Omne ignotum pro magnifico

Book Review: Yuval Noah Harari, "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow", Vintage, 2017. Previously, we saw how Homo sapiens was able to conquer the world due to a handful of key events: The Cognitive Revolution and emergence of fictive language about 70,000 years ago The extinction of American and Australian megafauna as well as other human species (like Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis ) by 13,000 years before the present The Agricultural Revolution and establishment of permanent settlements, kingdoms, scripts, money, and polytheistic religions between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago Empires, coinage, and monotheistic religions between 2,000 and 4,250 years ago The Scientific Revolution, Industrial Revolution, European colonialism, capitalism, and further extinction of plants and animals between 200 and 500 years ago Yuval Noah Harari concludes his "timeline of history" with the following ominous questions about the future: "Intelligent design beco...

Book Review: Yuval Noah Harari, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", Vintage, 2015. This is the first of two posts wherein I take a look at the bestselling books of the Israeli historian Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, who has become somewhat of an international phenomenon over the past couple of years. Besides the fact that Sapiens and Homo Deus  are popular, my motivation for reading them has also been stimulated by the fact that they are on the "bookshelf" of the website Conceptually.org , which claims that they can improve one's "cognitive toolkit". So what is this all about? Well, the first book is structured into four parts, with a total of twenty chapters. These are summarized below. *** "Fire gave us power..." Part One of Sapiens deals with the "cognitive revolution", which jump-started the development of human culture about 70,000 years ago. We like to think of our species ( Homo sapiens ) as special, but between...

Book Review: David Deutsch, "The Fabric of Reality", Penguin Books, 1998.  According to David Deutsch, science is not about attaining a collection of facts or predictions, but about explaining and understanding the fabric of reality. Despite the fact that the growth in our knowledge has led to the specialization of subjects into sub-fields as theories become broader, it is also true that at the same time, our theories have been superseded by deeper ones that simplify and unify the existing ones -- and Deutsch argues that depth is winning over breadth. In other words, we are heading toward a situation where one person would be able to understand "everything that is understood", thanks to a couple of deep, fundamental theories that contain within them the explanations of all subjects. We will have a Theory of Everything , and Deutsch is confident that he has a candidate for such a theory with his "four main strands" that together form a coherent explana...

Book Review: George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism", Princeton University Press, 2009.  ~and~ Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies", W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. This is the first time on my blog that I am reviewing two books together, but I thought it made sense in this case because the books are complementary: both are about economics, yet they take different perspectives. Animal Spirits  by Akerlof and Shiller is essentially a vision of "behavioral macroeconomics", criticizing the mainstream standard story about the economy as incomplete and offering a theory that includes human psychology. The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee applies the principles of economics to the issue of technological change in the 21st century and argues that the digital ...