[[Stephen Pinker]] is right that hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers (contemporary and prehistoric) had much higher rates of violent death than moderns, even including the world wars of the 20th century.
however, hunter-gatherers seem much less violent than subsistence/preindustrial agricultural societies, which make more and bigger wars.
low populations and few resources are an incentive to avoid wars with neighboring tribes, generally by physically staying out of their way.
most hunter-gatherer deadly violence is murder, not war.
murder declined in Europe with the rise of states in the Middle Ages/Early Modern period. stateless societies had more revenge killings and less law enforcement.
murder in hunter-gatherer societies is not considered acceptable; most murder is done by “sociopaths” violating the community norms; hunter-gatherers have methods, like capital punishment, to keep “sociopaths” from terrorizing the group.
possibly “sociopaths” are more likely to become chiefs or leaders in larger, more hierarchical agricultural societies, and lead them in wars?
humans are far less prone to violently assaulting other humans than primates are to members of their own species, but human violence is much deadlier than primate-on-primate violence. we have more self-control, better coordination and weapons, and more vulnerable bodies.
“Is SGD a Bayesian sampler? Well, almost.” empirically, the functions learned by common neural net architectures with stochastic gradient descent are close to the functions learned by Bayesian inference over the data with Gaussian processes.
links 4/1/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/04-01-2025
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-prehistoric-psychopath using a nice big dataset of modern hunter-gatherers and prehistoric archaeological sites, what do we find about ancient violence?
[[Stephen Pinker]] is right that hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers (contemporary and prehistoric) had much higher rates of violent death than moderns, even including the world wars of the 20th century.
however, hunter-gatherers seem much less violent than subsistence/preindustrial agricultural societies, which make more and bigger wars.
low populations and few resources are an incentive to avoid wars with neighboring tribes, generally by physically staying out of their way.
most hunter-gatherer deadly violence is murder, not war.
murder declined in Europe with the rise of states in the Middle Ages/Early Modern period. stateless societies had more revenge killings and less law enforcement.
murder in hunter-gatherer societies is not considered acceptable; most murder is done by “sociopaths” violating the community norms; hunter-gatherers have methods, like capital punishment, to keep “sociopaths” from terrorizing the group.
possibly “sociopaths” are more likely to become chiefs or leaders in larger, more hierarchical agricultural societies, and lead them in wars?
humans are far less prone to violently assaulting other humans than primates are to members of their own species, but human violence is much deadlier than primate-on-primate violence. we have more self-control, better coordination and weapons, and more vulnerable bodies.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.15191
“Is SGD a Bayesian sampler? Well, almost.” empirically, the functions learned by common neural net architectures with stochastic gradient descent are close to the functions learned by Bayesian inference over the data with Gaussian processes.
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~duvenaud/distill_bayes_net/public/ how Bayesian neural networks can improve generalization
https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/1iy708b/at_this_point_for_me_an_estradiol_lab_level_in/ Will Powers on hormone therapy
https://www.sully.ai/ AI agents for health care
https://astera.org/residency/ Astera residency applications open
https://press.asimov.com/articles/nobel-duel the story of the race to characterize CRF
https://jasonbenn.com/tools-for-thought-social-media-posts/50-days meditation personal experience
https://jasoncrawford.org/the-dilution-of-precise-concepts Jason Crawford on how concepts get diluted