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Comment by angst_ridden | Hacker News Reader

I think Diamond's greatest fault as a researcher is his reliance on reductivism. Anyone can cherry-pick history to support "5 simple rules that explain X" if the rules are even reasonably sane.

It may be satisfying and entertaining to read, but human history is much more complex than just a few rules.

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I bet I can take anyone's favorite history books and paint them as reductivist.

The charge of reductivism can be made against anyone who attempts to explain big patterns in comprehensible ways.

In fact, isn't it reductionist to claim that a historian's entire view on a topic can be reduced to theories they developed in a single book?

Exactly. Have you seen how many WWII or Civil War books there are. Do I need to read them all before I am allowed a valid opinion? All history gets condensed and interpreted. This thread isn't really do a very good job arguing that Jared is wrong, it seems much more like they disagree with some particular point politically, thus he must be wrong.

It's easy to level a charge of reductionist when the book is presenting a model for why things happened a certain way, instead of just describing what sort of things happened. GG&S is all about the why, and is therefore inherently reductionist.

I keep seeing this robot-like criticism of Diamond as "over-simplistic" or "hyperreductionist". But it's just a model? The map is not the territory, and Diamond has never claimed to explain all human development. His thesis is merely that geography and environment contribute to biological and cultural dominance to a disproportionate degree compared to other factors. I don't see how this is controversial.

I think it is because he's showing the colonial powers weren't especially evil, just more successful at being evil.

I took his rules as high level observations of the environment's impact on human evolution. But human experience is much more nuanced like you say. I do remember thinking some of the observations could come across as very blunt.

There is a video on the internet of him trying to shoot an old style gun... pretty funny... needless to say it's not his greatest skill.

Jared Diamond Funny video: https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxm-OUN3XNSdXmZ_fkXs1zZUQziwjaLZN...

No ear protection... most people not yet accustomed to guns would probably react about the same way.

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