One of the few youtubers I click and watch immediately. Love the overlap of fantasy, writing, worldbuilding, and general broader philosophy/life advice.
Glad I didn't stop at skits only and finally gave your longer videos a watch - when your thoughts have more space to flow and breathe, they build up in such a captivating way. Thanks for the long form content!
Your comments in your conclusion remind me that at the end of a lecture when everyone is visibly edging to pack up and leave, I love being the first person to put my laptop in my bag, and watch everyone else immediately do so as well
wanted to write a comment to support this style of video -- such a fascinating topic; I'm halfway through, I haven't got to the meat of the book review yet, but I really don't care. Great work!
I recently watched a video that coined the term "obligate sapience" to describe humans--a species that needs to alter and reshape its environment because it can no longer live in the wild. I'm just gonna keep using that u til it enters common parlance
Even though this is only the second you’ve done, I found myself feeling as if this was a regular thing you do and, for a brief 30 minutes, got to indulge in the comfort that gave me while probing at patches of thought I haven’t in a while (since I read Homosapiens and more recently The Power of Myth (though that one is only tangential to what you discussed in this video)). Well done, this simultaneously made me want to read the book and gave me a sense that if I don’t get to it that I got the gist.
#1 evolutionary advantage & the cornerstone of all human culture: pattern recognition. We’re pattern seeking machines that see patterns that may (science) or may not (superstition) be there.
I like your content a lot. Your fiction coverage is insightful and endearing, but I think your nonfiction breakdowns are outright fantastic. I watched this video yesterday and I listened to it again while playing Rogue Legacy just now. I am enamored with your content and riotously beg you to keep on keeping on. You said you're in India? The mountains behind you look beautiful. I hope your trip goes well, friend.
Please continue this! I love non fiction book analysis. Once I've used my audible credit I need youtube to read it for me 🤣 also this was just really well done. Thank you
This was super interesting! I just today watched a documentary about fungi where they discussed that one reason for our „startup“ might’ve been hallucinogenic mushrooms that grew in parts of Africa where our ancestors lived which basically enabled neuro pathways to form in our brain which enabled us to complicate communication. Like language and stuff. I’m not quite sure what to make of that theory but it’s really cool hearing even more about how we might have „started“! :D Thanks for the video, I’d love to see more like it!
Great video. I love how you're driven by world building motives! Bc of you I've read (and reread) Dawn of Everything. Now have 3 more books on my library hold list 😅 (btw, re the speed of the spread of genes -- lactase persistence seemed to spread significantly in 2000 years. So bring on the 1750s corpses!)
I find the "recursive thought"-model of human intelligence a plausible part of the puzzle. In short, the idea is that humans aren't faster or smarter at simple problems like at 2:30, but that we have a unique ability to think about the results of our thinking. Roughly speaking, an intelligent being (human or animal) will approach a problem like in the coin test like this: 1. Try different inputs 2. Observe the outputs 3. Correlate the inputs and outputs to make a theory about which inputs will lead to desirable outputs 4. Test the theory. 5. Apply the theory to gain rewards if it works, or return to a previous step if it doesn't. Humans are decent at this simple loop, but not exceptional. But we can apply this loop not just to physical objects, but also to purely mental inputs. We can think about thinking. We can play out the entire loop in our heads, question why we're even doing it, teach our strategy to another person without having to physically show it, and learn to get better at learning. A reason why apes outperform us at simple problems may indeed be that people are overthinking it. We already have multiple competing ideas of how the problem may work before we even start it, and we try to test multiple of them in parallel. This can make us slower at some simple problems, but we're indisputably better at solving some particularly hard ones. But of course that's only a part of the puzzle. We would be nowhere near this good at it without culture and inter-generational learning.
I only read like half of this book and it permanently altered my understanding of how humans developed from just one read. Was recommended it by my anthropology teacher, did not regret.
The Plant-Forward Diet was one of those things where learning about the implications for benefit, origins dating as far back as our origins, and near complete lack of exposure to the wide population left me flabbergasted.
You have to remember that the placebo, is an improvement in reported symptoms, not necessarily in observed symptoms. In many cases it only improves reporting, imagine some people being polite and report improvements where none is. This explains like 90% of the effect and its oddities.
the problem with that study comparing human and chimp children is that human brain development continues far past early childhood. If you compare mature humans and mature chimps, I think you would find a massive cognitive difference.
0:29 What bird is singing here? I doesn’t sound like a sparrow but it’s probably similar in proportions & anatomy, I wanna say a finch but I’m not sure.
TL;DR Natural selection doesnt just act on genes, but memes (in the generalized sense of cultural information that reproduces). Those memes which help their hosts survive the most get passed on. Just by pure chance, people will come up with memes (e.g. nixtamalization) that'll help them survive, and therefore reproduce, which is why cultures dont necessarily need intrepid scientists coming up with new survival techniques. Importantly, none of this requires the host of the meme to actually know why it works. Just as you dont need to know how cells to live, you dont need to know why you do some tradition to benefit from it.
I quite enjoyed this review. Don´t know what it means in this context but I am a psychologist and many ideas mentioned remind me of another book. Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene". Might I intrest you in reading and reviewing it? It´s brilliantly written and quite a breeze to go through. Keep up the good work. I love your Ideas/Memes. Maybe there is no meaning to the world but you can always find depth and wonder.
Also where are you living nowadays? I was in Thailand/Indonesia last couple years but got somewhat burnt out from travel and am looking to settle somewhere more western, at least where I speak the language and without the expat/local divide
I've been travelling for about half a year now. Mostly in Southeast Asia, but now I'm actually in India. Planning to head back to the States soon, though, as I can definitely relate to being burned out with travel.
This was nice, I love a good wholesome appreciation of evolutionary biology. Have you read The Social Leap by William Von Hippel or The Ape That Understood the Universe by Steve Stuart Williams? They first specifically references an instinctive team up mode humans have for things like launching volleys of rocks at lions as a team, and the second explores that concept you mentioned at the start of looking at humans from the perspective of an outgroup (some dumb culture war stuff in there too, but the book came out in 2018 so what ya gonna do?), but it's real magic is in the back 25% talking about mimetics and ideas experiencing Darwinian selection pressures. What were some of the things you thought would be fun to include in your writing?
To paraphrase a Harlan Ellison quote this type of content often makes me think of: "Some dumbos used to say "Like, some people think really neat thunks in the sci-fi scene, but they're kinda ass at writing lol," and now those idiots gotta deal with sci-fi being ultra popular." And I like this quote because it's happening again on youtube. Sucks for so many to have to alter the formstting to adhere to some algorithm, glad to see that people still make stuff to put their thoughts out there.
Regarding your final thoughts on culture, morality, and evolution, you might be interested in Johnathan Haidt's stuff on evolutionary psychology and the origins of altruism.
Hey, have you written anything that is public to read, or are you working on something you are able to give a non-specific finish date on? I am curious what you could come up with :)
This would explain why Conservatism is the primary social cultural context, and it can be said that all other social cultural contexts are reactions to it.
Hunter-gatherers were actually way smarter than us. The amount of knowledge needed to survive in the jungle is just stupendous, and their spatial memory was completely inhuman
While yes, also no. I believe humans today have advanced so much with the age of information that any skills such as hunting and gathering and spacial adaptation, can be learned with relative ease. Humans build on the experience of our ancestors, thus we can only progress.
Id be curious to know if you've read Debt: the first 5000 years because the anthropological references and cultural propensities are adjacent to some of the ideas you touched on here/from the book in question.
Great video. Check out 2 books, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, and Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, both by Robert Sapolsky, I think you'll like them.
I really hope he gets big someday so that I can keep watching these videos . I love deep breakdowns like this , though this wasn't that deep yet it was fun
Woah woah woah! If a seemingly trustworthy doctor just walks over and hands you medicine and tells you to take it you’ll just do that!? I would personally be a lot more careful about what kinds of things I’m putting in my body.
@@genericallyentertaining it's definitely worth a read. It's about the psychology of moral thinking, including evolutionary theories of how moral thinking developed. You can think of culture as another term for a shared moral framework. One of his arguments is that gossip is a large part of why humans have big brains and why we can't help listening into it, even if we dislike it.
22:20 .. a bit of an observation on the subject of foods like lemons or hot peppers.. Humans INVENTED them.. when it comes to a LOT of foods, we like them because we BRED them.. and the geographical location DOES make a difference.. because people who culturally identify as spicy food eating are where a LOT of spices come from.. The way you can track thru history the source of ‘spices’, their availability and quantities, explains a lot about how regional cuisine evolved.. and wether it was just the wealthy that ate anything that TASTED like much.. ..until people were growing plants they WANTED and they COULD grow, spices HAD to be imported.. you couldn’t actually GROW a hot pepper in northern climates until they bred a variety that could tolerate the weather etc.. I’ve got a bit of an uncommon take on this topic because I’m a prehistory nerd, therefore anthropology is a big part of that.. but I’m also a 3d gen. gardener in New England.. 😅 Who’s getting “old” at this point and I’ve seen a lot of things..😅 and read lots too.. This whole video is talking points on the things I spend my recreational time on.. LOL.. I could probably discuss this stuff for days .. 😂
We are the only ones not because we have culture, but because we have culture and hands. Dolphins have culture, but they don't have hands so they can't build stuff
another way the feedback loop can get started is if brain capacity of sociality is co-opted from some other ability that pre-dates high sociality. Similar to how literacy (a process that is too new for humans for them to have evolved its own brain regions) seems to be co-opted brain capacity from other functions. We are essentially giving up a bit of brain processing for activity A in order to do new activity B.
Calling homo sapien ape species makes more sense then Human so I get a massive secular bias from the person who wrote that bc you could use "person" or "being" as human feels more emotional and personal and psychological.
