A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inheritance.
Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.
You’re right that "walking off the land did happen". Although the feudal system legally bound serfs to the land, there were ways for individuals to escape this bondage. For instance, a serf who lived in a town for a year and a day without being reclaimed by their lord could often gain their freedom. These people, known as 'villeins' in some records, were essentially free peasants who had successfully left their lord's domain.
How does this compare to employment bonds of today?
At least I know of likes of Infy, TCS etc doing this (in the home country) — making freshers sign bonds for 2-3 years and if you want to leave within that period the only way is to pay a good amount irrespective of whether you didn’t receive a salary raise or didn’t get the opportunities which were good good for you. If you don’t pay the bond — they won’t usually drag you to a court (they send legal notices for sure) but they will also not issue you an experience certificate.
A boon for the very thing you describe was the Black Death of the 14th century. The colossal depopulation of Europe increased the de facto bargaining power of peasants to the point where they could competitively seek out better labor wages and land concessions in places well outside their previous manor. Thus, many peasants did exactly this, to the point where the noble elites and monarchies of Europe tried to enforce tougher regulations and laws against free movement, wage increases and even conspicuous displays of prosperity by the increasingly wealthy peasant classes of society (many of who were also turning to mercantile ventures to further diversify their income.
As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)
If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right.
No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.
Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
And that's why I say power must always come from the bottom.
Many people have anti-social traits which manifest by seeking power and then using it to extract value from other people at their expense.
Meanwhile the people doing real work are almost always pro-social but are too busy to play these power games, unless the power imbalance gets too large.
Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact
Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.
Nobody said it's a conspiracy. It's simple specialization. Some people are good at productive positive-sum work, others are good at office politics, manipulation and scams. The latter are good at accumulating power to extract value from the former.
Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.
The way labor availability doesn't actually help most peasant families if they don't have land to use it on. And when land is locked up by Big Men or temples or aristocrats, the system traps excess labor in a way that looks inefficient, but is actually great for those doing the extracting
People make mistake assuming that system is the same inefficient and exploitive for everyone. The owners and rule makers have everything in abundance, service providers from construction to healthcare queue at their doorstep. You might hear the owners and rule makers complaining about the reality and economy but it's something completely different from what you think.
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations.
I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.
I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.
The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place.
Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
My personal guess about this is that wealthy people tend to lock wealth away in unproductive but safe ventures instead of value production. When there is a large labor population decrease and labor can demand more of the wealth of a society, they tend to use that wealth in a more productive way for the average person and that leads to social flourishing. Hence, I am not at all worried about the decrease in population - that will increase the power of labor and unlock a lot of horded wealth towards actually productive ends, not whatever dumb or safe shit rich people think is smart.
The modern UK leasehold system is, in many ways, rooted in the feudal landholding arrangements. In the UK, when buying a house, the buyer sometimes leases the land rather than owning it outright, and must pay ground rent to the landlord. A lease is usually bought for 80 years or more, but occasionally properties are sold with only a few years remaining. If the lease is not renewed, the homeowner risks losing the property to the landlord. The right to renew is not a given and comes with premium costs. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to restrict or abolish this system but it continues to persist.
Vast majority of houses are not leasehold. It’s 125 years at lease, and aside from a couple of decades the ground rent was always a peppercorn (actual ground rents started in the 90s and have now finished)
You're right, but the proportion of leasehold is still somewhat high (about 7% of houses in the UK). Kinda weird that it's still a thing. There's also a good scam going where leaseholders will try and persuade you to buy out of the lease for X thousand £, because people want the piece of mind rather than paying the ground rent.
In UK and most of the rich EU, one doesn't even have to get indebted to be in precarious position. The land owning and tenancy alone make it, any person at any time is one letter away from being homeless or from at least months long legal battle.
I can recommend reading ACOUP to any technically minded person even if it's about history.
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.
how much have land ownership shrunk per person, for all americans, since 1910? i wouldn't be surprised if it was similar. which isn't to, in any way, discount the especially terrible treatment people of color have had in american history.
The idea that "efficiency" alone caused it glosses over how policy and power structures actively shaped who got to benefit from modern agriculture and who got left out (or pushed out).
Yeah, and imagine how much more time could the medieval peasants have spent working if only they had electricity, machines and computers at their disposal.
If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world.
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.
As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.
However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.
"chatgpt, a guy on hacker news just said spelling mistakes are a sign llms haven't been used - write <thing> with a reasonable amount of convincing spelling mistakes so that it appears to be written by a human."..
A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inheritance.
Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.
Labour mobility predates the modern era.
You’re right that "walking off the land did happen". Although the feudal system legally bound serfs to the land, there were ways for individuals to escape this bondage. For instance, a serf who lived in a town for a year and a day without being reclaimed by their lord could often gain their freedom. These people, known as 'villeins' in some records, were essentially free peasants who had successfully left their lord's domain.
How does this compare to employment bonds of today?
At least I know of likes of Infy, TCS etc doing this (in the home country) — making freshers sign bonds for 2-3 years and if you want to leave within that period the only way is to pay a good amount irrespective of whether you didn’t receive a salary raise or didn’t get the opportunities which were good good for you. If you don’t pay the bond — they won’t usually drag you to a court (they send legal notices for sure) but they will also not issue you an experience certificate.
A boon for the very thing you describe was the Black Death of the 14th century. The colossal depopulation of Europe increased the de facto bargaining power of peasants to the point where they could competitively seek out better labor wages and land concessions in places well outside their previous manor. Thus, many peasants did exactly this, to the point where the noble elites and monarchies of Europe tried to enforce tougher regulations and laws against free movement, wage increases and even conspicuous displays of prosperity by the increasingly wealthy peasant classes of society (many of who were also turning to mercantile ventures to further diversify their income.
As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)
If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right.
No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.
Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
12 replies →
I think if freedom is a desired trait then your system cannot (will not) be entirely dictated by any design.
1 reply →
Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "expert" in any given field to spread propaganda favourable to them.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
43 replies →
> optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
You are confusing narrative, a positive spin with actual rules of the system. In political system they are never the same.
Freedom, equal opportunity etc are not objectives of our political system, they are just the narrative.
I don't think those at the top of the social hierarchy would condone the 'better system'.
We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
2 replies →
> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
50 replies →
BF Skinner had the same idea. You can read it in his book, Walden Two.
I don't think we can. I think video game worlds (especially MMOs) have somewhat similar structures appear, where there's a portion of people that seem to become rich.
>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
Hierarchies and funnelling behavior seems to be emergent from people desiring more, and some securing it.
I disagree, though only slightly:
I would say that it's rare that a hierarchy is deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward.
Rather, many hierarchies emerge organically, but those at the top seek to eliminate any that do not funnel surplus upward.
It's less a process of deliberate construction, and more a process of deliberate curation. Something like cultural bonsai.
1 reply →
And that's why I say power must always come from the bottom.
Many people have anti-social traits which manifest by seeking power and then using it to extract value from other people at their expense.
Meanwhile the people doing real work are almost always pro-social but are too busy to play these power games, unless the power imbalance gets too large.
Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact
2 replies →
[flagged]
4 replies →
Can we please move to a more intelligent discourse on this than “rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down”? The social hierarchy shows self sustaining intent on small scales, but by and large it has been clearly shown to be emergent and ever-evolving. Believing that someone is keeping you from moving up the hierarchy is a story you tell yourself.
Nobody said it's a conspiracy. It's simple specialization. Some people are good at productive positive-sum work, others are good at office politics, manipulation and scams. The latter are good at accumulating power to extract value from the former.
Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.
> rich people are in on a giant conspiracy to keep us down
I mean, project 2025, heritage foundation, Thiel, Trump ... like in fact they are exactly on it.
The way labor availability doesn't actually help most peasant families if they don't have land to use it on. And when land is locked up by Big Men or temples or aristocrats, the system traps excess labor in a way that looks inefficient, but is actually great for those doing the extracting
People make mistake assuming that system is the same inefficient and exploitive for everyone. The owners and rule makers have everything in abundance, service providers from construction to healthcare queue at their doorstep. You might hear the owners and rule makers complaining about the reality and economy but it's something completely different from what you think.
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations.
I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.
I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
I wonder what would happen given today’s demographic if mass migration was shut down. There may be similar change. But ruling class is hard at work to avoid that.
The black death killed a lot of people, but mostly the old and infirm. Europe was left an extremely young and dynamic place.
Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
6 replies →
My personal guess about this is that wealthy people tend to lock wealth away in unproductive but safe ventures instead of value production. When there is a large labor population decrease and labor can demand more of the wealth of a society, they tend to use that wealth in a more productive way for the average person and that leads to social flourishing. Hence, I am not at all worried about the decrease in population - that will increase the power of labor and unlock a lot of horded wealth towards actually productive ends, not whatever dumb or safe shit rich people think is smart.
The modern UK leasehold system is, in many ways, rooted in the feudal landholding arrangements. In the UK, when buying a house, the buyer sometimes leases the land rather than owning it outright, and must pay ground rent to the landlord. A lease is usually bought for 80 years or more, but occasionally properties are sold with only a few years remaining. If the lease is not renewed, the homeowner risks losing the property to the landlord. The right to renew is not a given and comes with premium costs. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to restrict or abolish this system but it continues to persist.
Vast majority of houses are not leasehold. It’s 125 years at lease, and aside from a couple of decades the ground rent was always a peppercorn (actual ground rents started in the 90s and have now finished)
You're right, but the proportion of leasehold is still somewhat high (about 7% of houses in the UK). Kinda weird that it's still a thing. There's also a good scam going where leaseholders will try and persuade you to buy out of the lease for X thousand £, because people want the piece of mind rather than paying the ground rent.
Is there a division within Weights & Measures that handles the regulatory framework for peppercorns?
Just a point to say leasehold is very rare in Scotland. I remember being told about this when I was looking at places near London and being surprised.
In UK and most of the rich EU, one doesn't even have to get indebted to be in precarious position. The land owning and tenancy alone make it, any person at any time is one letter away from being homeless or from at least months long legal battle.
I can recommend reading ACOUP to any technically minded person even if it's about history.
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
Very good series on of all things, making bread.
When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.
how much have land ownership shrunk per person, for all americans, since 1910? i wouldn't be surprised if it was similar. which isn't to, in any way, discount the especially terrible treatment people of color have had in american history.
The idea that "efficiency" alone caused it glosses over how policy and power structures actively shaped who got to benefit from modern agriculture and who got left out (or pushed out).
Until the industrial revolution, 80% of people worked the land.
It's a fitting title to describe life today for most people.
The series actually talks about this in detail, in particular the (incorrect) trope that medieval peasants worked a lot less than we do.
Yeah, and imagine how much more time could the medieval peasants have spent working if only they had electricity, machines and computers at their disposal.
The joys of progress.
Is that a trope?
13 replies →
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism provides a good description
https://www.amazon.ca/Peasants-Knights-Heretics-R-Hilton/dp/...
Highly recommend this book on the subject.
If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world.
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
That's an oddly specific thing to point out
2 replies →
I've enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond recently. If you have read it, how does it compare?
It's a problematic work. From what I remember from my time on /r/askhistorians, they really did not like it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wd6jt/what_d...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210619035356/http://www.columb...
My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.
As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.
> their blog
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
singular "they" is older than singular "you"
I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.
However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.
Conflicted.
"chatgpt, a guy on hacker news just said spelling mistakes are a sign llms haven't been used - write <thing> with a reasonable amount of convincing spelling mistakes so that it appears to be written by a human."..
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