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>Sapiens is not highly regarded by anyone with a history background Thanks for illustrating the point about paradigm shifts being tough and entrenching bias. T

>Sapiens is not highly regarded by anyone with a history background Thanks for illustrating the point about paradigm shifts being tough and entrenching bias. This is especially true for soft fields such as history. Doubly so when researchers show cracks in the soft field with physicochemical data that does not agree with the prevailing view.

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
I hope you are not implying that anyone disagreeing with a consensus is right by virtue of disagreeing? Sapiens is bad because the author has a limited background. He is the best historian in terms of military dairies, a super cool niche subject. he made great points about it being the original precussor to the modern novel and did some fantastic research into this small lit genre. He was then forced to take a class of Hisotry 101 in uni, a subject he didn't know or care about. While preparing the class, with material for 18 year olds, he wrote the book. He did not contrast a lot of his findings. And the book became famous because people like Bill Gates and Obama praised it. They praised because the book is well written and it largely has a nice humanitarian angle. But they miss the problems the book has, because neither of them has a history background. Many of the problems are not in the facts but in the correlations, threads relating them etc, where the author essentially writes abeaautiful chain of causality that is entirely non existant. In other words, he wrote a fantastic story about the history of humanity, not a true one. It has academic value in so far highschoolers and 101 students can get some interesting facts explained really well. But as a presentation of rigurous historical facts, event sequences or terminology, its not a good resource, at all. There is a reason there is largely cynicism in the "Scholarly review" quotes that are used on the wikipedia page of the very book

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago

I hope you are not implying that anyone disagreeing with a consensus is right by virtue of disagreeing? Sapiens is bad because the author has a limited background. He is the best historian in terms of military dairies, a super cool niche subject. he made great points about it being the original precussor to the modern novel and did some fantastic research into this small lit genre. He was then forced to take a class of Hisotry 101 in uni, a subject he didn't know or care about. While preparing the class, with material for 18 year olds, he wrote the book. He did not contrast a lot of his findings. And the book became famous because people like Bill Gates and Obama praised it. They praised because the book is well written and it largely has a nice humanitarian angle. But they miss the problems the book has, because neither of them has a history background. Many of the problems are not in the facts but in the correlations, threads relating them etc, where the author essentially writes abeaautiful chain of causality that is entirely non existant. In other words, he wrote a fantastic story about the history of humanity, not a true one. It has academic value in so far highschoolers and 101 students can get some interesting facts explained really well. But as a presentation of rigurous historical facts, event sequences or terminology, its not a good resource, at all. There is a reason there is largely cynicism in the "Scholarly review" quotes that are used on the wikipedia page of the very book