3 ms·

I feel like there's some form of Gell-Mann amnesia here. Why say a book is right about a lot of big things when it is frequently wrong about those things which

• earthboundkid 6y ago
  Because I didn’t read Debt to learn about Apple, and that’s not what I took away from it.
  • cynicalkane 6y ago
    That's deeply disingenuous. It's not like this guy was telling the truth everywhere else. The lies were numerous. That's what Gell-Mann amnesia is, really: we believe what we want to believe, and forget the quality of the source.
• notahacker 6y ago
  Because I've read other, less entertaining writing on the history of money which concurs with Graeber's central argument that money is much best understood as debt accounting (and some pretty terrible writing about the magical powers of certain metals) and the sloppiness in illustrative anecdotes (or impractical utopian proposals of regular debt jubilees) doesn't really affect that central thesis. I wouldn't necessarily rely on Graeber's colourful anecdotes about historical civilisations or obscure tribes being accurate and uncontroversial without checking what other anthropologists think, but those are 'small picture' things.