Book: 20250105 to 20250610, "The dawn of everything" by David Graeber, David Wengrow

20250106 - Farewell to humanity's childhood

One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate,; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness. p20

What is real value to us?

20250111 - Wicked liberty

The idea of competitive exams for government job applicants may come from China. The idea of "liberty, equality, fraternity" may come from indigenous American.

This idea is weird, but possible.

Europen thinkers normally say that their ideas came from Ancient Greece and Ancient Roman, but it seems that they didn't have "competitive exams" or "equality" until European visited China and Americas.

Should we all embrace "baseline communism"? p47

It's actually individualism with basic support from government. The problem is, what should the baseline be?

Food, of course. How about shelter, clothes, transportation, communication, medicare, safety, etc.?

Civilization merely corrupts by encouraging us to value form over content. p63

The "content" Rousseau mentioned here, I think means time and attention. We paid too much attentiont to meaningless distractions.

Left leaning cares more about equality, right leaning cares more about efficiency(and productivity).

I think we should care more about justice, which means pay more attention to efficiency with basic social security to everyone.

If we do know what happened in history, that can help avoiding a lot of traps.

20250128 - Unfreezing the Ice Age

When we are capable of self-awareness, it's usually for very brief periods of time: the 'window of consciousness', during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. p94

This means, if we don't want to fall into the "screen trap", we should jump out in 7 seconds everytime we pick up the screen. No doubt we can extend this period by intentional practice.

It is said that our short-term memory only last for 8 seconds. Is that related to this 7 second attention?

The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way. How could such a decision have been made? We'll never know. p106

This is not that hard to guess. Why Chinese built the Great Wall 2000 years ago? To stop the northern nomads robbing the southern farms in winter. Farm land is the weak point of farmers. If the farmers have to protect their farm land, then they are more likely to lose the battle.
One of the major advantage of agriculture is to save enough food for winter and other natural disasters. If nomads can rob farmers easily during those period of time, then it's not worth to do farming, especially at early stage of agriculture.

In other words, there is no single pattern. p115
I don't agree. When large scale cooperation is needed, egalitarian is replaced by social hierarchy.

Social hierarchy brings us high efficiency.

Hunting large animals(such as whales, a herd of mustang), farming(building irrigation system, etc.), rituals, war, etc. all need large scale cooperation. Efficiency is critical during that period.

When agriculture replaced hunting and gathering, people(families) got oppotunity to live close to each other to set up allies. Then they need cooperate with each other.

This is consistent with the book "The Narrow Corridor" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. We need to balance efficiency and fairness.

20250216 - Free people, the origin of cultures, and the advent of private property

But at the same time, increases in the sheer number of human beings seem to have pulled in the opposite direction, ensuring that, for much of human history, ever-diminishing proportions of people actually travelled - at least, over long distances or very far from home. p123

Why is that? Travel long distance alone proves the capability of the person. To avoid incest, I think most of tribes welcome these travellers.

However, when agriculture arise, people quickly lost the capability of hunting and gathering. Then they could not travel long distance alone anymore.

Anyone who was still living mainly by hunting animals and gathering wild foodstuffs in the early to mid twentieth century was almost certainly living on land no one else particularly wanted. That's why so many of the best descriptions of foragers come from places like the Kalahari Desert or Arctic Circle. Ten thousand years ago, this was obviously not the case. p153

So true! The major advantage of agriculture is to protecting us from the Black Swans.

Are "private property" and "sacred (non-material) stuff" same thing? I don't think so.

"Private property" is supported by law/agreement, which including the force from other people.

"Sacred (non-material) stuff" is supported by the owner himself/herself. It could still be tradition, but more like shared psychological feature.

20250307 - Many seasons ago

Northwest Coast pursued vanity, and California pursued experience.

Experience(feeling) is real, thoughts(vanity, emotion) are not. Sadness is real, miserability is not.

Northwest Coast people chose fish as their major source of food. Surely they will have higher population density. When the Black Swans come, they have to start wars to reduce their population or get more food from other tribes.

This is exactly why nomads sometimes attack farmers. The problem is, material surplus in nomads are actually wasted. It's not used to develop any new technology or devices. In the end, farmers win.

The "fish" reminds me of the benefit bring to us through AI. What's the best way to handle AI? Is the invention of AI inevitable?

Civilization needs peace of envolve. Or else, wealth is just illusion.

20250324 - Gardens of Adonis

Goats and sheep are quite different from pigs and cattles, they don't need human to prepare food for them.
This make animal domestication much easier for first stage farmers.

Lacking technology and devices, the initial farming is just a little bit better than hunting and gathering. I guess that's the reason that people did it reluctantly or seasonly.

Use seasonal flooding to prepare soil is really good idea.

20250326 - The ecology of freedom

Why California people refused to adopt agriculture? Maybe the farming land area is too small, which make it hard to accumulate strength to protect their crops from hunter-gatherer?

Serious farmers tended to form societies with hard boundaries, ethnic and, in some cases, also linguistic. p267

Or else, they cannot defense against hunter-gatherer tribes.

Is flooding area the best place to develop farming? Hunter-gatherers don't have much interest in these area, as not much wild plants or wild animals can live there. But farmers can spead seeds there when flood retreated, and then harvesting before the next flooding.

This sounds similar to how small businesses compete with large companies.

Human society took about 3,000 years to transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.

From agriculture to industry, it took around 250 years.

From industry to the information age, about 50 years.

So how long will it take to move from the information age to artificial intelligence? 10 years?

20250421 - Imaginary cities

Why did those Ukrainian mega-sites exist in around 6000 years ago, without the support of bureaucracy? p290
I think, by that time, Homo Sapiens' major enemy is still natural environment. Predators, natural disasters, etc. Most of people were killed by them.
But they eventually became less dreadful, and more and more people got killed by other people.

Then bureaucracy arised.

Is there a causal relationship between scale and inequality in human societies? p316

I believe it's mainly decided by the external environment.
Andy Grove said, "Only the paranoid survive". King is the one leading people to spend excessive resources on defense.
It's much harder to build a shield than building a spear.

Under a "democratic" system, the public tends to resent allocating resources to military buildup — as seen in Western Europe, Northern Europe, Australia, Canada, etc. In the end, they are unlikely to avoid being overwhelmed by powerful external enemies.

In contrast, strongman regimes tend to heavily invest in military development — such as Russia, China, and North Korea.

The United States, being the country with the freest gun ownership in the world, sits roughly in between the two.

AI: From the perspective of constitutional structure and actual operation, the power of the U.S. president is generally greater than that of the heads of government in most Western and Northern European countries.

Why could Bali people insist the egalitarian principles? I believe they didn't have external existential threat. Bali is an island, among other island. This political institution make their technology progress slowly compare with Japan. Aggregation of wealth is necessary to make technological progress possible.

20250424 - Hiding in plain sight

Once again, we seem to be dealing with a feeling among the Maya that kings really should come from somewhere far away, and with the willingness of at least a few unscrupulous foreigners to take advantage of this idea.
Is this the reason that Alberto Fujimori became the president of Peru? The local people don't trust the local aristocrats there.

Ancient Athen, as democratic state-city, was not alone. There were quite a few places with similar political institution. Why did they all fail?
External enemies? Internal conflicts? It's easier to build a spear than to build a shield.

20250527 - Why the state has no origin

What is state? In my opinion, it's a large group of people who live in same territory and most of them share the same law.
Law is common imagination. It doesn't need to be fair, and it doesn' need to get approval or endorsement from everyone.

Today, nations are broadly divided into two types: democratic and authoritarian.

A hundred thousand years ago, primitive tribes were also roughly divided into two types: democratic-style and authoritarian-style.

Due to limited material surplus and poor communication and transportation, primitive tribes were mostly democratic. However, authoritarian tribes, with their strong capacity for mobilization and organization, were often able to raid other democratic tribes. The two coexisted in a dynamic balance.

Around ten thousand years ago, agriculture gradually became the primary source of food.

The resulting food surplus increased dramatically, and the emergence of writing led authoritarian societies to gain overwhelming dominance.

Today, democratic societies have regained the upper hand, as equitable systems help individuals realize their full potential.

Yet in terms of population, authoritarian societies still make up the majority.

The competition between different forms of organization fully conforms to the natural law of “survival of the fittest.”

Justice does not exist.

So far as anyone knows, their rulers did not command a stable military or administrative apparatus that might have allowed them to extend their power throught a wider hinterland. p186

Is it because that there are too many mountains? Interesting.

In other words, whenever state sovereignty broke down, heroic politics returned. p417

We can see this everywhere, again and again in history. Heroic politics means something seriously wrong.

How could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? p427

Rules are ruthless.

People have different talent and luck, which lead to different result under fair rules.

That differences could be transfered to other people and next generation.

Then it's compound effect, which caused huge wealth gap.

Bureaucracy is the form of those rules.

20250609 - Full circle

Cahokia's population peaked at something in the order of 15,000 people; then it abruptly dissolved. p452

The authors didn't think much about populations scale.

What would happen if there were 15 million instead of 15 thousand people?

How many people are needed to build large scale irritation system? So permanent farming is much better in handling the Black Swans?

How many people are needed to support a society which can produce Socrates, Budda or Confucius?

The purity of Uranium, and the volumn of Uranium are critical. Just like population density and population scale.

The law of entropy force people to improve productivity. Larger scale population means much more cooperation and much higher productivity. Hunter-gatherers have no chance to compete with such kingdom or state.

But they never came together to create any sort of ongoing village or town life. p460

There was no large domestic animal in North America before European arrived. How much did that affect the society revolution there?

We can use salt and smoke to preserve high energy food, such as meat and fat. But for hunter and gartherers, to vegetarian food, the choice is much less. Maybe just nuts?

If we cannot preserve food for months, then we cannot form large scale society.

The concept of "freedom" was not passed to Europe from North America indigenous people, but quite possibly affected by them, more or less.

Luck is critical to any specific event, but the law of Entropy decides the trend/evolution.

20250610 - Conclusion

The three basic freedom(to relocate, to disobey commands, and to shape entirely new social realities) have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them. p503

Can AI change this? Not likely.

Thousands of years ago, no one can cause serious damage to the society/tribe. Now, one terrorist can kill thousands of people. We have to sacrifice some privacy for safety.

Yet it(war) had a stubborn tendency to reappear, if only many generations later. p507

When cooperation replaced violence, population grows rapidly. But food is limited, then war break up.

Children were to be submissive to their parents, wives to husbands, and subjects to rulers whose authority came from God. p513

Complex systems don't have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world. p515

This reminds me of "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith, 1776. If wealth is not concentrated in the hands of a few (handreds of) families, I think Adam Smith is right. But if let the evolvement go freely, that's unlikely.

In all such cases, the process of giving refuge did generally lead to the transformation of basic domestic arrangements. p521

Is this what Bill Gates is doing in Africa? :-)

This reminds me of the dogs in the book "Animal Farm". Make sense.

It's pretty good theory, and no doubt worked well in many cases. But quite hard to verify that it's the major cause.

Organizations with powerful leader(s) are the one with self-awareness. It's like from single-cell creature to multi-cell creature. Multi-cell creature can slow down the growth of Entropy further.