Psientist’s Reviews > Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind > Status Update

Forced myself to finish it up. Just had the homily about the Singularity. Nothing unpredictable.

Just finished the section where he ties technological progress to colonial expansion. There is a good deal of blurring the difference between capitalism and imperialism here. Seems to be working himself up to calling for some sort of limits on capitalism due to climate catastrophe, but he is going very carefully

Ridiculously brief aside on Game Theory. It would have been better not to mention it. In an attempt to bolster the anodyne idea that cultures/beliefs/ideologies can serve themselves using humans as a petri dish he has ignored all the work done by e.g. Sober on showing that arms races are just one corner case that leads to mutual destruction. Mutual aid is far more common. Pre-figuration for neo-lib conclusion?

YNH is confused about the Marxist assertion culture functions to control people against their own interests. Many Marxist scholars argue explicitly that such ideas arise explicitly from the material conditions of production. Again YNH is slipshod and free in his wide-ranging assertions. Also posits chaos and determinism as opposites: Chaos Theory actually argues that chaos arises in deterministic systems.

Although agreeing with the problems of Just-So stories in human history (for which idea he should acknowlege Stephen Jay Gould) it is an Iron Law of Bullshit that someone asserting a debatable hypothesis will refer to said hypothesis as an iron law.

I like the idea of Nazis as "evolutionary humanists". Had not heard that definition before. Not sure about his definition of humanism or the partition of humanism into 3 branches: liberal, socialist or evolutionary. Seems like he has introduced the idea of syncretism in the earlier discussion of religion in order to give himself some room for fudging and wriggling here.

The attempt to paint ideologies as being the same as religions is not useful. In answer to his suggestion: yes, some Buddhist sects and stoics are examples of ideologies, but not religions. Some people _do_ justify their view of the world with (inaccurate) references to relativistic physics (New Age religions). Communism and neo-liberalism are different because they make concrete testable assertions. Weak sauce.

The attempt to paint ideologies as being the same as religions is not useful. In answer to his suggestion: yes, some Buddhist sects and stoics are examples of ideologies, but not religions. Some people _do_ justify their view of the world with (inaccurate) references to relativistic physics (New Age religions). Communism and neo-liberalism are different because they make concrete testable assertions. Weak sauce.

p.228 on religion is very vague. I wonder what scholars of religion make of his definition of religion, especially the idea that what he terms "natural-law religions" include liberalism,nazism and communism because they all believe in a "superhuman order". Does that make physics and chemistry religions too?

He is trying to paint money as one of the essential abstractions that allow human co-operation and is about to launch into a description of the positive effects of large empires ( a sort of humorless What the Romans Did For Us reprise).
He appears to quote David Graeber as support for the origin-of-money/coincidence-of-wants myth that is exactly what Graeber attacks (if I understand them both correctly). Hmmm!