A few things AFAIK anyone has to grant about this period:

- Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers lived all over the world, under vastly different climates, for ~100,000 years.

- These humans were anatomically modern in every sense. They had lives every bit as complex as ours.

- Human cultural, political, and social structures are and have always been inherently diverse.

- Humans have always impacted and managed their environments for better and for worse.

- The Neolithic Revolution occurred independently in multiple places over generations as a series of choices by individuals at least roughly as intelligent as we are.

- Humans who adopted agriculture came to out-populate those who didn't.

The idea that hunter-gatherers lived consistently affluent lives and enjoyed plenty of leisure time as a general rule doesn't neatly fit this picture for me. How is it more likely than the idea that these people lived basically evenly along a spectrum of fluctuating and diverse conditions, at the mercy and grace of natural systems and social trends?

Perhaps depending on the context some human groups lucked into a life of luxury, while others lived painful lives consumed by the anxiety of dwindling supplies, all as an accident of climate patterns, the spread of disease, or even human-caused overconsumption.

Even in early societies that won a Garden of Eden in the geographic lottery, what's more human than to invent new complex problems to stew over based on generational trauma, or simply wild speculation about a world we will always have limited understanding of? Perhaps some group of humans highly valued their downtime hobbies while others were obsessed with arbitrary hierarchies, wars to obtain slaves, or settling petty disputes between powerful families.

Agriculture at the very least provided predictable trade-offs that smooth out the previous extremes, and we can't know if on balance it was a strictly negative or positive change. Since then, however, I think it's safe to say that the lives of everyone I know is better off than a practitioner of early agriculture.

Your follow-up doesn't appear to contradict that (of course this wouldn't hold when populations start mixing in modern times and wouldn't have ever held 100%) so I was confused.

However the article does in fact dispute my previous belief:

>The researchers found that African individuals on average had significantly more Neanderthal DNA than previously thought—about 17 megabases (Mb) worth, or 0.3% of their genome.

This is as opposed to 1-4% of genomes for populations outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.

>They also found signs that a handful of Neanderthal genes may have been selected for after they entered Africans' genomes, including genes that boost immune function and protect against ultraviolet radiation.

>The best fit model for where Africans got all this Neanderthal DNA suggests about half of it came when Europeans—who had Neanderthal DNA from previous matings—migrated back to Africa in the past 20,000 years.

"The past 20,000 years" is pretty broad and seemingly includes modern era exchanges, but AFAIK that can't account for selecting Neanderthal genes or for how widespread Neanderthal DNA already is.

Of course, any AI smart enough to apocalypse us would also know about these.

This reads to me a little like: "The distracted boyfriend meme can be found at the helm of the Western mind whenever we encounter betrayal and disloyalty."

I get that this is more of a trope or a shorthand than literally saying that a certain thinker invented the idea of a good person being defined by their actions, but to me it's worth saying that these concepts and ideas are probably as timeless as language, not something invented a few hundred years ago, not something invented by Plato.

The diminishing power differential between regional/great powers seems to be exactly in line with what's being said about the shrinking incentives for conquest and the illustrative quagmires of Russia and America's foreign wars.

The ability for regional powers to coalesce feels like it underscores the way geopolitics have changed in exactly the way the author is arguing. Instead of a new Asean Empire that neatly fits into the patterns of a rising power from the 19th and 20th centuries, disparate polities with shared interests cooperate in a way that preserves their independent sovereignty and resists challenges to the status quo.

I can't speak to the author's sympathies with Project 2025, but if there is some related bias I didn't catch it on a first read where I wasn't aware of it. The mentions of "unvarnished unilateralism" and "U.S. strategy is shedding values and historical memory" and "democracies rotting from within" seem to imply Beckley has some idea of the existential dangers the current administration poses to American hegemony.

The view appears to be that the only credible rival to America (China) faces demographic headwinds that America doesn't to the same degree in trying to capitalize on any broader decline.

If a tenth of this happens, and we don't build a new power plant every ten weeks... then what?

The idea that is being plainly communicated here is that there's a single system of symbols that is so well-understood that it gets passed along to human populations in Siberia that then cross the Bering strait as well as the isthmus of Panama, and these populations over this period maintain this system with such fidelity that they're recognizable as descending from the SAME system of symbols that entirely separate populations in Europe and Southern Africa are also using.

I don't think an alternative intepretation is reasonable to take away from the "Consistent doodles" infographic or the phrasing like "early humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also developed a system of signs that is remarkably consistent across and between continents".

This is either earth-shaking news that demands an entirely new understanding of human heritage, or it's very obvious pseudo-science.

However, most of the content in the last half of the book consists of naming and describing what seemed like obvious strategies for refactoring and rewriting code. I would squint at the introduction to a new term, try to parse its definition, look at the code example, and when it clicked I would think "well that just seems like what you would naturally choose to do in that situation, no?" Then the rest of the chapter describing this pattern became redundant.

It didn't occur to me that trying to put the terms themselves to memory would be particularly useful, and so it became a slog to get through all of the content that I'm not sure was worth it. Curious if that was the experience of anyone else.

Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."

- Tiktok: "I don't want or need this" -> Delete forever.

- Pixelfed: "I don't want or need this" -> Don't install.

- Instagram: "Still get a ton of value from seeing updates come in from family, don't want the option of getting deep into reels" -> Strict daily timer.

- YouTube: "Still get a ton of value from the network of content published to the platform consistently, don't want the option of getting deep into shorts" -> ??? self control.

The dilemma I have with YouTube feels like exactly what the OP's app is intended to solve.

What if radiation from the sun actually sterilized something like 90% of neolithic men? Is that possible?

This creates a selection pressure for men whose sperm just happens to be resistent to the sun's radiation to get with as many women as possible. So any groups that don't practice patriarchal polygyny are at a sudden and catastrophic disadvantage for not utilizing their men who are still fertile and get outcompeted in a generation.

Thousands of years later we're still unwinding the social ramifications of this.

A human or an LLM accurately predicting a human conversation would probably say something like "ah I see, I did not read the riddle close enough. This is an altered version of the common riddle..." etc. Instead it really seems to flail around, confuse concepts, and appear to insist that it has correctly made some broader point unrelated to the actual text it's responding to.

To me it's still a little "off" considering that your conversational partner just got called out for missing a detail that should change their entire reading of the riddle, but it's totally fair that you can imagine realistic human emotional states to explain it.

FWIW, when I tried the same thing with GPT-4o the model went off bizarrely speculating about misdirection about "the man" being the surgeon's son:

>Good catch—and yes, that's exactly where the misdirection comes in.

The riddle says:

    “A man and his cousin are in a car crash. The man dies, but the cousin is taken to the ER...”

    “I cannot operate on him. He’s my son.”

    The man who died is not the surgeon's son.

    The cousin who survived is the surgeon's son.

I'm assuming that pointing this out leads you the human to reread the prompt and then go "ah ok" and adjust the way you're thinking about it. ChatGPT (and DeepSeek at least) will usually just double and triple down and repeat "this challenges gender assumptions" over and over.