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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

I started reading the comment you link to in that subreddit, but I had to stop after it claimed that

> The European conquest [of the Americas] was hardly decisive. Furthermore, the difference between hemispheres wasn’t all that great.

I had to stop because that's the kind of statement on which lots of people -- many of them smarter and more knowledgeable than me -- strongly disagree, often with ideological or religious fervor. I have no interest in or patience for that kind of debate, so I will skip out from this thread.

That said, if you and others think the Wikipedia page on this best-selling, award-winning book is out of date, you should try to update it.

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I'm struggling to decide whether to take this critique seriously or not.

You yourself told the parent "many experts disagree with your assessment", when the parent clearly indicated that they simply were following what appears to be the academic consensus on this book, today.

The link I provided has a clear link to further work you can go explore, and make up your own mind. But I sort of suspect that in the three cases of 1) the parent comment, 2) the wikipedia article, and 3) now this statement about the American conquest, you have already decided what you want to believe.

I'm not personally an expert in this field. So I am not going to go and update the wikipedia article. What I am going to do, is to listen to the people who are experts in the field. I actually loved Diamond's book when it first came out, but over many years, I have not found a single academic historian who had good things to say about it. And it's not for lack of trying. As much as the book has received many awards, it is today simply a fact that it has a very fraught reputation in academic circles.

I think one of the challenge with relying on academics of History or anthropology is that, unlike physics, consensus doesn’t necessarily progress towards a more accurate interpretation. I think the post above is suggesting that the linked academic has a agenda that is guiding their analysis. For instance they write that more advanced technology really is just more European. That rather than being more technologically “advanced” Europeans developed technology for a different context. Perhaps it’s inaccurate, but conclusions like these seem to some to be motivated by the need to retell events to achieve/support social justice movements today.

I love reading history, but I am concerned that all historical narratives are illusions - stories we string together from a minuscule subset of the data we’ve captured in writing or other records. This is particularly problematic if people, including academics, see the outcome of their historical interpretations as influencing modern power struggles.

> I think one of the challenge with relying on academics of History or anthropology is that, unlike physics, consensus doesn’t necessarily progress towards a more accurate interpretation.

I think this statement needs some very strong evidence to be even considered in passing. This statement is essentially saying "the entire field is bad at their job".

For individual academics and sources, yes, I agree that one should be vigilant. But the academic consensus is a different matter altogether, and the base assumption simply has to be that the field as a whole moves forward. Otherwise it becomes very difficult - maybe even impossible - to have any sort of evidence-based discussion.

> the base assumption simply has to be that the field as a whole moves forward.

Nature doesn't care what anyone thinks our base assumptions have to be. Parapsychology had a decent run academically for a century, and still isn't quite dead.

> the base assumption simply has to be that the field as a whole moves forward. Otherwise it becomes very difficult - maybe even impossible - to have any sort of evidence-based discussion.

It seems like this "assumption" needs to be qualified with time scales for disambiguating trends from "facts" .. otherwise this is equivalent to saying that academic consensus can never be wrong

> otherwise this is equivalent to saying that academic consensus can never be wrong

No it is not. I said that the assumption must be that the consensus becomes less wrong over time, not that it is never wrong. Those are two very different statements.

Over how much time? Does "consensus" never make a wrong turn?

Well, academic consensus usually takes a long time to build. And obviously it can take wrong turns (and there are plenty of examples of that historically, often due to work based on incomplete or wrong data - though arguably even if the academic consensus has been wrong on an absolute basis, it has often been "correct" in light of the available evidence).

But nevertheless, it should be obvious today that (probabilistically) the best understanding of the world - for laymen - is achieved by trusting the academic consensus. Anything else quickly veers into anti-intellectual, conspirationist mumbo-jumbo.

My undergraduate degree was in history from a top 10 university. Only say this to illustrate that I respect and love history. I thought I was going to become a historian. That said, the field has practical limits not faced by the hard sciences. You can’t test or prove your theories in History and many other humanities/social science. The best you can do is provide evidence that an event occurred. It’s the inherent limits of the field. How do you conclusively prove the cause of the French Revolution or the reasons the Japanese surrendered in WWII?

So how can you validate that any reinterpretation is forward progress and not just a change?

>This statement is essentially saying "the entire field is bad at their job".

Well, are there academic historians who dispute that fact?

It's hard to argue that something that took until the 1920s to complete is decisive. The American Indian wars didn't end until 1924. That's hardly decisive.

I think you would need to start be defining “decisive” for this context. Not sure the debate makes sense otherwise. Why does it matter if it was decisive or not?

Because the post I was replying to disagreed with the decisive nature of the conflict.

> Why does it matter if it was decisive or not?

It goes against the entire theory of the book - if it's argument was true, why did it take centuries to ultimately conquer the americas?

But Until decisiveness is defined it’s not really a debate. “Decisive” is not a concrete term, it’s subjective.

Just because a conflict/war hasn't been officially resolved or declared over by both sides doesn't mean the final outcome isn't clear.

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