it's a good, although pretty long piece. On Harari's popularity itself, I'm not convinced by it at all. as the article points out it's a weird mixture of Buddhist philosophy, futurology, and very broad accounts of history with some new age mixed in.
That seems to be a very popular syncretic combination these days but it often veers from speculative into science fiction and sometimes even pandering, both to a large mass audience fascinated by AI news and tech elites who like to be told they're controlling the world, even if Harari is scolding them.
On technical topics itself his takes, however, seem surprisingly shallow or outright wrong. There's is a very good case to be made that we're in fact not living in the transhumanist age and that society is not changing that fast at all. (secular stagnation, Robert Gordon on innovation, Thiel in the popular press) etc. In the discussion with Pinker, Pinker was very quick to point out that a lot of Harari's speculations about genetic optimization are fairly unreasonable given what we know about how complex genetic interaction is, and so on.
It seems to me ironically the way he writes is to feed into the common anxieties that are also reflected in the mainstream press and that are also popular among people like Sam Harris or Bostrom or others who have carved out their media niche in this space. They've found their audience but I'm not sure how good any of it is.
And also one thing that I find to be absolutely unacceptable behaviour for a writer who talks about the dangers facing our liberal societies:
"Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian translation of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” had been edited to make it more palatable to Vladimir Putin’s government. Harari had approved some of these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its 2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by President Trump."
If we had the possibility to bring someone back from the dead, it wouldn't matter if they were alive in 16th century or at the time we build the pyramids we live in a science fiction for these people.
Peter Thiel sometimes says random things to sound interesting so he can take a baby step out Elon's shadow.
Spot on. I enjoyed Sapiens but Homo Deus was unreadable. He doesn’t understand computers or mathematics, and his predictions about AI seems like all of his knowledge about it came from opinion articles in the NYT. Very weird book.
i've got nothing to say about harari, i don't like him myself either, but it's a bit of a stretch to say that society is not changing that fast at all. I wonder what you consider by society and change. Internet changed nothing? Everyone having smartphones etc?
Everyone having smartphones it's nice but it hasn't significantly increased economic output, the impact of computerization on productivity is in fact very small. The UK for example in the last 10 years (since the invention of the smartphone), has not seen increases in labour productivity at all.
Paul Krugman referred to the "kitchen test" at one point. If you go to your kitchen today and compare it to 40 years ago, what has changed? Arguably very little, maybe the only thing that would tell you what year you're in is a screen on your wall.
Robert Gordon also proposed imagining going to sleep in 1870 and waking up in 1970 in the same spot in New York. Someone waking up would find the car, skyscrapers everywhere, the discovery of dna, haber bosch allowing 3 billion additional people to grow food, going to the moon, the commercial airplane, the computer, antibiotics,and so on. Go to sleep in 1970 and wake up in 2020 New York and, well it doesn't look so different.
Paul Krugman referred to the "kitchen test" at one point. If you go to your kitchen today and compare it to 40 years ago, what has changed? Arguably very little, maybe the only thing that would tell you what year you're in is a screen on your wall.
This seems like a test tailor-made to prove the point you’re trying to make. Why not ask the same question about how much your local VHS rental store has changed?
And as to 1870 -> 1970 vs. 1970 -> 2020, isn’t it obvious? One is a span of time twice as long! The fair comparison is 1920 -> 2020, or 1970 -> 2070. In which case I think the point evaporates pretty quickly.
>This seems like a test tailor-made to prove the point you’re trying to make. Why not ask the same question about how much your local VHS rental store has changed?
Because a kitchen is significantly more representative on how much our daily lives overall have changed because the kitchen (or really you could pick any other place that represents labour or a place of gathering), says more than the VHS store.
The fact that you're bringing up the VHS store goes to show though what the crux of the problem is. Innovation over the last few decades has primarily only happened in the world of media and communication. Watching netflix instead of renting VHS tapes is nice, but it hasn't significantly expanded our productive capacities. In fact infrastructure, healthcare (remember watson?) and so on have largely stayed the same, or even gotten less productive.
Infrastructure, healthcare and housing represent a significant portion of both daily experienced lives and chunk of the economy. More social networks and more tv shows and online games are pretty cool, but they don't really touch labour organisation, structure of the firm or production, and it shows in stagnating economic growth and cost disease throughout the economy.
I can’t think of a space that hasn’t been heavily impacted since 1980. Even the kitchen. In addition to the obvious examples of kitchen appliances and screens and devices like Echo that weren’t available in 1980, how about the fact that there are many fewer meals eaten at home? Or cooked for families? How about the ways that women’s roles in society and families have changed? How about the rise of single person households? Or meal prep and delivery services? Or the much wider availability of fresh or “exotic” foods year round than 40 years ago?
Sure, you can walk into a kitchen from 1980 or 2020 and see many similarities, but there are also many differences that you can’t see at first glance.
what is economical output relevant? why is that an indicator of change :) just compare what you spend your daily life doing and thinking, to what your parents did and think, then go to another generation, then another
People’s responses to Harari remind me very much of Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia[0]. Everyone seems to be impressed by his work until they get to their area of specialism, which is the only area they think he falls down in. I’ve had a number of conversations like this with people from different fields, all of whom think his analysis in their area was significantly flawed. It feels like he writes stuff that’s very plausible for a lay audience, but subject it to any intellectual rigour from someone who knows their stuff and it crumbles.
I find this to be the case with most pop-science books; the author's intention is to leave the reader with a feeling of having learned something rather than providing a full overview of the field, which may be too complex for the situation anyway. I often compare it to my response when non-CS people ask me "what I do."
Do you have some specific examples the people you spoke to frequently criticize regarding Harari?
No specific examples I'm afraid (what they said put me off reading him entirely so I don't have any personal examples either - too many other books I want to read!), although the two people who mentioned it to me recently were a neuroscientist and an economist with a keen interest evolutionary biology.
I do wonder about the value of pop science. It feels like it's almost always oversimplified to the point of being misleading. I have a background in psychology / neuroscience and find it difficult to read any pop neuroscience without grinding my teeth.
“Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.” ― William Goldman
Bill Gates and Barack Obama, who both praised Harari, don't know anything about the future and neither does Harari. They make pretty good educated guesses, but are often wrong about what is actually going on. Harari seems like the latest incarnation of Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman before him.
14 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 52.0 ms ] threadThat seems to be a very popular syncretic combination these days but it often veers from speculative into science fiction and sometimes even pandering, both to a large mass audience fascinated by AI news and tech elites who like to be told they're controlling the world, even if Harari is scolding them.
On technical topics itself his takes, however, seem surprisingly shallow or outright wrong. There's is a very good case to be made that we're in fact not living in the transhumanist age and that society is not changing that fast at all. (secular stagnation, Robert Gordon on innovation, Thiel in the popular press) etc. In the discussion with Pinker, Pinker was very quick to point out that a lot of Harari's speculations about genetic optimization are fairly unreasonable given what we know about how complex genetic interaction is, and so on.
It seems to me ironically the way he writes is to feed into the common anxieties that are also reflected in the mainstream press and that are also popular among people like Sam Harris or Bostrom or others who have carved out their media niche in this space. They've found their audience but I'm not sure how good any of it is.
And also one thing that I find to be absolutely unacceptable behaviour for a writer who talks about the dangers facing our liberal societies:
"Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian translation of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” had been edited to make it more palatable to Vladimir Putin’s government. Harari had approved some of these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its 2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by President Trump."
Peter Thiel sometimes says random things to sound interesting so he can take a baby step out Elon's shadow.
Paul Krugman referred to the "kitchen test" at one point. If you go to your kitchen today and compare it to 40 years ago, what has changed? Arguably very little, maybe the only thing that would tell you what year you're in is a screen on your wall.
Robert Gordon also proposed imagining going to sleep in 1870 and waking up in 1970 in the same spot in New York. Someone waking up would find the car, skyscrapers everywhere, the discovery of dna, haber bosch allowing 3 billion additional people to grow food, going to the moon, the commercial airplane, the computer, antibiotics,and so on. Go to sleep in 1970 and wake up in 2020 New York and, well it doesn't look so different.
This seems like a test tailor-made to prove the point you’re trying to make. Why not ask the same question about how much your local VHS rental store has changed?
And as to 1870 -> 1970 vs. 1970 -> 2020, isn’t it obvious? One is a span of time twice as long! The fair comparison is 1920 -> 2020, or 1970 -> 2070. In which case I think the point evaporates pretty quickly.
Because a kitchen is significantly more representative on how much our daily lives overall have changed because the kitchen (or really you could pick any other place that represents labour or a place of gathering), says more than the VHS store.
The fact that you're bringing up the VHS store goes to show though what the crux of the problem is. Innovation over the last few decades has primarily only happened in the world of media and communication. Watching netflix instead of renting VHS tapes is nice, but it hasn't significantly expanded our productive capacities. In fact infrastructure, healthcare (remember watson?) and so on have largely stayed the same, or even gotten less productive.
Infrastructure, healthcare and housing represent a significant portion of both daily experienced lives and chunk of the economy. More social networks and more tv shows and online games are pretty cool, but they don't really touch labour organisation, structure of the firm or production, and it shows in stagnating economic growth and cost disease throughout the economy.
https://data.oecd.org/chart/5QdS
I can’t think of a space that hasn’t been heavily impacted since 1980. Even the kitchen. In addition to the obvious examples of kitchen appliances and screens and devices like Echo that weren’t available in 1980, how about the fact that there are many fewer meals eaten at home? Or cooked for families? How about the ways that women’s roles in society and families have changed? How about the rise of single person households? Or meal prep and delivery services? Or the much wider availability of fresh or “exotic” foods year round than 40 years ago?
Sure, you can walk into a kitchen from 1980 or 2020 and see many similarities, but there are also many differences that you can’t see at first glance.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
Do you have some specific examples the people you spoke to frequently criticize regarding Harari?
I do wonder about the value of pop science. It feels like it's almost always oversimplified to the point of being misleading. I have a background in psychology / neuroscience and find it difficult to read any pop neuroscience without grinding my teeth.
Bill Gates and Barack Obama, who both praised Harari, don't know anything about the future and neither does Harari. They make pretty good educated guesses, but are often wrong about what is actually going on. Harari seems like the latest incarnation of Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman before him.