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Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

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Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#101

Post by incogitor »

zen_of_prog wrote: post #41
George83728 wrote: post #12

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…

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 oldes…

It is his field. He's a geographer and a biophysicist, not only an ornithologist. Understanding geographic and environment contributions to evolution is explicitly in his wheelhouse.

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#102

Post by George83728 »

worik wrote: post #94
prepend wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I agree that he forces facts to fit his model, but that doesn't make the book racist. The entire point of his book is that environmental circumstances, not racial or cultural characteristics, explain the circumstance of European dominance in the modern era; this is explicitly anti-racist. (Inb4 Kafkatrap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265324)

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#103

Post by incogitor »

worik wrote: post #94
prepend wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

That's literally how creating a theory works. You don't "pre-hoc" explanations or there would be no point to scientific inquiry. Do you mean to say he's cherry-picking or displaying some other bias?

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#104

Post by WalterBright »

SamBam wrote: post #99
WalterBright wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets are a big deal. They are indeed the key to success/wealth/innovation.

And part of Diamond's book was about how geography helped form free markets.

Sorry, free markets are not dependent on geography. Any country/civilization can adopt them any time they want to.

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#105

Post by wizofaus »

Barrin92 wrote: post #75
karaterobot wrote: post #49

When I first read GG&S in a university anthropology course in 2000 or 2001, I immediately disliked it. The reason was not because I thought it was racist or imperialist— I don't think it is. Instead, I disliked it because it tried to explain the shape of history with an overly simplistic model that tossed out every nuance which didn't fit the thesis. Now that I'm older, I understand that this is what pretty much ever…

>it tried to explain the shape of history with an overly simplistic model that tossed out every nuance which didn't fit the thesis I think it's worth quoting Friedman from his essay on positive economics[1] "In so far as a theory can be said to have "assumptions" at all, and in so far as their "realism" can be judged independently of the validity of predictions, the relation between the significance of a theory and t…

The availability of suitable species for domestication always struck me as the most interesting part of his argument, as it's not one I'd seen before - but strangely it's the one that's not captured by the title "Guns, Germs & Steel" (which are, I suppose, the main proximate reasons why Europeans ended up decimating/overpowering populations elsewhere in the world, rather than more interesting fundamental reasons why Europeans got to the point they could travel the world possessing said items well before any other candidate civilizations did. Accepted, "germs" is related to ability to domesticate various animals, but hardly captures the full set of advantages that came from animal and crop domestication). I never thought his explanations of why it couldn't have been China or India instead were that compelling though, not does he bother to explain why certain European nations became far more successful as colonial powers than others (e.g. why were Germany and Italy so late to the game, and unable to really compete with Spain/the Netherlands/Great Britain as far as colonisation efforts went).

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#106

Post by unmole »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #42

Graeber/Wengrow's Dawn of Everything is a good critical examination. I don't see anyone in this thread mentioning the kind of points that book covers. But it is another one that rankles institutional beliefs.

Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence to argue for his fringe beliefs was Graeber's whole shtick. Let's not pretend his political screeds are works of dispassionate scholarship.

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#107

Post by gregjor »

George83728 wrote: post #57
seanalltogether wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, a…

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…

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.

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#108

Post by rufus_foreman »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #97

>> But military histories of the conquest support the assertion that the small parties of Spanish soldiers were able to defeat much larger Native armies thanks primarily to their superior steel weapons and organizational capacity, in line with Diamond’s argument. I don't have a bone to pick with Diamond, but this widely disseminated narrative lacks nuance. When people say that a few Spaniards conquered the largest Me…

This is covered in the article under the section "Native Allies":

'Diamond does not discount the fact that native allies assisted the Spaniards in seizing the Americas. He is more concerned that Spanish victories should not be "written off as due merely [emphasis mine] to the help of Native American allies"'

...

'Diamond's suggestion is that Native peoples would have found it irrational to help tiny bands of Spaniards if they did not possess some military advantages.'

...

'When the Spaniards escaped Tenochtitlan, they numbered at most 1,300, many sick or wounded, along with just 96 horses. They were aided by 5,000-6,000 Tlaxcalans, who were unlikely to have many martial advantages over trained Aztec warriors. The city's population was estimated at the time to have been over 200,000. If just ten percent were fighting-age males, the Spanish faced difficult odds. A week later, at the battle of Otumba, 425 Spaniards and 3,000-3,500 Tlaxcalans defeated an Aztec force of 200,000—a feat that would still be impressive if the Spanish exaggerated their enemies' numbers by ten times.'

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#109

Post by gregjor »

WalterBright wrote: post #48
TeMPOraL wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> 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. Sorry, but this is exactly backwards :-) In the US, the rights came first. Note that the states that still practiced slavery failed at industrialization, specialization, etc.

The Founders of the United States did not invent the rights you refer to. They had thousands of years of western history to cherry-pick ideas from.

The states in the north had slavery too, just not an economy heavily based on slavery. By the time of the American Revolution slavery was already on the way out in Europe, practiced in plantations in the New World but not at home. The ancient Athenians and Romans believed in inherent rights of life, liberty, happiness, freedom too, just not for everyone.

Re: Jared Diamond: A Reply to His Critics

#110

Post by WalterBright »

gregjor wrote: post #109
WalterBright wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Sorry, but this is exactly backwards :-) In the US, the rights came first. Note that the states that still practiced slavery failed at industrialization, specialization, etc.

The Founders of the United States did not invent the rights you refer to. They had thousands of years of western history to cherry-pick ideas from. The states in the north had slavery too, just not an economy heavily based on slavery. By the time of the American Revolution slavery was already on the way out in Europe, practiced in plantations in the New World but not at home. The ancient Athenians and Romans believed…

> The Founders of the United States did not invent the rights you refer to.

You're right, those rights are inalienable characteristics of humans. However, the US was the first to codify them into the founding document of a nation.

The states in the North had all ended slavery by 1804. Prosperity followed.

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