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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

It was explicitly written with a European POC at the end of the 20th century. What else would you expect?

That doesn’t make something racist if you’re European writing during that period. Should all books by euros from 1950-2000 be discarded? I’m not sure I understand your argument.

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He mistook his post hoc analysis for historical and geographical determinism

Not all writers do that

I think the geographical determinism is the whole point though, right?

That’s the argument is that geography contributed heavily to what we have today. Not that we’ll have this forever.

I remember reading about the East/West spread vs North/South spread of technology and it seems clever to me.

> I think the geographical determinism is the whole point though, right?

My point is that it is post hoc a theory to fit the facts.

I agree that he forces facts to fit his model, but that doesn't make the book racist. The entire point of his book is that environmental circumstances, not racial or cultural characteristics, explain the circumstance of European dominance in the modern era; this is explicitly anti-racist. (Inb4 Kafkatrap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265324)

That's literally how creating a theory works. You don't "pre-hoc" explanations or there would be no point to scientific inquiry. Do you mean to say he's cherry-picking or displaying some other bias?

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