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Patrick Wyman

@patrickwyman.bsky.social

18K followers 440 following 1.9K posts

Pod: Tides of History, currently covering the Iron Age. Book: "The Verge," on the world around 1500. Coming soon: “Lost Worlds,” on prehistory. pwymanusc at gmail.

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 13d

Today's the big day, friends - my new book, Lost Worlds: The Rise and Fall of Human Societies from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age, is available for preorder! Smash that link and purchase from your retailer of choice, if that's the kind of thing you're into. www.harpercollins.com/products/los...

Lost Worlds

The creator of the hit podcast Tides of History offers a new look at humanity’s deep past, showing us how our world was built not by inevitability, but by t...

www.harpercollins.com

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 2h

Very much same on Billups, but he now has exactly the personnel he wants, so if he can't make them grow and gel that's on him

Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 3h

I'm just lucky I never bought a Durant Suns jersey. Got one on sale for my son, though

Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 3h

I'm never going to shut up about Yang Hansen, so consider yourself warned

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 3h

One of the things I miss most about old Twitter is the sports community, and I can't wait to get deeper into #nbasky this season

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Reposted by Patrick Wyman

Asher Hellbein @asherelbein.bsky.social · 17h

When did big multicellular organisms evolve — and how many times did it happen? In my first big print feature for @sciam.bsky.social, I wrote about *extremely* controversial 2.1 billion year old specimens from the Francevillain, and the question of how to recognize life on a basically alien planet

These Enigmatic ‘Fossils’ Could Rewrite the History of Life on Earth

Controversial evidence hints that complex life might have emerged hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought—and possibly more than once

www.scientificamerican.com

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

These aren't consumer-facing products and trying to sell them as such is business malpractice, even if the underlying technology really does have world-changing potential at some point in the future

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

At some point, someone will do cool stuff with AI image generators, just like LLMs can in fact do some really interesting and powerful things. None of these are that cool thing and I have yet to see one, just like OpenAI and its competitors aren't going to survive to see the cool LLM stuff.

Scientific American @sciam.bsky.social · 2d

Despite early, and familiar, copyright growing pains, Sora may be the prelude to AI-generated on-demand TV and movies

Want to See Marilyn Monroe in Game of Thrones? AI Could Make It Soon

Despite early, and familiar, copyright growing pains, Sora may be the prelude to AI-generated on-demand TV and movies

www.scientificamerican.com

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

There's a big-picture objection to the book's overall thesis - why did we all end up here if we have all these options? - that I'm mostly on board with. The smaller critiques largely (IMO) come from people who don't know the material well enough for their objections to carry weight.

Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

It's bad on every level - the research is slapdash, cited texts don't say what the authors think they do, the thesis is shoehorned into evidence that doesn't support it, and they repeatedly get basic facts wrong.

Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

I went and looked at those spots, and where I knew the underlying scholarship, it seemed more like reasonable differences of interpretation than anything else.

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

Big part of the reason I spent five years writing "Lost Worlds"

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

I'm gonna say that "Why Nations Fail" is worse because it's so widely praised and read by non-specialists in economic history - Acemoglu and Robinson won a Nobel!

Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

My reading-between-the-lines take (and I know some of the folks who HATE the book reasonably well) is that it's mostly down to Graeber being personally unpleasant to a lot of them at some point in the decades before his death. They're looking for a reason to hate it.

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

I used his dissertation-turned-first book extensively for "The Verge" chapter on Gotz von Berlichingen. It's good scholarship.

Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

Don't even get me started on "Why Nations Fail," the worst book I've ever read.

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

"Sapiens" is the latter. So is everything by Niall Ferguson. Contrast that with Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything": You might disagree with its arguments (I do in places!) but you can't doubt the depth and care of the research.

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

Popular books by famous academics fall into two categories: 1) a fascinating journey through someone's life work where it's obvious they've been thinking about it for decades; and 2) a shoddy thesis built atop research done by grad assistants while the writer is praised for their erudition

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 1d

The fundamental problem with "Sapiens" is that Harari doesn't actually know the scholarship he's haphazardly citing. He's a historian of early modernity - his first book was on Renaissance military memoirs - and I'd bet he had grad students doing most of the research for "Sapiens."

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 1d

"Sapiens" is so normal for the first 70,000 years of human history but then goes absolutely buckwild as soon as it gets to colonialism

Had the Aztecs and Incas shown a bit more interest in the world surrounding them - and had they known what the Spaniards had done to their neighbours - they might have resisted the Spanish conquest more keenly and successfully.

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Reposted by Patrick Wyman

The Ass is the father of the legs @internethippo.bsky.social · 1d

Watching people being brutalized by the state, secure in the knowledge that I'm safe because I don't do anything wrong. And the best part? The state can't suddenly and arbitrarily redefine what "wrong" means

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 2d

Oxford University Press has been trying to do a volume (same series as Battle Cry) on pre-Revolution North America for a long time - one of my old professors, Peter Mancall, has been working on it - but it's never quite come together, per my understanding

Reposted by Patrick Wyman

Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 2d

Big news, friends: on December 3rd, I'll be launching a brand-new history show, "Past Lives." Every episode focuses on the life of a real person from history and tries to make sense of their experiences and their world. There will be weekly scripted episodes and tons of bonus content on Patreon.

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 2d

Two of my favorite books - 1491 is getting a bit dated now as work continues in the field, but its main theses hold up just fine, and it's still worth a read. It's been longer since I read 1493.

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 2d

Not a bad way to understand him - he was by all accounts pretty good at working a room, particularly when his targets weren't versed in his grift

Reposted by Patrick Wyman

Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 2d

"The Verge," Patrick's great book on the era of financialization that made this all possible, rules, and in no small part because of how clear he is about the way that everything from purgatory to violence work was not just monetized, but financialized www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/patri...

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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 2d

Not by the Inquisition, by his own subordinates!

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