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The AskHistorians group on reddit has a section of the FAQ devoted to Jared Diamond which you might be interested in: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wi

by opo 3y ago

The AskHistorians group on reddit has a section of the FAQ devoted to Jared Diamond which you might be interested in: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

LudwigNagasena 3y ago
I don't really understand the hate /r/AskHistorians has for Diamond. When you look at the assessments of Foucault there, he basically will be criticized for somewhat similar things yet with a far more forgiving and even praising tone. I guess one can read into Diamond implicit atonement of the sins of white people because "it's just geography"; and it is just too much for some people, especially for this specific demographic who is into humanities and Reddit.
- defrost 3y ago
  Foucault has strengths and weaknesses, makes good points, makes bad points, but is almost always read by people as part of or adjacent to some other ongoing education. Foucault gets debated and recognised for having pros and cons. Diamond, unlike Foucault, is damn near airport departure lounge fodder; historians and sociologists generally encounter general members of the public who are uncritically fans of Diamond and near venerate the GG&S book for radically changing their world view, etc. It's that association that grates after a while .. it can be as relentless as those who approach mathematicians with their novel proofs for squaring a circle.
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago
    I have read both, and Foucault is 100x the charlatan than diamond is. Foucault is responsible for significant amounts of fashionable nonsense within the academy.
    - defrost 3y ago
      C'mon now, he was pretty spot on about that pendulum ... /jk
      - chongli 3y ago
        Different Foucault!
        defrost 3y ago
        Not the one that wrote The Name of the Rose then? Damn, who'd have thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum
    - Radim 3y ago
      To paraphrase Roosevelt: "He may be a charlatan, but he's OUR charlatan!"
    - DiscourseFan 3y ago
      >fashionable nonsense If you believe that critiquing the prison-industrial complex is fashionable non-sense, then I think I know where you lie politically.
      - Der_Einzige 3y ago
        I (unfortunately) read most of his works alongside a lot of the post-modernist cannon while participating in speech and debate. While he may give some interesting speculative reasoning about the nature of state power, he's ultimately fashionable nonsense. Lacan, Zizek, Foucault, and Derrida are The 4 horsemen of the epistemological apocalypse.
        DiscourseFan 3y ago
        >Lacan, Zizek, Foucault, and Derrida are The 4 horsemen of the epistemological apocalypse. We should probably just go back to Rhene Thom and Morphogenesis, except that even that theory has lost face. A hundred years of denying the importance of Hegel's Logic has led to a significant loss in the progress of human civilization.
  - DiscourseFan 3y ago
    Contemporary anthropology is...not very good. Latour's critiques are still quite strong and very difficult to overcome; perhaps anthropology as a field is fundamentally flawed. I haven't read Diamond, but I could understand, if you're a liberal academic and you see a text, almost like Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals, that just says that the strong always conquer the weak because of totally contingent conditions, it will seem horrifying because, as a liberal, you genuinely believe in personal agency and social justice and all that fun stuff. But go back and actually read Marx, go and read all your favorite Frankfurt school thinkers: they will say, the conditions that we have been placed in are a real illusion of nature: even if the so-called nature of things is a construction, it is one where the reality of it is undeniable for us. Therefore, the goal of critique, even in that Marxian, Kantian sense, is to raise consciousness to shatter that real illusion precisely by illuminating this so-called "natural" process. For Marx, revolution is a natural result of the development of Capitalism, but Capitalism also dissolved history, and temporality, so the naturality of revolution must be immanent in every moment of its development: its like Walter Benjamin said, we must bring about a real catastrophe, as opposed to the constant "accidents" of human suffering under the system that come about with almost mechanical regularity. In any case, I don't remember Marx ever being either an academic, or particularly hard to read in most cases, even if a thorough familiarity with German Idealism is a great help to understanding him more deeply. Even Foucault was technically an academic, but only because he helped organize a nearly successful revolutionary movement that managed to extract the concession of an entire university (Paris VIII) out of the government which he then ran, and is still being run by his students and colleagues to this day.
    - NeuNeurosis 3y ago
      If someone wanted to read more into the theory(s) you highlighted do you have any recommendations on where to start? I ask because I have not heard either of those ideas put that way of the real illusion being undeniable and needing to shatter that real illusion by raising consciousness, or the idea of "Walter Benjamin said, we must bring about a real catastrophe" Any recommendations are welcome. Context no background in German Idealism just some cursory understanding of Marxism and Nietzche.
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  See also: Anthropology. I am guessing it's a simple matter of human pride. These groups consider themselves to have authority over their domains. Diamond made claims that ignore some of their tenants, and come to different conclusions. There is a visceral reaction.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    More to the point, Diamond got rich doing it.
- arolihas 3y ago
  This is like asking why economists hate freakonomics but have respect for Milton Friedman.
  - DinaCoder99 3y ago
    > have respect for Milton Friedman. Do they? Still? Color me skeptical.
  - ggm 3y ago
    Normally I hate Analogies but this one is too good to go past. The freaks are chic, but Milton is worthy of hate because he's smart but evil
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Evil has nothing to do with correctness.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > This is like asking why economists hate freakonomics but have respect for Milton Friedman. Do economists hate Freakonomics? I know some who liked it. I think the objection is not to popular content but to misleading popular content.
  - kevinventullo 3y ago
    Do they? I have one economist friend who credits reading Freakonomics as a kid with sparking his interest in the field.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  I don't know for certain, but the two major faults of Diamond are first, that his framework for anthropology is perpetuating beliefs that are antithetical to modern anthropology, and second, that he is extremely resistant to following up with new advances in anthropology. On the latter point, for example, Diamond is still a believer in Clovis-First hypothesis, despite that having been discredited for so long that I learned about it in grade school decades ago. On the first point in particular: there's a general thesis of anthropology which is properly termed unilineal model (and in more colloquial terms, Civilization-style tech tree), which views civilizations as existing on a spectrum from less to more advanced. In essence, GG&S reduces the question of "why did Europe conquer the New World and not the other way around" as "because Europe was more advanced" (and then go on to try to explore why Europe was more advanced), but never trying that hard to justify why "was more advanced" was the answer to the first question. By contrast, the consensus view of modern anthropology is that technological development is heavily adapted to the context of its culture, so that (for example) the Incans don't develop carts because carts are useless in their mountainous environment. Once you go beyond the idea that "more advanced" is a qualitatively useful metric of comparison and actually start demanding to see the causal links in how specific technologies are necessary to achieve the claimed outcomes, it starts to become clear just how badly Diamond whiffs it. Literacy is a fun example: Diamond has to work around the fact that the conquistadors were largely illiterate, and they were facing bureaucratic, administrative imperial states that ran on record keeping, requiring at least proto-writing [1]; really, how different were the two empires in terms of literacy? Another fun example I like to bring up is comparing Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital) to Toledo (the Spanish one). Tenochtitlan had over 100,000 inhabitants, universal primary education (for both boys and girls, even!), running water, and public amenities like zoos and history museums; the Spaniards had... none of that. [1] And there's a case to be made that Incan quipu were an honest-to-god writing system.
  - GMoromisato 3y ago
    What is the consensus answer to why Europe conquered the Americas and not vice versa? If technological development is "heavily adapted to the context of its culture", and that context is mostly geography ("mountainous environments") then isn't Diamond right? Seems like the alternative is, "That's just the way it turned out," which is not very satisfying.
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  Well there's no great mystery, jared diamond doesn't engage in anything resembling academic historiography, but still tries to sell a great narrative of history.
- melagonster 3y ago
  Most of historians at there said they like him, some people even said that they were inspired by his book. but as a historian, they can't say book is correct, because it is not truth. I do not think this is hate.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  To be fair they don’t seem to like most popular historians, podcasters etc. and big picture/all encompassing theories which over simplify complex systems. Which I guess is reasonable, if you’re a real historian deeply specialized in a specific field seeing someone gloss over or outright ignore very important details and/or new findings/theories might be hard to stomach.
sershe 3y ago
A pretty good response: https://blog.daviskedrosky.com/p/jared-diamond-a-reply-to-his-critics https://blog.daviskedrosky.com/p/jared-diamond-a-reply-to-hi... This FAQ is mostly ideologically-driven and, at the very least, willfully misinterprets what Diamond says in his books in a way that I think is impossible to explain by accidental misreading or even misunderstanding; only by intentional misinterpretation driven by an agenda. I've read Diamond, then many years later this FAQ, then the above response; then cross-referenced all 3 to see who's lying. I used to say all modern humanities are worthless garbage, except history. After that exercise, assuming AskHistorians crowd is representative, I'm not so sure about history...

by opo 3y ago

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

I don't really understand the hate /r/AskHistorians has for Diamond. When you look at the assessments of Foucault there, he basically will be criticized for somewhat similar things yet with a far more forgiving and even praising tone. I guess one can read into Diamond implicit atonement of the sins of white people because "it's just geography"; and it is just too much for some people, especially for this specific demographic who is into humanities and Reddit.

defrost 3y ago
Foucault has strengths and weaknesses, makes good points, makes bad points, but is almost always read by people as part of or adjacent to some other ongoing education. Foucault gets debated and recognised for having pros and cons. Diamond, unlike Foucault, is damn near airport departure lounge fodder; historians and sociologists generally encounter general members of the public who are uncritically fans of Diamond and near venerate the GG&S book for radically changing their world view, etc. It's that association that grates after a while .. it can be as relentless as those who approach mathematicians with their novel proofs for squaring a circle.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  I have read both, and Foucault is 100x the charlatan than diamond is. Foucault is responsible for significant amounts of fashionable nonsense within the academy.
  - defrost 3y ago
    C'mon now, he was pretty spot on about that pendulum ... /jk
    - chongli 3y ago
      Different Foucault!
      - defrost 3y ago
        Not the one that wrote The Name of the Rose then? Damn, who'd have thought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum
  - Radim 3y ago
    To paraphrase Roosevelt: "He may be a charlatan, but he's OUR charlatan!"
  - DiscourseFan 3y ago
    >fashionable nonsense If you believe that critiquing the prison-industrial complex is fashionable non-sense, then I think I know where you lie politically.
    - Der_Einzige 3y ago
      I (unfortunately) read most of his works alongside a lot of the post-modernist cannon while participating in speech and debate. While he may give some interesting speculative reasoning about the nature of state power, he's ultimately fashionable nonsense. Lacan, Zizek, Foucault, and Derrida are The 4 horsemen of the epistemological apocalypse.
      - DiscourseFan 3y ago
        >Lacan, Zizek, Foucault, and Derrida are The 4 horsemen of the epistemological apocalypse. We should probably just go back to Rhene Thom and Morphogenesis, except that even that theory has lost face. A hundred years of denying the importance of Hegel's Logic has led to a significant loss in the progress of human civilization.
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  Contemporary anthropology is...not very good. Latour's critiques are still quite strong and very difficult to overcome; perhaps anthropology as a field is fundamentally flawed. I haven't read Diamond, but I could understand, if you're a liberal academic and you see a text, almost like Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals, that just says that the strong always conquer the weak because of totally contingent conditions, it will seem horrifying because, as a liberal, you genuinely believe in personal agency and social justice and all that fun stuff. But go back and actually read Marx, go and read all your favorite Frankfurt school thinkers: they will say, the conditions that we have been placed in are a real illusion of nature: even if the so-called nature of things is a construction, it is one where the reality of it is undeniable for us. Therefore, the goal of critique, even in that Marxian, Kantian sense, is to raise consciousness to shatter that real illusion precisely by illuminating this so-called "natural" process. For Marx, revolution is a natural result of the development of Capitalism, but Capitalism also dissolved history, and temporality, so the naturality of revolution must be immanent in every moment of its development: its like Walter Benjamin said, we must bring about a real catastrophe, as opposed to the constant "accidents" of human suffering under the system that come about with almost mechanical regularity. In any case, I don't remember Marx ever being either an academic, or particularly hard to read in most cases, even if a thorough familiarity with German Idealism is a great help to understanding him more deeply. Even Foucault was technically an academic, but only because he helped organize a nearly successful revolutionary movement that managed to extract the concession of an entire university (Paris VIII) out of the government which he then ran, and is still being run by his students and colleagues to this day.
  - NeuNeurosis 3y ago
    If someone wanted to read more into the theory(s) you highlighted do you have any recommendations on where to start? I ask because I have not heard either of those ideas put that way of the real illusion being undeniable and needing to shatter that real illusion by raising consciousness, or the idea of "Walter Benjamin said, we must bring about a real catastrophe" Any recommendations are welcome. Context no background in German Idealism just some cursory understanding of Marxism and Nietzche.
the__alchemist 3y ago
See also: Anthropology. I am guessing it's a simple matter of human pride. These groups consider themselves to have authority over their domains. Diamond made claims that ignore some of their tenants, and come to different conclusions. There is a visceral reaction.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  More to the point, Diamond got rich doing it.
arolihas 3y ago
This is like asking why economists hate freakonomics but have respect for Milton Friedman.
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  > have respect for Milton Friedman. Do they? Still? Color me skeptical.
- ggm 3y ago
  Normally I hate Analogies but this one is too good to go past. The freaks are chic, but Milton is worthy of hate because he's smart but evil
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Evil has nothing to do with correctness.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > This is like asking why economists hate freakonomics but have respect for Milton Friedman. Do economists hate Freakonomics? I know some who liked it. I think the objection is not to popular content but to misleading popular content.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  Do they? I have one economist friend who credits reading Freakonomics as a kid with sparking his interest in the field.
jcranmer 3y ago
I don't know for certain, but the two major faults of Diamond are first, that his framework for anthropology is perpetuating beliefs that are antithetical to modern anthropology, and second, that he is extremely resistant to following up with new advances in anthropology. On the latter point, for example, Diamond is still a believer in Clovis-First hypothesis, despite that having been discredited for so long that I learned about it in grade school decades ago. On the first point in particular: there's a general thesis of anthropology which is properly termed unilineal model (and in more colloquial terms, Civilization-style tech tree), which views civilizations as existing on a spectrum from less to more advanced. In essence, GG&S reduces the question of "why did Europe conquer the New World and not the other way around" as "because Europe was more advanced" (and then go on to try to explore why Europe was more advanced), but never trying that hard to justify why "was more advanced" was the answer to the first question. By contrast, the consensus view of modern anthropology is that technological development is heavily adapted to the context of its culture, so that (for example) the Incans don't develop carts because carts are useless in their mountainous environment. Once you go beyond the idea that "more advanced" is a qualitatively useful metric of comparison and actually start demanding to see the causal links in how specific technologies are necessary to achieve the claimed outcomes, it starts to become clear just how badly Diamond whiffs it. Literacy is a fun example: Diamond has to work around the fact that the conquistadors were largely illiterate, and they were facing bureaucratic, administrative imperial states that ran on record keeping, requiring at least proto-writing [1]; really, how different were the two empires in terms of literacy? Another fun example I like to bring up is comparing Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital) to Toledo (the Spanish one). Tenochtitlan had over 100,000 inhabitants, universal primary education (for both boys and girls, even!), running water, and public amenities like zoos and history museums; the Spaniards had... none of that. [1] And there's a case to be made that Incan quipu were an honest-to-god writing system.
- GMoromisato 3y ago
  What is the consensus answer to why Europe conquered the Americas and not vice versa? If technological development is "heavily adapted to the context of its culture", and that context is mostly geography ("mountainous environments") then isn't Diamond right? Seems like the alternative is, "That's just the way it turned out," which is not very satisfying.
DinaCoder99 3y ago
Well there's no great mystery, jared diamond doesn't engage in anything resembling academic historiography, but still tries to sell a great narrative of history.
melagonster 3y ago
Most of historians at there said they like him, some people even said that they were inspired by his book. but as a historian, they can't say book is correct, because it is not truth. I do not think this is hate.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
To be fair they don’t seem to like most popular historians, podcasters etc. and big picture/all encompassing theories which over simplify complex systems. Which I guess is reasonable, if you’re a real historian deeply specialized in a specific field seeing someone gloss over or outright ignore very important details and/or new findings/theories might be hard to stomach.

sershe 3y ago

A pretty good response: https://blog.daviskedrosky.com/p/jared-diamond-a-reply-to-his-critics https://blog.daviskedrosky.com/p/jared-diamond-a-reply-to-hi... This FAQ is mostly ideologically-driven and, at the very least, willfully misinterprets what Diamond says in his books in a way that I think is impossible to explain by accidental misreading or even misunderstanding; only by intentional misinterpretation driven by an agenda. I've read Diamond, then many years later this FAQ, then the above response; then cross-referenced all 3 to see who's lying. I used to say all modern humanities are worthless garbage, except history. After that exercise, assuming AskHistorians crowd is representative, I'm not so sure about history...