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Comment by seph-reed | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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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