Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

> Diamond absolves Europeans of blame for the crimes of imperialism through his geographical determinism, since the conquerors couldn’t help but seize the helpless Americas.

Running through the article is the notion that somehow Europeans were uniquely interested in brutal empire building. I can only infer that such notions stem from never having read history books about other cultures.

For example, "Empire of the Summer Moon", by Gwynne

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

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.

> But Guns, Germs, and Steel—which is explicitly anti-racist

Reminds me of: "I'm not racist, but...."

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.

> He says the difference comes from a different cultural perspective. It's been a long time since I read it, but I'll try to summarize it with the Chinese perspective was that phenomena could not be modeled. Everything was a unique creation. I.e. the behavior of a model could not be extrapolated to explain other behaviors, while the European perspective was always trying to explain things with models.

This makes me believe Diamond over Roberts even more. I don't think cultural philosophical beliefs matter that much. They can be arbitrary and stick around for long if they don't make much of a difference in daily lives - but anything that does make a difference will get more accurate with time rather quickly. This is to say, humans aren't dumb - and because of that, economics is stronger than faith or custom.

> My own observation of history is that the key factor is recognition of and protection of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness produce massive technological progress and the uplifting of society.

I'm a much less experienced observer, but my current view is that... it's mostly the other way around. Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is the kind of stuff that mostly flows from people's emotions and social intuitions. People try to pursue those naturally. How far they go is determined by their economic situation - Ancient Rome afforded for different levels of "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" than early agrarian settlements did; different still than what was possible in Feudal Europe, and different from what was possible after the Industrial Revolution.

Technological progress reshapes the economical landscape, allowing people to achieve more "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness". Specialization of labor, agriculture optimization, the printing press, industrialization, engines, washing machines, electricity - all created conditions that allowed people having more rights, liberty and happiness than they could've before.