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> Without trivializing the work and scholarship, are there generalized take-away messages that you think the public should know from Questioning Collapse? Some
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Without trivializing the work and scholarship, are there generalized take-away messages that you think the public should know from Questioning Collapse?
Sometimes, the most important generalized take-away message is that there aren’t generalized take-away messages. Many times the causes for collapse are different and multi-factorial that an overarching theory that tries to generalize across a bunch of events is more misleading than helpful.
- abeppu 5y agoI get that sometimes we get carried away trying to universalize something and let a good story get in the way of the actual facts. This is to be avoided, and if others hold those narratives up to rigorous scrutiny, that's healthy. However, it doesn't seem helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other end of the spectrum, where we regard everything as being so rooted in the specific and context and circumstances, that we're unwilling to draw any lessons to apply to modern problems. Surely there's some middle ground, where we can have some loose generalizations which we acknowledge only apply some of the time and are only ever partial explanations?