What Came First: Big Gods or Big Societies? Round Two
November 22, 2019
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In my previous post, Historians and Historical Databases, I discussed how the Seshat Databank would be impossible without a close collaboration with historians and other humanities scholars. Today I want to give a specific example of how this collaboration works. For those who have no
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Historians and Historical Databases
November 13, 2019
In recent days there was much discussion by historians on Twitter of the proper and improper uses of historical knowledge in testing social science theories. It was initially prompted by the publication of a Science article last week on historical Church exposure and global psychologi
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A History of the Near Future: What history tells us about our Age of Discord
November 06, 2019
Last week I visited Centre for Complex Systems Studies (CCSS) in Utrecht, where I gave a talk about my research results and plans for the Ages of Discord project. Several people on Twitter asked to see the slides, and so I am posting them on this blog. First, here’s an abstract
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The Puzzle of Neolithic Cycles: the Strange Rise and Collapse of Tripolye Mega-Settlements
October 06, 2019
As the readers of this blog know, a big chunk of my research focuses on why complex societies go through cycles of alternating internally peaceful, or integrative, phases and turbulent, or disintegrative periods. In all past state-level societies, for which we have decent data, we fin
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Why Theory Is Important: Responding to two reviews by Scott Alexander
September 05, 2019
Scott Alexander wrote two reviews of my work on the structural-demographic theory: Book Review: Secular Cycles and Book Review: Ages of Discord. The first one, on Secular Cycles, is quite positive, but the tone of the second review is a bit uneven–generally positive, but with so
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The Structural-Demographic Roots of the UK Crisis
July 14, 2019
I am often asked, after my talks or on social media, to pass a judgment on the stability, or lack of it, of a particular country. For example, looking across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, one sees a lot of parallels with the crisis we are currently living through in the US. The
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Impressions of China
June 15, 2019
I just came back from a trip to China, during which I and two friends traveled along the section of the Silk Route that passes through PRC. We started in Luoyang, then went to Xian, made three stops in the Gansu corridor, and finally reached Turpan and Urumqi in Xinjiang. Our main int
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They Call It “Coding Errors”?
May 04, 2019
Our recent article in Nature, Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history has been generally very well received, but this week we got slammed with two critical articles, both published as preprints on PsyArchive. It will take us some time to carefully evaluate t
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Do “Big Societies” Need “Big Gods”?
March 21, 2019
The scale at which humans cooperate expanded greatly over the last 10,000 years—from hundreds of people to hundreds of millions. One popular theory that explains this dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of human societies is known as the Big Gods hypothesis. The basic idea,
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