
If Sapiens were a blog post - alltakendamned
https://neilkakkar.com/sapiens.html
======
aogaili
When I read Sapiens, the real shift in perspective was not in the details but
in the perspective the author was using to view humanity. The boldness and
firmness in answering the big questions is what I enjoyed the most. Things
like what made humanity dominant, the big trends on human cultures, the
subject/object and intersubjective realties, the important role of fiction
etc..

~~~
devoply
In the end what he's telling is half fact half myth, in that he's making a
narrative to justify things which though convincing may not be entirely true
or the entire truth. So as with all history to be taken with a grain of salt.
But yes it was a very good narrative and I have read other books by him that
are as captivating such as Homo Deus.

~~~
ulises314
As I was reading it I was thinking "is it even legal to have this many
misconceptions about human history?"

~~~
mfoy_
Gross generalizations aside, do you have any examples of things he gets really
wrong?

~~~
entee
As just one example of very poor reasoning, I found his treatment of how/why
patriarchy is so common to be rather poorly reasoned. He basically says:

"It can't be strength because the strongest person doesn't usually rule
societies." Then moves on to, "men are more violent and therefore may make
better soldiers, but fighting doesn't mean you'll be successful at
leadership." Finally he says, "maybe there are evolutionary pressures that
would make men more competitive and ambitious and make women more subservient,
but women could gain power by cooperating amongst themselves and we see
matriarchal societies among animals so that can't be it."

The first 2 are basically restatements of themselves, and he completely
ignores how strength or violence can establish conditions where the stronger
party would gain power without the strongest individual within that party
necessarily leading the whole group. In essence, strength contributes to
patriarchy, which then is self-reinforcing and within the group of strong
people there are many qualities that can bring out a leader. He glosses over
the volumes of examples from history of military leaders taking over
societies. Those leaders had to be good fighters to rise through the ranks and
earn their soldier's respect. Then they had the army to impose their will.
Seems plausible, fairly obvious, but he doesn't address it.

The 3rd is really oddly toxic because it suggests maybe a genetic
subservience. I personally find that hard to square with the people I know and
what I understand about genetics, particularly that very complex traits such
as social behavior are extremely unlikely to have strong genetic ties at a
population level. So much gets influenced by culture. See for example the
tribe of baboons that went from patriarchal to matriarchal [1]. It's good that
he dismisses it, but he should have emphasized culture more.

Essentially he doesn't consider that reasons 1+2 could predispose to one type
of dynamic (stronger people have more power) which will then tip over into
patriarchy, and once a social system is established it takes a lot to change
that system. Many arguments in the book could have been made in 1/3 the amount
of text, and could have been made better.

Small other annoyance: at one point he says that until modern times nobody
wanted to travel, that the desire to travel is a consumerist urge and a
demonstration of wealth. Nevermind that for most of human history it would
have been insane to even think of traveling more than a few dozen miles from
home and BTW that would have taken months/years, and anyway you probably
wouldn't have known that things like the pyramids (picking a random example)
existed at all. So how exactly does he conclude people didn't want to travel
for leisure because they weren't poisoned by consumer culture?

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-
bulli...](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullies-
baboons-retool-their-culture.html)

~~~
drblast
I agree. Discounting the "men are better fighters but that doesn't make them
leaders" is pretty silly. To me this is such an obvious driver for patriarchal
society it's amazing anyone would argue with it.

I've spent some time in areas immediately after a natural disaster, when
looting is a possibility and governments and law enforcement is no longer
effective. Even those times are relatively safe, but strong people with guns
immediately become very appealing people to have on your side in situations
like that.

Thinking about tribal societies and evolution, those societies that are best
able to protect their reproductive capacity (women and children) from the
elements and other humans are obviously going to survive in much greater
numbers over those that are not. This has to have an effect on gender roles.
You can lose half the men and reproduce at the same rate. You can't lose the
women.

~~~
philwelch
It’s one of those things that’s obvious and intuitive, _unless_ your baseline
of normalcy for the human condition is an ivory tower in a WEIRD culture.

------
youdontknowtho
I personally found Sapiens to be just like this blog post.

It seemed to gloss over major historical factors in a way that presented them
as accepted wisdom. This often hides implicit assumptions about those
historical factors that reinforce modern systems.

I just didn't find Sapiens to be that interesting once it got out of
discussions about pre-history. The rest of it's views on human development
seem to really be focused on explaining the "rightness" of how we currently
already see the world. I'm probably not explaining myself well here.

The overwhelming praise for Harari also makes me suspect. The people praising
Sapiens are people that I don't trust. So...yeah, that's me being a weirdo.

~~~
mirceal
definitely overhyped. definitely presented speculations as fact. definitely
too ambitious for its own good (what it tried to cover is insanely large) and
does a mediocre job at best.

i know a lot of people that loved it and recommend it (and later books) left
and right. my best guess is that it’s trendy and some sort of status symbol. i
wish people could look past the hype

~~~
sametmax
Harari keeps repeating "this is just an hypothesis" or "we can't be sure of
what happened at that time" during the whole book. He highlights multiple
hypothesis as well in all chapters, to compare them.

Actually the blog post literally shows that, by repeating "We’re not sure".

I can imagine many critics to the book, but presenting speculations as fact is
definitely not one of them.

~~~
youdontknowtho
I wasn't referring to his hypothesis. I was referring to how he covered some
historical movements as just the received wisdom regarding them. It was like
"Time-Life covers human history". There were somethings that can't be divorced
from their historical context. It's the same way that people lump all of
something into a generic pile...like all Islam is basically Whabism (not
saying that he said that but many people do) or things like that. Like I said,
I'm probably not expressing myself very well here.

------
rimher
After having read Sapiens I realized that there's something deeply disturbing
about it all, though.

The fact that Harari seems to think that everything is just a 'story' that we
tell ourselves, is way too nihilistic.

Maybe, taking this external perspective, we can understand better the
direction in which we're going, but it doesn't resolve a fundamental question:
why do we live the way we do?

In the long(human timescale) run, this is unsustainable and depressing, it
takes away from the ethics and the aesthetics that have made human life what
it is, that have brought us to live the way we do.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
> The fact that Harari seems to think that everything is just a 'story' that
> we tell ourselves, is way too nihilistic.

I find that the great challenge that confronts our species is precisely the
search for meaning.

There are myriad options for sale in the marketplace of ideas, many coming
with pre-packaged meaning. This is the typical case with Judeo-Christian
religions, where some external authority dictates meaning to us. But let's
suppose that there really is an Anthropomorphic God in the Sky that created
everything and has rules for us. Ok, good for him I guess, but you have to
lack a bit of imagination to not see the absurdity of that situation. It's
just a parent-child relationship, with an imaginary parent, that spares the
followers the pain of confronting existential questions, provided that
development remains arrested.

The same is true of Atheists and Materialists. Ok, there's only atoms.
Everything can be explained as a cold mechanism that progresses from the Big
Bang, through evolution, to us and all of our preferences and inclinations. Of
course, given that the scientific model of reality is so useful, it is easy to
forget that it is just another story when it comes to meaning.

To actually reach adulthood, I believe that one has to confront the scary
reality that one is one's own source of meaning. In one sense the universe is
made of atoms, in another it is made of stories. Both of these models are
useful, but no model can ever spare you from the task of becoming your own
source of meaning.

~~~
xixixao
To you and parent's points: I think Harari dwells on the this distinction so
much because one "model" can be changed, and one cannot.

The whole book is a cry for people to understand that most facts of life stem
from the stories model, not the physical model, and hence are to some extent
under our control.

------
tw1010
It's insane to me that Sapiens seems to make up the entirety of many
engineers' humanitarian education. And not only that, that you're basically
shamed if you haven't read it, but on the other hand seen as overambitious
and/or not interested enough in tech if you've opted to read a more
traditionally accepted scholarly tome instead.

~~~
weeksie
You shouldn't be getting downvoted. Sapiens is pretty mainstream anthropology
repackaged in a well written narrative. It's everything that pop
intellectualism aspires to be. Sapiens also frames a ton of issues in a way
that doesn't assault the STEM ego, so that certainly helped its reception.
Most engineers have an atrocious understanding of the humanities, but it's
hard to blame them. Most people in the humanities are woefully undereducated
in regards to science.

Being steeped in one field it's easy to believe you've got it all figured out.
Engineers, of which I am one, are notoriously bad about speaking with
confidence from a position of ignorance, but all of us do it.

~~~
ardy42
> Sapiens also frames a ton of issues in a way that doesn't assault the STEM
> ego, so that certainly helped its reception.

Can you describe that framing and how it "doesn't assault the STEM ego?" I
haven't read the book, but I'm genuinely curious about sociological
observations like this.

------
simonebrunozzi
As a side note, the author of the blog post clearly states this at the
beginning:

> You can get the book here 1

And the "1" footnote says it's an affiliate link. I exactly hoped and expected
that to be the case, and I plaud him for being so explicit about it. He has
gained my trust immediately.

I wish more people were this gentle and transparent about things on the
Internet.

~~~
neilkakkar
Thank you, Simone :)

~~~
simonebrunozzi
You deserve it :)

By the way, I think several people (including me) have been tempted to do what
you did, but never did it because it takes a long time to do it properly!
Kudos for the perseverance and stamina!

I hope I'll be able to return the favor one day by doing a similar thing of
some of my favorite books ("1491", "1493", "Debt: the first 5,000 years",
"Atlantide" (book by Renzo Piano and his son Carlo, only in Italian) etc).

~~~
neilkakkar
Thanks, looking forward to it!

Another monster book I just finished reading and want to do a summary of is
Guns, Germs and Steel, which is similar, but focused on one time-section.

I found writing down a mind map of what the author wants to convey really
helps distill down the ideas.

More than once, I'd read through one section of the book (again) - and be
unable to make the connection to the overall theme. This post (and any summary
I want to read) aims to solve that - do the hard work once of figuring out the
progression, how things connected together, so I can draw upon them for future
use.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I've read it; I vastly preferred "the third chimpanzee". Guns, Germs and Steel
was a bit on the weak side in terms of data to support his claims.

------
apo
Great idea as a way to benefit readers and the author of the post.

The first ~half of the book (prehistory) was much better than the second. Even
then, I recall the author missing some rather significant points.

For example, the hypothesis that megafauna die-offs were related to the
appearance of humans minimized one of the biggest, non-human contributors -
the recession of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age (Pleistocene). The
accompanying environmental dislocation is enough on its own to explain the
extinction, but you'll find almost nothing about it in the book.

It's almost certainly no coincidence that the early phases of what we think of
as civilization begin to appear very soon after the end of the last ice age.
Yet the author seems to blithely skip over that looming detail as well.

~~~
Epholys
There is a lot of evidence indicating that the megafauna extinction was
principally due to the human hunters. Here is a very good (but long) Twitter
thread by a biologist explaining it in detail:
[https://twitter.com/DRMegafauna/status/1084896526151942145](https://twitter.com/DRMegafauna/status/1084896526151942145)

------
sharadov
I was not impressed with Sapiens, especially Hariri's belief that the
agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud, and his belief that
hunter-gatherer societies were better ( I don't know, how when 90% of your
time was spent foraging for food and fighting for survival). Everyone agrees
the agricultural revolution was the most dramatic event, allowed us to farm
and afforded us the leisure time to pursue art, science and make the big
discoveries on which modern civilization is based on.

~~~
pippy
I came to the same conclusion after reading his book. His book is pretty
terrible.

His viewpoint (while interesting) was not very grounded at all. Simply because
agriculture requires more work doesn't mean it's inferior to hunting. Try
hunting an antelope if you've got a sprained ankle.

Another perspective that irked me was his blind faith that modern society is
built purely conceptual ideas. Citing empires, car brands, and money. In
reality all these things work because they provide practical benefits. Few
people or groups go out of their way to work purely on ideological bases, and
those who do, do so on a rational philosophy. Let alone as soon as it becomes
impracticable (See Maslow's hierarchy of needs).

~~~
ALittleLight
I think you've simplified his view a bit too much. Agriculture not only
requires more work but...

* Worse nutrition because you're eating only the narrow selection you can grow.

* Poor nutrition means worse health, digestive, and dental problems.

* Agriculture leads to higher population densities and living in proximity to animals which in turn leads to plagues.

* Agriculture leads to population growth and consequent vulnerability to weather, floods, etc.

* Agriculture leads to population density, leads to social organization, leads to war, genocide, feudalism, etc

There are lots of problems with primitive agriculture and it seems perfectly
plausible that it would be a better life to be an early hunter gatherer than
an early farmer. Try tilling a field with a sprained ankle, or with rotting
teeth after a bad harvest to feed your starving children. Etc.

------
qwerty456127
I wish more books were written/rewritten this way. I haven't read the post so
far, perhaps it's a little bit too short to fit all the interesting stuff from
the book, but I am pretty sure at least 80% (if not 99%) of books are at least
80% water.

I hope you are going to summarize the rest of the books of the same author and
go on to other nonfiction authors perhaps. I would read such a blog regularly.

~~~
neilkakkar
Indeed, that's the plan! You can find others I've done already tagged "Notes"
\- [https://neilkakkar.com/categories/](https://neilkakkar.com/categories/)

I realise now I should make that more explicit in my posts!

~~~
neilkakkar
Oh, also, for some more interesting stuff that doesn't fit into the overall
flow of the blog post - you can have a look at the HTML comments!

There's usually some more interesting one-off gems in there!

~~~
qwerty456127
Thanks for the clue! I thought nobody writes HTML comments any more.

------
mjollnir
"The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and
30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re
not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic
mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to
think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using a new type of language."

The genetic mutation story is not the most commonly accepted view in
anthropology, regardless of what Harari suggests. Perhaps it was more popular
at one time when archaeological evidence for "behavioral modernity" abruptly
ceased beyond ~50 kya, but if anything, it has been waning as a convincing
hypothesis as alternative interpretations[0] and evidence for modernity
continues pushing back the ~70 kya date[1].

This isn't to say that a real uptick in complex behavior and cognition didn't
happen in the Upper Pleistocene; of course it did. But an absence of
archaeological data is a pretty poor basis for inferring a single mutation
that caused artefact data to go from sparse to abundant/ complex. Beyond the
obvious (simply lacking data), it also seems to gloss over, for example, the
possibility of cultural evolution, demographic shifts, etc., all of which
require no "Tree of Knowledge mutation".

[0]
[http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf](http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf)

[1]
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202021)

~~~
gdubs
Haven’t read the parent post yet, but in his book from the 1970s (outdated in
numerous ways by now but still very interesting) “Dragons of Eden”, Carl Sagan
presents the argument that it was our ability to use tools. Essentially, tools
shaped us as much as we shaped them, and as our tools became more advanced, so
did our minds.

------
0xCMP
Interesting bit about money since it's mentioned in there: Most economics give
the same version in the notes which is that money just kind of _sprang up_ out
of no where to solve this problem of trade, but it's actually very likely that
Credit, and therefore also Debt, is the source of "money". That money only
became more important as trade extended from tribes and to strangers we didn't
trust. Also that the world goes through cycles of being currency heavy and
credit heavy in their transactions of which right now we're living through a
new credit heavy cycle which is hard to predict the outcomes of.

Recommend this book: [https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-
Years/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-
Years/dp/1612194192)

~~~
photojosh
I read 'Debt' a few years ago. Am currently reading Niall Ferguson's 'The
Ascent of Money' which dives more into the details of how our banking and
monetary systems arose. Only two chapters in, but I would recommend already.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money)

------
dalbasal
The book was originally a college course (introduction to world history). I
wouldn't be surprised if you could scare up class notes/handouts that
summarise it all in bullet points. They'd probably be in Hebrew though.

------
jsshah
Here is a series of videos that Yuval Harari (author) did that is enjoyable to
watch

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfc2WtGuVPdmhYaQjd449...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfc2WtGuVPdmhYaQjd449k-YeY71fiaFp)

------
nexus2045
There seems to be a lot of hate on Sapiens every time it's posted here in HN.
From what I gather, the criticism of his book comes from getting a lot of
things wrong, or pushing some incorrect narrative. I assume that those who
critique his book have read far more than myself and so have a stronger
foundation to assert this critique, because as someone who just hasn't read
that much nor has the appetite for digging through more dry tomes related to
these subjects, Sapiens was very readable and reshaped my perspective a lot.
Many people cite it as one of the best books of 2015(?). So is the criticism
here just incessant nitpicking without respect for a palatable narrative, or
are there books that provide another perspective that I'm seriously missing
out on?

------
astazangasta
Like most grand theories of history most of this is only works as a result of
approximation. For example, the Unification stuff appears to me to be pure
garbage. There is no moment in history when people went from cleanly
separating outsiders from insiders. The examples given are both wrong; Egypt
was likely ruled by a dynastic elite that came from outside (a common pattern
across many cultures in Asia throughout history); the Romans, ironically, are
the ones who gave us the word "barbarian". People still rail about foreigners;
cf. Brexit.

------
daxterspeed
Unrelated to the primary content and purpose of this post but this was
actually a pretty interesting use of an image map. Sadly the polygons don't
seem to align that greatly with the image, nor does it seem like mobile Chrome
applies the tap-helping algorithm it uses to help you tap the link you
"intended" to tap (rather than were your finger actually registered its
coordinates).

I was also surprised to find that there's lots and lots of text stowed away in
the HTML comments. Perhaps it's a peak into how this particular article
evolved?

~~~
neilkakkar
Hey, yep, that's exactly right. I wanted to keep the artefacts, and regarding
the image-map, sadly they aren't responsive, yet. They work perfectly fine on
every screen with width > 700px though.

I haven't figured out a nice way to make them responsive yet.

------
JadeNB
> It’s the original text, edited to ensure it still flows like the book.

This blog post seems to start off with the premise that you understand what's
going on, which I don't. Is the author _summarising_ his own impressions of
Sapiens (surely acceptable), or literally lifting the original text of the
book and taking it as his own, as this quote seems inadvertently to suggest?

~~~
latexr
> This blog post seems to start off with the premise that you understand
> what's going on, which I don't.

From the top of the blog post:

> The goal? Future-me should be happy to read this once future-me forgets how
> we evolved.

The post isn’t for you, but a reference for the author. It seems to be one of
those “I’m making this for me, but if it’s useful for anyone else, so much the
better” cases.

~~~
OJFord
Why not quote the sentence before that? The actual first sentence is:

> I spent over 25 hours building a cut-down version of Sapiens.

Unless OP is on HN and added that after comments here.

~~~
latexr
> Why not quote the sentence before that?

Because however many hours were spent making it is irrelevant as to _why_ it
was made, which was the point.

~~~
OJFord
I don't mean the hours, I mean the "cut-down version of".

~~~
latexr
Similar reason. Explaining _how_ it was made (by cutting it dow) has no
bearing on the _why_ , which was the point.

~~~
OJFord
No it wasn't, you were replying to:

> Is the author summarising his own impressions of Sapiens (surely
> acceptable), or literally lifting the original text of the book and taking
> it as his own [...]?

The first sentence about cutting it down answers that.

~~~
latexr
> No it wasn't, you were replying to

No, I was not, I was replying to the section I quoted (hence quoting it,
that’s how that works).

------
V-2
"Proletariat = collective noun for working class people."

Thanks, footnote. I was completely stumped.

~~~
neilkakkar
hahaha, I was too! (and I wanted to save people a google search :P

------
numbers
wow this blog post is amazing b/c oftentimes I want to refer to a specific
part of the book and since I don't have an ebook version, I don't have it
readily available! Thank you so much for putting this together!

~~~
dmix
Every book should come with a free ebook, especially the non-fiction ones.
This is something the publishers should get in on.

------
novaleaf
> If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species
> flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a
> hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the
> ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

LOL, such a succinct rebuttal-yet-affirmation of the "Paleo diet"

------
hanniabu
Thought this was going to about the Sapiens indie game that's been in
development the past 4 years.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave](https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave)

------
anbop
From a strict legal perspective, isn’t this a derivative work of the book?

~~~
jonny_eh
I figured there must be some precedent involving Cliffs/Sparks/Coles Notes,
but all I could find was this: [1]. Unfortunately it just talks about an
upcoming lawsuit, not the result.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2008/04/prof-sues-
note/](https://www.wired.com/2008/04/prof-sues-note/)

------
____Sash---701_
Sequel: Homo Deus

------
petermcneeley
This is a great summary. Someone suggested to me this book but , in reading
this summary, I now realize that this book is just a regurgitation of the neo
liberal manifest destiny.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I genuinely don't understand how you could come to this conclusion.

~~~
petermcneeley
I am comparing parts of the summary to what I understand of
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama)

~~~
solidsnack9000
Fukuyama’s recent books are genuinely scholarly and thorough.

