Astral Codex Ten

Diamond

5 min read

Diamond

Article

Diamond is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 17, 2021 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Jared Diamond calls agriculture “ the worst mistake in the history of the human race.””; “she found a sled dog named Diamond, whom she rescued from death and befriended”; “from the Davids to Yuval to Pinker to Diamond”. It most often appears alongside Africa, California, COVID-19.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: June 17, 2021
  • Last seen: June 10, 2022

Appears In

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.

Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples
June 17, 2021 · Original source
William H. McNeill versus Jared Diamond
A lot of these big picture histories of humanity start with sometimes conflicting premises. How happy were hunter gatherers? In Sapiens Yuval Noah Harrari frames humanity as a slow deterioration of individual happiness at the expense of building a greater society starting from the carefree hunter gather and ending in the far AI future of civilizational greatness and individual obliteration. Jared Diamond calls agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Other narratives paint individuals crawling out of the dark neanderthal caves into utopian agricultural societies and everyone is more or less getting happier as modernity progresses. The distinction is foremost a narrative tool which seems to have important implications, but I have been unresolved on which side I adhere to. Plagues and Peoples kind of has it both ways in a way that seems truer. Human individuals are constantly finding the balance between their environment and society towards something... mutually tolerable.
Inline links: the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
I never read Guns, Germs, and Steel, but constantly wondered how parallel Diamond and McNeill thought about diseases. Luckily, they had a public debate! McNeill criticizes GGS, Diamond responds, and then McNeill further replies! How lucky we are.
California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
Reinette Senum was the first woman to successfully cross Alaska alone in the winter. She said that “I could handle the 55-below cold, but I could not handle the loneliness”. Partway through her journey, she found a sled dog named Diamond, whom she rescued from death and befriended. She had to leave Diamond behind at the end of her journey, which bothered her so much that she decided to go back and get him. She sold the footage of her trek to National Geographic, who turned it into a special called Alaska Revisited, and with the money she flew back to Alaska and rescued her dog friend a second time. They moved to Nevada City, California, where unfortunately Diamond was killed by a car. If you don’t vote for her after hearing this story, you have no soul.
Inline links: Reinette Senum, the first woman to successfully cross Alaska alone in the winter
She stayed in Nevada City (population: 3,000) for twenty years, got elected to City Council, and eventually became Mayor. Now she wants to do a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington style move to the big city.
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
What is the version of prehistory the Davids offer in The Dawn of Everything? It is an anti-story. The Davids are offering up an alternative to (as well as a criticism of) thinkers like Steven Pinker or Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, all of whom give a standard model of human prehistory that goes small hunter-gatherer tribes → invention of agriculture → civilization (with its associated hierarchies and private property and wealth inequalities).
Some might try to dismiss the Sapient Paradox by pointing to evidence of ongoing human evolution. And while there is some evidence of recent human evolutionary changes, it often seems clustered around things like dietary changes—at least, there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and almost everyone who tackles these issues, from the Davids to Yuval to Pinker to Diamond, agrees that Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Indeed, early Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago had brains as large as our own!
Inline links: brains as large