Today's Sam Harris's Making Sense Podcast featured writer Tim Urban. It was a great discussion, as most of Sam's are, with the title "The Great Derangement". Tim offered up an instructive analogy to track human progress. Our species has been around for about 250,000 years. He imagined a one thousand page book with each page representing 250 years of human history. For the first 950 pages, not much happened. We were in small hunter-gatherer bands, just trying to eat enough to survive, with little technological progress to show beyond improved arrow heads, typically dying in our twenties, with enormous maternal and child death rates. There was some migration going on as we began to leave Africa. Beginning around page 950, things started to happen: trade routes and agriculture developed, and a bit later, civilization began. At page 1000, which would begin around 1775, the pace and complexity of progress really picked up with the harnessing of electricity, fossil fuels, nuclear power, and the development of computers, civil and human rights, liberal democracy, etc. You get the idea. And at the bottom of the last page, we'd see AI, genetic engineering, electric cars, commercial rocketry, social media, trans rights, etc. There were many great back and forths but the matter of our evolving brains held special significance. For most of our existence, being the social creatures who we are, we banded together for the sake of survival, and typically adopted the norms of our group. It just wasn't in one's best interest to offer a dissent, or fail to conform. And we still see the pull of tribal identity today, and our only slowly evolving brains are ill prepared to deal with the dizzying pace of change. I'm not doing justice to the quality of the conversation but suffice it to say, it's worthwhile lending an ear. Peter T.
The Story of Homo Sapiens in 1000 pages
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Today's Sam Harris's Making Sense Podcast featured writer Tim Urban. It was a great discussion, as most of Sam's are, with the title "The Great Derangement". Tim offered up an instructive analogy to track human progress. Our species has been around for about 250,000 years. He imagined a one thousand page book with each page representing 250 years of human history. For the first 950 pages, not much happened. We were in small hunter-gatherer bands, just trying to eat enough to survive, with little technological progress to show beyond improved arrow heads, typically dying in our twenties, with enormous maternal and child death rates. There was some migration going on as we began to leave Africa. Beginning around page 950, things started to happen: trade routes and agriculture developed, and a bit later, civilization began. At page 1000, which would begin around 1775, the pace and complexity of progress really picked up with the harnessing of electricity, fossil fuels, nuclear power, and the development of computers, civil and human rights, liberal democracy, etc. You get the idea. And at the bottom of the last page, we'd see AI, genetic engineering, electric cars, commercial rocketry, social media, trans rights, etc. There were many great back and forths but the matter of our evolving brains held special significance. For most of our existence, being the social creatures who we are, we banded together for the sake of survival, and typically adopted the norms of our group. It just wasn't in one's best interest to offer a dissent, or fail to conform. And we still see the pull of tribal identity today, and our only slowly evolving brains are ill prepared to deal with the dizzying pace of change. I'm not doing justice to the quality of the conversation but suffice it to say, it's worthwhile lending an ear. Peter T.
