Book: 20220808 to 20220910, "The End Is Always Near" by Dan Carlin

20220809 - Do tough times make for tougher people?

This is a wrong question.

Tough time make people focusing on short term benefit. That give gene higher chance to survive. But huge improvement needs accumulation of knowledge, which needs comfortable environment. If there is no enough food, or always under stress, people cannot spend much time in exploring environment.

In tough time, there is less large scale cooperation, which lowered the social productivity. People cannot find science theory in battlefield.

Almost all books were written by authors who don't need to worry about food. Or else, the authors would spend more time searching for food, instead of writing a book.

Yes, tough times make for tougher people. But tough time is always bad to human being. If German before WW2 has enough food, I doubt many of them would support large scale war.

20220814 - Suffer the children

How much did poor childhood environment affect the societies of the past? p16

When we compare Afghanistan with other developed countries, the answer is clear. Childhood environment is part of the social meme, which is critical to the whole society.

If something is more socially accepted and lacks the stigma it would have today, does that lessen its damage? p18

Dan Carlin made a mistake here. In ancient time, children grew up in group. There is much less privacy to each family, and children can learn from other elder children, and get support from them. Other relatives and even friends are also critical to help children get normal "parenting" even if their parents are neglect and abusive.

1780, the chief of police in Paris estimated that on average, 21000 children born in that city every year, only 700 were nursed by their biological mothers. p25

The most important factor to grow healthy mind is to let children stay with each other, so they can learn how to cooperate with each other. Parents and abuse are not that important. -- The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris

20220813 - The end of the world as they knew it

What is dark age? There is something that almost everyone prefer to sacrifice to get or avoid. If they could do that before but not anymore, for long time, I would call it dark age.

History is mostly hidden in mist. We can figure out some traces, but no way to rebuild all details. Or, does that matter? Can we analyze history based on the first principle? Math and physics don't cheat.

How to avoid dark age coming back? Redundancy is the key. Globilization is really a stupid idea. All major continents need their own factories to produce everything.

This chapter is about bronze age.

20220817 - Judgment at Nineveh

This chapter is about iron age.

The earlier the age, the more cruel people were.

Ironically, Babylon is still remembered, but Assyria is almost forgotten.

Assyrian focused on external material stuff, and material stuff doesn't last for long time. Babylon focused on art and other spirital stuff, which impressed modern people. Ancient Romanian did the same.

Same thing also happened to most of the elites, and only creative work gain people's respect.

20220822 - The barbarian life cycle

What caused the rise and fall of civilization?

It's a bit like the growth and death of a tree, but takes much longer time. Many trees compete with each other, suck nutrition from each other, and learn from each other.

When a tree die, it's body would decompose. That's why coinage was replaced by barter in UK when West Roman Empire fell, and people forgot how to build drainage.

What caused the failure of West Romain Empire? Knowledge owned by elites, and those vested interest groups has different aim with others. I think that's the root cause. So we have to look after everyone to avoid similar tragedy, and need to run a distributed system to back up modern knowledge.

Backup plans are critical to avoid civilization collapse.

It's not really cycle, but moving forward spirally. No moat can protect a civilization forever. We are safe only if we are progressing faster than others. The more population(include the more friends), and the less internal friction, the faster we are advancing.

How about USA? Are they falling? The best talented people are still moving there. USA is still almost the best place for those talented people. Was West Roman Empire same? This about Class Mobility. USA has pretty good Class Mobility, althouth Wealth Gap is huge. West Roman Empire lacked it. Maybe that's the root cause of West Roman Empire's collapse.

20220828 - A pandemic prologue?

In Europe during the Middle Ages, the people who served as the scapegoats (of the Black Death) were the Jews. p134

This must be one of the reason that Jews are not welcome in Europe. Good to know that Jews got a lot of help from many Europe countries and US.

With the progress of mRNA vaccination, hopefully we will never meet another pandemic which kill more than 2% of people. The real threat is from population collapse, which "kills" much more people than any contagious disease.

20220904 - The quick and the dead

What did people think about atomic weapon after 1945? Human are lucky. So many incidents might cause dreadful result.

It's great that nuclear war didn't happen after 1945. If it did, and even if the winner wiped out the other side from the earth, people would lose their diginity from their lives. People would realize that there is no one they can trust. No organization or individual is trustworthy. That's nightmare to civilization envolvement.

Should we make nuclear strike if we feel seriously in danger? Pre-emptive strike is the best way to defend yourself, right? Wrong. The ultimate goal of war is not winning, but to make better lives for everyone. Nuclear war doesn't help about that.

John F.Kennedy made a mistake on "Bay of Pigs". He didn't follow the first principle. Instead, he relied on experts who didn't have skin in the game.

Why Kennedy understood the world better than his advisors in 1962 Cuba Missle Crisis? Part of the reason must be books. He read quite a lot of good books.

20220910 - The road to hell

Things were escalated through negative feedback loop. People just want to survive, so they don't mind to kill all enemy including citizens.

With the help of high tech missiles, can we avoid this ending?

Missiles loaded with AI and GPS are actually pilot-less airplanes. They are faster and with great mobility, which means it's hard to be intercepted or be destroied pre-emptively. If one country wants to attack another country, they have to send troops there, in warship, plane, trucks. These vehicles are big and move relatively slow, which are easy targets of missiles. From this point of view, missiles are perfect for defense, not invasion.

If Ukraine and Taiwan are loaded with thousands of missiles, can they protect themselves from Russia and China? Only if satellites are there. Satellites can help the war complete in a few days or even a few hours.

What if the satellites of the defense side are all gone? Surface-to-air and surface-to-ship missles are still powerful, with the help of Radars. But it cannot last for long time.

20220910 - Afterword

Dan Carlin doesn't think much about gene and the black swans. It's weird.

From what I can see, there are two major types of source of war: religion conflicts and natural resource scacity. The Ukraine war is triggerred by the latter, and if China attack Taiwan, it would triggered by the former.

But most of the developed countries don't believe that, and they are much more powerful than others. So we don't need to worry too much about wars.

Our body is the vehicle of our gene. Our gene always want to survive through adaption to the environment changes. So, the black swans are more likely be the main threat.