Astral Codex Ten

Jared Diamond

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Jared Diamond

Article

Jared Diamond is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 17, 2021 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “William H. McNeill versus Jared Diamond”; “criticism of thinkers like… Jared Diamond”; “Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel”. It most often appears alongside Africa, Athens, China.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: June 17, 2021
  • Last seen: August 25, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples
June 17, 2021 · Original source
William H. McNeill versus Jared Diamond
A lot of these big picture histories of humanity start with sometimes conflicting premises. How happy were hunter gatherers? In Sapiens Yuval Noah Harrari frames humanity as a slow deterioration of individual happiness at the expense of building a greater society starting from the carefree hunter gather and ending in the far AI future of civilizational greatness and individual obliteration. Jared Diamond calls agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Other narratives paint individuals crawling out of the dark neanderthal caves into utopian agricultural societies and everyone is more or less getting happier as modernity progresses. The distinction is foremost a narrative tool which seems to have important implications, but I have been unresolved on which side I adhere to. Plagues and Peoples kind of has it both ways in a way that seems truer. Human individuals are constantly finding the balance between their environment and society towards something... mutually tolerable.
Inline links: the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
I never read Guns, Germs, and Steel, but constantly wondered how parallel Diamond and McNeill thought about diseases. Luckily, they had a public debate! McNeill criticizes GGS, Diamond responds, and then McNeill further replies! How lucky we are.
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
What is the version of prehistory the Davids offer in The Dawn of Everything? It is an anti-story. The Davids are offering up an alternative to (as well as a criticism of) thinkers like Steven Pinker or Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, all of whom give a standard model of human prehistory that goes small hunter-gatherer tribes → invention of agriculture → civilization (with its associated hierarchies and private property and wealth inequalities).
Some might try to dismiss the Sapient Paradox by pointing to evidence of ongoing human evolution. And while there is some evidence of recent human evolutionary changes, it often seems clustered around things like dietary changes—at least, there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and almost everyone who tackles these issues, from the Davids to Yuval to Pinker to Diamond, agrees that Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Indeed, early Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago had brains as large as our own!
Inline links: brains as large
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is treated with similar inconsistency: while initially admitting it is "a powerful approach to the puzzle on which he focuses" (why the Old World colonised the New instead of vice versa), AR eventually claim
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is treated with similar inconsistency: while initially admitting it is "a powerful approach to the puzzle on which he focuses" (why the Old World colonised the New instead of vice versa), AR eventually claim … it is not even historically or geographically or culturally predetermined that Europeans should have been the ones colonizing the world. It could have been the Chinese or even the Incas. The Chinese perhaps, but Diamond's thesis is completely inconsistent with the Incas. Soviet growth apparently "did not feature technological change". As an economist I assume they mean that statistical measures of total factor productivity did not grow. But by any ordinary meaning of "technological change" this statement is patently ridiculous: horses were replaced with tractors, employment shifted from agriculture to industry, the production of steel, electricity and machine tools grew exponentially, and city dwellers moved into highrise apartments with radio, TV and refrigerators. (I once travelled a bit in Central Asia and the newly ex-Soviet 'stans felt like developed countries that had fallen on hard times. Nepal didn’t.)
Inline links: total factor productivity