Sapiens, by Yuval Harari, notes and insights

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

This book is full of knowledge, so be careful. Don’t contact me for help finding the undo button for ignorance. But if you find it, contact me immediately. That includes you too, future me.

I’ll skip my usual complaints about underdeveloped characters (Neanderthal Bob could have used a few more brush strokes to his personality), and just summarize the insights I still remember blowing my mind. Speaking of, isn’t it amazing that something can blow your mind and you can still remember it afterward with the same organ that just got blown? All hail the human brain.

Also, don’t mistake my version of any of these facts/insights for the original. I may have misinterpreted and then misremembered, and those two don’t always cancel out.

1. The main insight, and one so obvious it’s invisible: the past is always barbaric, and the future inscrutable. The brilliant insights of today will be nothing but obvious tomorrow. Things that were completely obvious/right/moral to us yesterday seem ridiculous/abhorrent today, and tomorrow, today’s views will be equally, and equally obviously, untenable.
2. For megayears, evolution was purely genetic. For example, before the Cognitive Revolution, Homo Erectus won the lottery with their stone tool. They didn’t improve it for 100k years! Question: was the invention of the stone tool the result of a genetic change?
3. The Cognitive Revolution was brought about by the invention of fiction, which expanded the max size of a cohesive group from 150 (the limit of gossip) to…we haven’t found the limit yet. Or maybe Harari is saving it for the sequel.
4. Fictions are pervasive, powerful, and transparent (or is it opaque?): money, religion, Apple, tennis, national identity, necromancy, the legal system, capitalism. They’re held together only by shared belief, like Mab in the best TV movie ever made (Merlin).
5. We treat many fictions as if they were reality, and they are not. Not even basic human rights. Sorry, they don’t exist. The universe is made of cold undistilled Communism. (Kidding, and sorry Communism for getting your hopes up).
6. Biology allows, culture forbids. Or the more inflammatory version: if it’s biologically possible, it’s natural.
7. Modern monotheistic religions have many artifacts from the religions they outcompeted, e.g. ghosts from animism, and the Devil from dualism.
8. At some point, a nation’s credit rating began to matter a lot more than its natural resources. The Dutch conquered the world because they paid their debts, and when they didn’t, you could sue them in a Dutch court and get your money. The Spanish, on the other hand, totally blew it. No court would rule against the Spanish king, and he wasn’t a big debt payer.
9. Empires were conquered not by states, but by private companies such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), British East India Company, and their mercenary armies. Conquered territories were nationalized only much later. When trade/exploitation hit a snag, the state stepped in. For example, the British went to war with the Chinese for the right to continue selling them opium. The British, yes again, they did a lot in this book, created Greek war bonds during Greece’s war for independence from the Turks, put them on the London Exchange and let British investors have at them. When the Greeks were about to lose, the British were like “whoa! Don’t give up on your freedom! Think of our investors!” They swept in and heroically rescued the Greeks. And by rescued I mean the Greeks came out of the war holding a giant invoice.
10. Capitalism, the idea that profits should be re-invested into production, was as unintuitive to people at the time as it was revolutionary. However, it didn’t catch on in China and India for a while, due to the missing sociopolitical foundation. I would love to understand this better.
11. Amerigo Vespucci, the guy America’s named after, was the first to voice the idea that our maps should have blank spaces instead of just sewing together known lands. When the idea caught on, those blank spaces didn’t last long. Europe collected them like Pokemon.
12. Science and technology were married by Francis Bacon. Yes, they seem like they’re MFEO, but that’s just our hindsight bias. At the time it was a revolutionary idea. Before that, financing research into the workings of the universe with the hope to reap technological benefits was not intuitive to either states or businesses. Technology breakthroughs happened at random. One carpenter in a million would invent a better chair, but most started new religions instead.
13. The Scientific Revolution was a “discovery of ignorance.” Before that, something was either known by the church or not worth knowing. Once ignorance became cool, we traveled all over science and flashed our ignorance flashlight at all the knowledge. Finally, after many years, real flashlights were invented.
14. The Cognitive Revolution decoupled us from our genetic evolution
15. The Agricultural Revolution turned us from generalists into specialists, simultaneously creating niches for imbeciles (e.g. you could carry water for a living). That’s pretty charitable if you ask me, because imbeciles would never think to thank it.
16. The Agricultural Revolution radically transformed our gods, and with them, our self-perception. We abandoned direct relationships with things around us (“the rain hates me”) in favor of mediated ones (“God, I slaughter this here sheep in your name, now please make it rain already”). As our gods changed, we stopped seeing plants and animals as equals, and began to worship ourselves as a species.
17. With the Industrial Revolution, the state took over the responsibilities of looking after people from the family unit and the community. The individual became way stronger. And you no longer had to kill someone’s cousin when they killed yours. Then again, you also no longer had the option to. Tradeoffs.
18. Happiness is results relative to expectation. This is why we’re not happier showering every day than peasants a thousand years ago were being smelly every day. Worse, we’re continuously bombarded with images/stories of hot/smart/healthy/well-adjusted outliers, which give us unrealistically high expectations. In the past, you just had to be hotter than toothless old men and faster than the boy next door.
19. Happiness is a slippery concept. Here are common attempts to get a grip: 1) happiness is biological: there is no spoon. What makes us feel good is not the promotion we got or all of those people staring at our butt as we walk away. It is merely a pleasant sensation in the body served by the neurotransmitter bartender upstairs. Also, our body is designed to sit at some equilibrium point and regress to it no matter how happy or unhappy we get temporarily (elsewhere called “the happiness treadmill”). Hand me a winning lottery ticket or cut off my legs, and a few days later I’ll be back to my own peculiar normal.
    2) happiness is finding meaning in life: there is no spoon. There is only a person’s propensity for self-delusion. If you can align your values with one of the values-of-the-day and haul ass in that direction, you can win.
    3) happiness a la buddhism: there is no spoon. Happiness doesn’t come from external sources, nor inner feelings. Acquiesce to the impermanence of everything, and let feelings arise and pass. Getting embroiled in external or internal worlds is what makes you suffer.
20. We won’t be homo sapiens for much longer. We’re getting close to divergence on several fronts: genetic engineering, merging with machines, and/or creating life that outcompetes us or changes our life experience to something unrecognizable
21. Don’t worry about losing your humanity to the singularity, we lost it long ago for what we do to animals. Also, we might all die soon. We have several buttons at our disposal which cause apocalypses.

Oh Internet, tell me what I missed and/or got backwards