I've read the book and every criticism of it that I came across, much of it here on HN. Because I could not care less who is right, I have no emotional beef on

I've read the book and every criticism of it that I came across, much of it here on HN. Because I could not care less who is right, I have no emotional beef on either side, I'm just a mildly interested bystander (nothing in my life is affected by any of it). However, every criticism I read felt... thin. It felt like many reddit comment replies - you post something that you happen to actually know a lot about, but any human communication requires the other side to work with you. Human information exchange is not like computer data exchange, not even close. Lots of ambiguity, lots and lots of unmentioned context, lots of other stuff I could not even name. Those reddit replies I mentioned, it's things like - always hard to come up with a concrete example - I think I'll just point to Dilbert: - http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-07-08 http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-07-08 (quite a bit of the criticism was like that, I could not match them to the book that I had read at all) - http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07 http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-06-07 Also, as another commenter pointed out, the criticism focuses on the tree and misses the forest. I have yet to see something that lets me conclude anything even close to your statement. Also, many - MANY - or, actually, all models are wrong. That's not just some stupid meme. Every single model is "wrong". When you go through learning chemistry, for example, at every new step you learn "oh and by the way what we taught you two years ago is completely wrong". Question is, is it useful? What is the alternative believe that you work with if that book was never written? Note the target audience - just like a Ph.D. chemist will find the models learned in high school useless so will actual anthropologists probably find a book targeted at the masses useless. The question is, what ideas in the heads of the people did the book replace, and what is the alternative? If it's so easy, someone just write a better book and we'll gladly read it and forget about Guns, Germs and Steel. I have and ever had any doubts that it's all a lot more complicated and different than described in one popular book. It's the same everywhere: the closer you look, the more insane the theories of/for those who don't look closely seem to be.