Sapiens

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari, 2011)

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari traces the arc of humankind from the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago to the scientific and industrial revolutions that shaped the modern world. Harari argues that shared fictions (money, nations, religions) enabled large-scale cooperation among strangers. In Chapter 13, he introduces a distinction between two kinds of systems. Level-one chaotic systems (e.g. weather) do not react to predictions about themselves. Level-two chaotic systems (e.g. markets, politics, history) respond to predictions, making accurate forecasting fundamentally impossible. The actors in these systems incorporate observations into their decisions, invalidating the predictions.