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Comment by schnitzelstoat | Hacker News Reader

I found the more mundane explanations in "Why Nations Fail" to be far more convincing than the geographical determinism of "Guns, Germs and Steel"

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They seemed largely complementary to me? Guns, Germs and Steel was mostly about how people, culture, ideas and skills spread across the world, whereas Why Nations Fail seemed to be mostly about what happens after that, at a nation state level.

To be honest I didn't understand why they felt the need to position it as a rebuttal of GG&S when reading it either.

Jared Diamond is a pretty big proponent of environmental determinism. This can be somewhat obscured in GG&S itself, but his follow-on book Collapse is a pretty naked advertisement for environmental determinism, and he harps on a lot about it in interviews and the like. In fact, the introduction to Why Nations Fail (if memory serves correctly) includes some discussion by people who saw the book before it was published, and one of those discussions was Diamond, who complained that the book rejected environmental determinism as a major factor (to which the authors responded "the evidence just doesn't hold up, what more do you want us to say?").

A lot of the complaints about GG&S are to some degree a complaint about Diamond in general being mapped on to the least offensive of his works, and if that is the only exposure you have to Diamond, it can be seem like the complaints are coming out of left field.

Which discredits the entire field. Ad hominem arguments have no place in science. Everyone knows that Newton wrote extensively on the occult but that takes nothing away from his contributions to physics and mathematics.

If I could address his critics as a whole I would say:

Critique the theory on its own, independent of the author. Provide an alternative theory. “It’s complicated” is not a theory.

What's wrong with environmental determinism? Obviously our civilizations are influenced by our environment; that's why Egypt formed around the Nile delta, instead of forming a hundred miles west in the Sahara.

Geographic arguments are a very common tool in pop Social Sciences, for example the correlation between landlocked states and poverty or supposed American exceptionalism due to the fertile Midwest (while ignoring similar agrarian immigrant countries like Brazil and Argentina).

Furthermore, the kinds of argumements that Diamond would provide weren't actually "tested" per say. Social Sciences are a "Science" (albeit flawed in some shape or form), but are dependent on validating a hypothesis in a reproducible manner as well, hence why economics has basically become applied math since the 50s (and similar changes in other fields like Sociology, Linguistics, Polticial Science, and Anthro as well)

There isn't much difference between grifters like Perun or Zeihan and Jared Diamond.

Also, Jared Diamond doesn't have a background in Economics or Political Science - he is an Ecologist/Environmental Scientist (and one of the best ones at that), and as such reading GGS induces Dunning-Kruger for those with a background in Comparitive Politics.

Perrin the guy on YouTube? What’s wrong with him?

this comment reads like you called Jared Diamond a "grifter" e.g. diligent con and knowing thief.. maybe you did not mean that exactly?

I did mean that.

No one in the academic PoliSci, Sociology, or Anthropology space views him as credible.

He is a great Ecologist and Environmental Historian, but he is not someone with domain experience in Comparative Politics, Political Economy, IR, and/or other adjacent fields which people try to extrapolate GGS to.

> other adjacent fields which people try to extrapolate GGS to

I don't have a dog in the fight other than having read (most of) GG&S and found his writing style laborious, but the quoted bit above seems more like an issue with those other people that Diamond.

If I say "x" and people extrapolate that to things for which it was not intended, how does that make _ME_ a grifter?

The issue is Jared Diamond explicitly argues for Environmental Determinism despite it largely being bunk. He has had multiple opportunities to clear up his arguments, but he only digs deeper and deeper into it.

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