The Better Angels of Our Nature
Article
The Better Angels of Our Nature is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 28, 2021 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature tabulates violent deaths”; “Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, discusses a “Hobbesian trap”“. It most often appears alongside Africa, Britain, Europe.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 28, 2021
- Last seen: June 10, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Africa (2 shared issues)
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- Britain (2 shared issues)
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- Europe (2 shared issues)
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- homo sapiens (2 shared issues)
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- Steven Pinker (2 shared issues)
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- The New York Times (2 shared issues)
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- 50,000 BC (1 shared issues)
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- A Game of Thrones (1 shared issues)
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- African Americans (1 shared issues)
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- Against Empathy (1 shared issues)
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- Altamira (1 shared issues)
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- Amazonia (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
We don't know anything about pre-historic man, but let's speculate wildly in the thesis's favour How did this play out for pre-farming man? Were we friendly, or was life 'nasty, brutish and short'? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature tabulates violent deaths for:
In asking “What took so long?” the Sapient Paradox is the prehistoric analog of the Fermi Paradox. Instead of: “Why are we alone in the universe?” the Sapient Paradox asks: “Why were we trapped in prehistory?” And just as the Fermi Paradox implies a Great Filter, the Sapient Paradox implies a Great Trap, a trap in which human society lived for, at minimum, 50,000 years, and, at maximum, something like 200,000 years or even more. Depending on your politics, the Great Trap might be an oppressive patriarchy, or perhaps a decadent matriarchy, or a lazy commune, etc (e.g., Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, discusses a “Hobbesian trap” of mutual warfare between tribes—although he does not connect this to the Sapient Paradox).