13: The Secret of Success

Victor Wu
Reading Collaboration
1 min readNov 1, 2017

From Harari — Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

This is a weird chapter in that the author doesn’t really present new content. But he does comment on what he thinks is the correct approach to study history.

The author says that you cannot predict history. It is not deterministic. He says history is level two chaos. Level two means that history itself reacts to its own predictions, so you can never actually forecast history accurately. He illustrates with the thought experiment where if you can predict some negative event happening, you will take steps to prevent it from happening, and therefore, the event will not happen at all. This reminds me of all those time travel fallacies. In any case, it is important to understand this concept when studying history, that we are not too arrogant and pre-suppose and blame certain people or organizations for how events unfolded in human history.

The author also brings up memetics. This is a popular theory of how culture and information within humans spread. It’s curious why the author even brought this up. I found this chapter sort of weak. It didn’t really need to be here at all.

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