Dominik Lukeš

Two thoughts. 

1. The 10x productivity number is (as you say) only for specific tasks  - and even for core tasks, anything that can be sped up by a factor of 10 is unlikely to be more than 50% of the job - and probably much less. This is because pretty much nobody does the core thing they do more than about 70% of the time. And 10% time savings across ten tasks does not add up to 100% saving.
2. But I think you underestimate how useful "vibecoding" has become for many people with agent tools. So, instead you're getting expansion and not replacement. People with existing codebases are getting small productivity increases, people who

"the first book-length work of ethnography I’ve read"

Somewhat uncharitably, I'd suggest that you still have the first work of ethnography to read. I think the key feature of any ethnography since about 1920 is the search for meaning rather than superficial features of the observed. It's not what sense the observation (no matter how accurate) makes to you, it's about what sense it makes to those described.

The question of whether you can generalise these observations is really the wrong one to ask in this sense. The things Semyonova describes are commonly found across cultures but they do not necessarily  'mean what you think they mean'. You should really be asking, can I... (read 763 more words →)

Thanks for these questions. I think Restall's and Thorton's books will answer these adequately. But Sharman's 'Empires of the weak' is even more forceful in this thesis.

However, Scott's 'Against the grain' is also an important element. Essentially he argues against the conflation of the civilisations with buildings and recorded institutions with 'nations' in today's sense. Most people were not controlled by them until much later. So while the 'silver mines' were indeed hell on Earth, they represented a sliver of the population. Cortes and Pizarro managed to destroy relatively new and hugely unpopular empires by relying on local allies (and they were learning from each other in that). They achieved... (read more)

Perhaps, I should have phrased that differently. In the 1800s, the historiography was not so much tendentious as unreflective. The books I list certainly have a point of view. But they are aware of that point of view and do not hide under "primarily trying to recount events". Because any recounting involves selection and emphasis and selection is always personal (ie epistemology is ethics). The books I list point out the gaps in those accounts and offer a way in which we could think of the past with those gaps filled in (and perhaps choosing other things for the gaps).

For example, when you say something like "Europeans conquered the Americas... (read more)