
Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone - benbreen
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/yuval-noah-harari-gives-the-really-big-picture
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Barrin92
it's a good, although pretty long piece. On Harari's popularity itself, I'm
not convinced by it at all. as the article points out it's a weird mixture of
Buddhist philosophy, futurology, and very broad accounts of history with some
new age mixed in.

That seems to be a very popular syncretic combination these days but it often
veers from speculative into science fiction and sometimes even pandering, both
to a large mass audience fascinated by AI news and tech elites who like to be
told they're controlling the world, even if Harari is scolding them.

On technical topics itself his takes, however, seem surprisingly shallow or
outright wrong. There's is a very good case to be made that we're in fact not
living in the transhumanist age and that society is not changing that fast at
all. (secular stagnation, Robert Gordon on innovation, Thiel in the popular
press) etc. In the discussion with Pinker, Pinker was very quick to point out
that a lot of Harari's speculations about genetic optimization are fairly
unreasonable given what we know about how complex genetic interaction is, and
so on.

It seems to me ironically the way he writes is to feed into the common
anxieties that are also reflected in the mainstream press and that are also
popular among people like Sam Harris or Bostrom or others who have carved out
their media niche in this space. They've found their audience but I'm not sure
how good any of it is.

And also one thing that I find to be absolutely unacceptable behaviour for a
writer who talks about the dangers facing our liberal societies:

 _" Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian
translation of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” had been edited to make it
more palatable to Vladimir Putin’s government. Harari had approved some of
these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its
2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by
President Trump."_

~~~
asimovfan
i've got nothing to say about harari, i don't like him myself either, but it's
a bit of a stretch to say that society is not changing that fast at all. I
wonder what you consider by society and change. Internet changed nothing?
Everyone having smartphones etc?

~~~
Barrin92
Everyone having smartphones it's nice but it hasn't significantly increased
economic output, the impact of computerization on productivity is in fact very
small. The UK for example in the last 10 years (since the invention of the
smartphone), has not seen increases in labour productivity at all.

Paul Krugman referred to the "kitchen test" at one point. If you go to your
kitchen today and compare it to 40 years ago, what has changed? Arguably very
little, maybe the only thing that would tell you what year you're in is a
screen on your wall.

Robert Gordon also proposed imagining going to sleep in 1870 and waking up in
1970 in the same spot in New York. Someone waking up would find the car,
skyscrapers everywhere, the discovery of dna, haber bosch allowing 3 billion
additional people to grow food, going to the moon, the commercial airplane,
the computer, antibiotics,and so on. Go to sleep in 1970 and wake up in 2020
New York and, well it doesn't look so different.

~~~
senordevnyc
_Paul Krugman referred to the "kitchen test" at one point. If you go to your
kitchen today and compare it to 40 years ago, what has changed? Arguably very
little, maybe the only thing that would tell you what year you're in is a
screen on your wall._

This seems like a test tailor-made to prove the point you’re trying to make.
Why not ask the same question about how much your local VHS rental store has
changed?

And as to 1870 -> 1970 vs. 1970 -> 2020, isn’t it obvious? One is a span of
time twice as long! The fair comparison is 1920 -> 2020, or 1970 -> 2070\. In
which case I think the point evaporates pretty quickly.

~~~
Barrin92
>This seems like a test tailor-made to prove the point you’re trying to make.
Why not ask the same question about how much your local VHS rental store has
changed?

Because a kitchen is significantly more representative on how much our daily
lives overall have changed because the kitchen (or really you could pick any
other place that represents labour or a place of gathering), says more than
the VHS store.

The fact that you're bringing up the VHS store goes to show though what the
crux of the problem is. Innovation over the last few decades has primarily
only happened in the world of media and communication. Watching netflix
instead of renting VHS tapes is nice, but it hasn't significantly expanded our
productive capacities. In fact infrastructure, healthcare (remember watson?)
and so on have largely stayed the same, or _even gotten less productive_.

Infrastructure, healthcare and housing represent a significant portion of both
daily experienced lives and chunk of the economy. More social networks and
more tv shows and online games are pretty cool, but they don't really touch
labour organisation, structure of the firm or production, and it shows in
stagnating economic growth and cost disease throughout the economy.

~~~
senordevnyc
What? Productivity has expanded tremendously in the last 40 years!

[https://data.oecd.org/chart/5QdS](https://data.oecd.org/chart/5QdS)

I can’t think of a space that hasn’t been heavily impacted since 1980. Even
the kitchen. In addition to the obvious examples of kitchen appliances and
screens and devices like Echo that weren’t available in 1980, how about the
fact that there are many fewer meals eaten at home? Or cooked for families?
How about the ways that women’s roles in society and families have changed?
How about the rise of single person households? Or meal prep and delivery
services? Or the much wider availability of fresh or “exotic” foods year round
than 40 years ago?

Sure, you can walk into a kitchen from 1980 or 2020 and see many similarities,
but there are also many differences that you can’t see at first glance.

------
frereubu
People’s responses to Harari remind me very much of Murray Gell-Mann
Amnesia[0]. Everyone seems to be impressed by his work until they get to their
area of specialism, which is the only area they think he falls down in. I’ve
had a number of conversations like this with people from different fields, all
of whom think his analysis in their area was significantly flawed. It feels
like he writes stuff that’s very plausible for a lay audience, but subject it
to any intellectual rigour from someone who knows their stuff and it crumbles.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect)

~~~
asterisk_
I find this to be the case with most pop-science books; the author's intention
is to leave the reader with a feeling of having learned something rather than
providing a full overview of the field, which may be too complex for the
situation anyway. I often compare it to my response when non-CS people ask me
"what I do."

Do you have some specific examples the people you spoke to frequently
criticize regarding Harari?

~~~
frereubu
No specific examples I'm afraid (what they said put me off reading him
entirely so I don't have any personal examples either - too many other books I
want to read!), although the two people who mentioned it to me recently were a
neuroscientist and an economist with a keen interest evolutionary biology.

I do wonder about the value of pop science. It feels like it's almost always
oversimplified to the point of being misleading. I have a background in
psychology / neuroscience and find it difficult to read _any_ pop neuroscience
without grinding my teeth.

------
okareaman
“Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field
knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and,
if you're lucky, an educated one.” ― William Goldman

Bill Gates and Barack Obama, who both praised Harari, don't know anything
about the future and neither does Harari. They make pretty good educated
guesses, but are often wrong about what is actually going on. Harari seems
like the latest incarnation of Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman before
him.

