Comments on: Even Though I Haven’t Read It

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 07:58:00 +0000

Your comments are very weird.

From what I've read by reliable sources, I'm not inclined to purchase it. But I may be persuaded to read certain portions of it.

So not only have you not bought it, you haven't even read it.

Diamond attempts to extrapolate from history a cautionary tale of current environmental woes. I'm afraid this is a path I'm not going to follow Diamond down. And not because I think environmental problems are insignificant. I do, but perhaps not in ways Diamond does.
Diamond falls into the neo-Malthusians, carping about overpopulation and resource exhaustion. I tend toward the Cornucopians, championed quite well by Julian Simon and, more recently, Bjorn Lomborg.
No doubt Diamond's inferior exposition, lacking accuracy and circumspection, will proliferate through common discourse.

WTF? Dude. Read first. Critique after. Never do it the other way around.

By: ed

ed — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 03:39:21 +0000

Boy, the the last of this book is BAD…see more comments on my blog at http://mildride.blogspot.com

By: C M

C M — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 02:08:28 +0000

Diamond, while providing good explanations of how things happen, often does a horrible job (when that job is even evident) of trying to discuss WHY things happen. He views human history as a set of scientific tests that he can then develop scientific principles from and attempt predictions based therein. This view suffers greatly in accounting for the HUMAN aspect of history as well as failing to account for the multiple perspectives that history is invariably formed from. To compound the issue, his works seem to be rather apologetic for the horrible decisions of humanity, as he views those decisions as being reliant on material factors and non-variable scientific principles, rather than recognizing the inherently variable and mostly free nature of human decisions and actions.
As for this book, I’ll give it a read and see if he’s presenting anything new in collapse theory, but the line from the editorial where he states that we’re the first society with the opportunity to learn from others’ collapses is patently ridiculous. The theme of societal collapse has been present in almost the entire breadth of recorded history. Whether those writings are acted upon is a whole other story, and that problem remains for our time.
Someone with a mind to read up more on this subject might want to check out a book entitled “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by an author named Tainter. Good read.