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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

It's weird to see the people in this thread stating the generally accepted scientific viewpoints downvoted while those praising Diamond are upvoted.

Diamond is a skilled and persuasive writer, who's had success as a pop science writer but the theories he pushes to put it lightly are largely not accepted within academic communities.

Some, like the stories of ecocide featured in Collapse, have been completely and thoroughly debunked. That book is about as academically rigorous as The Lorax and fills the niche: a modern ecological morality tale for a modern Western audience.

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The problem is that it seems like the scientific community has largely failed at communicating their findings to the wider public. Where are the books like Diamond's that tell people what modern science has found about the same topics? Pop Sci is extremely popular, but scientists refuse to write them, so you get books by people like Diamond that hit the mainstream and then you get subreddits like r/askhistory getting mad about it. You can't get mad when your entire field has failed at educating the public.

The problem is that "the academic view" is a messy web of ideas and findings, with a lot of uncertainty and inconsistencies. That's a hell of a lot harder to sell and engage people with than a simple and elegant idea that's eloquently explained, even if said idea is almost certainly wrong.

I think people can easily be engaged by complex, messy topics. You just need a scientist who's a decent writer to try. Scientists, academics as a whole aren't trying.

This is only tangentally related to this discussion, but this youtube video about science communication (through the lens of 'what killed the dinosaurs?') I found quite interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DHgkMYgp7w . Science communication is hard, and it's not that unusual for scientists to market their ideas to the public, but it's still difficult even then for the public to get a good idea of the academic view.

The problem is that "the academic view" is a messy web of ideas and findings, with a lot of uncertainty and inconsistencies

That’s a cop-out. What it’s really saying to me (as a non-academic) is that they don’t have a theory. That is really bad news for a field struggling to be respected as a science.

Where is the Newton of history? Where is the Einstein or the Darwin of anthropology? Diamond earns my respect for having the courage to even try.

This just reads as the typical HN veneration of arrogance.

> Where is the Einstein or the Darwin of anthropology?

Diamond is more the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck of Anthropology.

Then who is the Einstein or the Darwin of anthropology? If Diamond is not credible, then who is? It's a lot easier to pick apart someone else's theory than it is to advance your own. If no one in a field is willing to step forward with a theory then the whole field is worthless.

Well, duh. Not every branch of academia has a grand unified theory of their field. That's what physics is going for, and still hasn't succeeded at. That doesn't make any random attempt at a theory a good one. Coming up with a theory is easy if you don't bother to be constrained by pesky details that don't match your theory, but unfortunately description of human society is actually incredibly patchwork, messy, and inconsistent.

The problem is to non-academics, it’s all a bunch of Just-So stories and Whig histories, so it’s difficult to judge and the more compelling writer is gonna win.

As an aside, the debunkers were also quite entertaining (at least as entertaining as GGS), although they weren't generally commercialized or marketed to the same degree.

I loved the team's demonstration that showed the complexity of Easter Island's civilization, and included a demo of how the moai statues were "walked" into place.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11613

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY

Part of the problem is that pop-sci debunkings of Diamond - which is of course what the general public reads, as opposed to actual papers - tend to be very explicitly ideological, and often start with that angle rather than addressing the actual problematic constructs that Diamond presents. And, conversely, Diamond's books, while factually questionable in many ways, are written in a language that reads very dry and sort of "science-neutral". Given the cultural climate of our times, this inevitably conjures an image of someone doing hard science being attacked primarily for "inconvenient" views.

Simply put, if you want to convince people that Diamond is wrong, don't start by telling them that his books are bad because racism/colonialism/..., even if that is true.

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