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Comment by mirceal | Hacker News Reader

definitely overhyped. definitely presented speculations as fact. definitely too ambitious for its own good (what it tried to cover is insanely large) and does a mediocre job at best.

i know a lot of people that loved it and recommend it (and later books) left and right. my best guess is that it’s trendy and some sort of status symbol. i wish people could look past the hype

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Harari keeps repeating "this is just an hypothesis" or "we can't be sure of what happened at that time" during the whole book. He highlights multiple hypothesis as well in all chapters, to compare them.

Actually the blog post literally shows that, by repeating "We’re not sure".

I can imagine many critics to the book, but presenting speculations as fact is definitely not one of them.

This is what impressed me the most about the book, and why I’m so confused as to how this can be the main criticism of it that I see.

I’d like to see a speculation stated as fact, but have yet to see a satisfactory example.

ha. sure, one can see it this way. or you can read it, think that it makes sense and take it as a fact. i can tell you all day that's a hypotesis, when I'm focusing on the hypotesis you're going to go with it.

i also fundamentally disagree with speculating on what might have happened 10000 years ago. If you're going to speculate present at least 2-3 plausible scenarios.

On the other hand, there are several instances where he presents pretty big counterexamples to his theories, dismissing them as "the exception that confirms the rule".

This makes no sense (and reflects a complete misunderstanding the expression).

I wasn't referring to his hypothesis. I was referring to how he covered some historical movements as just the received wisdom regarding them. It was like "Time-Life covers human history". There were somethings that can't be divorced from their historical context. It's the same way that people lump all of something into a generic pile...like all Islam is basically Whabism (not saying that he said that but many people do) or things like that. Like I said, I'm probably not expressing myself very well here.

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