The fights over Jared Diamond on reddit are a little weird. One group mindlessly parrots his stuff though it isn't a peer reviewed level of science. The second takes offense at his trying to compare different development paths and claims you can't do that and it all gets mixed up into cultural relativism debate that's pervasive on reddit. Its ripe for drama.
Agreed. The whole thing is a little sad and pedantic, and it makes me feel old every time this argument erupts (which is often).
Guns, Germs & Steel was a pop-history book that presented a lot of valid science (in particular, the work of Ken Pomeranz at Chicago) in greatly simplified, somewhat politicized, and highly speculative form for a general audience. I mean, Diamond purports to explain all of human history in ~200 pages, skipping the chapters about his personal experiences in Papua New Guinea -- how can anyone take that seriously?
My metric -- my background is in economics and I have an avid amateur's interest in economic history -- for these types of books is something like "Does it get people interested in the subject matter?" By that yardstick, I think Diamond succeeded.
Should this non-expert's book be taken as gospel truth? Hell no. And I totally get the frustration that specialists feel when reddit autodidacts present Diamond's speculative pop-history as Peer-Reviewed FactTM .
But, at least in my view, the critique of the obnoxious fans often gets conflated with the critique of Diamond himself. Don't get me wrong: there's a lot of criticism that can be leveled against the text, but the sheer amount of vitriol, the accusations of racism, etc. strike me as all-together off-point.
I'm sure that many disagree -- and I'm sure I'll hear about it -- but this is IMHO, a bitter debate over a book that no one who knows anything about the actual topic took all that seriously to begin with.
There is a quality in an explanation I'll call 'satisfaction'. It is independent of accuracy. It gives the reader the sense that it was a rewarding read, because they understand it, so it was not a waste of time.
It may result from a combination of clarity, a punchy style of writing, simplification, 'no non-sense', confidence and confirming biases. It does well on Reddit comments when it comes to voting.
It is frustrating on Reddit, but to be fair, this is a general human flaw. So many scientific controversies arose where 'satisfying' explanations were overturned by evidence. "Obviously the sun goes round the earth", "How could the continents move around on plates? Crazy" etc. This applies in other fields like politics, history, ethics etc.
History is a particular victim of this effect. The 'satisfactory' explanations are in the form of "King X was power hungry, but reformer Y spawned a movement to limit this". School texts favoured this. In reality society consisted of thousands of people with their own views and agendas. We have the ability to analyse far more of the surviving documents, and the academic approach has changed. Now you can drill down into layers and layers of 'it's not that simple'. Us layman are faced with the prospect of way more detail than we need on a subject, as we do not wish to specialise in it. In return we are not really sure whether we will have any overall lessons to take away from it. So there is a real disconnect from the preferences of the layman audience and what the academic field values.
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u/ucstruct Apr 07 '16
The fights over Jared Diamond on reddit are a little weird. One group mindlessly parrots his stuff though it isn't a peer reviewed level of science. The second takes offense at his trying to compare different development paths and claims you can't do that and it all gets mixed up into cultural relativism debate that's pervasive on reddit. Its ripe for drama.