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The author needs to look at this in a wider context. GG&S may be defensible, but Collapse is pretty horrible, trying to force environmental explanations at the

by yyyk 3y ago

The author needs to look at this in a wider context. GG&S may be defensible, but Collapse is pretty horrible, trying to force environmental explanations at the cost of downplaying European slave raids (Easter Islands) or utter absurdity (Diamond's suggestion that Viking Greenlanders preferred to starve than to eat fish). Diamond had a thesis and forced the facts to fit in the expense of integrity. After Collapse, it made much more sense to look askance at GG&S.

api 3y ago
I always get a little suspicious of big nonfiction books arguing some big thesis that arrive with fawning reviews from all the right places and whose authors immediately get crowned as important public intellectuals. These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten. I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker. A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed. In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  This seems more like sour grapes. Is "A Brief History of Time" in this category? Who's to say. There are a ton of non-fiction books that are written for popular audiences that do not make it big. If they are all equal, than all the ones that don't make it should also end up being wrong. That doesn't seem right, why is it only the ones that do become popular must turn out wrong. This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.
  - perardi 3y ago
    “A Brief History of Time” is a standout here, as it’s dealing with really well-defined, well-studied, well-tested physics theories. (Well, except for Grand Unification stuff.) But Diamond’s work, and other authors that are in this middle-brow reviewed-in-The New Yorker mold, deals with really complex sociology and psychology, which aren’t reducible to equations. (There’s no Lorentz transformation for colonialism.) Malcom Gladwell really comes right to mind here—lot of pop-sci stuff which gets in all the right publications and then ends up being just wrong in all the ways.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
It is hard to tell because in the current political climate, there is such animosity against anybody mentioning human impacts on the 'environment', that someone could just state something obvious, like maybe we should stop polluting so much, and be called a 'woke liberal elitist'. So is his book Collapse forcing an environmental theory, or are you so against any theory of 'human caused environmental problems', that you can't see past your own bias. It is hard to tell online. I mean, his book was totally about environmental problems, so to criticize it for outlining environmental problems is bit much. It has been awhile but think the Vikings had more variables, like weather that prevented fishing. And, don't think slave raids negates there were other variables, why can't slave trade and environment both have contributed. So he didn't highlight what you wanted to hear about enough, isn't an argument that slave raids contributed more.
- yyyk 3y ago
  >It has been awhile but think the Vikings had more variables, like weather that prevented fishing This was categorically refuted by bone analysis showing that Vikings did eat seaborne food[0]. The current hypothesis is that the fish bones were used to feed animals or burnt. The more important point that the thesis was absurd in the first place. The Vikings were seafarers, and we have no record of any such taboos. You can't invent a food taboo completely against their way of life and with absolutely no written evidence out of thin air. At the very least, there was an extremely high level of proof needed, and Diamond doesn't even try to get near. Moreover, We have a 5000 years history of human food taboos, and as a rule when people face starvation or just illness, the taboos get shunted aside. Even the fanatically devoted Ghandi compromised and drunk milk. The one exception I can think of in all of human history is Nongqawuse, and even that was: not a food taboo but based on existing faith, encouraged by a foreign power and disobeyed by a non-trivial faction. You didn't get complete extinction even there. [0] https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/abs/2002/03/epn02301/epn02301.html https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/abs/2002/03/epn... As for Easter Islands, there are serious arguments that there wasn't any environmental problem and the population survived well enough (e.g. [1]). More importantly, the Europe slave raids are documented to have carried off a third-to-half of the population, the more educated part. In other contexts of similar casualty levels, downplaying that would be called way worse. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/what-happened-on-easter-island-a-new-even-scarier-scenario https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/w...
czzr 3y ago
I agree his later books were not as good, but this argument is ridiculous - evaluate GGS on its own terms, those don’t change if the author later writes poorer books.
- yyyk 3y ago
  Well, when one of the big arguments is whether Diamond absolves European colonialism, and in a later book he does exactly that, that does lead me to assume less good faith even in a previously written book. [EDIT: Note the title is "Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics". While the substance of the post is about GGS, the title is about Diamond. I think his other 'work' is fit for discussion under this title.]
- chongli 3y ago
  Yeah. If we evaluated every author’s work based on their worst book or theory, we’d have to throw out everything Newton did because he wrote a lot of bunk about alchemy and the occult. Good thing we don’t do that, because calculus, gravity, and optics are extremely valuable.

by yyyk 3y ago

api 3y ago

I always get a little suspicious of big nonfiction books arguing some big thesis that arrive with fawning reviews from all the right places and whose authors immediately get crowned as important public intellectuals. These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten. I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker. A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed. In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
This seems more like sour grapes. Is "A Brief History of Time" in this category? Who's to say. There are a ton of non-fiction books that are written for popular audiences that do not make it big. If they are all equal, than all the ones that don't make it should also end up being wrong. That doesn't seem right, why is it only the ones that do become popular must turn out wrong. This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.
- perardi 3y ago
  “A Brief History of Time” is a standout here, as it’s dealing with really well-defined, well-studied, well-tested physics theories. (Well, except for Grand Unification stuff.) But Diamond’s work, and other authors that are in this middle-brow reviewed-in-The New Yorker mold, deals with really complex sociology and psychology, which aren’t reducible to equations. (There’s no Lorentz transformation for colonialism.) Malcom Gladwell really comes right to mind here—lot of pop-sci stuff which gets in all the right publications and then ends up being just wrong in all the ways.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

It is hard to tell because in the current political climate, there is such animosity against anybody mentioning human impacts on the 'environment', that someone could just state something obvious, like maybe we should stop polluting so much, and be called a 'woke liberal elitist'. So is his book Collapse forcing an environmental theory, or are you so against any theory of 'human caused environmental problems', that you can't see past your own bias. It is hard to tell online. I mean, his book was totally about environmental problems, so to criticize it for outlining environmental problems is bit much. It has been awhile but think the Vikings had more variables, like weather that prevented fishing. And, don't think slave raids negates there were other variables, why can't slave trade and environment both have contributed. So he didn't highlight what you wanted to hear about enough, isn't an argument that slave raids contributed more.

yyyk 3y ago
>It has been awhile but think the Vikings had more variables, like weather that prevented fishing This was categorically refuted by bone analysis showing that Vikings did eat seaborne food[0]. The current hypothesis is that the fish bones were used to feed animals or burnt. The more important point that the thesis was absurd in the first place. The Vikings were seafarers, and we have no record of any such taboos. You can't invent a food taboo completely against their way of life and with absolutely no written evidence out of thin air. At the very least, there was an extremely high level of proof needed, and Diamond doesn't even try to get near. Moreover, We have a 5000 years history of human food taboos, and as a rule when people face starvation or just illness, the taboos get shunted aside. Even the fanatically devoted Ghandi compromised and drunk milk. The one exception I can think of in all of human history is Nongqawuse, and even that was: not a food taboo but based on existing faith, encouraged by a foreign power and disobeyed by a non-trivial faction. You didn't get complete extinction even there. [0] https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/abs/2002/03/epn02301/epn02301.html https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/abs/2002/03/epn... As for Easter Islands, there are serious arguments that there wasn't any environmental problem and the population survived well enough (e.g. [1]). More importantly, the Europe slave raids are documented to have carried off a third-to-half of the population, the more educated part. In other contexts of similar casualty levels, downplaying that would be called way worse. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/what-happened-on-easter-island-a-new-even-scarier-scenario https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/12/09/249728994/w...

czzr 3y ago

I agree his later books were not as good, but this argument is ridiculous - evaluate GGS on its own terms, those don’t change if the author later writes poorer books.

yyyk 3y ago
Well, when one of the big arguments is whether Diamond absolves European colonialism, and in a later book he does exactly that, that does lead me to assume less good faith even in a previously written book. [EDIT: Note the title is "Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics". While the substance of the post is about GGS, the title is about Diamond. I think his other 'work' is fit for discussion under this title.]
chongli 3y ago
Yeah. If we evaluated every author’s work based on their worst book or theory, we’d have to throw out everything Newton did because he wrote a lot of bunk about alchemy and the occult. Good thing we don’t do that, because calculus, gravity, and optics are extremely valuable.