Trust your first impression of him trying to big brain about the pandemic, that's his whole shtik - compelling blather. Probably you're not a human population history researcher? That would make it very hard to see through his sensationalism
> Agriculture transformed humanity’s relationship to nature, giving us dominion. Thanks to agriculture, ecologists say, we now suck up half or more of the primary productivity of the planet.
Bad idea, Mr. Harari says. Agriculture increased the amount of available food, yet the result of prosperity was not happiness but “population explosions and pampered elites.” Farmers worked harder than foragers and had a worse diet and poorer health. The surplus went to the privileged few, who used it to oppress. “The Agricultural Revolution,” Mr. Harari says, “was history’s biggest fraud.” Really? Always and everywhere? Were the Iroquois, who farmed, so much worse off than the foraging Abitibis and Témiscamingues to their north? Discussing the long dispute among anthropologists about whether the earliest hunter-gatherers lived in “peaceful paradises” or were “exceptionally cruel and violent,” Mr. Harari maintains that the question can’t be answered, because the meager data from archaeology and anthropology aren’t enough to pierce “the curtain of silence” that enshrouds our remotest ancestors. Surely the same logic applies to comparing their well-being to that of the earliest farmers.
> “The Romans, Mongols, and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth—not of knowledge. In contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories.”
> “Unfortunately,” he says, “the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.”
> Probably you're not a human population history researcher
No I am a very interested amateur. I just learned about Denisovans. Sapiens is a good story and I assumed he was simplifying. I plan to go deeper on this subject.
I don't think Yuval is trying to "big brain", just rationalize what the world will become under the need of "emergency" like here, Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus[1], he's not shown interest in "speculating" the origins of the virus or how the pandemic begins so compare this trait to some other "big brain" out there
>Centralised monitoring and harsh punishments aren’t the only way to make people comply with beneficial guidelines. When people are told the scientific facts, and when people trust public authorities to tell them these facts, citizens can do the right thing even without a Big Brother watching over their shoulders. A self-motivated and well-informed population is usually far more powerful and effective than a policed, ignorant population.
Of all Harari's predictions, this one was the most depressing when we found out it was false.
"when people trust public authorities to tell them these facts" - There was a lot of mixed messaging from authorities going on in the first half of 2020, so I can understand why citizens are mistrustful (even though I may disagree with a lot of their conclusions).
Agreed. There wasn't one thing in Sapiens that I hadn't already encountered in another book (sometimes written a decade or more earlier).
I would recommend The Great Human Diasporas by Cavalli-Sforza, Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins, and Against the Gods by Bernstein to tickle similar parts of your brain.
>It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously. So we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as 'infotainment', a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria it is a most successful book.
-C. R. Hallpike
Not a professional anthropologist or historian, but I do enjoy reading about it. You should be skeptical when authors/books make general claims about a large group of people. There are counterexamples, especially when writing about a long period of history, and books like these can often end up being Eurocentric.
Here are some good Reddit threads from r/AskHistorians and r/AskAnthropology, where professionals often visit, describing the flaws in Sapiens. The comments have specific examples, if you follow the links.
> Beyond that, Harari seems generally unconcerned with differentiating the experience of Western Europe from the experience of "us"- the species. This is why I can't really recommend the book, because this so thoroughly undermines his apparent goal. The very name of the book tells us that it will be a history of all of us and how we became so dominant in the world. And yet, so much of the book focuses on things that only a portion of H. sapiens ever developed, but talks about them as if they were natural developments for our species as a whole.
Sapiens is a big "picture human history" book, which is a genre which is always going to have a number of weaknesses due to the problems of trying to squelch all of human history into a single readable book with a clear thesis. The quote about the French Revolution is indeed pretty bad as a literal description of what happened during the revolution, (though I understand what he is getting at when he says it.) However, I don't think that this analysis is quite fair to Harari.
His main criticism is of Harari's "shared fiction" concept and it seems to me that he misses the point of the concept. Harari is pointing out a category of thing that really does exist in the real world, but only exists because people agree on some level to recognize its existence. Corporations (to use Harari's example) are indeed real, but they exist only because people agree they exist. If people refused to believe in IBM, for example, it would cease to exist.
I don't know if Harari is correct that this ability to embrace social realities actually constitutes a "cognitive revolution" that allowed homo sapiens to surpass other human species in a dramatic way, but I do think that it is certainly different from our ability create a word for "rock" and thereby reify rocks into existence. There's a difference between being able to create arbitrary categories for material objects in the world and being able to recognize a new category of thing through shared acceptance. I don't think that the latter is simply a consequence of our ability to use language.
Also, it's important to note that that critique is being offered by a historian but the core of the critique is philosophical (or maybe linguistic) not historical. I think the best criticism I've seen of Sapiens is that the author is a historian trying to write anthropology, but this critique of that anthropology book is also by an historian so it has the same weakness.
So, after reading those threads, my first impression is this is an ideological disagreement, but not that Harari is actually wrong in his analysis.
Ok, so I'll start with some observations on the comments themselves, and will continue to explain what really needs to be addressed in order for me to understand things better. The comments seem to dislike that this book is about the whole of humanity, written in a short book, so I would expect a simple counter to this, but I see people not having read the book in full:
QUOTE "But again, since I've yet to personally read the book rather than get second-hand info about it"
QUOTE "I've tried to read it twice and not got very far."
QUOTE "I've seen some water cooler chat about the book, but I don't personally know anyone that has read the book - like myself"
Regardless, the first link seems to contain better info on why it's wrong, with specific detailed counters, it's just that those details could still be off, but the premise could still be right... however this "benefit of the doubt", let's call it, is only given to OTHER books just not Sapiens:
QUOTE "This is why a book like 1491 has been so much more warmly received. One can undoubtedly find dozens of factual errors within. But instead of mirroring a popular inquiry born out of popular ignorance ("Why were the Americas so decisively conquered?"), it recognizes that ignorance as a problem to be solved."
First, "warmly received" is useless here, and second we can start to see the root of the disagreement... it has to do with a specific perspective of the world, and anyone going against that perspective is wrong (but of course, the reasons won't be made clear -- instead attacking mistakes, character, and credentials).
The following quote shines a light on this a bit more.
QUOTE "Some would argue that language is purely abstract- that the act of calling something a rock is what creates the rock. As much as the 'rock' exists as a physical object with observable properties, there is no natural boundary between 'rock' and 'pebble' and 'sand.' "
Ah... isn't this interesting? This is all philosophy, and I would even label Sapiens as philosophy to a great extent. These are all theories that can only be reasoned about, and thus we enter Epistemology and Ontology, and we're in a completely different territory than History. We're trying to understand ourselves in History, this is not an event, or a fact.
In conclusion, I would like a hard counter to his simple premise, which is an answer to the question, why are humans so different than the rest of the animal kingdom? (TED talk summarizes it nicely), and also, I would like to point out that the criticisms are not self-aware that they're arguing philosophical matters and instead are pretending they are countering hard historical facts, and dismissing the book on that basis.
TL;DR: why are humans so different than animals, and why is that a historical conversation, when it's really philosophy, and ultimately Harari made it simple, so there should be no need to argue around it if he's wrong in his premise.
From my perspective (population genetics), I'd recommend anything by Adam Rutherford (Humanimal, The Book of Humans) . He hits similar topics, but with the citations to back his assertions and a minimum of editorialization.
