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Comment by cynicalkane | Hacker News Reader

"He also got into flamewars on Hacker News"

It's disappointing to see 'flamewar' contexualizxed after 'provoking interesting discussion'. Reading through Graeber's long, contradictory, insult-filled, self-important rants, I'm not sure what would motivate this contextualization.

Normally, I might assume good faith, but Graeber's polemical behavior characterizes both a significant part of his work and a significant part of his participation on his site. The contextualization of this kind of unhinged and hateful behavior as some sort of intellectualism is something I find especially repulsive and pernicious.

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Can you provide examples please? I've followed Graeber for years, and this sounds nothing like the person I came to know.

You can refer to dang's link to Graeber's flamewar with Brad DeLong on here. It begins and ends with insults sandwiching a suspiciously uncharitable characterization of the subject.

This suspicion is founded: many of Graeber's claims are also false; in particular, Delong provided a litany of elementary falsehoods in Debt, in which Graeber's inaccurate claim about Apple is merely of especial characteristic inaccuracy--but that's beyond the scope of this post. Zooming back out, if one leads and ends with hateful insults which they cannot justify, that ought to be viewed with deep suspicion. No, DeLong is not a "con-man" who "suckers" people because he wants to call out a book which he feels, and can earnestly argue, is deeply wrong.

Near the end of this long, screenfilling rant, Graeber claims he has been trying to "ignore" DeLong. I didn't know such fits of apoplexy were how you ignored someone.

Well no, here's what Graeber actually said at the end of his comment (emphasis added):

> I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.

That reads like a post-hoc justification to me. Most people practice ignoring people by, well, ignoring them. If they don't, they will explain what's "really going on" by just explaining it, not with prolonged fits of unwarranted and uncharitable apoplexy.

As I described elsewhere, Graeber is also lying when he said he made any serious attempt to ignore DeLong at all.

It's well presented, but can you explain how your argument is fundamentally different from a child shouting "liar?"

Can you go into more detail? Because Graeber's post seems quite convincing, and DeLong fails to coherently reply to the accusations.

Graeber went into detail about why DeLong was impossible to ignore, including DeLong apparently creating a twitter bot to attack Graeber (!!).

I mean, Graeber is right in that he was being trolled. But Graeber lies when he says he tried to ignore DeLong and Graeber lies when he characterizes DeLong as obsessively harping on one inaccuracy.

Graeber's fit of apoplexy wasn't just in that one HN comment. His "ignoring" DeLong was an uninterrupted train of obsessive, one-sided, and often bizarrely misdirected anger and insult. The only "ignoring" was that Graeber, in all his raging against DeLong's trollbot, did not bother do any raging in the form of citing facts or other defense. As DeLong puts it:

> Graeber, of course, makes no attempt to defend his claims in his chapter 12. He doesn't because he can't. Chapter 12 is in fact riddled with errors.... It really appears to be just too easy for people like David Graeber to imagine that they are in a two-month extended conversation where there is a human mind on the other side, when actually they are just the bird pecking itself in the window glass[1].

That incident was a piece in a longer flamewar in which Graeber, essentially, behaves in the obsessive and intellectually bankrupt manner he accused DeLong of behaving.

[1]https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/04/david-graeber-april-f...

To be fair to the late Graeber, DeLong was intentionally provoking him from the start. To be fair to DeLong, he was doing it because Graeber had dramatically overreacted to relatively mild critical takes on his work on the Crooked Timber economics blog whose contributors thought his book intellectually stimulating enough to hold a multi-author 'seminar' on it - accusing them of being part of a 'strategy of delegitimization'. Which just goes to show that academic debate can easily head in the same direction as arguments on the rest of the internet.

As for the actual Debt: The First 5000 Years book, it's engaging, thought-provoking, less opinionated than I was expecting and right about a lot of big things. But his critics aren't wrong that it's also wrong about a lot more small details than the founding of Apple Computer (one I'm surprised none of the academic economists scrutinising his book picked up on: he describes Treatise on Money as Keynes 'most famous work' which is akin to calling Wings Paul McCartney's most famous band. That's particularly surprising in the middle of a passage about Keynes' work which is actually well-informed). Still think it's worth reading for people vaguely interested in the subject matter though.

I feel like there's some form of Gell-Mann amnesia here. Why say a book is right about a lot of big things when it is frequently wrong about those things which can be verified?

Because I didn’t read Debt to learn about Apple, and that’s not what I took away from it.

That's deeply disingenuous. It's not like this guy was telling the truth everywhere else. The lies were numerous.

That's what Gell-Mann amnesia is, really: we believe what we want to believe, and forget the quality of the source.

Because I've read other, less entertaining writing on the history of money which concurs with Graeber's central argument that money is much best understood as debt accounting (and some pretty terrible writing about the magical powers of certain metals) and the sloppiness in illustrative anecdotes (or impractical utopian proposals of regular debt jubilees) doesn't really affect that central thesis. I wouldn't necessarily rely on Graeber's colourful anecdotes about historical civilisations or obscure tribes being accurate and uncontroversial without checking what other anthropologists think, but those are 'small picture' things.

I felt much the same way having never heard of Graeber before but being familiar with DeLong. I'm seeing the same from Graeber supporters in the comments shouting down Noah Smith's review of Debt instead of addressing his arguments.

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