User: obtusegoose

obtusegoose (OP)

December 1

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I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and was searching for reviews to see other people's thoughts and help me...

I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and was searching for reviews to see other people's thoughts and help me organize my own, as I must admit I was probably zoning out while listening for significant parts of it.

I stumbled upon this review/essay and thought it was really interesting, specifically the later parts that starts talking about the "Sapient Paradox", i.e. why did we only see rapid development since 10,000 BC if we've been around for 100,000-200,000 years. It's not something I've seen much discussion about (although this is not my field so might just not be aware), and I thought the proposed hypothesis of a "gossip trap" was pretty thought provoking.

A “gossip trap” is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school.

And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization—at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans. Eventually, you need to create formal structures, which at first are seasonal and changeable and theatrical, and take all sorts of diverse forms, since the initial condition is just who’s popular. But then these formal systems slowly become real.

So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap. For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip. Are not our paragons of civilization figures like Supreme Court justices or tenured professors, or protected classes with impunity to speak and present new ideas, like journalists or scientists?

Another interesting hypothesis from one of the comments is that we suddenly stopped doing large scale migrations. Essentially we'd filled up most of the globe and we couldn't expand outward anymore so we had to start organizing ourselves more. This is probably even more plausible, but I'm sure whatever the reasons it's likely a combination of multiple factors.

I'm interested to hear what other people think and if you've heard any other hypotheses that attempt to explain the "Sapient Paradox", and also what your thoughts were on the book if you've read it.

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