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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"...he doesn’t directly acknowledge that farming reduced life quality, via wars, slavery, nutrition constraints, etc..."

He does, actually, but in proper fashion...which is to say, he reminds those of us who have bought into the theories of Sahlins et al. that warfare, slavery and nutrition constraints predate farming; he accurately cites the case of the native peoples of the northwest coast of north america, for instance, who had slavery, class structures and warfare without agriculture. Farming might have brought these things to a more acute state in regions where it emerged, but as Ridley notes, it brought far greater benefits, and it is those societies which eventually emerged from this agricultural backdrop which eliminated slavery, endemic warfare and overcame nutritional constraints...in short, you're critique is wrong on this point. Indeed, it misses one of the main points of the book.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

It sounds like Karl is saying the same thing that Hanson has said a number of times.http://www.overcomingbias.c...The number of possible ideas that can be had is limited by the number of possible configurations of the universe. The same reason I gave for why the universe can only last a finite amount of "time" (apologies for bringing that up since you don't care for the argument, but other readers might be interested).

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