Talks at Google
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2018–2019
59:52 · 40K views · Mar 8, 2016
Joseph Henrich's Talks at Google presentation of his book. He argues that human success comes from collective brains and cultural learning across generations rather than individual intelligence.
Cited to support the view that human progress comes from networks and social learning.
4 comments from Hacker News
That is true for any discovery after the stone hand ax. A "true" discovery that can be ascribed to one person 100% instead of to a network of people working jointly in space and time (the dead are involved too!) needs that person to work without using knowledge as well as any tools created by others (in space as well as in time). Humanity is more like a brain - the secret of our success is in the connections between us (again, in space as well as in time). My own conclusion, but I found this in support: this video (" Henrich is professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. ") I also recommend this - and please ignore which concrete product was more or less randomly chosen, it does no matter: "What Coke Contains" - [LINK] > The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. ... Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. ---- Same in business. Each time you hear about an extremely well-paid executive or a "self-made(!!?) billionaire" remind yourself that those people's main "accomplishment" is to live today. How much of the network effects (of the human network
There is more to it - the environment, and networking effects (so., the environment, which causes or prevents them). Only some of the human civilizations went all the way to the Internet, we still have people living as hunter/gatherers even today. So the advancement does not come from "inside" alone. In any case, I like to think of humanity more like a brain, human = neuron. There are huge differences, for example, the human network also extends deep in time , not just in space (we manage to "network" with our ancestors, one-way from them to us, they gave us knowledge as well as all their tools). My point is "humanity" to me is a network effect. Place any modern human, adult or baby, in an prehistoric setting (20,000 years ago). Even if you gave them, let's say, an iPad-like device with all knowledge we have as of now, they would still not be able to do anything - because without the tools it would take quite some time to bootstrap. So "humanity" really is a lot - a lot - more than the sum of all humans, it's a giant ecosystem on its own. I think depending on the environment you can have creatures with far higher intelligence than the average human and they still won't come up with modern technology. I think individual intelligence is clearly necessary and beneficial but overrated, that network effects are the main contributor, and that they don't appear automatically. We still have plenty of human societies right here and now that seem to be stuck. Here's a Google Talk I onc
if bots can produce 'worthy set of opinions' we would be totally useless Are you useless because other people write comments? What is the difference between it being a biological human and an artificial human - should we ever get that far? Apart from quality and relevance considerations I'm reminded of the situation where people open businesses that already exist, or people try to get jobs despite other people existing that are actually better. For example, why doesn't BMW stop producing cars, after all, there's Mercedes-Benz (and very close too), or vice versa. Or why is there yet another bakery. Or why do I try to get that programming job and don't even mind to admit that I'm probably not even among the best 1% of people for that particular job. Because none of that matters. My advantage in the last case is I'm here (interviewing) while those other people are not. Same with the bakery and the car makers. The existence of something else isn't a reason unless there is a direct impact. Even if we ever make something that is far more intelligent than us. Still no reason to expect that that new thing is going to murder each and everyone. We don't murder each and every creature that is orders of magnitude less intelligent than us (the extinction event that we started notwithstanding, that's a side effect because of limited space on the planet). We don't murder our own less intelligent members of society either. To extend on the last point, the real human intelligence is not as mu
In the book, The Secret of our Success, Joseph Henrich offers a perspective of cultural inheritance from evolutionary biology. How do children determine who to pay attention to? who to learn from? 1. Skill / Competence ("whose arrows hit the target?") 2. Success ("who brings back the big prey?") 3. Prestige (cues of attention, deference) - use what other people are doing - they are worthy of paying attention to 4. Age (ie, scaffold to incrementally experience) 5. Self-similarity - what might be useful to you later? - males copy males, females copy females, etc this video (19:22)