A toy to think with: The Erector Set

What Happened to the Erector Set? | The Toy That Taught Every Boy in America to Build

From the YouTube page:

For generations, the Erector Set wasn’t just a toy — it was a hands-on introduction to engineering, creativity, and real-world building.

Long before modern STEM kits and digital learning tools, children across America learned how to think, design, and construct using metal beams, bolts, and gears. Created by A. C. Gilbert in the early 1900s, the Erector Set became a symbol of innovation and imagination, inspiring future engineers and inventors.

In this video, we explore the complete story of the Erector Set — from its invention and rise during the golden age of American toys, to its cultural impact and eventual decline in a rapidly changing world of plastic toys and digital entertainment.

Discover how it competed with brands like LEGO, why its popularity began to fade, and what ultimately happened to one of the most educational toys ever created.

From steel structures to childhood dreams, this is the story of the toy that taught a generation how to build.

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the legendary Erector Set… this nostalgic deep dive reveals it all.

Claude: On the origins and history of chess, plus a Straussian reading of DeepBlue vs. Kasparov [MR 5]

My examination of Tyler Cowen, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026), continues. While Tyler does discuss chess briefly at the end and in connection with artificial intelligence, this post has nothing to do with that discussion. That, I suppose, makes this post something of a digression. But it’s a digression in the style of Tristram Shandy, digress to progress. It’ll all make sense in the end.

Note that what I am reporting here comes at the end of a rather long discussion of chess, one that does have a direct connection of Tyler’s chapter three, where he’s interested in the fact that pinnacles of human achievement seemed to be reached at different times for different domains, some rather early, some quite late. While chess is rather old, traceable to the 6th century CE in India, the treelike structure of the game wasn’t explicated until recently, 1913 by Ernst Zermelo. I asked Claude about the nature of the mathematical equipment Zermelo needed to construct his proof. That led to a long discussion about the nature of the chess tree, chess as a vehicle for the expression of personality, how computers open up exploration of new regions of the chess tree and so forth. That whole discussion is part of the context for the discussion that follows. However, this discussion is pretty much independent of that one, so you don’t need that context to understand what Claude says here.

Note: I’m using my own account on Claude for this discussion, not the AI that Tyler made available with the book.

* * * * *

Chess as an abstraction over military conflict

Let’s take this discussion of chess in a different direction. I’m interested in the origins of the game. The game, after all, is a highly abstracted version of a war between two societies, each having its own king and queen. I could imagine a just-so story, perhaps a Star Trek episode, where we have two nations that are locked in a deadly conflict that continues year after year, decade after decade, until, their resources exhausted, the two nations call a truce and in the space of that truce, invent the game of chess. Then each nation chooses its champion, and the champions continue the conflict by playing chess. [When you consider the role that chess played in the Cold War between the USA and the USSR that origin story is all but a highly abstracted version of that historical conflict.] But what do we actually know about how the game originated?

Your just-so story is charming, and the Cold War parallel is genuinely apt — but the actual history is both more interesting and more complex, and it cuts against one specific element of your narrative in a revealing way.

What we actually know

The earliest precursor of modern chess is chaturanga, which flourished in India by the 6th century CE, and is the earliest known game to have two essential features found in all later chess variations — different pieces having different powers, and victory depending on the fate of one piece, the king.

The name itself is telling: chaturanga is a Sanskrit word meaning "four divisions of the military" — infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots — which map onto the pieces we now recognize as pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks. So the military origin of the game's structure is not speculative — it's explicit and preserved in the name.

The name came from a battle formation mentioned in the Indian epic Mahabharata. The game chaturanga was a battle-simulation game that rendered Indian military strategy of the time.

From India the game traveled westward: around the 7th century CE, chaturanga reached Persia and became known as "chatrang" or "shatranj." Many modern chess terms have Persian origins, such as "Shah" (King), and even "checkmate" from "Shah Mat," meaning "the king is dead" or "the king is helpless."

A form of chaturanga or shatranj made its way to Europe by way of Persia, the Byzantine Empire, and the expanding Arabian empire. Muslims brought chess to North Africa, Sicily, and Spain by the 10th century.

The rules then changed dramatically in late medieval Europe: the chaturanga piece called the elephant, which had been limited to a two-square diagonal jump in shatranj, became the bishop, more than doubling its range. With the new queen and bishop powers, the trench warfare of medieval chess was replaced by a game in which checkmate could be delivered in as few as two moves.

Where your just-so story cuts against the evidence

Your narrative imagines two symmetric opposing societies, each with a king and queen — the structure of modern chess with its two mirror-image armies. But chaturanga wasn't originally a two-player game in that sense, or at least not necessarily. The Cox-Forbes theory asserted that the four-handed game chaturaji was the original form of chaturanga — four players, four armies, a dice element. The clean two-army symmetry of modern chess is a later development, not the original structure.

And the queen — the piece that makes modern chess feel like a conflict between two courts — is a late European invention. The original piece in that position was the mantri (minister) or counselor, a weak piece that could only move one square diagonally. The vizier piece, which had limited movement in earlier versions, became the "queen" and gained much greater power only in the late 15th century in Europe. The transformation of a male counselor into a powerful queen is itself a fascinating cultural moment — it reflects something about late medieval European court culture, the figure of powerful queens like Isabella of Castile, that has nothing to do with the Indian military original.

The deeper point about abstraction

What's remarkable in the actual history is the direction of abstraction. The game began as an explicit military simulation — every piece named for a branch of the army, the board a battlefield, the objective the capture of the king. Over fifteen centuries of transmission across cultures — India to Persia to the Arab world to Europe — it progressively shed its military literalism and became more abstract. The elephant became a bishop (losing its literal referent entirely in the European context). The chariot became a rook (the Persian rukh, itself possibly meaning chariot or a mythical bird). The military counselor became a queen.

Each culture reshaped the pieces to reflect its own social imagery, but the underlying structure — the tree, the rules, the objective — remained surprisingly stable across this enormous cultural distance. The abstraction was always already present in the game's formal properties; what changed was the surface representation hung on that structure.

This is itself a nice illustration of the Rank 2 point from our earlier discussion. The game's transmissibility across such different cultures depended precisely on its formal specification being separable from any particular cultural content. You could strip away the Indian military imagery, replace it with Persian court imagery, then European feudal imagery, and the game remained the same game because the rules — the Rank 2 specification — were what was being transmitted. The cultural clothing was exchangeable; the formal skeleton was not.

The Cold War resonance

Your Cold War parallel is historically well-grounded, and not just as analogy. The 1972 Fischer-Spassky match in Reykjavik was explicitly framed by both sides as proxy warfare — American individualism versus Soviet collective training, capitalism versus communism, with the world watching. Fischer's behavior, the diplomatic incidents, the American government's last-minute intervention to keep Fischer in the match — it was understood by everyone involved as something more than a chess tournament. The game had come full circle: from explicit military simulation, through centuries of abstraction, back to serving as a ritualized substitute for geopolitical conflict. Your Star Trek episode would merely be making that latent structure manifest.

DeepBlue vs. Kasparov

And so the post-Cold War victory of Deep Blue over Kasparov becomes what? What’s the Straussian reading, as Tyler might say?

The surface reading is triumphalist: human chess genius defeated by American corporate technology, confirming the post-Cold War narrative of Western technological capitalism's dominance. IBM's stock rose. The press celebrated. It was framed as a milestone for artificial intelligence.

The Straussian reading is almost the opposite.

Role play with large language models

Shanahan, M., McDonell, K. & Reynolds, L. Role play with large language models. Nature 623, 493–498 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06647-8

Abstract

As dialogue agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, we must develop effective ways to describe their behaviour in high-level terms without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. Here we foreground the concept of role play. Casting dialogue-agent behaviour in terms of role play allows us to draw on familiar folk psychological terms, without ascribing human characteristics to language models that they in fact lack. Two important cases of dialogue-agent behaviour are addressed this way, namely, (apparent) deception and (apparent) self-awareness.

Main

Large language models (LLMs) have numerous use cases, and can be prompted to exhibit a wide variety of behaviours, including dialogue. This can produce a compelling sense of being in the presence of a human-like interlocutor. However, LLM-based dialogue agents are, in multiple respects, very different from human beings. A human’s language skills are an extension of the cognitive capacities they develop through embodied interaction with the world, and are acquired by growing up in a community of other language users who also inhabit that world. An LLM, by contrast, is a disembodied neural network that has been trained on a large corpus of human-generated text with the objective of predicting the next word (token) given a sequence of words (tokens) as context1.

Despite these fundamental dissimilarities, a suitably prompted and sampled LLM can be embedded in a turn-taking dialogue system and mimic human language use convincingly. This presents us with a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, it is natural to use the same folk psychological language to describe dialogue agents that we use to describe human behaviour, to freely deploy words such as ‘knows’, ‘understands’ and ‘thinks’. Attempting to avoid such phrases by using more scientifically precise substitutes often results in prose that is clumsy and hard to follow. On the other hand, taken too literally, such language promotes anthropomorphism, exaggerating the similarities between these artificial intelligence (AI) systems and humans while obscuring their deep differences1.

If the conceptual framework we use to understand other humans is ill-suited to LLM-based dialogue agents, then perhaps we need an alternative conceptual framework, a new set of metaphors that can productively be applied to these exotic mind-like artefacts, to help us think about them and talk about them in ways that open up their potential for creative application while foregrounding their essential otherness.

Here we advocate two basic metaphors for LLM-based dialogue agents. First, taking a simple and intuitive view, we can see a dialogue agent as role-playing a single character. Second, taking a more nuanced view, we can see a dialogue agent as a superposition of simulacra within a multiverse of possible characters. Both viewpoints have their advantages, as we shall see, which suggests that the most effective strategy for thinking about such agents is not to cling to a single metaphor, but to shift freely between multiple metaphors.

Adopting this conceptual framework allows us to tackle important topics such as deception and self-awareness in the context of dialogue agents without falling into the conceptual trap of applying those concepts to LLMs in the literal sense in which we apply them to humans.

There's more at the link (the article is ungated). 

H/t Henry Farrell. 

Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH)

In July 2008 the Kingdom of Bhutan adopted  new constitution. This constitution made Gross National Happiness (GNH) the guiding philosophy and instituted an index for measuring GNH. I just had a discussion about this with ChatGPT, a discussion which included the use of digital technology for helping with the assessment. 

This obviously resonates with ideas I've been exploring with the book I am developing: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. Relevant tags: Arena_4, Homo_ludens, and  Kisangani2150.

* * * * *

Gross National Happiness

And then we have Bhutan, which has made Gross National Pleasure as it's measure of success.

Yes—Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) is one of the most radical and illuminating gestures in the modern political world. And while the word is “happiness,” its philosophical grounding overlaps richly with what we’ve been discussing: pleasure not as luxury, but as meaningful, integrated well-being.

Bhutan

Let’s briefly place Bhutan in this framework:

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🇧🇹 Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness: A Civilizational Reframe

In 1972, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck famously declared:

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”

This wasn’t a slogan—it was the beginning of an alternative developmental philosophy grounded in Buddhist ethics, specifically the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions. GNH is not about fleeting enjoyment—it’s about cultivating the conditions for a flourishing life, individually and collectively.

GNH is built around four pillars:

1.     Sustainable and equitable socio-economic development

2.     Environmental conservation

3.     Preservation and promotion of culture

4.     Good governance

These are evaluated through nine domains, including:

·       Psychological well-being

·       Health

·       Time use

·       Community vitality

·       Ecological diversity

So while the term is happiness, its moral and spiritual structure evokes a Buddhist-Tantric understanding of harmony, presence, and balance—not endless pleasure, but the absence of inner conflict and outer disintegration.

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🪷 GNH as a Model for Pleasure-Rooted Ethics

In the context of your work, Bhutan offers a real-world example of policy grounded in consciousness. It suggests:

·       Pleasure, joy, and inner harmony can be public values, not just private pursuits.

·       Well-being is not reducible to income or productivity.

·       Cultural and spiritual life matter—ritual, rhythm, beauty, connectedness.

And this reframes pleasure not as hedonism, but as ecological coherence—where internal energy flow matches external structure.

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How Bhutan evaluates happiness

 

Tell me more about how Bhutan evaluates happiness.

Certainly. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) is not just a slogan—it’s a structured, multi-dimensional framework for national policy and measurement, rooted in Buddhist principles and an ethos of holistic well-being. It challenges the economic model of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by asserting that development must serve the happiness and well-being of people, not just their material wealth.

Here’s how Bhutan actually evaluates happiness:

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🧭 The GNH Framework: Overview

Bhutan's GNH is organized around 4 pillars, expanded into 9 domains, and measured by over 130 indicators. It is both philosophical and quantitative, designed to assess whether development aligns with inner and outer well-being.

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🌳 Four Pillars of GNH

1.     Sustainable and equitable socio-economic development

2.     Environmental conservation

3.     Preservation and promotion of culture

4.     Good governance

These pillars guide national policy, education, infrastructure, and law. They're not just values—they’re implementation targets.

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🌸 Nine Domains of Happiness

Each domain reflects one dimension of holistic well-being, based on Buddhist principles but articulated in secular terms:

Domain	Description
1. Psychological well-being	Measures emotions, spirituality, life satisfaction, and meaning in life.
2. Health	Physical health, nutrition, and mental wellness.
3. Education	Formal education, skills, and knowledge.
4. Time use	Balance between work, leisure, sleep—emphasizing time poverty.
5. Cultural diversity and resilience	Celebration and continuity of Bhutanese traditions, languages, and rituals.
6. Good governance	Perceptions of government effectiveness, participation, and transparency.
7. Community vitality	Trust, belonging, safety, and relationships within communities.
8. Ecological diversity and resilience	Environmental stewardship, access to nature, sustainability.
9. Living standards	Material well-being, income, housing, and security—but not overemphasized.

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📊 How It’s Measured

The Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research conducts detailed GNH surveys across the country every few years.

·       The surveys use Likert scales (e.g., from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied”) to assess subjective well-being.

·       Objective data is also used (e.g., health records, income, education level).

·       Each person is scored on their achievements across the nine domains.

Importantly:

·       A person doesn’t have to “score high” in every domain to be considered happy.

·       Bhutan uses a sufficiency approach: the focus is on whether people meet basic thresholds in a majority of domains.

This allows for individual and cultural variation in what happiness means.

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🔄 Use in Policy

Unlike most countries, Bhutan uses GNH indicators to guide public policy:

·       A GNH policy screening tool is applied to proposed laws and projects.

·       If a highway, factory, or education reform doesn’t support GNH values, it may be revised or rejected.

·       Examples: emphasis on organic farming, slow tourism, protection of sacred sites, and environmental laws embedded in the constitution.

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🧘 Underlying Philosophy

Though GNH appears secular in structure, it is deeply shaped by Buddhist ethics, especially:

·       The goal of reducing suffering and promoting compassion.

·       The belief that external conditions must support internal development.

·       An emphasis on interdependence, impermanence, and non-material contentment.

In other words, happiness isn’t a product—it’s a condition of harmony.

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📍 Summary: Bhutan’s Happiness Evaluation Model

·       Goes beyond GDP to ask: Are people flourishing in body, mind, culture, and community?

·       Recognizes that subjective well-being matters—but it must be grounded in ethical and ecological context.

·       Offers a model of development with conscience, where pleasure, meaning, and belonging are not sidelined, but centered.

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Would you like to see how this model might apply (or be adapted) to other cultural contexts—such as Western nations or digital environments?

I’m interested in digital environments.

That’s a timely and visionary direction—rethinking pleasure and well-being in digital environments using a framework like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness is exactly the kind of reframing our cultural moment needs. As more of life migrates into digital space, the question becomes:

Can the digital realm be designed not just for engagement, but for flourishing?

Let’s build on Bhutan’s model and begin mapping how its domains and philosophy might guide digital design, platforms, and cultures that prioritize well-being over addiction, connection over consumption, and flow over friction.

Let's Groove: Hoboken Spring Arts & Music Festival

On the role of play in cultural evolution, a conversation with Claude 3.7

I’ve got two posts on the subject where I use passages from David Hays’s book on the history of technology: The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks. Both posts date from 2019, though I’ve since bumped them up in the queue so they now display a more recent date. Here’s one of those posts: Personality, understanding, and anxiety as the driver of cultural evolution [Tech Evol]. “Anxiety” is the operative word here, for anxiety is something intrinsic to the operations of the brain, something I discuss in Beethoven’s Anvil (2001, pp. 85-90). Here’s the other post: Cultural Evolution: Expressive culture before practical culture [Progress]. Expressive culture, in turn, can been seen as an aspect of Homo Ludens, which brings up my recent conversation with Claude: Homo economicus sucks! Homo Ludens rocks!

This post follows up those previous posts with another conversation with Claude 3.7. This starts with a passage from Chapter 5, “Politics, Cognition, and Personality” in Hays’s book on the evolution of technology. As always in these conversations, my remarks are in bold face while Claude’s responses are in plain face.

Progress is driven by the need to control anxiety

I’m appending a passage from a book by David Hays. Does it make sense to you? Can you come up with other examples of the phenomenon?

In reading to prepare to write this book, I have learned that the wheel was used for ritual over many years before it was put to use in war and, still later, work. The motivation for improvement of astronomical instruments in the late Middle Ages was to obtain measurements accurate enough for astrology. Critics wrote that even if the dubious doctrines of astrology were valid, the measurements were not close enough for their predictions to be meaningful. So they set out to make their instruments better, and all kinds of instrumentation followed from this beginning. (That from White, Medieval Religion and Technology). Metals were used for ornaments very early – before any practical use?

In its original manifestation the compass was a divination, or future-predicting, instrument made of lodestone, which is naturally magnetic." (George Basalla, p. 172; in The Evolution of Technology)

I suspect that we could get many further examples, up into the growth curve from rank 2 to rank 3.

In fact, someone in the future may look back on psychoanalysis and remark that its origin was in parapsychology–dreams were interpreted first for divination, second for diagnosis of pathology.

Here is my first point: The driving force behind progress in social organization, government, technology, science, and art is the need to control anxiety, to satisfy the brain's striving for understanding.

The passage from David Hays makes perfect sense, and I find it fascinating. He's highlighting a counterintuitive pattern in technology development: many innovations that we now consider practical tools were first developed for ritual, religious, or mystical purposes.

This phenomenon demonstrates how human curiosity and spiritual needs often drive innovation before practical applications are discovered. It suggests that addressing existential concerns and "controlling anxiety" (as Hays puts it) can be more powerful motivators for technological development than immediate practical utility. Here are some additional examples of this phenomenon:

1. Dario Amodei mentions in his essay that "mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists who have applied their skills to biology over the last 30 years have been quite successful." This relates to Hays' point about how tools developed in one field (often for theoretical rather than practical reasons) end up having practical applications elsewhere.
2. Chemistry originated from alchemy, which was primarily concerned with transmutation of elements and the search for the philosopher's stone - mystical pursuits that eventually led to practical scientific understanding.
3. Early computing machines were often developed to calculate astronomical positions for navigation, which had both religious calendrical significance and practical applications.
4. Cave paintings and early art appear to have had ritual/spiritual significance before developing into practical communication tools.
5. Mathematics was often developed for religious astronomical calculations (predicting eclipses, solstices, etc.) before its widespread practical applications.
6. Early glass making was largely for decorative and ritual objects before becoming practical for windows and vessels.
7. The first organs and mechanical musical instruments were developed for churches and religious ceremonies before secular use.
8. Early writing systems were primarily used for religious texts and royal/divine record-keeping before becoming tools for everyday communication.
9. Many early drugs and medicines were first used in shamanic rituals before their medicinal properties were understood in a practical context.

This pattern seems to reflect something fundamental about human nature - we're motivated not just by practical needs but by deeper questions about meaning, the future, and our place in the universe. The anxiety about the unknown that Hays mentions may indeed be a powerful driver of innovation, as humans develop tools to help make sense of the world, first through ritual and religion, and later through practical applications.

As far as I can tell, the governing ideologies in the West are strongly influenced by the idea of Homo economicus, which has it that human motivation is economic in origin, that reason is rational (in the special game-theory sense of the word), and that growth is the primary aim of society. That would seem to be at odds with the phenomena we’ve just looked at.

You're making an astute connection. The "Homo economicus" model does indeed contrast sharply with the pattern we observed, where innovations often emerge from spiritual, ritual, or existential concerns rather than rational economic calculation.

The economic view of human motivation assumes that people primarily:

• Act as rational utility maximizers
• Make decisions based on self-interest
• Respond primarily to material incentives
• Value efficiency and practical outcomes above all

Yet the historical pattern Hays identified suggests that humans are often driven by:

1. The desire to understand and control our anxiety about the unknown
2. Spiritual and existential concerns
3. Ritual and social/cultural meaning
4. Curiosity that isn't immediately practical

This disconnect is important because our economic and social policies are frequently built on the "Homo economicus" model. If we misunderstand human motivation at a fundamental level, we may create systems that don't actually align with how humans naturally innovate and find meaning.

Dario Amodei touches on related themes in his essay when discussing work and meaning in a world with advanced AI. He notes that "I think meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labor," and suggests that "It is easy to argue that children shouldn't die of disease if we can prevent it" - pointing to moral and compassionate motives rather than purely economic ones.

The examples we discussed (ritual wheels preceding practical ones, astrological instruments leading to scientific ones, etc.) suggest that humans often create their most important innovations when addressing deeper needs than economic efficiency. This has significant implications for how we might want to structure society, education, and research funding if we want to encourage genuine innovation.

What do you think are the implications of this mismatch between our governing ideology and the historical pattern of how innovation actually occurs?

From innovation to Huizinga

I think it means that we don’t have a deep understanding of innovation, and our policies are likely to miss the mark. But getting back to Amodei, his observations about work and meaning in a world of advanced AI seem almost like after thoughts. He’s mostly interested in convincing us that all sorts of marvelous things are just around the corner. That may be so, but, if our thinking and institutions are dominated by the idea of Homo economicus, then we’re not ready. If we don’t think explicitly and differently about human motivation, we’re going to keep getting blindsided by unfolding events.

You've hit upon something crucial. The relegation of "work and meaning" to almost an afterthought in Amodei's essay reflects a broader pattern in how we approach technological development.

Amodei's essay focuses extensively on the technological marvels AI might bring - curing diseases, extending lifespans, solving complex problems - but spends comparatively little time on how humans will find meaning in this new world. This imbalance mirrors our societal approach: we excel at advancing technology but often treat human psychological and spiritual needs as secondary considerations to be figured out later.

Homo economicus sucks! Homo Ludens rocks!

Here's what Wikipedia says about Homo economicus:

The term Homo economicus, or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively defined ends optimally. It is a wordplay on Homo sapiens, used in some economic theories and in pedagogy.[1]

In game theory, Homo economicus is often (but not necessarily) modelled through the assumption of perfect rationality. It assumes that agents always act in a way that maximize utility as a consumer and profit as a producer,[2] and are capable of arbitrarily complex deductions towards that end. They will always be capable of thinking through all possible outcomes and choosing that course of action which will result in the best possible result.

The rationality implied in Homo economicus does not restrict what sort of preferences are admissible. Only naive applications of the Homo economicus model assume that agents know what is best for their long-term physical and mental health. For example, an agent's utility function could be linked to the perceived utility of other agents (such as one's husband or children), making Homo economicus compatible with other models such as Homo reciprocans, which emphasizes human cooperation.

As far as I can tell, Homo economicus dominates the ideological formations behind the major institutional structures of Western society. More specifically, it dominates the world of AI, both as a model of the mind, and as a way of thinking about the social consequences of AI, but good and bad. I say it functions as an ideological formation because it is simply assumed to be how the world is.

One can, however, reject that assumption in favor of something else. I'm am rejecting it in favor of a view promulgated in Homo Ludens, published in 1938 by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga. From Wikipedia:

It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society.[4] Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture. The Latin word ludens is the present active participle of the verb ludere, which itself is cognate with the noun ludus. Ludus has no direct equivalent in English, as it simultaneously refers to sport, play, school, and practice.

Thus:

Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.

Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:

1. Play is free, is in fact freedom.
2. Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
3. Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.
4. Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.
5. Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it.

Huizinga shows that in ritual dances a person 'becomes' a kangaroo. There is a difference in how western thought expresses this concept and how "primitive" religions view this. Scholars of religion use western terminology to describe non western concepts.

In the rest of this post I list a conversation I had with Claude 3.7 that starts with some passages from Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017), which sets the current AI revolution in the context of all of human history. He accepts Homo economicus without question. I then propose Homo Ludens as an alternative.

My standard conventions apply. My prompts are in bold face. Claude's responses are in plain face.

Homo Economicus 

I’m reading Harari’s Homo Deus. In Chapter 9, The Great Decoupling, he says things like:  

In the twenty-first century liberalism will have a much harder time selling itself. As the masses lose their economic importance, will the moral argument alone be enough to protect human rights and liberties? Will elites and governments go on valuing every human being even when it pays no economic dividends?  

And: 

 The technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support the useless masses even without any effort on their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? People must do something, or they will go crazy. What will they do all day? One solution might be offered by drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred in useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in La La Land?  

He's clearly assuming that humans get their value from their ability to make economic contributions. Where does he get that assumption? He attributes it to liberalism. Is that valid? Why happens to his argument if one rejects that view? Instead, one can affirm that human life is intrinsically valuable, that the sacredness of human life is intrinsic and not dependent on economic contributions.

You've pinpointed a crucial assumption in Harari's argument. His view that human value in liberal societies is fundamentally tied to economic utility is certainly debatable.

Harari is drawing on a particular interpretation of liberalism that emphasizes its economic aspects over its broader humanistic foundations. While economic productivity has certainly been valued in liberal societies, the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism - from Locke to Kant to Rawls - have often emphasized human dignity, autonomy, and inherent worth that exists prior to and independent of economic contribution.

If we reject his economic-centric assumption, his argument changes significantly. The "Great Decoupling" becomes less threatening if we maintain that human worth is intrinsic rather than instrumental. The questions become:

1. Can liberal societies maintain a commitment to human dignity without the pragmatic reinforcement of economic necessity?
2. How might social and political systems evolve to recognize human value beyond productivity?
3. What alternative sources of meaning and purpose might emerge beyond economic contribution?

Many religious and philosophical traditions have long held that human value is intrinsic and not dependent on utility. Even within secular humanism, there are strong arguments for inherent human worth based on our capacity for consciousness, relationships, moral reasoning, and subjective experience.

Harari's dystopian vision assumes that elites will abandon their commitment to universal human value once it's no longer economically expedient. But this presupposes that such commitments were only ever pragmatic rather than principled - a highly contestable claim about human moral psychology and political philosophy.

By questioning this fundamental assumption, you've identified a potential way to challenge Harari's more pessimistic conclusions while still engaging with the technological transformations he describes.

It seems to me that he makes unwarranted assumptions about AI. For example, he seems to accept Bostrom’s idea that super-intelligence is inevitable, though it is by no means clear just what “super-intelligence” might be. I notice that Harari was enthusiastic about the medical applications of IBM’s Watson. But five or six years have Harari published the book (2017) IBM sold-off it’s medical unit, presumably because it wasn’t performing well enough. Of course, Harari could point out that things will surely change in the future, as they surely will. Still, an awful lot depends on assumptions he’s making about the course of AI. He seems to assume that we have no choice about how we build and deploy the technology.

You're making an excellent point about Harari's technological determinism. He does seem to treat certain technological developments as inevitable rather than contingent on human choices and values.

Why are we as a culture addicted to work? [Because we have forgotten how to play.]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, both on general principle, and because it's relevant to a book I'm trying to get off the ground. Think of Maslow's well-known hierarchy of needs, with physiological needs at the bottom and more abstract needs – cognitive, aesthetic and "self-actualization" – at the top. If primitive societies could satisfy the physiological needs with a 15-hour workweek, then they must have had a lot of time to work on the higher needs. THAT's not the typical picture of primitive society. Economists see growth as being driven by the necessities at the bottom of the pyramid. I think they've got it wrong. It's driven from the top.

 

• • • • •

 This title caught my attention:

Why Do We Work So Damn Much? Hunter-gatherers worked 15-hour weeks. Why don’t we?

I immediately answered:

Because we’ve forgotten how to play? We’re stuck in work mode and can’t get out.

Is that the article is about? The article is an interview that Ezra Klein (NYTimes) conducts with anthropologist James Suzman, who has done research among hunter-gatherers and has recently published a book, Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Here’s how Klein sets it up:

So one of the truly great essays in the history of economic thought is this 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” And it’s a weird essay. It’s done in the depth of the Great Depression, so everything is terrible, and people are really poor. But Keynes steps back and just imagines the future.

And he makes his now famous prediction that by 2030, which was a 100 years hence, human beings would be so much richer, so much more technologically advanced, that the problem of scarcity — that the problem that had defined economics, and arguably, human civilization, until then — would have been solved. And now we’d only work 15 hours a week. And the whole problem would be what to do with all this time.

And the reason this essay still gets talked about and debated and written about today is that Keynes was interestingly right and wrong. The part of this that seems hard and probably seemed very out there when he did it, the calculations for how much richer we’d get in 100 years, that was not just right. If anything, it was conservative. We passed his predictions for income growth decades ago. And then we got even richer than that.

But you may notice we don’t work 15 hours a week. In fact, in an inversion of past history, the more money you make now, the more hours you generally work. It used to be the point of being rich was to not work. And now we’ve built a social value system. So the reward for making a lot of money at work is, you get to do even more work.

Here’s where Suzman comes in:

And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn’t driven by what we need. It’s driven by what we want. It’s also driven by how, socially, we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where his research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in.

But the big thing here is that Keynes had it backwards. Humanity solved the problem of scarcity and achieved a 15-hour workweek long before modernity. But as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.

You can’t solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least, for many of us.

That’s heading where I think we need to go. Just how far Suzman gets us, that’s not clear.

So, hunter-gatherer egalitarianism:

JAMES SUZMAN: One of the most distinctive features about the Ju/’hoansi and, indeed, many of the other hunter-gatherer societies, similar ones, was that they were, to use the words of Richard Lee, fiercely egalitarian. And they had various mechanisms to manage this egalitarianism. Now one of the most interesting mechanisms was a system called demand sharing. One anthropologist who didn’t like it much called it tolerated theft.

And it is a system which is, in many ways, the complete inversion of our rules of giving, sharing, and taking. When we ask somebody for something, we say please. It’s an offer of a debt. When somebody gives us something, we say thank you. I’m in your debt. There’s a kind of sense of an exchange going on. And it is in the right of the giver. And generally, I was always brought up, wait for somebody to offer you something. And always say thank you and be in their debt. And it’s effectively in the rights of the giver to deny somebody something that they asked for.

In Ju/’hoan cultures and, indeed, many other hunting and gathering cultures, that relationship is inverted. Basically, in an idealized form, demand sharing means that pretty much anybody in a society can go to anybody else. And remember, these are relatively small social groupings. Can go to anybody else and demand something from them. So if, for example, I have a bag of tobacco, somebody else is perfectly entitled to come and demand some of that tobacco from me.

And it would be considered extremely rude — in fact, it would be considered offensive — if I don’t give him some of that tobacco. At the same time, it’s not considered at all rude to make that kind of demand. So what you have is a society where, in effect, everybody can spontaneously tax everybody else. The net result of this is that nobody bothers acquiring services because you’re just going to share it and give it away anyway. And people end up spontaneously sharing everything.

And they see a certain virtue. It’s not a completely unconscious thing. I mean, culture is habitual. It becomes unconscious. But people are aware of the virtues of it. And in hunter-gatherer life, there was a real sense that if anybody tries to accumulate resources or dominate the distribution and flow of resources, it is socially unhealthy. It produces tensions. It produces anxieties. It produces a hierarchy or an attempted hierarchy. It adds a whole level of risk and cost to the social life of the group.

What about violence?

JAMES SUZMAN: My perspective on demand sharing was that it certainly made anthropologists feel violent until they got a bit used to it. But amongst everybody else, it was actually something very peaceable. Now, yeah, there’s been this pretty much endless debate. And it really is a debate about modernity, whether we’re on this great path of progress or not. To make the case of progress, it helps to say that actually our lives in the past were much more miserable and much more violent.

Play time in Northwest Hoboken

Is work really the virtue it's claimed to be? No! It's time to wake up!

Erik Baker, Elon Musk Is the World’s Richest Man. Why Is He Sleeping on an Office Floor? NYTimes, Feb. 27, 2025.

This association between incessant work and entrepreneurial success is pervasive in American business culture today. Jeff Bezos reports working 12 hours every day of the week in the early years of Amazon. The Apple chief executive Tim Cook is famous for sending emails at 4:30 a.m. Mr. Musk’s ostensible boss, despite his well-known fondness for TV news and social media, also insists that “no president ever worked harder than me.”

These boasts, plausible or not, reveal something important about the American valorization of work, and help explain why this class of supposedly busy billionaires has come to believe they’re entitled to dominate our national life. For Mr. Musk and his associates, a herculean enthusiasm for work isn’t merely a way to get things done; it’s also a mark of innate superiority, a “superpower” that confers the right to impose their vision on the world. Mr. Musk’s decades in the highest echelons of the tech industry, surrounded by other executives who justified their lordship over their private empires by trumpeting their inexhaustible work ethic, have taught him that if you work harder than everyone else, you should be rewarded with unquestioned rule over your dominion. [...]

While the scope of Mr. Musk’s project may be novel, the archetype he embodies has a long history. The Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter, who taught at Harvard from 1932 until his death in 1950, helped popularize the idea that entrepreneurs possessed a special set of personality traits that set them apart from lesser businessmen and managers. Entrepreneurship, according to Schumpeter, smashed economic routines. That took “will and personality.” [...] They were superheroes.

These days:

In recent decades, two trends in American life have supercharged the spread of this entrepreneurial work ethic, helping to push busy billionaires to the center of our politics. First, more and more ordinary Americans learned to think of work as something scarce. As deindustrialization ravaged wide swaths of the country and unionization declined, they got accustomed to cycles of layoffs and the need to retrain in new occupations or new industries. [...] the bosses atop our class pyramid correctly perceive how such jobs have become a status symbol: [...] We see them working constantly while we hunt for extra shifts or struggle to string part-time jobs together, and we marvel at how special they must be.

Then there is the looming threat of a seismic technological breakthrough. Many tech leaders today believe that the development of artificial intelligence is poised to automate most jobs into oblivion.

But if that is so, and I fear that it may be, then a national culture based on the moral value of work is doomed to breed massive discontent and ultimately failure.

We desperately need a new value system, perhaps one based on the concept of play, Homo Ludens, to use the title of a profound book by Johan Huizinga. That's what Charlie Keil and I had in mind when we published Playing for Peace: Reclaiming Our Human Nature (Kindle, Paperback).

Meanwhile, read Ezra Klein's interview with James Suzman, Why Do We Work So damn Much? Here's most post excerpting it: Why are we as a culture addicted to work? [Because we have forgotten how to play.] In his introduction Klein notes, referring to the book:

Hunter-gatherers were usually healthy. They were usually well nourished. Even in very unforgiving climates, they tended to have diverse diets. And they did it while only spending about 15 hours a week on hunting and gathering.

Suzman’s new book is called “Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots.” And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn’t driven by what we need. It’s driven by what we want. It’s also driven by how, socially, we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where his research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in.

But the big thing here is that Keynes had it backwards. Humanity solved the problem of scarcity and achieved a 15-hour workweek long before modernity. But as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.

You can’t solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least, for many of us.

Yes! I've worked in start-ups. I've felt that kind of competition, where working long hours is a way to achieve status. I've lived it. It's insidious.