Holly Dunsworth is doing a page-by-page reading of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. She has more stamina than I do.
When that book came out, it got a lot of praise, so I picked a copy off the shelf at the bookstore and started browsing through it. I did not buy it, because I could see, just from skimming the first chapter that it was shallow trash written by someone with only a superficial knowledge of the subject. How did people fall for this? It was just another example of the enshittification of everything, in this case of evolutionary science.
She doesn’t hate the book, though. She’s just correcting all the petty and annoying mistakes in a book that, so far, is sort of generally true. That’s a useful service.
Personally, I couldn’t bear reading the book, but it’s worth reading the Dunsworth commentaries.
In October 2024 Harai’s book “Nexus” came out. I was mildly interested and then I read an interview with Harai where he was asked about his views on AI. In his answers he claimed that AlphaGo’s victory over the Go champion Lee Sedol by using unusual moves was a sign of creative intelligence. To me, that was an indication tha Harari doesn’t know much about AI and had no idea how it works. Money saved.
Imagine if he had bothered to have a professional read it before he sent it to the publisher. I mean, I have a professional check my taxes first, how hard can it be?
@1 — Harari makes it clear that he does not equate creative intelligence with consciousness. What he says about AlphaGo is correct within his definition of the term. He’s generally on firmer ground in that book because it’s essentially about history, which is his field, and not evolution or biology.