The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.
Interpretation
Human invention accelerates in diverse, competitive societies, while cultural loss decreases.
This quote by Jared Diamond highlights the relationship between human innovation and cultural dynamics, suggesting that societies that experience competition and interaction with others tend to invent more rapidly and preserve their cultural heritage more effectively. When multiple societies coexist and interact, they inspire and challenge each other, leading to greater technological advancements while reducing the risk of losing cultural practices.
In practice
In a speech about technological advancements at a conference, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of cultural diversity.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future.
Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world's pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn't humane.
The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said.
As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.
Bullhorns are overrated: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value.
There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only is it creative, but it's incredibly absorbing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.