I think this needs clarifying: the probability of getting industry conditional on already having agriculture may be more likely than the probability of getting agriculture in the first place, but as agriculture seems to be necessary for industry, the total likelihood of getting industry is almost certainly lower than that of getting agriculture (i.e. most of the difficulty in developing an industrial society may be in developing that preceding agricultural society).
Interesting point by Aidan. And yes, I interpreted it in the way Gavin’s comment implies it should be interpreted, partly because I think Jebari was implicitly speaking in those terms: likelihood of agriculture developing, conditional on something like anatomically modern humans existing in substantial numbers, vs likelihood of industry developing, conditional on the same thing plus on agriculture being in place.
A possible counterargument to Aidan’s idea: Maybe for some purposes the number of humans between one development and the next is more relevant than the number of years between them. That “metric” would presumably suggest the development of industry was either (a) more likely than the development of agriculture, but by a smaller margin than a focus on the number of years would suggest, or (b) less likely than the development of agriculture.
(I haven’t looked at the estimated cumulative population of humans pre-agriculture vs between agriculture and industry, so I don’t know whether this would end up suggesting (a) or (b). And in any case, our overall views should then of course also be influenced by a variety of other arguments and lines of evidence.)
I think this needs clarifying: the probability of getting industry conditional on already having agriculture may be more likely than the probability of getting agriculture in the first place, but as agriculture seems to be necessary for industry, the total likelihood of getting industry is almost certainly lower than that of getting agriculture (i.e. most of the difficulty in developing an industrial society may be in developing that preceding agricultural society).
Yep, agreed
Interesting point by Aidan. And yes, I interpreted it in the way Gavin’s comment implies it should be interpreted, partly because I think Jebari was implicitly speaking in those terms: likelihood of agriculture developing, conditional on something like anatomically modern humans existing in substantial numbers, vs likelihood of industry developing, conditional on the same thing plus on agriculture being in place.
A possible counterargument to Aidan’s idea: Maybe for some purposes the number of humans between one development and the next is more relevant than the number of years between them. That “metric” would presumably suggest the development of industry was either (a) more likely than the development of agriculture, but by a smaller margin than a focus on the number of years would suggest, or (b) less likely than the development of agriculture.
(I haven’t looked at the estimated cumulative population of humans pre-agriculture vs between agriculture and industry, so I don’t know whether this would end up suggesting (a) or (b). And in any case, our overall views should then of course also be influenced by a variety of other arguments and lines of evidence.)