Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21^st Century

Author: Samuel Peterson

Date Published
2022 - 08 - 18 ISO 8601
77 - 08 - 18 PB

Every year my pappy distributes a book during Christmas for those of his progeny who request it. The book for the year 2021 was "A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21^st Century", by Drs Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.

I think this book is best understood as a self-help book, in which a sort of luddite social-conservatism is preached by a pair of anarcho-communists. If that sounds confusing, you're correct. The central thesis is that humanity is heading headlong into disaster through a combination of hyper-novelty, and our own disregard for our limited capacity to adapt to this change. Another key point to the book is that Bret and Heather know how to stop our impending doom.

About the Bret and Heather

A brief introduction to the authors is in order. Bret Weinstein's notoriety is, I think, chiefly due to his involvement in an episode of student revolt in a small liberal arts school called "Evergreen State College". Wikipedia's summary of the event is here, and you can find a bunch of videos and accounts of the incident on YouTube. Long story short is that he was defenestratated for saying that pressuring white people to stay off campus for a day was kind of racist.

Now he and his wife are public intellectuals running a podcast and scraping together a living from people who are concerned about the capture of much of academia by identity politics. While they themselves in many ways are radical leftists, They appear to have a right-leaning audience and I think this is down to two reasons:

• Given their history, and the fact that they live in Portland, they focus on the kind of craziness that manifests itself in universities and the west coast -- which skews to the left.
• They also have a knee-jerk distrust of the statements and motives of conventional authorities/narratives. This trend takes them into kooky conspiracy-theorist territory. In today's media landscape, this will attract a more right-wing audience, particularly if one also takes the anti-covid-vaccination stance, which they have.

So now they decided to impart their wisdom to the rest of the world. I'm sure many people will like the book, but before I get too much into my own (mostly negative) opinions about it, I would still encourage you to buy the book. It's currently $14 on the kindle, and I love the idea of these weirdos having an audience.

My thoughts on the book

The basic point of the book is the following proposition: "Hey, the world is complicated, and a single new idea or technology can have any number of unforeseen consequences. So be careful before jumping into a brave new world." Sounds like reasonable advice. You can take that perspective too far if you focus too much on negatives, however. Consider the case of artificial lighting: Sure, it does lead to less sleep, especially if you don't take steps to dim lights toward bedtime... But to conclude that the light-bulb is just a modern folly is extreme. Thanks, but I'll keep the lights on, and I will use LEDs: the net trade-offs are clearly positive.

The perspective of authors is a perplexing mixture of risk-aversion and recklessness. One example would be that they on the one hand suggest not using things like SSRIs for depression because they might do things you don't want; at the same time they recommend not going to a doctors for "minor" bone fractures because casts delay healing. On the first point, fine SSRIs might be overprescribed, but it's hardly like their effects are unknown. But on the second point, it seems reckless to trust your own judgment about what constitutes a minor bone fracture. It is the case (as is mentioned in the book) that surgical intervention is necessary in the case of bad fractures, and failure to get proper medical attention in time can result in permanent disfigurement. It seems silly to risk misdiagnosis of severity just to potentially shave a couple of weeks off of recovery time.

Lastly there is a severe lack of vision in the book, which I will get back to when I discuss the final chapter.

Themes

The theme of the book is that the world is indeed falling apart due to what the authors call hyper-novelty, which is to say that the realities of life are changing so fast that due to new technologies that our bodies and even our cultures are not able to keep up. We are therefore becoming less and less suited to the environments we are creating.

Many new cultural phenomena springing up, which could be seen as experiments in social change are vigorously (and for the most part effectively) criticized. These include:

• The extreme sheltering of children from risk and responsibility.
• The over-metricized nature of primary schooling.
• The embrace of non-monogamous pairing as the norm (or at least a non-stigmatized option)
• The pervasive adoption of online social media.
• The willful dismissal of the notion that (statistically speaking) men and women differ in meaningful ways.

There is also a very pessimistic theme implied in the book. The authors urge children to be raised in luddite manner, and to be sheltered from the pathologies of life on the network. In addition to that, many practices from non WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) cultures (and more broadly, non-industrialized) are lauded as salutary and worthy of adoption. I must conclude then that the authors believe that trying to adapt to modernity is a fools' errand because it likely will be crashing down in about 20 years time.

Where the book is good

Bret and Heather's background in evolutionary biology gives them a great vantage point to talk about mating strategies. In particular, there is a great evolutionary analysis of the rewards and incentives involved in the three main classes of mating strategies:

• Monogamy -- Where one male and one female mate with each other exclusively (or are expected to).
• Polygamy/Polyandry -- Where one male/female has exclusive mating access to multiple females/males.
• Promiscuity -- Where both females and males partake in non-exclusive mating with multiple partners.

Examples of all of these systems exist. The most common being monogamy and polygamy. I think looking at behavior from an evolutionary lens is appropriate here, since you are dealing with very primal motivations. The authors make a strong case for monogamy as the more socially healthy norm than the other strategies. The basic point is that this is the norm which incentivizes men the most to participate in child-rearing, as well as providing the largest amount of men with mating opportunities (which is a good way of curbing violence and chaos).

You might look at the above paragraph with indignation: "why should we have make a system which seems focused on male considerations? Is this just some more self-serving patriarchal trick?" The answer is no to the second question, and as for the first, be assured that if you are a woman who wants children, you want males males to participate. Otherwise, you're doing it yourself.

When discussing why there are differences between male and female mammals, you need to start with their different experiences in the realm of reproduction. The differences in the evolutionary incentives are so stark that they cannot help produce profound differences in how the two sexes behave. It would do the reader well to consider the experience of each sex to see what I mean. Also, for the sake of this argument we are talking about prehistoric times, since we are dealing with the evolutionary incentives that have molded our behavior over millions of years. Specifically that means we are restricting our analysis to the following constraints:

• Relatively short life-span
• Relatively high infant and child mortality
• Relatively high probability of women dying in child-birth
• Relatively high probability of dying violently, especially males

With that out of the way, let us look at reproduction from the vantage point of men and women. Also let us make clear that we are ignoring fairness, morals or any other modern nonsense. We are just talking about what is more likely to produce viable offspring.

If you are a woman, you can have 20 kids, tops. Probably less, because you'd probably die by child 10 when you're 30. Also, in order to be relevant evolutionarily speaking, you need to create at least more than two (and this is the logic of aggregates, so 2.5 is fine) who will live long enough to reproduce and be viable. This means you probably need to have somewhere between four to six children just to break even. With those realities, you will have to be totally committed to your children if you are to have any chance of success -- regardless of what sort of mating strategy is adopted by you.

If you are a man, you can father thousands. You probably won't father any, but if you're lucky enough to not get murdered, you have a good chance of living to 50, potentially breeding the whole time since gestation and birth is of no threat to you. With those realities, you have way fewer incentives to invest much at all on any single child. If it is socially acceptable to do so (i.e. if there are no significant social penalties), you have all the incentive in the world to spread your seed far and wide. Preferably in the form of a harem, so you can be more certain of paternity. Where would these women come from? Either you are a chief and can out-compete your fellow males socially, or you can steal them in war.

Unless constrained by social forces, the incentives presented to males clearly points in the direction of winner-takes-all nastiness. A way of mitigating this selective pressure is to institute social pressures which restrict the mating opportunities available to males. This would make any single child of a man's far more valuable to him, and would incentivise his participation in the rearing of this child.

So what sort of social pressures do the four main strategies provide?

Polygamy

This system just embraces the evolutionary implications of mammalian biology. Not only will this dis-incentivise males from participating in child-rearing, but it will be also be tyrannical, as the rich and powerful will dominate the mating market, squeezing many males into the category of incels who currently don't fit that description. Males would therefore be more likely to be violent, and less interested in either the welfare of women or children.

Polyandry

If it's the females who have multiple consorts, then that would constrain the amount of children any single male might have. That could well suppress some of the social problems inhererent in Polygamy. There is a glaring shortcoming however. This system fails to correct for another disincentive to male child-rearing -- the problem of uncertainty in parentage.

Promiscuity

This is potentially the worst system for reigning in the anti-social tendency of males. With polygamy, you at least have a situation where a male can be reasonably sure that a majority of his consort's children are his. That gives him at least some reason to care about his offspring. With promiscuity, you can expect virtually no interest in children from men. This would leave the entirety of child-rearing to females.

Monogamy

Here we see the most effective means of inducing male participation in family life. If social pressures are such that a male is likely only to father roughly the same amount of children as a female can, and he is given some degree of certainty of parentage, his participation in child-rearing makes sense. The main winner in this arrangement are females, at least the ones who have children which makes up the majority. Another winner are a large number of males who would under a different system be out-competed for mates.

It should also be noted that even with a monogamous norm, extramarital relations occur. It's also true that males are far more likely to break monogamous promises. On top of that penalties for women have historically been far harsher for breaking these norms. Given that, it is understandable that feminists view monogamy in a cynical manner. However, alternatives to this arrangement run into a bunch of other problems that don't help women. Put another way: as bad as males behave under a monogamous system, it's about as good as they are ever going to behave -- until we can tweak our design reliably, that is.

Mating in the 21^st century

Society is flirting with promiscuity under the name of polyamory at the moment. Those that espouse it emphasise the importance of honesty and consent with their partners. Sexual relations before marriage with multiple partners is the norm. Opting out of marriage altogether is also increasingly common and virtually without stigma. It is a wildly different world regarding sexuality than existed at the turn of the 20^th century.

There shouldn't be any surprise that experiments in sexual mores might follow the advent of effective contraception. Sexual intercourse without socially enforced guarantees of support was most unwise when pregnancy was impossible to control. To me it is obvious that this great risk associated with sex was the main reason why sexual mores were far more strict a couple of generations ago.

Bret and Heather rightly point out, however that while a loose attitude toward sex itself might confer far fewer risks to females, it does not change the basic incentives that males face in a promiscuous society. This is all fine and well for women who don't want kids, but for the majority who do want kids, an externality of a more promiscuous society is a greater difficulty in finding men willing to assist in child rearing.

I wonder what will become of mating norms in the future. I think the authors are correct that a monogamous society is still in the interest of women, especially since there is a relatively narrow window of time in which children are most readily birthed and raised. On the other hand, imagine a future where not only is pregnancy easy to control, but healthy lifespans are greatly or even indefinitely increased. I think a consequence of an extremely prolonged healthy lifespan would be a dramatic decrease in the rate of childbirth, an increase in the average age of child-bearing, an increase in the time-interval between children, and a decrease in the amount of people rearing children at any one time (although it might make the fertility rate increase). In such an environment who knows what will be the social norms which are most adaptive. Robert Heinlein's books that explored longevity figured that marriages would be ephemeral arrangements, Kim Stanely Robinson envisaged temporary communes for child-rearing. Whatever the consequences, it would probably reflect a basic reality: the strain of child-rearing would likely be far less intense.

The point of the above pondering is just to acknowledge the basic fact: changing capabilities leads to social experimentation. It seems obvious that effective contraception would cause a questioning of mating norms even if we are still in a position where those norms serve us well. On the other hand these experimentations need to be subject to criticism, which Bret and Heather do quite well.

Fundamental Flaws

This book vastly underestimates the human capacity for novelty in my opinion. It does this because it weights too much of what makes us who we are on our biology, when in fact we are not just pieces of meat. As Yoda said in "The Empire Strikes Back"

Illuminous being are we, not this [pinching Luke Skywalker's arm] crude matter.

What do I mean by this? Observe the following: All life, its forms, behaviors, abilities is a product of some sort of knowledge. As far as we can tell, most species on this planet store this information genetically, with some birds and mammals offloading some of this knowledge in the form of very crude memes. Using the length of the human genome as an example of the order of size of generic organism's genome, we are looking at ~1 gigabyte of data which a typical organism has access to. (Note, this crude estimate is likely a gross over-estimate as much of the genetic code's purpose is difficult to identify and may well be meaningless)

Humans, by contrast, may collectively have exabytes of knowledge at their disposal. What's more, much of this is explanatory knowledge -- knowledge which would not likely be created by means of random genetic mutation.

We are fundamentally different from other animals. I shall digress here and address a related pet-peeve of mine regarding how humans are often described -- in this book and in others. We are not generalists, or general specialists. We are hyper-specialized. As animals, we are garbage at pretty much everything except in our ability to interact with information. I shall abuse a metaphor here: computer science has a notion of a finite state machine (one that can compute a finite set of computable functions), and a turing-complete machine (one that can compute every computable function).

One way to make a turing complete machine is to take a finite state machine which reads instructions from an array of memory and writes to memory. If a finite state machine is designed to handle an appropriate set of instructions, and assuming an infinite array of memory, this arrangement is turing complete, and we would call the instructions on the array of memory a program. Also worth note is that the behavior of this system is often best understood by examination of the contents of the program rather than the finite state machine.

This gets me back to what humans are. Our relationship with the knowledge that we create is analogous to the finite state machines' relationship with the infinite array of memory. We have some hardwired behaviors in our genes; probably a fair amount of our mating behaviours and inclination toward violence is driven by our genetics; We are also programmed to ingest, transform, and transmit information. We are capable of generating the extra-corporeal information at such a rate that its volume far surpasses what our genes provide.

My point is that our capacity for knowledge generation is universal. Concerns about hyper-novelty, which is the main focus of the book, are unwarranted in my opinion. There are solutions to the problem which novelty creates. In cases where these solutions have not been found, so-called hyper-novelty should be addressed with still more novelty.

On medicine

The chapter regarding medicine merits its own section here. I think a faithful distillation of the authors' attitudes about western medicine is thus: "Medicine is a scam by psychopaths masquerading as scientists trying to sell you a pill".

They state that modern medicine is reductionist to the point of not following the scientific method, and instead just pretending at it. Doctors will jump to simple guesses about a patient's condition, and will not humor preferences to avoid whatever pill is prescribed. My rebuttal to their critique is as follows:

There is too much progress in areas such as genetic therapies to support the claim that we are just faking scientific progress. Recent examples are: MRNA vaccines, these cancer treatments, and, gene therapy for colorblindness. Arguments that we are not getting a better understanding of how bodies work and how we can apply that knowledge are not that convincing.

That's not to say there is nothing to the criticisms leveled at medicine. I just think they misdiagnose the core issue: There is a difference between medical research and medical practice. In the practice of medicine, doctors have to satisfy their patient's desire to have something done to help them on a paucity of data and time.

Something should be said of Bret and Heather's record of advocating against the MRNA vaccines for the Covid 19 pandemic. Maybe they do know more than me, but from my vantage point, it looks like the following:

• The vaccines developed under the aegis of operation Warp Speed are as they have been described by various public health agencies in the US: they are far safer than contracting the virus, and that they dramatically reduce the impact of Covid 19 infection
• They may be right that on the issue of MRNA vaccines I am just a sheep, but after listening to a fair amount of their podcasts, it is clear that Bret and Heather have a strong contrarian impulse.

The Final Chapter

The Hunter Gatherer's guide to the 21^st century ends with a prescription for humanity. The way the authors see it, Humanity flourishes by exploring frontiers. I'll directly quote them on their definitions of frontiers here; I think they say much about their attitudes.

Geographic frontiers are what we tend to think of when frontiers are invoked: the vast unspoiled vistas, the abundant and yet uncounted resources. All of the New World -- North and South America, the Caribbean, and every island near the coasts -- was a vast geographic frontier for the Beringians. The frontier of the New World was fractal, so the descendants of the first Americans discovered even more: To the Ahwahneechee Indians, Yosemite Valley was a geographic frontier. To the Taino, the Caribbean was a geographic frontier. To the Selk'nam people of the far sourthern Chile, Tierra del Fuego was a geographic frontier.

Technological frontiers are moments when innovation allows a human population to make more, or do more, or grow more, than they did before the innovation occurred. Every human culture that has terraced hillsides, decreasing runoff and increasing crop production, was confronting technological frontiers -- from the Inca in the Andes to the Malagasy on the Haut plateau of Madagascar. The first farmers in China, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica were doing so, and the first ceramicists -- who dug clay, formed it into useful shapes, and fired it in coals -- were doing so as well.

Finally, there are transfers of resource frontiers. Unlike geographic and technological frontiers, transfer of resource frontiers are inherently a form of theft. When people from the Old World came across the Atlantic and landed in the New World, they may have at first imagined that they had stumbled upon a vast geographic frontier, but they hadn't. In 1491, the New World is estimated to have had between fifty million and one hundred million people in it, with uncountable distinct cultures and languages. Some people were living in city-states, amongst astronomers, craftsmen, and scribes; others as hunter-gatherers. To Francisco Pizarro, the Inca Empire was a transfer of resource frontier -- and once the Zaparos were thus weakened, their longtime competitors, the Huaorani, moved in as well. In modern times, transfer of resource frontiers are everywhere: oil drilling, fracking and logging in ancestral lands; predatory lending, as with subprime mortgages and much student debt; the Holocaust. One symptom of transfer of resource frontiers is tyranny.

Clearly we see what the authors' thoughts are about the morality of transfer of resource frontiers (which weirdly includes something that would otherwise be called the trading of natural resources through voluntary exchange... you know, theft). Geographic frontiers are written off as fully depleted, and technological frontiers are dismissed as being limited (as in: for any specific technology there are theoretical limits) and unreliable. So the author advocates for exploring a "fourth frontier", a fuzzy notion of a new framework in which to organize peoples lives which would satisfy humanity's innate need for exploration, and which would be sustainable (precisely what is meant by sustainable is left unclear).

This final chapter is the clearest example of what I think is the authors' principle deficiency: a lack of vision. Take for example the case of geographic frontiers. The universe is a big place; hell the solar system is big place, and still largely unexplored. Writing off extra-terrestrial frontiers as a suitable outlet for human energies is just shameful resignation in the face of clearly surmountable difficulties. Indeed, I would make the claim that after accounting for our technological capabilities compared with those of neolithic peoples on the austronesia, the exploration of the mid-pacific islands seems at least at the same order of difficulty as the exploration of the solar system today, and yet it was done ~3500 years ago.

Technological progress is written off for a strange reason: that you can only take a certain technology so far. The specific example given regarding this limitation is that Moore's law will eventually stop, and might have already. Sure enough, any given technology has limitations, as well as diminishing returns to refinement. What this detraction misses is that as a particular technology matures, it potentially opens up many more frontiers of expansion. Take modern computation as a counter example to the authors' pessimistic perspective. The development of computational power and computer science over the past 70 years have enabled many new capabilities which are just in their infancy. To name just a few:

• Computational genomics: a bunch of new capabilities are coming into their own. Alpha Fold being a high-profile instance of this, but there are many more. The ability of making high-fidelity simulations of novel proteins seems plausible in the nearish future, perhaps enabling humans to natural selection as a generator of genetic knowledge.
• Autonomous control systems: The possibilities of autonomous driving are enormous. Also, automated control plays a significant role in reusable rocket vehicles (a development which could in open vast frontiers in its own right). Modern computers and computational techniques have made these capabilities far more developed.
• Quantum computation: I recently purchased a book on quantum computation published in 2010. In the forward, the stated record for the number of qubits put into an entangled state was 2. here is an example of a 127 qubit quantum computer.

There a bunch of other nascent technologies which our maturing classical computational capacities have enabled. My point here is that pushing technological frontiers tends to expose new frontiers to explore. Forgetting about the specific domain of computational technology, a more general response to Bret and Heather is in order: If you look around today and see a shortage of frontiers, you're eyes are closed.

The best answer I am aware of the to the final chapter of "Hunter Gatherers Guide" is the final chapter of David Deutsch's "Beginning of Infinity" entitled Unsustainable. The thesis there is that because of fallibility, sustainability means stasis and eventual death. We should consider ourselves fortunate that we will always be wrong about something as this gives us a never-ending set of problems to solve. Also worth noting that while the "Hunter Gatherer's Guide" seems to be primarily concerned with materialistic frontiers -- those directly pertaining to the acquisition of wealth or territory, the "Beginning of Infinity" is far more expansive. Problems relating to all sorts of things, like beauty, morals, taste all are up for solutions. Deutsch's vision presents us with all an inexhaustible set of frontiers to explore -- no vague neo-marxist utopia required.

The ethos of the enlightenment may well be this fourth frontier which Bret and Heather are trying to grasp.