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Amazingly, I haven't yet read any of Diamond's work, though I think I have this on my bookcase.

I know that Tainter has criticized him some for cherry picking in order to support his presuppositions, specifically regarding his Easter Island ideas. I think he talks about it a little bit on this Omega Tau podcast:

http://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-colla...

It's on my personal list still though, get around to it eventually.

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I like his methodology, mainly because of a couple reasons. 1) We don't have that many civilization level societies to study in history, and 2) no society specifically sets out to implode, in fact there is tremendous benefit in not doing so. So even if we only had one collapse to study, we probably should do so and learn as much as we can from it, careful not to put too much value in the 'this time it's different' thing for our own prospects.

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