Apparently gender differences personality are stronger in plough societies and richer societies, richer is surprising
Edenic transition = neolithic revolution. The patriarchy, primogeniture, distance from nature. Primitive man had no need to invemt monsters like the minotaur, nature was everywhere and terrifying. Did the move away from animism and equality precipitate or follow from the neolithic revolution?
Eric Hoels idea of the gossip trap as what we escaped as we exceeded Dunbars number in 10’000BC, and what we’re returning to now woth social media.
Question of why 10k BC (the sapient paradox) might be because of the end of the last ice age or because we ran out of frontiers (though surely this would imply civ starting in southern africa, since this are would run out of frontiers first.
Mid east had easiest to profitably domesticate flora and fauna
Easier for europe to sail west than china
Why not go east?
This made intellectual work more profitable in europe, and encouraged both liberality from rulers and focus on practicalish questions from researchers
Production of niches in evolution is relevant to coevolution of culture and geography?
War either leads to the creation of strong unified states, disincentivising violence, or to the breakdown of such states, incentivising violence. As the world becomes more full of states, war reduces violence.
When doing unspecialised thinking, in order to have a chance of being right, you need to ensure your errors cancel out, so avoid singular biases. Randomness or sampling is one such strategy.
The key is how to get rigid breakdowns from big history to small history, in order for small history to work as a test for big history questions and big history questions to unfold into small history questions in a deterministic way.
This is the same basic pattern as how do you get seemingly underspecified rules to unfold in surprisingly deterministic ways in language games cf. Lewis
Big history doesnt make event by event predictions, but it does make predictions about the relative frequency of events, e.g. Likelihood of great power war in europe post 1870, profitability of voyages to the americas from europe vs china
Important to consider what stage of farming economy a society was at to see how malthusian it would have been, was land or labor the limit on productivity for exampe? Relevant to voluntariness of hunter-gatherer transition, proto-feminism. See black death in europe, which drove labor costs up bc labor scarcity, until most of europe hit the malthusian ceiling again as land became the limiting factor once the population recovered (to benefit of landowners)
If history is more deterministic virtue politics is less feasible. (Or the world is driven by spikier distributions, with a lack of reversible changes, like the world with nukes)
Has a paper arguing whenever anywhere gets to axial age energy use conditions axial age though emerges whats mesoamerica then?
How does this fit in with collins? The high god directly caring about behaviour is an attentional simplification vs. many disconnected tabboos?
I guess its slightly different to purely intellectual stuff, it intersects with authority much more
Resource curse in africa
More resource rich countries are worse economically because theyre incentivised to get extractive dictators and coups.
Its like extractive capacity (resources x extractive efficiency) is disruptive, and instotutions need to be strong enough to capture it. In effect they must evolve in sync, as they do at the technological frontier.
The analogy with AI should make you more worried, as extractive capacity accelerates faster than institutions. Its like everyone with ai tech has the option of being an african dictator. The Alignment Problem and AI safety notes