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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of HumanityBook

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

1 person

Holden Karnofsky
Co-founded GiveWell and led Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes, on the most important century and how to think about it.
disliked

All of the reviews - plus this Twitter thread by Brad DeLong - echoed the theme that the book is thinly cited and that many of its claims seem overstated or unsupported. That makes it a tough sell for me, as I’m not excited to read 500 pages of claims that aren’t particularly likely to hold up once I dig in and check them out.

A 'book non-review' explaining his decision not to read a prominent book, based on its first chapter and reviews.

cold-takes.com ↗·2022-01-20Wrong?

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

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The small bar beside a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The bar shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Full and green is recent. It drains, and turns amber and then grey, as the post gets older.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The bar is empty after about:

A striped bar means the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no bar.