Reddit reviews The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

I think that more so has to do with the origin of the criticism--UMass is a heterodox school, Harvard is one of the premier economics schools in the world by prestige (if you can trust rankings, #2, but that's bubba meisa).

Additionally, the finding in the R&R paper was extremely politically convenient at a time when some, including well respected thinkers like Stiglitz, Krugman, Akerloff, Schiller, Summers, were calling for a return to a more a fiscal-based anti-crisis policy.

Had their paper not come out, some other talking head would have been found to justify the austerity claim (not that the R&R paper even really does justify austerity--the issue is long term average debt, balanced over the business cycle, not its static measurement at any given moment), which occurs regularly.

Also, the more intense your prestige, the less likely you are to publicly fess up. You see this in other disciplines. Chomsky, who, by any metric, is an incredibly intelligent man, who changes the conclusions of his theories regularly, will, nonetheless, never own up to their being issues in generativism generally & the minimalist program, specifically.



It really may be a Harvard & MIT disease. Steven Pinker was savaged by Taleb's statistical analysis, not to mention substantial rebuttals from anthropology, sociology, poli sci & economics which disputed his claims (notably everyone from Douglas P Fry to James Scott to Jared Diamond to John Gray disputes it, despite their lack of agreement on anything else)--but he only ever doubles down. Ditto for Pinker & other talking heads on the issues of adaptationism in evolution and genocentrism & other issues in biology generally. Larry Summers (who, academically within econ actually has some integrity) famously gave a talk about differences between men & women's career outcomes--he cited someone for his claim who was literally in the audience at the talk and during the Q&A said he mis-interpreted the data. He recast himself as a martyr for free speech later, even as this was impertinent to the subject at hand.

There's nothing 'unhealthy' about these sexual affair circumstances. This is how humans evolved. There was no such thing as context 2. There was just your tribe, one context. There no such thing as go to work with group B (strangers/kinda friends) then come back with group A (your family/LTR/friends). You worked and lived with the same 0-150 people your entire life. Strangers (i.e. plane travelers) were rare and avoided at all costs. Co-ed work was rare until The Industrial Revolution gave women an strength assist. Corporate America is a pseudo tribe. You spend more time with your colleagues than your own family, friends and LTR. The schism and daily flip-flop fucks with your brain. You'll naturally feel the desire to open up given the time and effort you out into the group. Women especially because hypergamy is contextual. Men rotate, women exchange.

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Read: The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

It is true that traditional societies across the world experience much more systemic warfare and violence than modern states.

Check out some of Jared Diamond's work on the subject (The World Until Yesterday is a great example).

States have allowed civilization to advance to a very high level of health, wealth, and safety, even for average citizens, and the massive drop in the violence an average person can expect to experience or endure can certainly be at least partly attributed to the monopolization of violence by the state.

I don't think any learned anarchist would dispute this, but it's still true that we can make even further strides taking what we've learned from the nation-state model and expanding past it to render it obsolete.

OK, lets continue down that line of thinking- yes driving a car is more dangerous, but it has a purpose of getting you somewhere that is clearly faster than walking.

There is nothing conclusive which says people who open carry are safer than others, so it is a cost to society that does not even have a clear benefit. Yes people might get used to guns, but it does not change their risk. On an unrelated note, check this book out about perceived versus actual risk: . The author makes the point that we have been selected to worry about things like predators, and things that are posed real risks in our lives, and we tend to not learn the real risks of others which are far more likely to kill us. Such as slipping in the shower, rather than terrorists. So keep in mind that anything that keeps the total number of guns down across the board, such as limiting the power of the NRA, benefits everyone.