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Comment by seph-reed | Hacker News Reader

So, I just went down a rabbit hole of criticisms on Guns, Germs, and Steel... it's largely coming from the far left and far right. Very few moderates.

The far left says it's a cop out on racism, blaming white evil on natural conditions. The far right says that it's too PC, that plenty of other places had the right conditions and gives no credit to culture or innovation.

So both the far left and far right want to take credit from chaos and put it on the people: either to hate them, or to take pride.

This in and of itself is not proof of anything. But if something pisses off far left and right at the same time, I tend to think of it as a green flag.

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You're not looking at any of the criticisms I've seen, then. Here's a brief summary, off the top of my head:

* Jared Diamond posits an explanation of megafauna extinction in North America that's heavily predicated on the Clovis-first hypothesis and the overextinction hypothesis. The former hypothesis is very thoroughly discredited, and the latter is also generally disfavored, especially in the it's-the-primary-cause way that Jared Diamond uses it. (Specifically, it should be noted that the megafauna extinction in North America also coincides pretty closely with the Younger Dryas, whose climatic effects were most pronounced in North America).

* The primary north-south/east-west transmission hypothesis doesn't actually hold that well up to evidence. The two things I'd note are a) local topography has a major effect on climate that's not accounted for, and b) if you look at the transmission of cereal crops, there's very little transmission between the Mediterranean/Mesopotamian basin and China basin but universal spread of maize along the vertical axis of the Americas--the complete opposite of what the theory predicts.

* I don't have a link handy, but I've seen someone more versed in the history of infectious diseases point out that the killer diseases that Diamond identifies don't appear to have actually become epidemic in the manner that Diamond asserts.

* Diamond also places way too heavy on emphasis on the unreliable accounts of the conquistadors in explaining how the Spanish conquests happened.

In short, the main problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel is that... it gets the facts wrong. And people have brought these complaints to Diamond previously, so it's not like he's aware that there are facts which destroy his thesis, and Diamond's response is to double-down on the thesis without trying to explain why the countervailing facts might be incorrect interpretations or whatnot, or providing other nuggets of insight to bolster his thesis, just continually reassert that he's right.

Try reading Charles Mann's 1491. It goes into more well-researched explanations of pre-Columbian cultures that would help you understand why Diamond's thesis is wrong.

Most of these points don't seem central to Diamonds thesis as I interpreted it.

They do negate some of the spurious theories, but the central theory (IMO) is that there's a whole lot of luck involved in global domination, and that luck is not evenly spread.

The one about germs being less of a killer is definitely very interesting though. That's totally central, though -- if not germs doing the killing -- it'd just fall back onto guns. If you happen to dig up the link, I'd love to read through it.

If it's just guns, you have to account for the number of failed attempts, and the century-long military effort it took to hold territory. Cortés got his ass handed to him repeatedly in military conflicts.

> century-long military effort it took to hold territory

Centuries, actually. Indigenous peoples in the Americas were able to hold out against European, and later successor state, attempts to acquire their territory until around 1900.

Uh, go to a place like r/badhistory where they actually cite sources for their problems with it for a start

Actual academics have problems with it

I went down another rabbit hole on r/badhistory.

There's definitely plenty of holes in the theories of GG&S, if that's what you mean by "academics have problems with it" === "it is not a perfect theory."

But overall, it seems most of the points hold more than enough water to be worth merit. None of them perfect, but vastly better than throwing the whole thing out.

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Also, holy crap I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but the first few threads I went into were... blatantly far left (as Reddit tends to be). Seriously though: spiraling into tangents of communism, your classic woke/sassy "dunk" lingo, clearly had some external bias bone to pick. I'm not sure r/badhistory is a community worth considering the acme of academia, only based off my short interactions with it. But maybe the worst just came up first?

IDK, I'm generally on r/badeconomics which is the best one of the badX gang, but as far as I saw, badhistory was very informal but generally fine?

Like, sure there's probably a bias to the left but it's not the hellhole of r/badphilosophy for instance there. They won't advocate for nonsense stuff,just use the terminology from social sciences

I don't read r/badhistory but occasionally r/AskHistorians instead (where why GG&S is bad is literally in the FAQ), and in perusing old threads there, I came across this take that might be interesting to you: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4o1n26/i_wan...

While I think you are probably more likely to sympathize with restricteddata than anthropology_nerd, I do think that anthropology_nerd's comments may be able to elucidate a little bit why GG&S provokes such hostility among academics.

Thanks a ton for sharing that. This is -- so far -- the highest calibre of this debate I've seen.

I think both parties are talking passed each-other, having missed a very, very important statement:

> You recommended people read GG&S with a grain of salt, but the vast majority of casual readers lack that salt when it comes to understanding the flaws in the book.

Whether or not this salt is there seems like the addition / omission from which each side argues. With salt, it's a fine enough book. The broad strokes are close enough. Without salt -- as in "I'm a professional because I read this book" -- it probably gets really, really annoying.

I definitely agree that nuance is important, and the book should put more effort into not presenting itself as fact. But it's pop-history. It wouldn't be pop if it didn't, and what would be pop would be even worse IMO.

Yeah, in my experience there's a lot of misinformation floating around r/badhistory. It's not uncommon to have some comments halfway down (below all the highly upvoted snark and attempts at humor) that point out the inaccuracies in a post, so that's something at least.

But a large part of the problem with r/badhistory, and r/AskHistorians as well, is that it seems like most of the users don't realize that being better at history than most of Reddit is an extremely low bar. There's certainly some good stuff that ends up there (well, in r/AskHistorians, less so in r/badhistory), but there's still a lot of junk as well, and too many people act as if the stuff there is equivalent to published work by professional historians.

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