we can now feed 10-15 times the population we had 100 years ago.
If you look at the explosion of the population of the planet in the 20th century you can see how much of a revolution we have underwent.
This is why you don't see or hear about wide spread famine today.
Sure there are still pockets in developing nations and even cases of malnutrition in the developed world.
But that isn't famine, it's not a natural disaster, it doesn't decimate whole countries and if we had the political will to go and fix it there would be almost no major pockets since we can resolve the few remaining parts.
Food is hard to distribute when you are being shot at.
