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Comment by forkandwait | Hacker News Reader

While nobility is bullshit, better nutrition as evidenced by height and tooth remains is true, only catching up in the 20th century, except for the rich of course. Sorry I don't have a source. (The benefits of civilization may have only accrued to a small proportion of the population for most of history. )

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Jared Diamond's essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race makes this argument quite convincingly: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

Ordered this book but haven't touched it yet:

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/55101875...

Doesn't look too happy to me -- maybe because I'm over 30 and would be dead. Also, I loved my mother (who is dead) -- but at least she didn't die in childbirth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Life expectancy at birth was low because of high children mortality. If you've made it to adolescence, you could expect to live 50-80 years.

https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...

Losing many of my children, wives, and loved ones sure would make me sad.

It would surely make you sad, if you had time-traveled there. If you had been living there, you probably would be a bit more fatalistic and willing to accept untimely deaths as a part of natural order, having no experience of better life.

Does your logic also apply to the millions of people living in slavery and profound poverty today?

I concede that people adjust their expectations to norms that surround them. But I also feel there are certain floors in the human condition -- the death of a child being one of those rock bottoms.

Jared Diamond is not an expert. He's a pop culture writer.

If you want to explore the other side to that old essay, try this: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Worst+Mistake+in+the+His...

He's a physiologist, who moved to other disciplines, with a touch of anthropology. There are no experts-on-everything-human, of course, so that'll probably have to do for now. One can imagine better combinations for such a synthetic interdisciplinary topic, I agree - but there weren't a lot of other volunteers. Academia likes narrow specialists. No need to falsely disparage him as a self-appointed writer whose only credential is popularity, it isn't true.

"After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands." - Wikipedia

I'm not convinced by that call to authority. For example, what about Larry Summers? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

Do you dispute his position on women in science? Or, should we take his position as correct for the same reasons that you list.

I did not say his only credit was popularity. I said he's a pop-writer, as opposed to, say, a peer reviewed expert in the domain.

In any case, my primary request is that people consider the long list of refutations to the claims in his mass-market publications.

It should not be a call to authority. The only thing that matters are the individual arguments he exposes in the books, not the fact he's not an expert.

And history has also shown some experts can be wrong when the paradigm change of new ideas is too big.

However, and I say this is particularly important: all refutations I have read about his work focus on some particular detail, they are of the type: 'this number is wrong'. Of course it can be, he's speculating. And that's the easy part to fix! Just change the number in his argument with the correct one. Be constructive.

But I have never read a refutation that says: 'this line of reasoning is wrong'.

In fact, his work has been cited as an inspiration for 'Sapiens', which is a current best seller and it follows the same modus operandi.

If you're genuinely curious in reading a refutation, then you should read through the 10-year-old HN discussion linked above.

Or, try googling. For example, here is a relevant discussion on NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-do...

As ever HackerNews discussed this ten years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118

(Tichy’s karma is just 110 short)

Would be fun to do a serious analysis of HN discussion, on the same topic, separated by 10 years. I don't mean identifying the occurrence -- I mean various characteristics of the discussion.

For example, perhaps certain facts have been more/less passionately supported after 10 years. Also aspects like tone.

Weak effort of combining "is true" with "don't have a source."

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