Agriculture simply multiplied everything. Hunter-gatherers still had and have tribal wars, murder, rape, rapine, torture, high infant mortality, much lower male life expectancy (due to fighting), plus the usual disease, famine, and social inequality of women.
The average college student in a dorm room enjoys greater luxury and comfort than kings of yesteryear; they have climate control, hot and cold running water, antibiotics, corrective eyewear, and of course a far greater selection of food year-round, not to mention a better selection of healthy mates.
Whether people are happier in modern technological society or hunter-gatherer society is almost beside the point; evolution seems to have selected for worried, discontented people -- they outcompete the easily satiated. Even as we precipitate the extinction of traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can imagine them at some point in the past wiping out even less technologically-savvy people who perhaps were even more happy and contented, leading an existence akin to our bonobo relatives. A similar article written then by gatherers might blame the widespread adoption of hunting for increasing societal violence and leading to a new class division: warrior, due to the ensuing upswing in human-human "hunting".
Increased population can be thought of as a tool; it has been exploited for ill much of the time, but it can also be used for the betterment of all. When we start to live in "The Matrix" (a pleasurable one), we may well rely on aquaculture to produce high-yield algae we farm for biofuel and for nutrients for our IV drips. At that point we may instead regard agriculture, regardless of temporary blips, as the best thing to happen to humanity.
Ok, time for a bit of hand wringing. I said I'd wait a week, but this needs to be pointed out. In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news.
Not only that, but the article itself is 20 years old, and is not an attitude I have read in Diamond's later works like 'Collapse', where he certainly underlines the dangers and problems that face the human race, but does manage to strike a good balance between gloomy and cautiously optimistic about the possibility for improvement.
If you don't allow downvoting of stories then you get this, so you have to ignore some stories. But that's much better than the alternative, which is people banding together to bury certain stories that reach the front page (or before they do, if the karma threshold is above 2).
I don't read reddit, anyway, I guess it takes time to find out what is considered appropiate for the new hacker news. I went by the definition of "is not shown on TV". It's 20 years old, but old articles have been posted before, and I only found it today... If nobody is interested, nobody will mod it up?
Besides, I thought this article also relates to startupping, because of the average work hours aspect. But granted, Jared Diamond is not exactly unknown.
It's not that bad a link... it just seems so drastic a change:-/ It seems also to illustrate that the intersection of interesting startup links is very well defined, whereas the intersection of interesting 'hacker news' is rather less well defined, and will probably be more prone to disagreement, even if the people posting are the same ones as with the old yc.news, because our interests and beliefs are likely to be quite varied.
Add to that people who didn't see or take part in the original, and while I hope the change will go ok, it will be a lot of work.
Obviously hackers have found this interesting, but I agree it is on the border of being irrelevant. I think it is useful to use PG's rule of thumb that if it's covered on TV news then it's off topic which I think this is an exception to.
I like this new direction that yc is taking, the site was rather boring to me before which I barely frequented until I saw that it changed on reddit.
I shouldn't come here to often because each time I read something by PG I feel like quitting my job and starting a company.
The filtering by the wise guardians probably hasn't yet kicked in, either ;-) Time will tell if the filter mechanism will help to move hacker news into a specific (desired) direction.
"In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news."
I love reddit, but I loved the old yc news also. I don't understand how this happens. PG says we're changing focus and all of a sudden people start linking and upvoting different stories??
How is this more interesting to hackers than startup news. I don't understand how a rather top-down decree has changed the output of a definitively democratic system.
Anyone who thinks hunter gatherers had pleasant lives should stop to think what happened to people who were too old to follow the tribe when it moved, or what happened when a mother who was already nursing had another baby.
I don't think all hunter gatherers where nomads (but some agriculturalist are, or do shepherds not count), and I think I read in another book that nursing actually acts as contraceptive (Edit: I just saw that the article also mentions infanticide to keep children spaced four years apart, so true, some gruesome aspects are there).
Anyway, the point is certainly not to recommend going back to a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Although I wonder if startupping is not somewhat akin to hunting.
>Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species.
Neither of which would have been possible if we were too busy hunting for food every waking hour.
I beg to differ. If you compare the average member of a hunting-gathering society to the average farmer, then sure, the hunter-gatherer has more time. That's because the farmer farms very intensively, and feeds everybody else in the society. If you take the average member of a farming society, on the other hand, probably about 1.5% of his waking time is spent farming. (3% of the population farms, and each farmer maybe spends half or maybe a little more of his waking time farming). Thus, farming does, in fact, lead to time freed up from acquiring food, but it does so unequally, letting those who choose to farm farm, and letting everybody else do something else.
Not to pick a fight here or anything but in your original message, you implied something completely different. You implied that the hunter/gatherers would have no time to make any discoveries since they'd be off looking for food all the time.
Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).
So I think the point is that with farming you get free time, but also all the bad things mentioned above. What Diamond is arguing is that hunter/gatherers didn't have to deal with most (all?) of the negatives but still had plenty of free time to pursue their leisure. That is, civilization might not have been set back just because we didn't adopt farming. In the end, it was sheer numbers that decided the outcome, not the best method.
2. Yeah, we have overcrowding, inequality, classes, and war. There are bugs in agriculture. Overcrowding just means that most people aren't dying off quickly like they did when there wasn't farming. Inequality just means that some people are now wealthy, where before nobody was wealthy. I'd bet war happened before, too; it just happens on a larger scale now because everything happens on a larger scale now.
3. You can't do most kinds of technology, education, or pretty much any other kind of endeavor if you have to spend all your time near enough naturally growing sources of food to not spend all your time in transport. Most kinds of art and technology come from concentrating appropriate quantities of appropriate kinds of people in one place. That's the point of universities, conservatories, and, for that matter, companies. Most interesting things in the world come from concentrating people.
> Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).
And he's not wrong; because farming is progress, and progress brings good things as well as bad things. But, as we're an intelligent species, we recognize bad things (yes, it takes generations) and work around them.
You might want to be careful about anachronism when stating facts.
It is true that very few today farm, but take into account that, within the past century alone, the yield of farmers has increased by an order of magnitude, not to mention the millennia of domestication and invention before it. For most of agricultural history, the percentage of farmers was much higher than 3%.
For example, from Wikipedia's article on Roman Agriculture:
>In the Roman Empire, a typical family of 3.25 persons would need between 7-8 iugera of land to meet minimum food requirements (without animals). If a family owned animals to help cultivate land, then 20 iugera is needed. There would not be a surplus production on this farm.
Well, all right, so agriculture sucked for a long time. It's still the case that the precursors to many of the good things we have today (e.g. computers) come from concentrating people in cities, which comes from farming.
That is true, but my point was merely countering the assertion that ancient farming cultures had more average free time than ancient hunter-gatherer cultures. I don't dispute that agriculture allowed technology to eventually flourish in the slightest; hundreds of millenia of slow-progress pre-agricultural prehistory are strong evidence of that.
Well, okay, but the point of the normal free time argument is that agricultural people have more time, and are therefore able to do more stuff. My point is, it may not be the case that agricultural people have more time on average, but it is the case that agricultural societies give enough people free time to do many more interesting things, and especially, enough free time to concentrate in cities and do things they couldn't do while not in cities. Which more or less negates the whole agriculture-is-a-mistake argument; once you show that agriculture lets you do lots of amazing things in cities, you can argue that those things are worth the various bugs in agriculture (most of which eventually get fixed anyway).
Actually, in traditional agricultural societies, almost everyone is a farmer. There's a reason that the vast majority of people in the middle ages were serfs -- it took that many people to feed themselves plus everyone else.
You can actually gauge how advanced a post-agricultural civilization is based on the percentage of the population that works in the agricultural sector. Most thresholds of technological advance (most notably, the industrial revolution) have allowed a smaller farmer class to feed an entire society.
>>It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.
FTA... please read it :p
You can make the argument that by increasing population size and crowding, it also made collaboration, partnership, and the growth of ideas easier but the article itself debunks the whole "they spent their entire life looking for berries" argument.
I think it is moreso the ability to settle in one place that caused the growth of technology. The hunter-gatherers, no matter how numerous, certainly did not spend their free time building forges and experimenting with metal.
Also note that the time spent gathering food likely does not include preparing to gather food (e.g.: making weapons). Although they could spend plenty of time playing games, note that games originated to prepare children to spend time gathering food (and practice other necessary survival skills).
I must rescind this statement. As a result of these discussions, I began reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, which, in the chapter "To Farm or not to Farm," makes clear the disconnect between agriculture and sedentary living:
"Another misconception is that there is necesarrily a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. In reality, although we frequently develop such a contrast, hunter-gathers in some productive areas, including North America's Pacific Northwest coast and possibly southeastern Australia, became sedentary but never became food producers. Other hunter-gatherers, in Palestine, costal Peru, and Japan, became sedentary first and adopted food production much later. Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction 15,000 years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gathers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.
Conversely, there are mobile groups of food producers. Some modern nomads of New Guinea's Lake Plains made clearings in the jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live again as hunter-gatherers, return to check on their crops, weed the garden if they find the crops growing, set off again to hunt, return months later to check again, and settle down for a while to harvest and eat if their garden has not produced. Apache Indians of the southwestern United States settled down to farm in the summer at high elevations and toward the north, then withdrew to the south and to lower elevations to wander in search of wild foods, during the winter. Many herding peoples of Africa and Asia shift camp along regular seasonal routes to take advantage of predictable seasonal changes in pasturage. Thus, the shift from hunting-gathering to food production did not always coincide with a shift from nomadism to sedentary living."
It still does not make sense. Humans were in a hunter-gathering mode for quite some time. If they were so much healthier, AND had more free time, why did the society start rapidly progressing only with the advent of agriculture? Did they just magically become smart? I'm sorry, but no. While this article is certainly interesting, and thought provoking, the thesis doesn't hold.
They didn't suddenly become smart and you certainly cannot attribute all the developments to the adoption of agriculture. Progress has been very... erratic (can't find the right word) throughout history.
To blindly attribute progress to a singular cause such as farming is short sighted. I'm sure there are many different variables (farming included) that influence progress and discovery.
Agriculture is not exactly the reason for technological advances; rather, progress became possible (but not guaranteed!) thanks to agriculture.
While a few hunter-gatherer societies lived in a place so abundant that they can settle in a single location and gather everything they needed, the vast majority of such societies were migratory, moving to wherever the food was.
In a migratory society, most technological advances are simply not useful. When you only keep the things you can carry on your back, anything that doesn't have a direct use is an active hindrance with a quantifiable opportunity cost. Civilization is only possible when people can settle in one place.
Further, even hunter-gatherer societies that are fortunate enough to settle in a single place have to remain small to survive, or they exceed their food supply. This means that the chance of a given society developing a new technology is much smaller (given a smaller supply of creative individuals). It also means that even if a society does develop a new technology, that technology spreads very slowly, leading to less cross-pollination with other individuals and ideas.
By contrast, agriculture concentrates people together. There are a variety of technologies that increased the productivity of an agricultural society as a whole, and it's very natural for those technologies to spread throughout a society. Furthermore, agricultural societies that are more productive than their neighbors can produce more soldiers (when a smaller percentage of the population can feed the whole society, there is excess labor for armies, as well as other pursuits), allowing them to conquer their neighbors and spread their advances to their newly conquered territories. Basically, in an agricultural society, technology spreads like a virus.
For me the connection with hacking is that it points out a potentially unintuitive thing, and switching from hunting to agriculture also is a kind of hack. Is a startup not also trying to hack society in a way? Also I thought it interesting that some ancient societies seemed to have less work hours.
Obviously it won't interest everybody, but didn't pg say "anything that interests hackers", not only hacking itself?
Anyway, my apologies if it was too far stretched. I hope I will refrain from further submissions in the future. Perhaps I should check out Reddit...
Massive self-aggrandizing factual error in the third paragraph:
It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short.
Um, Jean Jacques Rousseau? Noble Savage? Only a few decades after Hobbes?
It may not be relevant to the case being made here, but come on. I remember writing "compare and contrast" papers on Hobbes and Rousseau in high school.
It sort of bothers me that this is getting upmodded--not because it's off-topic, but because it's so painfully banal--every high schooler has already thought these things through completely, just like this:
I didn't see the article as a manifesto against industrialism, despite the sensationalist title. Jared Diamond is a researcher, after all - I just found it informative to learn something about ancient societies, without jumping to conclusions from that.
This article certainly is well documented... still I don't see why agriculture is a mistake. Yes, our ancestors were intelligent enough to understand that progress usually involves a temporary loss of comfort to achieve long-term benefits. Why is it a mistake?
One of the recurring off-topic discussions on Startup News was the evolution of humanity from nomadic tribes through the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Now that the scope of the site has expanded, it would make sense that one of the most popular discussions is still the evolution of humanity. If this topic doesn't interest you, maybe you should submit a story that you find interesting.
This story is only interesting as a historical artifact in itself. It was a nice example of the current "conventional thinking" refuted by that other story yesterday about how England escaped the malthusian trap. Why is this story still here and the newer one gone already? Jared Diamond is very useful in this field, so maybe vote up some of his newer stuff?
Agriculture simply multiplied everything. Hunter-gatherers still had and have tribal wars, murder, rape, rapine, torture, high infant mortality, much lower male life expectancy (due to fighting), plus the usual disease, famine, and social inequality of women.
The average college student in a dorm room enjoys greater luxury and comfort than kings of yesteryear; they have climate control, hot and cold running water, antibiotics, corrective eyewear, and of course a far greater selection of food year-round, not to mention a better selection of healthy mates.
Whether people are happier in modern technological society or hunter-gatherer society is almost beside the point; evolution seems to have selected for worried, discontented people -- they outcompete the easily satiated. Even as we precipitate the extinction of traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can imagine them at some point in the past wiping out even less technologically-savvy people who perhaps were even more happy and contented, leading an existence akin to our bonobo relatives. A similar article written then by gatherers might blame the widespread adoption of hunting for increasing societal violence and leading to a new class division: warrior, due to the ensuing upswing in human-human "hunting".
Increased population can be thought of as a tool; it has been exploited for ill much of the time, but it can also be used for the betterment of all. When we start to live in "The Matrix" (a pleasurable one), we may well rely on aquaculture to produce high-yield algae we farm for biofuel and for nutrients for our IV drips. At that point we may instead regard agriculture, regardless of temporary blips, as the best thing to happen to humanity.