
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) - GuiA
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
======
jqm
"modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their
distant ancestors..."

Given that "Turks" proper are a Central Asian people and not the original
inhabitants of Turkey I have to wonder exactly what ancestors he is referring
to.

Another point... maybe the skeletons before agriculture were taller, could be,
but I'm guessing there are many more skeletons available from the agricultural
period, so if the goal is maximum net skeletons, the agricultural period takes
the prize (can't support a lot of people hunting gathering). There are
probably plenty of tall skeletons from this period as well. Rulers who had the
malnourished masses doing their work for them. But a malnourished skeleton
still has more mass than a skeleton that just plain isn't there because the
lifestyle never would have brought it into existence.

I've never been a fan of Jared Diamond. I think his analysis is too one
dimensional and neglects myriads of factors in his quest for "the reason". I
realize he is very popular and he does raise some somewhat interesting points
at times. He just gives them too much credit for causing everything. Frankly,
this piece sounds like it was written by a guy who wants to have a life a
little bit freer than it is right now.

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lovemenot
I'd agree that a hunter/gatherer lifestyle may provide a local maximum in some
regions, at some points in time.

For instance, in Japan, the Jomon hunter/gatherers persisted long after they
might have been supplanted by settled agriculturists just across the water.
According to Jared Diamond in his later edition of Guns, Germs and Steel, the
sheer fertility of Japan's land and seas allowed the Jomon people to maintain
a relatively sophisticated culture, mitigating advances which might otherwise
have arrived from the fertile crescent via Korea.

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Asbostos
Those non-working "parasites" include most of the people how made the
important scientific discoveries of the previous couple of centuries. You
can't do that if you've all got the same job and live in a society that can't
sustain progress of any kind.

~~~
iofj
The thing I don't get about these articles is their author's complaints.
They're complaining people ... don't kill themselves. But obviously they
themselves don't suicide either.

So as I see it, they may have 2 intentions : 1) actually suicide themselves.
But then why are they writing articles and also, no suicide ... So while this
is their declared intention, it can't be their real intention.

2) increase their own success and, therefore increase their own environmental
impact, success (and therefore kids) and all they say is evil.

This would also make them lying hypocrites : they're not looking to improve
the environment, they're looking to make it worse.

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x3n0ph3n3
If humans had never invented agriculture, we would have never gone to space
and invented ways to track and prevent catastrophic asteroid impact. Plenty of
non-human species will benefit from that, but I don't think this is a result
the author predicted given this was written in 1987. IMHO, that trumps all of
the ills mentioned in the paper as now we are talking about the future
existence vs non-existence of the human race.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
_we would have never gone to space_

Interesting conclusion. Can you elaborate how you got there? Did you perhaps
fall victim to the "no free time" fallacy, that somehow agriculture gave us
more time for leisure, study, etc?

Diamond writes _modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do
farmers_ \- and this in land that is marginal, since we farmer-society-types
have pushed them there.

A more intriguing line of argument might have to do with settled communities,
etc.

Regardless of your line of argument, please ensure you do not succumb to
survivor bias (because we got here this way we could only have gotten here
this way, because no hunter-gatherer society got here, none can).

I look forward to rigorous reasoning.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Obviously, because most of us are neither hunters nor gatherers today. One
modern farmer can feed 10's of thousands of people. Those people can
specialize e.g. engineer, astronaut, teacher.

Hunter societies could never, ever have become this productive. There's just
no leverage there. And ultimately, the local environment has a strict limit on
supporting apex predators (hunters), which is orders of magnitude smaller than
the environment 'tamed' and groomed for agriculture.

The whole hunter-is-better argument is silly, from a civilization point of
view.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
I don't believe anyone has argued _hunter-is-better_. The question is whether
or not agriculture is better, and the jury is out. That is the point of the
article.

They may be equivalent. Tough to tell. One may be better than the other. Tough
to tell.

But to assume that just because we have agriculture and just because we did
all this cool stuff the two are necessarily related is to make a logical error
of the first order. History is contingent, not inevitable.

After all, how many thousands of years did we have agriculture with only the
slowest of overall technical progress? Consider that life in the 18th century
was, but for gunpowder and the printing press, essentially the same as life 18
centuries before the modern era, and about the same as life about 18 centuries
before that.

Find the contingencies that caused rapid technical advancement starting
roughly at the end of the 18th century, find the contingencies that made the
last two (2!) centuries so much different that the 100 centuries that preceded
them, and you might be on to something.

Now demonstrate that those contingencies simply could not have happened with
the leisure time available to the hunter-gatherer.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. I simply refuse to make any
assumptions. Survivor bias is a bitch.

------
ethana
It's ironic how there's a strain of progressives that want nothing to do with
human _progress_.

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unchocked
I'm pretty sure that most of the 7.3 billion of us wouldn't be alive without
agriculture. So if agriculture was a mistake, does that mean most of us
shouldn't be alive?

~~~
agumonkey
Isn't it a bit off point ? The article implies distribution of quality of
life, not population count. 1 mostly happy billion versus 7.23b struggling and
0.07b accumulating wealth (if I subscribe to the 1% thing), which one do you
prefer ?

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agumonkey
> Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to
> remain hunter-gatherers

The article doesn't give any reason why this would be the case, and it seemed
a little stretched, anyone know why would farmers really want to kill hunters
?

ps: >Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow
fat on food seized from others.

This feels naive at best. Biology creates classes, strong, witty, devious, etc
etc

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wpaladin
Nary a mention of the much higher levels of violence in hunter-gatherer
societies, past and present.

~~~
pluckytree
Where are you getting this data from?

~~~
wpaladin
Much has been written on the topic. Here's a fairly decent book.

[http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-
Savag...](http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-
Savage/dp/0195119126)

------
carsongross
Always fun to enjoy a curmudgeon rant, but if you are honest and empirical
about it, communism takes this black prize.

------
danharaj
Time to move beyond private property, hierarchies, and rule by force.

~~~
unchocked
How would you possibly move beyond rule by force?

~~~
danharaj
I hope in your day-to-day interactions with others, at the very least you
strive for cooperation based on common understanding, social bonding, and
mutual aid.

Even at my place of work, which has an implied hierarchy with force backing it
up, I strive for this. When people need to pull rank or exert force, something
is wrong. People who work together well work together without force.

Force is how you get people to do what you want when they don't want to do it.
The only way you can think force is inevitable is if you think you can't live
harmoniously with other people. To look beyond force as a means of social
organization, one must be an optimist, but when you do that, you find all
around you possibilities. The relationships that nourish and support us most
fully are the least violent ones.

~~~
unchocked
Yeah, no problem with your sweet outlook, though I don't appreciate the
personalization of your response.

But what would I do if some unenlightened person sought to compel me through
the threat of force?

~~~
danharaj
You resist them with force.

Of course that's a little facetious. There's more to resisting force than
simply meeting it with force in opposition. People live lives of resistance in
all walks of life, and finding ways to get around hard, inflexible enforced
conditions is useful to even powerful people. In general, the answer to your
question is exactly determined b y the nature and context of the force.

Personally, I am a nonconfrontational person. I think avoiding confrontation
has helped me find ways to deal with people who throw their authority around.
On the subject of physical violence, well I don't want to spill personal
details like that on a public forum.

~~~
unchocked
And thus we find that force is the ultimate arbiter of human affairs.

~~~
danharaj
I edited my comment realizing I was being too facetious. Force is usually the
worst way to get anything done socially. If someone is using force, it means
they have failed in every other way, and it'll lead to degrading social bonds,
a reduction in cohesion, lower productivity, and future conflict. We live in a
society that propagandizes extremely violent power structures and tries to
pretend they aren't as violent as they actually are. If force were so ultimate
and the true master of human relations, people wouldn't try to so hard to
obfuscate it. Force is force. People dislike people who use force. That's why
they bend over backwards to justify their force, or dress it up as some other
means of mediation.

