Disclaimer

I've tried my best to copy-paste the summaries' contents into SN, but it's simply too much of a pain in the ass at this point in time, since somehow everything is set to zero - whether this is done by SN or by copying from the get-go, I don't know, but I sure as hell ain't gonna spend another hour reinstigating every detail I've gotten right in the document.
@k00b, maybe you can have a look at this yourself, try copying the first page and see how it gets entered into SN - redoing one page is okay, but ten? Not so much.
Therefore i'd like to ask you to please have a look at the original document instead.
I've got the original version written in a more native language for me - German, and tried my best translating the contents with the help of ChatGPT, although I don't think it's on-par with the German version, but you tell me.

Good-to-know's;

The attached document only contains the first 40-ish pages of the book, and is still a work in progress. The summary is solely based on the books pages, there's no additional research done and mingled in.
Written using my own words as much as possible

With that out of the way; Please have a good read-through, and if possible, relay any constructive criticism my way, for i'd really like to improve on the work I've done so far, which wasn't little.

There's probably some 16-ish hours of work in that document by now. 😅
The people that explicitly stated their interest in the summary are; @siggy47 @cleaningup12 @OriginalSize @Coyote_Cosmico, enjoy!
And since @ekzyis expressed his interest in military history, I might be able to spark his interest in anthropology, too 🤫😉
I can tell you put in a load of work here, well done!
About the formatting:
somehow everything is set to zero - whether this is done by SN or by copying from the get-go, I don't know
You mean the when you copy paste you lost the text styling and headings, right? Like italics and h2s?
I don't know what program you're using to write, but if you're using Google docs, or you export your file to Google docs, you can get the html in a cleaned-up format (no extraneous code) from a tool like this one.
Then convert the html to markdown. I'd ask gpt to do that, or there are also dedicated tools for it, like this one.
It sounds like a pain but I don't think that would take more than 10 minutes after you've done it once or twice. Hope it helps - maybe try it and drop the results in a comment here?
About the writing:
It's hard for me to give constructive feedback without knowing intended audience. Who did you write it for and what do you want the reader to take away from the piece?
As Seth Godin would ask "Who's it for? What's it for?"
Right now it looks like super-detailed personal notes, to help you absorb and remember the material. I'm sure it served that purpose well.
If the intended audience is someone else, what's the purpose?
Are you trying to inspire them to read the book? Are you trying to give a qualitative review of the content itself, or the writing? Are you trying to highlight some interesting nuggets from the book which most people would be surprised by or interested in? Some combination of these?
I read it all, and to be blunt it took a lot of effort. That's generally not a good thing for a piece of writing, but again I don't know if you're just sharing your own notes here (which is fine) or if this is intended to be an audience-facing piece, like a blog post.
If it is intended for an audience, and if you'd like me to, I can share more feedback.
--
It did serve as a nice refresher to Sapiens, and reminded me about the needle (not the awl, but the threaded fine-pointed needle) being one of the most important inventions in early human history. I just find that fascinating because I would never have guessed it.
I learned that from one of Brian Fagan's books where he wrote about early clothing tech, and how awls could produce basic cloak-like garments suitable for shielding us from the sun, rain, wind and basically making us more comfortable in frontier conditions. But for real habitat expansion during the ice age, we needed individually tailored & form-fitting clothing to survive, which was only made possible by the development of advanced threaded needles.
Once early humans got good at that, the world was truly our oyster! 🌎
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🥰, Yeah it's the Documents-app from Chromebook, I'll give your possible fix a look.
It's main purpose is indeed to help my understanding of the chapters and remembering the key-points he's trying to bring across.
I also think that it can be hard to "get" without having the book's context in the back of your mind to supply what's written there, that's why I asked if there's people who'd like such a summary :D
Alas, as long as one can take one or two things away from it, my goal's achieved.
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I really enjoyed Sapiens. I know it is slightly blasphemous in the bitcoin community to say this because he is practically Klaus Schwab's right hand man in the great reset but it's a good, informative book.
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The great reset?
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"The Great Reset Initiative is an economic recovery plan drawn up by the World Economic Forum in response to the COVID-19 pandemic"
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What does it entail?
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It entails a cabal of global elites controlling everything you say and do.
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There's no such thing as a cabal.
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Ok choose whatever identifier you want.
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Anyways... Harari is a bad guy, then?
Excellent, re reminds me of reading it years ago
Have a thousand on me 🤙
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🥰🥰🥰 Thanks, happy to hear!
Anything that needs some more love and care?
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Thanks for sharing this. I trust you're doing it mainly to cement your own understanding. When I make notes, it's mainly to keep track of the great ideas a text has generated for me. This has more the feel of cliff notes. Both have their use and obviously this takes a lot more effort. So well done! I could hear the narrator's voice again from when I listened to the audiobook.
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🥰, yeah, no, I'm not planning to write a book or something, I hear that often though... 🌞
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