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I believe it's unfair to include Diamond in this genre, as although he's popular, he's also a thinker (and prof) with an academic's consistency and attention to

I believe it's unfair to include Diamond in this genre, as although he's popular, he's also a thinker (and prof) with an academic's consistency and attention to data. The Freakonomics guys are also closer to data, but episodically popularising rather than Diamond's coherent meta-narratives. The biggest argument you could level against Diamond might be one of leaning too heavily on "geographical determinism", which he can veer towards at times.

ijk 13y ago
Diamond is a little different, but he is working outside of his original field and produces very mixed responses from anthropologists (e.g. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-does-jared-diamond-make-anthropologists-so-mad http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-does-... ).
- notahacker 13y ago
  The difference between Gladwell and Diamond (and for that matter Levitt) is that Gladwell is attacked for his work being atheoretical; it's basically a collection of anecdotes that belongs on a bookshelf with Bill Bryson. Diamond is criticised for stretching his grand unified theories too far and missing all the evidence to the contrary. Levitt is accused of picking bad hypotheses and doing sloppy econometric analysis to support them. Gladwell doesn't have any grand unified theories, or any theories substantial or original enough to be controversial. and doesn't do any comparable statistical analysis.
ghaff 13y ago
I agree with both your points--at least with respect to Guns Germs and Steel. Arguably he way overextended his basic research in later works. An interesting supplement to Diamond is Ian Morris' Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. To greatly oversimplify, Morris endorses the idea of a Western core headstart (with credit to Diamond) but then basically says "Well, yeah, of course that's the case." But how does that explain how things ended up millennia later. A good read. Another broader point though is that serious researchers are always going to put down popularizers who write books people actually read. But no one is going to read serious researchers except other serious researchers. Of course, you can go too far in the popularization direction and I tend to agree Malcolm Gladwell is a great example of that.
- cossatot 13y ago
  Fortunately, there are a couple examples of serious researchers who are also excellent (though maybe not as well known) popularizers. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) and Steven Strogatz (Sync, etc.) come immediately to mind, because I have read them recently. I have some books by Benoit Mandlebrot in shipping, and I am quite excited about them. If anyone has other examples, I would love to hear them--I'm trying to pack my immediate reading list right now and am currently uninterested in fiction.
  - sien 13y ago
    Steven Pinker is an experimental Psychologist you might like. His book 'The Blank Slate' is very good. Joseph Stiglitz, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek & Paul Krugman are all winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and all have written some accessible books for the public. The Richard Dawkins books on biology are really good. Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics has written some fine popular science books.
  - daemin 13y ago
    I found "The Misbehavior of Markets" by Benoit Mandelbrot to be a good and engrossing read. It explained the concepts of fractals and especially fractal dimensions better than the Wikipedia page and other sources that I have read previously.
kylebrown 13y ago
Worth mentioning that the Freakonomics guys (Donohue and Levitt) work tying abortion law to crime reduction was debunked. There was a bug in the regression analysis code, "coding errors" (as in typos while copying data tables from print sources), and flat out statistical errors (most egregious was their use of total arrests instead of arrests per capita). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortion_on_Crime#Foote_and_Goetz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...
- EricDeb 13y ago
  More interesting is that reduction in childhood exposure to lead is the most significant factor. Levitt counters the debunking of his theory two paragraphs down from your link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortion_on_Crime#Nevin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...
  - kylebrown 13y ago
    I know, Levitt and Donohue made the corrections, and then made even more "corrections", until they got back their original results (or as close as they could get). That's how it often goes when researches are accused of scientific misconduct (not to accuse LD, just noting). One famous example was Potti & Nevins at Duke. There were several back-and-forth "Comments" published to counter the questions Baggerly & Coombes were raising. PN repeatedly addressed the issues, each time releasing another "corrected" supplementary data set. Eventually the journals stopped publishing the BC critiques, PN seemingly convinced the reviewers that BC were just being pedantic about inconsequential statistical subtleties. It only came to a head because Duke was proceeding with human clinical trials based on that research. To this day Potti still claims that he can address all the issues BN raised and correct them, and that his research was valid.
SiVal 13y ago
Diamond is very much in the same camp. In the introduction to Guns, Germs, and Steel he stated that his motivation for the work was to come up with evidence with which to counter an Occam's Razor assumption (basically, that certain groups had done more smart things because they were smarter) that contradicted his campus political theory. The "academic's consistency" is the lawyer's consistency of only making the arguments that support what he has decided in advance to support, and the "attention to detail" is attention to only those details that support his case. The fact that his book presented no evidence in favor of the Occam's Razor position (the reason certain groups do more smart things is because they are smarter) but only a list of possible counter-arguments makes it not an investigation of an issue, but an attempt to defend a pre-existing political position. Even anthropologists sharing the same campus politics have been unwilling to endorse Diamond's arguments with any real enthusiasm.

ijk 13y ago

Diamond is a little different, but he is working outside of his original field and produces very mixed responses from anthropologists (e.g. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-does-jared-diamond-make-anthropologists-so-mad http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-does-... ).

notahacker 13y ago
The difference between Gladwell and Diamond (and for that matter Levitt) is that Gladwell is attacked for his work being atheoretical; it's basically a collection of anecdotes that belongs on a bookshelf with Bill Bryson. Diamond is criticised for stretching his grand unified theories too far and missing all the evidence to the contrary. Levitt is accused of picking bad hypotheses and doing sloppy econometric analysis to support them. Gladwell doesn't have any grand unified theories, or any theories substantial or original enough to be controversial. and doesn't do any comparable statistical analysis.

ghaff 13y ago

I agree with both your points--at least with respect to Guns Germs and Steel. Arguably he way overextended his basic research in later works. An interesting supplement to Diamond is Ian Morris' Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. To greatly oversimplify, Morris endorses the idea of a Western core headstart (with credit to Diamond) but then basically says "Well, yeah, of course that's the case." But how does that explain how things ended up millennia later. A good read. Another broader point though is that serious researchers are always going to put down popularizers who write books people actually read. But no one is going to read serious researchers except other serious researchers. Of course, you can go too far in the popularization direction and I tend to agree Malcolm Gladwell is a great example of that.

cossatot 13y ago
Fortunately, there are a couple examples of serious researchers who are also excellent (though maybe not as well known) popularizers. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) and Steven Strogatz (Sync, etc.) come immediately to mind, because I have read them recently. I have some books by Benoit Mandlebrot in shipping, and I am quite excited about them. If anyone has other examples, I would love to hear them--I'm trying to pack my immediate reading list right now and am currently uninterested in fiction.
- sien 13y ago
  Steven Pinker is an experimental Psychologist you might like. His book 'The Blank Slate' is very good. Joseph Stiglitz, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek & Paul Krugman are all winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and all have written some accessible books for the public. The Richard Dawkins books on biology are really good. Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics has written some fine popular science books.
- daemin 13y ago
  I found "The Misbehavior of Markets" by Benoit Mandelbrot to be a good and engrossing read. It explained the concepts of fractals and especially fractal dimensions better than the Wikipedia page and other sources that I have read previously.

kylebrown 13y ago

Worth mentioning that the Freakonomics guys (Donohue and Levitt) work tying abortion law to crime reduction was debunked. There was a bug in the regression analysis code, "coding errors" (as in typos while copying data tables from print sources), and flat out statistical errors (most egregious was their use of total arrests instead of arrests per capita). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortion_on_Crime#Foote_and_Goetz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...

EricDeb 13y ago
More interesting is that reduction in childhood exposure to lead is the most significant factor. Levitt counters the debunking of his theory two paragraphs down from your link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortion_on_Crime#Nevin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...
- kylebrown 13y ago
  I know, Levitt and Donohue made the corrections, and then made even more "corrections", until they got back their original results (or as close as they could get). That's how it often goes when researches are accused of scientific misconduct (not to accuse LD, just noting). One famous example was Potti & Nevins at Duke. There were several back-and-forth "Comments" published to counter the questions Baggerly & Coombes were raising. PN repeatedly addressed the issues, each time releasing another "corrected" supplementary data set. Eventually the journals stopped publishing the BC critiques, PN seemingly convinced the reviewers that BC were just being pedantic about inconsequential statistical subtleties. It only came to a head because Duke was proceeding with human clinical trials based on that research. To this day Potti still claims that he can address all the issues BN raised and correct them, and that his research was valid.

SiVal 13y ago

Diamond is very much in the same camp. In the introduction to Guns, Germs, and Steel he stated that his motivation for the work was to come up with evidence with which to counter an Occam's Razor assumption (basically, that certain groups had done more smart things because they were smarter) that contradicted his campus political theory. The "academic's consistency" is the lawyer's consistency of only making the arguments that support what he has decided in advance to support, and the "attention to detail" is attention to only those details that support his case. The fact that his book presented no evidence in favor of the Occam's Razor position (the reason certain groups do more smart things is because they are smarter) but only a list of possible counter-arguments makes it not an investigation of an issue, but an attempt to defend a pre-existing political position. Even anthropologists sharing the same campus politics have been unwilling to endorse Diamond's arguments with any real enthusiasm.