');
The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
RSS
Show by ⇅�
Email This Page to Someone

�Remember My Information



=>
Sources Filter? ❌
akarlin.com da-russophile sublime-oblivion
Nothing found
�
BlogAnatoly Karlin Archive
/
Big History
�BlogAnatoly Karlin Archive
/
Big History

◄►Bookmark◄❌►▲ ▼Toggle AllToC▲▼Add to LibraryRemove from Library •�B
Show CommentNext New CommentNext New ReplyRead More
ReplyAgree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
AgreeDisagreeThanksLOLTroll
These buttons register your public Agreement, Disagreement, Thanks, LOL, or Troll with the selected comment. They are ONLY available to recent, frequent commenters who have saved their Name+Email using the 'Remember My Information' checkbox, and may also ONLY be used three times during any eight hour period.
Ignore Commenter Follow Commenter
Graphing Influence
•�August 15, 2012
•�500 Words •�2 Comments
As today seems to be the day of cool visualizations on this blog, so on this note I'd like to highlight a really cool way of analyzing the influence of various people (philosophers, coding languages, etc) on history. One of the basic strategies is to feed the information in Wikipedia info-boxes into a computer program... Read More
The Power of Contingency: Why China Didn't Rule the World
•�July 30, 2011
•�3,400 Words •�71 Comments
Pomeranz, Kenneth – The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2001) Category: economy, history, world systems; Rating: 5*/5 Summary: Brad DeLong's review; The Bactra Review; Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? It's a rare book that not only vastly informs you on a particular issue, but in so doing... Read More
Walled Off By Complexity: Did China Stagnate Because of Its Writing System?
•�May 7, 2011
•�2,500 Words •�62 Comments
One of the biggest questions in global history is why it was Western Europe that industrialized first, and ended up colonizing most of the rest of the world. As late as 1450, the possibility of such an outcome would have been ridiculed. By almost any metric, China was well in the lead through the medieval... Read More
Review of “the Lucifer Principle” (H. Bloom), or: Fascism Is the Natural State
•�July 15, 2010
•�2,800 Words •�20 Comments
Depressingly fatalist, morbidly truthful, irresistibly Nietzschean. That's Howard Bloom's "The Lucifer Principle" in a nutshell: a meandering trawl through disciplines such as genetics, psychology and culture that culminates in a theory of evil, purporting to explain its historical necessity, its creative potential and the possibility of it ever being vanquished. The odds do not appear... Read More
Review of "War and Peace and War" by Peter Turchin
•�April 8, 2010
•�2,500 Words •�21 Comments
Then you might get something like Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War, which I've finally read on the recommendations of Kolya and TG. Ranging from Ermak's subjugation of the Sibir Khanate to the rise of Rome, Turchin makes the case that the rise and fall of empires is reducible to three basic concepts: 1)... Read More
Cliodynamics: Mathematizing History
•�December 4, 2009
•�4,900 Words •�5 Comments
One of the most interesting emerging sciences today, in my opinion, is cliodynamics. Their practitioners attempt to come to with mathematical models of history to explain "big history" - things like the rise of empires, social discontent, civil wars, and state collapse. To the casual observer history may appear to be chaotic and fathomless, devoid... Read More
Review of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond
•�December 3, 2009
•�3,100 Words •�2 Comments
While trawling through my computer archives, I stumbled across this book review of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" from five years ago. Overall, it's a great book, better than his follow-up "Collapse", which is also interesting - especially in the psychological aspects of "collapse", like creeping normalcy and "landscape amnesia" - but far from... Read More
Violence Is Reality
•�October 11, 2009
•�2,500 Words •�15 Comments
Realism has been falling out of favor since the end of the Cold War, condemned by the Kumbaya crowd, avoided by the liberal, PC-gone-wild intelligentsia, and denigrated by "end of history" ideologues (many of whom all too cynically remain realists while cloaking it under the mantle of "liberal interventionism"). What they all have in common... Read More
Education as the Elixir of Growth II
•�July 18, 2008
•�2,200 Words
A while ago I wrote Education as the Elixir of Growth on DR, in which I noted that in most countries the educational profile is closely correlated to their level of productivity. The major exceptions are nations with resource windfalls (inflated productivity) and socialist legacies (deflated productivity). Furthermore, the greater the gap between the 'potential... Read More
"Big History" Items Across Entire Archive
Anatoly Karlin
About Anatoly Karlin

I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.