[archibaldJ]

It’s not God complex. Society doesn’t come into existence by itself in hunter-gathering time. It starts off with someone self-identifying as the chief/shaman and who is socially approved.

Starting a small settlement / community is not a small feat. It requires lots of organizing top-level-down. And then fast forwards million of years later we have religions and government and we start paying taxes without asking lots of questions while also taking everything for granted.

Religions and governments were considered a progressive thing 2000 years ago. But then gradually in the past 100 years we started to see disentanglement between these two. And now we are here.

And now we are starting enter the aeon of AI. Now it is good time to fix many real-world problems.

[piloto_ciego]

> Society doesn’t come into existence by itself in hunter-gathering time.

Ummmmm… like how do you think cities got started?

[microtherion]

There's no single answer. Most of them did indeed get started organically, but some got started by dukes who were in the city starting business:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zähringen

Some got started by Roman Emperors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augsburg

Some got started by a country wanting a new capital:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasília

And some grew organically, but were at some point or other subject to a massive master plan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

https://thegreatestgrid.mcny.org

[piloto_ciego]

Sure all that is true but this guy was asserting that cities didn’t just come about organically, when… well a lot of them did lol.

[archibaldJ]

So you think cities and villages just magically got built because people would come together and interact like some kind of brownian motion?

I already laid down my arguments from an anthropological perspective. There was something very special about the past 2000~4000 years (since the beginning of stone age 3 million year ago, and anatomically modern humans 300,000 years ago) and that is why at the year 2024AD, things have progressed into the current state. (Or why have we not progressed faster as a civilization/species?)

It's about cost and the sustaining of people's attention and work. Even for communities that started so to speak "organically", they would have dependency on some form of leadership at some points, if not throughout, or it would not be self-sustainable and grow to scale up e.g. into a village/city.

[piloto_ciego]

There are a lot of assertions in your post. Again, take an anthro class or at least read about the origin of cities.

Hell, we don’t even know if all the early ones were inhabitated year round. Nor do we know if many of the early cities required “leadership” in any real way.

Also, there may be more ways to measure “progress” than you’re aware of. Depending on the metric you choose… we may not be doing as well as you’d think.

Is this Steven Pinker’s nephews HN account?

[archibaldJ]

you are totally missing the point. whatever. At this point none-technical discussion on HN has become almost like reddit.

[piloto_ciego]

What are you talking about?

This actually is a technical discussion.

You’re asserting things about the formation of cities that aren’t just unknown or mysterious, you’re asserting things that are patently untrue, then upset when someone calls you out for it lol. How Reddit is that?

You’re saying, “cities require strong leadership, planning, cost, and sustaining people’s attention, and work.” (To roughly paraphrase). I’m saying, “that’s not necessarily true, we don’t know enough about this to assert this. You should read some more about it or take an anthropology class.”

This is a highly technical subject, it’s just not one about computers or math or physics. Like, for some early cities we are unsure if they were even inhabited year round, for some cities it appears that there was absolutely no leadership. Maybe megalopolises requires strong central authority but I’m not so sure.

Even if you spend $8b and start your own version of Fordlandia you still may not succeed at building utopia because how do you maintain things how “you want them” when people like me exist who will try to flaunt your rules? Violence?

[archibaldJ]

At this point it sounds like I'm talking to gpt3.5 with the system prompt as "angry troll on the internet". Won't be surprised if I am.

If you are not a chatbot, here is my advice after reading this incoherent thing you wrote: go work on something to make the change you want to see in your life.

It saddens me that discussions on HN are now turning into dumpster fire like this.