Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond

• If biological diseases could desire victories. Who is to say that cognitive ones cannot?
• Agriculture isn't particularly useful until one decides to settle down. Settling down allows you to gather food surplus. You can't gather food surplus as a hunter gatherer species. Because storage is useless when there is no one near to guard the storage.
• Food surplus is actually the first useful form of a currency. Wealth storage is a precursor to society.
  • When you have wealth storage a political elite can arise naturally. This leads to kings, organized religion, scribes etc. Once political elites arise the polity gets more complex.
  • More complex polities are better at raging war and using resources then less complex polities.
    • This is primarily because full time specialization is possible.
  • I am using complex here because that is what Jared Diamond uses in the book. I think organized would be a better word to describe this property though. Since bureaucracy can get out of control.
• Radiocarbon dating that was done prior to the 1980s required grams of carbon. Since most sites didn't contain grams of material to be carbon dated. Prior to 1980s carbon dating should generally be assumed to be highly inaccurate.
• Radiocarbon dating is problematic in general (See page 99) and should be taken with grains of kosher salt.

• Adoption of food production is an autocatalytic process.

• The Anna Karenina principle (named after Leo Tolstoy's novel) is as follows:

• X Y's are all alike; every Z Y is Z in it's own way.
• Where X is a positive adjective and Z is the negative equivalent of that adjective. Y is a thing that makes sense for X and Z to apply to.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

• Most animals are really bad for domestication. It is a miracle that Eurasia had domesticable animals to begin with. Even with modern technology we have failed to domesticate undomesticated animals.
• The spreading speed of an infection can be defined as spread = new_infected/original_patient.
• Microbes do not want to kill their hosts. It is an accident of trying to spread too harshly. It's more manslaughter and less homicide.
• I surely did not expect a categorization of germs in this book. Jared Diamond provides one anyway.
  • Passives: salmonella, trichinosis, anisakis, kuru.
  • Hitchhikers: malaria, plague, typhus, sleeping sickness, syphilis, AIDS, rubella.
  • Actives: syphilis, small-pox, influenza, common cold, whooping cough, cholera, rabies, hookworms, schistosomes.
• In Sumerian both arrow and life are pronounced "ti" (no actual phonemic inscription was provided) thus the ideograph for arrow ends up referring to arrow or life. In order to avoid confusion you would invent determinatives, thus decisive intonation.
  • You can also use this to make it so you can spell more phonetically. If English were to have a ideography you could spell belief (which can't have it's own ideograph (because it is abstract) by using the ideographs for bee and leaf thus bee-leaf which sounds like belief when read.
• The ways that a technology would transmission over to a different polity lies on a spectrum. On one end lies "blueprint copying" and on the other end lies "idea diffusion".
  • Where "blueprint copying" is learning how the technology was made and remaking it in that way in the same manner.
  • Where "idea diffusion" is knowing the technology is possible and remaking it from basically scratch just with motivation.
• The Phaistos disk is the earliest printed document in history.
• Technological progress is a cumulative process. It does not happen by some heroic smart person. It happens on the shoulders of giants.
• Things are generally not invented to solve a problem. Usually something is invented just because, it may also turn out to solve a problem.
• Technological progress and invention from an autocatalytic process.
• How to become a kleptocrat:
  1. Disarm the population, arm the elite.
  2. Keep the masses happy by spending taxes in popular ways.
  3. Use your monopoly on force to promote happiness.
  4. Create an ideology/religion to justify your kleptocracy.
• No matter how much you hate bureaucracy, it is still a necessity in any complex system.

What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself. Understanding is more often used to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.

~ Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs & Steel

We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations for success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.

~ Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs & Steel

[I]nvention is often the mother of necessity, rather then vice versa.

~ Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs & Steel