Pangur Bán
Deconstructed
Even if that were true it wouldn't effect this discussion. I've got a feeling you have genericized what I am saying into some straw man, but maybe you should state explicitly what you think my position is to clarify that.
Jared Diamond
- Thread starter Wrymouth3
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Even if that were true it wouldn't effect this discussion. I've got a feeling you have genericized what I am saying into some straw man, but maybe you should state explicitly what you think my position is to clarify that.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
Well, those are reasons, but I fail to see how they can be good reasons.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I'm really not sure what this thread is even about any more.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Pangur Bán;12868477 said:
I really shouldn't have to do that. If you're frustrated at being misunderstood perhaps you should communicate better?
It sounds like you're making a lot of appeals to scientific rigor in defense of a notion that human behavior is subject to the laws of nature, observable and comprehensible as they are. But the examples you gave don't demonstrate that, I don't think.
Pangur Bán
Deconstructed
Self-awareness is not a natural skill, but I suggest you think about the contrast between these two sentences.
No. Human behaviour is subject to the laws of nature, that's assumed, and if you want to argue otherwise we might as well debate the existence of fairies. I list examples of attempts to harness successful scientific methodology to elucidate how it works. If you think I am saying these methodologies are always working in practice then you've ignored several assertions I've made in this thread denying that (e.g. my 'just because you can't process the information doesn't mean it isn't there' comment).
Gucumatz
JS, secretly Rod Serling
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Is it me, or are historians afraid of interdisciplinary review? Most experts or whatever competent judges in whatever field (economics, philosophy, biology, etc.) all seem to hate when other people chime in via their different perspectives. Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists (although perhaps less so with them), all seem to be particularly easily to dismiss things historically that may be deduced via other means. Which goes back to Diamond - the fact is some of his general ideas are indeed plausible, but there seems to be an outright rejection/strawmanning of his positions. He is clearly not a historian and clearly makes mistakes quite often, but some of the pushback (ie Park's) in this thread I feel seems to be out of almost a sense of fear than it is on his content (and there is plenty in his content to criticize).
Same happens in other fields of course, but don't know - just seems particularly pronounced in history.
Same happens in other fields of course, but don't know - just seems particularly pronounced in history.
Pangur Bán
Deconstructed
Historians are bad, but have nothing on historical philologists or psychoanalysts. Those guys are more like a religious cults than academic disciplines, but still get patronage and so still exist (the former don't listen to actual linguists and the latter don't listen to actual scientists of the human mind).
This is a sort of bizarre line to take, given that the trend over the last few decades in academic history - and indeed academia in general - is to value "interdisciplinarity" as a Thing In Itself regardless of the concrete benefits of whatever interdisciplinarity entails. That was the entire foundation for the linguistic and cultural turns, after all, which were only the most important historiographical developments of the past half-century.
I don't think that historians in general pooh-pooh Diamond's work because it incorporates anthropological, biological, and ecological evidence. Some obviously do, but there are simply so many other historians who employ those sorts of data themselves that it would be ridiculous to react against Diamond for doing the same. It's also important to note that not everybody thinks that Diamond sucks. I don't even think that most academic historians do. You'll find Guns, Germs, and Steel as required reading in high school and undergraduate courses all throughout the world, even in history classes that don't really deal with the Americas. Professors and teachers don't have to agree with required reading, of course, but in my experience few of them assign it purely to tease out criticisms of it.
Of course there are some very vocal and virulent detractors of Diamond's two vaguely history-related books, but you'll find such people around any history books that reach the popular imagination. Chris Browning had to deal with an incredibly loud backlash against Ordinary Men, even though most of academia accepted his conclusions, because there was a vocal minority who disagreed with them. It would be silly to conclude from the existence of Daniel Goldhagen that historians don't like it when people (in this case, Browning) apply psychological studies to history. So it is with Diamond.
And with all that said, there are reasons for not particularly liking either Guns, Germs, and Steel or Collapse. While the evidentiary basis for both works is, in general, sound, there are some sections that appear to rely on superseded or methodologically dubious findings. The fact that Diamond's most vocal detractors have seized on these as being indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy of his entire oeuvre, which obviously goes too far, does not mean that those factual issues do not exist. Another point is that Guns, Germs, and Steel, at least, while broadly correct, is mostly correct because its findings are not exactly news to academic history or anthropology. Diamond was not the first, or even the hundred thousandth, person to point out that colonizing powers often possessed key technological advantages over the inhabitants of the places that they colonized, to note that disease was often a key factor in human history in various ways, or to mention the economic advantages of local flora and fauna. And finally, there's the ongoing debate about how much of a role Diamond assigned to ecological/biological factors in determining historical causation; there are good reasons for claiming that he stressed his evidence far beyond its limits, and there are good reasons for claiming that he, well, didn't. (I think that if you look at both Collapse and GGS together, the former conclusion seems more reasonable, but if you look at certain specific chapters, especially in GGS, the latter is more appropriate.)
I, personally, don't really care about the whole thing that much. Nothing that Diamond has written has any relevance for the academic history that I deal with. Most of the time, my main contact with what he wrote is either in dealing with incessant debates about him between people who do care about such issues (especially on CFC) or in dealing with enthusiasts of his who take everything to extremes and start bringing up biological/ecological considerations in places where they are patently ridiculous with no evidentiary basis, such as the claims that anthropogenic climate change destroyed the Western Roman Empire. Those sorts of people show up with any author writing for a popular market. (Not that pop-science/-history/-philosophy/-whatever writers publish books that automatically suck because of their provenance. And it's not that popularizing academic topics is a bad thing, far from it. It's just that most people who write for a popular audience either get things wrong by relying on perspectives that have fallen into disfavor or by failing to account for more recent and well-accepted views, or they say things that, while not wrong, also fail to take account of more recent academic writing, creating sometimes very sizable holes. It's a tendency, is all.)
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Pangur Bán;12868724 said:
Well, like I've said perhaps half-a-dozen times so far, nevermind your apparent bullheaded insistence on charging forward with your half-baked assertions, it's all well-and-good to say the laws of nature apply to human behavior, but you and Jared Diamond still have all of your work ahead of you when it comes to making sense of this interaction. The fact that every "methodology" or branch of study you cited is completely, 100% qualitative does not instill an enormous amount of confidence in the development of a model of human behavior, and to say that that's irrelevant because what really matters is the scientific process, even as you sit here lecturing us about how free will doesn't exist, is purely unscientific by your own metric. Free will, which has not been "disproven" nor anything like it, cannot be discarded so blithely, or you abandon the pretenses of science that you cherish.
In Jared Diamond's specific case, it's that he insufficiently substantiates his claims, and ignores a great deal of relevant information. This is to be expected because history cannot be quantified; there is no mathematical model to develop or test. This is why all these "ignorant historians" haven't been too keen to jump on your bandwagon.
Pangur Bán
Deconstructed
Fairies haven't been proven not to exist either, but we don't waste time arguing about them like we do about 'free will'. You don't need to prove something doesn't exist in order to ignore it, and indeed such a burden of proof would have floored our civilization centuries ago.
Implicit in your argument is that if theories cannot be modelled mathematically, then there is no way to make them superior to others and that any untestable nonsense is equally of worth vis-a-vis well-tuned heuristics. That of course is not the case, as I've already pointed out. I of course wasted my time since you'd rather try to make personal attacks than actually read what is written, you'd rather attack a straw man than an actual argument taking place here, and you'd rather indulge in the nirvana fallacy than openly admit or emphasize that scientifically-tuned methodologies and reasoning à la Diamond can bring insights to historians (even when they themselves might not immediately understand or accept them).
H4run
Deity
true, my under graduate major was psychology, there are no way to make a quantitative measurement on unmeasurable entity like emotion and cognitive, our quantitative approach is by observing the symptom and try to make quantitative consensus to an entity that clearly unmeasurable. To say human behaviour and emotion it is part of the law of nature and have a constant measure is to say that human will react the exactly same reaction most of the time from the same sensation from stimulus (you quantify it from 0-1). Which the behaviourist try to prove and make psychology more scientific discourse, as you mention before, Pavlov, Thorndike, Skinner, and like we know how they fail to do math on human behaviour.
While psychoanalysis itself is not at all science, even Freud himself refuse it to be categorize it to science if I'm not mistaken and even the psychologist at that time having a debate should it be count as a psychology discourse. As Freud said :
"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador--an adventurer, if you want it translated--with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort" (Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Feb. 1, 1900).
How can a claim that a son want to fill his mother by his genital when he is born as count as something scientific? something that his own student Karen Horney and other disciples protesting. The popularity of psychoanalysis was falling until Lacan appear with his neo psychoanalysis and once again make psychoanalysis popular, and again nothing scientific about Lacan. I think it is close to say Psychoanalysis is more art than a scientific discourse as they interpretate dream and human behaviour like one interpretate painting or poetry.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Pangur Bán;12868973 said:
Well it's not that you haven't bothered to disprove free will, it's that you haven't engaged with it at all. The question of human agency is utterly unsettled. How can you be so confident about the nature of human agency?
And back to Diamond: I'm not sure if you've been reading this thread, but the consensus is "he has some interesting ideas, but they aren't very rigorously expressed/examined." How do you get a nirvana fallacy out of that?
Pangur Bán
Deconstructed
Diamond isn't attacking free will or 'human agency', he is being criticized for ignoring it.
The nirvana fallacy was in reference to your own previous comments.
You are correct that those hostile to him actually already accept some of his most important observations, but still feel compelled to attack him. Like I said earlier, it's not just that the implications of some of the stuff forwarded by him isn't understood, it's also that he has a bit of a cult following and much of the hostility is aimed at the latter by people unaware of what JD actually says.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Pangur Bán;12869082 said:
The criticism is more substantial than that, I think, and certainly not without merit given the myriad problems his arguments have.
Pangur Bán
Deconstructed
I don't understand?
I never said the criticism was limited to that, I know it's not -- though it is the 'criticism' that tends to get repeated the most.For the record, Guns, Germs and Steel is not that great of a book. Collapse is more insightful, best for explaining some of the dynamics of genocide to a wider public, but has dodgier use of history (though not much more than many people calling themselves 'historians'). The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee is by far his best work, and any historian who reads it will learn a lot about what guys like JD can teach us. GGS is an expanded version of one of that book's later chapters.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
Sure, but do you think ignorance is good? What's the point of having an accurate understanding of history, while we're at it? Why not keep believing that Rome fell because of barbarians and that feudalism is a thing? What's the problem with misrepresenting history too?
I seriously fail to see how anyone here can be ok with the idea of misrepresenting the work of an author for "professional gain, satisfying personal vindictiveness," etc. If you disagree with Jared Diamond's work, make sure you understand what he's even arguing. If you don't want to do that, that's fine too, just don't express an opinion on something you don't understand (not you personally, but a general you).
Gucumatz
JS, secretly Rod Serling
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Pangur Bán;12869121 said:I don't understand?
For the record, Guns, Germs and Steel is not that great of a book. Collapse is more insightful, best for explaining some of the dynamics of genocide to a wider public, but has dodgier use of history (though not much more than many people calling themselves 'historians'). The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee is by far his best work, and any historian who reads it will learn a lot about what guys like JD can teach us. GGS is an expanded version of one of that book's later chapters.
You really think Collapse is insightful? Collapse is probably the least original of his works and rehashes sometimes historically and/or scientifically disproved theories. It doesn't explain the dynamics of genocide really at all (except for a slight attempt with Rwanda) and instead tries to shoehorn nearly everything as environmental collapse. Here is just a listing of a few chapters in Collapse that are downright wrong:
- 2 (Easter Island, No one really views the population collapse anymore as a tragedy of the commons result and Hunt and Lipo's research from the last 2 decades coupled with the historical record shows that the decline of population came from Spanish contact with the written record and obsidian, biological, and habitat records demonstrating the population remained stable before and after first contact with the Dutch.)
- 4 Anasazi "collapse". Another factually incorrect example and he tries to enforce his point via packrat middens that are not only notoriously unreliable but whose biological nature make it that those findings are pretty much guaranteed useless. Plus we know quite a few of the sites where greenery was cut for the sites and none of them are even remotely close to the Anasazi sites. Diamond completely ignores the people who continued to live using the same canals, "colonies", etc. of the main Anasazi sites that continued well after the gradual decline of more famous sites ie at Mesa Verde and Chaco.
- 5 And don't get me started on the Maya. Where to begin - the whitewashing of native history and really history in general to fit an environmental narrative often discredits people simply to score the modern day west to try and fix its environmental programs. Unfortunately it means a rewriting (and whitewashing) of history - this has become the case for the Maya too. In only examining the classical transition and completely ignoring the pre-classical transition and other transitions in the Mesoamerican world, Diamond completely ignores any historical, archaeological, or scientific context when it comes to the historical movement of populations in Mesoamerica. In claiming that deforestation damaged the Maya environment "repeatedly" he completely ignores any context about what my ancestors did in order to manage deforestation and degradation of the land. We created narrow but long aqueducts, rebuilt eroded limestone karsts, rotated fields, etc. As it is, every few years archaeologists have to revise population numbers upwards of Maya sites because they are stuck in the idea that we "slash and burnt" or mismanaged fields and other more primitive means of agriculture. If you look at forests that grew back around the fields of various sites that eventually declined, one could see a hundred years ago different ages/years from when some of these 300-500 year old trees came from via these field rotations. The practice continued for a while although it has declined today. Or if you look at the south, field rotation still happens all the time today. The cities of Kaminaljuyu and other southern cities aren't looked at by Diamond at all - but they present a good case of centuries, even millennia of extensive land management.
And it gets even more aggravating the more you look at his "details" that are just plain factually inaccurate. From English pastoral systems, to Mycenae Greece, to Greenland, to Australia he continues to get detail after detail wrong. Collapse is easily his most useless book and contributes pretty much nothing to anyone.
Gucumatz
JS, secretly Rod Serling
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Yea you are probably right. I think I have read too many posts from forums that have almost soured the milk though that make me think that this sort of thinking (anti-interdisciplinary really in anything, but particularly regarding Diamond) is more common than it probably is in real life. And I agree with pretty much all of your points and share pretty much the same concerns with Diamond you list.
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