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I never bought into the claims that Jared Diamond is some sort of racist; he book is plainly anti-racist and anybody who says otherwise probably never read it.

I never bought into the claims that Jared Diamond is some sort of racist; he book is plainly anti-racist and anybody who says otherwise probably never read it. Honestly. That said, some of Jared Diamond's arguments are really lame.. just poorly thought out. For instance, is claim that the use of wheels for transportation is in some way gated by the availability of pack animals. This guy has never used a wheel barrow I guess... of course he has and mentions them much later in his book, but dismissing the point as a "puzzling non-invention". This realization doesn't seem to have him question his earlier assertion that wheels for transportation would only be invented where pack animals are available. I think it's got nothing to do with pack animals, and the truth is that wheelbarrows, and wheels for transportation generally, are one of those inventions that are obvious only in retrospect. Even after you've invented wheels on toys, it isn't necessarily immediately obvious that wheels could have practical applications as well. A very small handful of people in the history of humanity had this idea and most people never did (and just copied it from other people). It's not because of geography or ecology, just shear dumb luck.

seanalltogether 3y ago
> For instance, is claim that the use of wheels for transportation is in some way gated by the availability of pack animals. This guy has never used a wheel barrow I guess... I pulled up a PDF of GG&S to search through and I can't see this argument in the book. What I can see is him making the observation that the wheels invented in mesoamerica didn't make their way north or south to be paired up with pack animals, and that this showed how hard it was for technological discoveries to travel vertically through climates.
- George83728 3y ago
  He argues that because technology transfer was difficult in the Americas, the ancient Mexican wheel never found it's way to the Andes where it may have been combined with suitable pack animals. That much is fairly plausible. But he goes further than this: he also argues that because ancient Mexican wheels weren't combined with pack animals, wheels could offer no practical utility to ancient Mexicans and this explains why the wheel wasn't put to practical use in the Americas. This is too far, he's forcing the data to fit his model. The relevant passage: > While wheels are very useful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. That seems incredible to us, until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters. It has nothing to do with pack animals. Pack animals are not and never were a prerequisite for putting wheels to practical use. Across all of humanity, perhaps as few as two individual people ever had the idea to invent the wheel; at least once in China and at least once again in Mexico; all other uses of the wheel plausibly descent from these two instances of invention. So obviously the wheel wasn't an obvious invention, and neither were practical applications for the wheel obvious, except seemingly so in retrospect. Chariots appeared about 4000 years ago, but wheel barrows only appeared about 2000 years ago. You can't explain that gap with environmental circumstances. The gap is explained when you realize these aren't obvious inventions. Searching for environmental reasons for the invention or non-invention of such things is folly, because the greatest hurdle to clear is simply having the incredible luck of somebody on your continent having such an idea in the first place.
  - gregjor 3y ago
    Your claim that perhaps as few as two individuals in all of history thought of the wheel seems far-fetched, and presented without evidence. You aren't even addressing Diamond's argument. Diamond doesn't claim that the wheel only got invented twice or a few times in history. He asks why the ancient Mexicans apparently didn't use wheels for transport, and why the invention of the wheel didn't get transported south or north to other civilizations. Very few wooden artifacts from prehistory or ancient times survive, and we know about ancient chariots and carts from depictions in art rather than from surviving examples. Lacking animals to pull wheeled carts leaves people to carry stuff, and then you have to ask if people using wheelbarrows or pulling wheeled carts makes transporting goods more efficient than having more people carry stuff. And you have to ask if the civilizations who didn't use wheels had access to the materials (hard wood) to make wheels and axles and carts. Any number of factors might have affected the adoption of wheeled vehicles, or failure to go that direction, but positing that the wheel idea only came up a handful of times in a couple of places seems an unlikely explanation. The precursor to wheels is fairly obvious and doesn't require one brilliant mind out of millions. Logs used to roll heavy loads were used by probably every neolithic culture that built monuments, including those that never developed wheeled vehicles pulled by animals. Going from there to the wheel doesn't seem like a huge leap of insight.
    - George83728 3y ago
      Across Eurasia you had about 2000 years where people were riding around on chariots with strong spoked wheels, but farms didn't have even primitive wheelbarrows to move rocks off their fields. Moving rocks off fields is back breaking work and even a primitive improvised wheel barrow gives you an order of magnitude advantage. The prerequisite technology, conditions, demand, etc were there, but it took thousands of years for somebody to have the idea. Therefore, I think it's safe to conclude that very few people who've never seen or heard of a wheelbarrow would ever have the idea to invent one, even if they were already familiar with wheels in other contexts. The idea itself is the rare thing, not the prerequisite technological/social conditions. The idea can go unhad for thousands of years after all the other pieces were in place. > You aren't even addressing Diamond's argument. I think Jared Diamond could be correct, but I would still say that his argument is lame because he failed to establish a high likelihood of prompt invention once prerequisite conditions are met before concluding what those supposedly missing prerequisites were. I'm not addressing his argument because he failed to convince me that his argument addresses a real question in the first place. Supposing hypothetically that ancient Mexico had pack animals, it still might have been thousands of years before pack animals and wheels were put together. > Going from [rollers] to the wheel doesn't seem like a huge leap of insight. I really think it was. There's a big conceptual gap between rolling something on logs, and making the rollers captive through the use of an axle. The roller goes from being a tool used to move a thing to being an integral part of the thing. Wheels may have been invented more than twice, but there's not much evidence for that. And in any case, it certainly did take a very long time for some seemingly simple applications of wheels to be considered after wheels were popularized for more sophisticated and demanding purposes.
zen_of_prog 3y ago
His arguments definitely don't have the same academic rigor as someone in their own field, but I felt like everything was pretty defensible. Ox-drawn plows are at least 4000 years old, and I feel like seeing an animal pulling a plow all day begs for wheels so you can pull anything anywhere. At least more than the combination of a wheel and a stick, to apply mechanical advantage to lift and then move things. The oldest wheelbarrow that we know of is from ~200 BCE, and the oldest chariots from ~2000 BCE. This tracks with animals pulling your stuff either being more obvious or to there being a higher ratio between payoff and cost of development. You're right that it often comes down to dumb luck, but I think those lucky moments are usually facilitated by other factors. That's why there are often simultaneous and independent inventions (multiple discovery), and why tech startups aren't geographically uniformly distributed.
- ramblenode 3y ago
  Wheels are also more advanced than they might appear to us nowadays. They are kind of a quantum leap because only a good wheel is useful, and a good wheel has multiple components that have to be fashioned and integrated in just the right way. Even if the idea of a wheelbarrow exists, it might not seem worth the investment when there isn't an established wheel industry and the wheel will need lots of tinkering and adjustment. But a wheeled cart driven by animals is a BIG improvement over saddlebags that would be worth it for travelers and soldiers to figure out.
  - George83728 3y ago
    Wheels sturdy enough to carry light loads are easier to fabricate than wheels sturdy enough to carry heavy loads. Similarly low-speed wheels are easier to create than wheels suitable for a chariot pulled by a galloping horse. So the thousands of years gap between heavy carts and chariots vs wheelbarrows, isn't something you can explain by citing insufficient technology or unsuitable environmental conditions. I think it all comes down to nobody had that idea yet.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Probably more of a multiplier. Wheels on pack animals are going to multiply the work that can be done many times over just a human pushing the thing. Sure, it helps the human do more, but combined with a pack animal its orders of magnitude more than the human. And building a cart to fit to the pack animal is probably not the easiest thing to come up with, but looks obvious after seeing it, hence why the flow of technology isn't instantaneous.
worik 3y ago
> book is plainly anti-racist and anybody who says otherwise probably never read it. I read it. It is deeply racist as none of the argument makes sense unless you look from a European POV from the end of the twentieth-century It so happens that the industrial revolution happened in England and not India, and a bunch of European gangsters went on a three hundred year world wide rampage that is coming to an ignoble end now Jarrad has some interest ideas but his euro centric POV is so deeply ingrained he cannot see it. He is utterly racist. He does not know it, but it drips from all his writings
- prepend 3y ago
  It was explicitly written with a European POC at the end of the 20th century. What else would you expect? That doesn’t make something racist if you’re European writing during that period. Should all books by euros from 1950-2000 be discarded? I’m not sure I understand your argument.
  - worik 3y ago
    He mistook his post hoc analysis for historical and geographical determinism Not all writers do that
    - prepend 3y ago
      I think the geographical determinism is the whole point though, right? That’s the argument is that geography contributed heavily to what we have today. Not that we’ll have this forever. I remember reading about the East/West spread vs North/South spread of technology and it seems clever to me.
      - worik 3y ago
        > I think the geographical determinism is the whole point though, right? My point is that it is post hoc a theory to fit the facts.
        3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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seanalltogether 3y ago

> For instance, is claim that the use of wheels for transportation is in some way gated by the availability of pack animals. This guy has never used a wheel barrow I guess... I pulled up a PDF of GG&S to search through and I can't see this argument in the book. What I can see is him making the observation that the wheels invented in mesoamerica didn't make their way north or south to be paired up with pack animals, and that this showed how hard it was for technological discoveries to travel vertically through climates.

George83728 3y ago
He argues that because technology transfer was difficult in the Americas, the ancient Mexican wheel never found it's way to the Andes where it may have been combined with suitable pack animals. That much is fairly plausible. But he goes further than this: he also argues that because ancient Mexican wheels weren't combined with pack animals, wheels could offer no practical utility to ancient Mexicans and this explains why the wheel wasn't put to practical use in the Americas. This is too far, he's forcing the data to fit his model. The relevant passage: > While wheels are very useful in modern industrial societies, that has not been so in some other societies. Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. That seems incredible to us, until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters. It has nothing to do with pack animals. Pack animals are not and never were a prerequisite for putting wheels to practical use. Across all of humanity, perhaps as few as two individual people ever had the idea to invent the wheel; at least once in China and at least once again in Mexico; all other uses of the wheel plausibly descent from these two instances of invention. So obviously the wheel wasn't an obvious invention, and neither were practical applications for the wheel obvious, except seemingly so in retrospect. Chariots appeared about 4000 years ago, but wheel barrows only appeared about 2000 years ago. You can't explain that gap with environmental circumstances. The gap is explained when you realize these aren't obvious inventions. Searching for environmental reasons for the invention or non-invention of such things is folly, because the greatest hurdle to clear is simply having the incredible luck of somebody on your continent having such an idea in the first place.
- gregjor 3y ago
  Your claim that perhaps as few as two individuals in all of history thought of the wheel seems far-fetched, and presented without evidence. You aren't even addressing Diamond's argument. Diamond doesn't claim that the wheel only got invented twice or a few times in history. He asks why the ancient Mexicans apparently didn't use wheels for transport, and why the invention of the wheel didn't get transported south or north to other civilizations. Very few wooden artifacts from prehistory or ancient times survive, and we know about ancient chariots and carts from depictions in art rather than from surviving examples. Lacking animals to pull wheeled carts leaves people to carry stuff, and then you have to ask if people using wheelbarrows or pulling wheeled carts makes transporting goods more efficient than having more people carry stuff. And you have to ask if the civilizations who didn't use wheels had access to the materials (hard wood) to make wheels and axles and carts. Any number of factors might have affected the adoption of wheeled vehicles, or failure to go that direction, but positing that the wheel idea only came up a handful of times in a couple of places seems an unlikely explanation. The precursor to wheels is fairly obvious and doesn't require one brilliant mind out of millions. Logs used to roll heavy loads were used by probably every neolithic culture that built monuments, including those that never developed wheeled vehicles pulled by animals. Going from there to the wheel doesn't seem like a huge leap of insight.
  - George83728 3y ago
    Across Eurasia you had about 2000 years where people were riding around on chariots with strong spoked wheels, but farms didn't have even primitive wheelbarrows to move rocks off their fields. Moving rocks off fields is back breaking work and even a primitive improvised wheel barrow gives you an order of magnitude advantage. The prerequisite technology, conditions, demand, etc were there, but it took thousands of years for somebody to have the idea. Therefore, I think it's safe to conclude that very few people who've never seen or heard of a wheelbarrow would ever have the idea to invent one, even if they were already familiar with wheels in other contexts. The idea itself is the rare thing, not the prerequisite technological/social conditions. The idea can go unhad for thousands of years after all the other pieces were in place. > You aren't even addressing Diamond's argument. I think Jared Diamond could be correct, but I would still say that his argument is lame because he failed to establish a high likelihood of prompt invention once prerequisite conditions are met before concluding what those supposedly missing prerequisites were. I'm not addressing his argument because he failed to convince me that his argument addresses a real question in the first place. Supposing hypothetically that ancient Mexico had pack animals, it still might have been thousands of years before pack animals and wheels were put together. > Going from [rollers] to the wheel doesn't seem like a huge leap of insight. I really think it was. There's a big conceptual gap between rolling something on logs, and making the rollers captive through the use of an axle. The roller goes from being a tool used to move a thing to being an integral part of the thing. Wheels may have been invented more than twice, but there's not much evidence for that. And in any case, it certainly did take a very long time for some seemingly simple applications of wheels to be considered after wheels were popularized for more sophisticated and demanding purposes.

zen_of_prog 3y ago

His arguments definitely don't have the same academic rigor as someone in their own field, but I felt like everything was pretty defensible. Ox-drawn plows are at least 4000 years old, and I feel like seeing an animal pulling a plow all day begs for wheels so you can pull anything anywhere. At least more than the combination of a wheel and a stick, to apply mechanical advantage to lift and then move things. The oldest wheelbarrow that we know of is from ~200 BCE, and the oldest chariots from ~2000 BCE. This tracks with animals pulling your stuff either being more obvious or to there being a higher ratio between payoff and cost of development. You're right that it often comes down to dumb luck, but I think those lucky moments are usually facilitated by other factors. That's why there are often simultaneous and independent inventions (multiple discovery), and why tech startups aren't geographically uniformly distributed.

ramblenode 3y ago
Wheels are also more advanced than they might appear to us nowadays. They are kind of a quantum leap because only a good wheel is useful, and a good wheel has multiple components that have to be fashioned and integrated in just the right way. Even if the idea of a wheelbarrow exists, it might not seem worth the investment when there isn't an established wheel industry and the wheel will need lots of tinkering and adjustment. But a wheeled cart driven by animals is a BIG improvement over saddlebags that would be worth it for travelers and soldiers to figure out.
- George83728 3y ago
  Wheels sturdy enough to carry light loads are easier to fabricate than wheels sturdy enough to carry heavy loads. Similarly low-speed wheels are easier to create than wheels suitable for a chariot pulled by a galloping horse. So the thousands of years gap between heavy carts and chariots vs wheelbarrows, isn't something you can explain by citing insufficient technology or unsuitable environmental conditions. I think it all comes down to nobody had that idea yet.
  - giantrobot 3y ago

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Probably more of a multiplier. Wheels on pack animals are going to multiply the work that can be done many times over just a human pushing the thing. Sure, it helps the human do more, but combined with a pack animal its orders of magnitude more than the human. And building a cart to fit to the pack animal is probably not the easiest thing to come up with, but looks obvious after seeing it, hence why the flow of technology isn't instantaneous.

worik 3y ago

> book is plainly anti-racist and anybody who says otherwise probably never read it. I read it. It is deeply racist as none of the argument makes sense unless you look from a European POV from the end of the twentieth-century It so happens that the industrial revolution happened in England and not India, and a bunch of European gangsters went on a three hundred year world wide rampage that is coming to an ignoble end now Jarrad has some interest ideas but his euro centric POV is so deeply ingrained he cannot see it. He is utterly racist. He does not know it, but it drips from all his writings

prepend 3y ago
It was explicitly written with a European POC at the end of the 20th century. What else would you expect? That doesn’t make something racist if you’re European writing during that period. Should all books by euros from 1950-2000 be discarded? I’m not sure I understand your argument.
- worik 3y ago
  He mistook his post hoc analysis for historical and geographical determinism Not all writers do that
  - prepend 3y ago
    I think the geographical determinism is the whole point though, right? That’s the argument is that geography contributed heavily to what we have today. Not that we’ll have this forever. I remember reading about the East/West spread vs North/South spread of technology and it seems clever to me.
    - worik 3y ago
      > I think the geographical determinism is the whole point though, right? My point is that it is post hoc a theory to fit the facts.
      - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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