Crooked Timber on Jared Diamond
There was an interesting post on Crooked Timber a couple months ago, concerning Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel), and by the time I read it, it had accumulated almost 300 comments. I finally read the whole conversation, and while I learned a lot from it, the signal-to-noise ratio is low enough that I can't recommend a full read. If you want a high-signal sample, I'd suggest using the browser's "find" function, and first reading all of the comments by Doctor Slack and then Keith M. Ellis. lemuel pitkin and adamhenne also make some interesting points, albeit a bit less coherently and tactfully. I was somewhat struck by how some of the regular Crooked Timber commenters, who seem to be fairly reasonable most of the time, ended up at each others' throats, and I'm having trouble thinking of a good explanation for this.
The short version of the story is that Diamond wrote an article in the New Yorker that featured a potentially damaging story about his driver, and this seems to have revealed several ethical lapses on Diamond's part. Diamond claims that the driver related the story (basically an attempted revenge killing in Papua New Guinea) in the first person, but the story turns out to be factually incorrect on several points. Most importantly, the presumed victim was never shot by an arrow, and is in fact not paralyzed, so it seems that someone or multiple people at the New Yorker failed at basic fact-checking. Diamond also reported this using the driver's full name, did not bother to inform the driver that this story was going to be in a major publication, and did not obtain consent (which is standard practice in anthropology and other fields with human subjects). I've never met Diamond, but this story gave me the impression that he is a narcissistic jerk and a sloppy scholar.
The first half of the comments on the article were mainly devoted to discussion of the libel suit that the driver brought against the New Yorker. The consensus seemed to be that the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed in court, but it might produce negative publicity for the New Yorker. At some point, the conversation shifted to a more interesting discussion of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and some anthropologists weighed in on problems in the book. I had heard that anthropologists were upset about the book before I came upon this post, but I had not seen a good summary of reasons. It seems that the primary problem is that it gets enough facts wrong that the central thesis is quite ill-supported. I don't think I can do justice to the arguments concerning Eurocentrism, so further details are perhaps best found by reading either Burke's article or the relevant comments by, e.g., Doctor Slack at Crooked Timber linked above.
More mundane lessons I picked up include:
The short version of the story is that Diamond wrote an article in the New Yorker that featured a potentially damaging story about his driver, and this seems to have revealed several ethical lapses on Diamond's part. Diamond claims that the driver related the story (basically an attempted revenge killing in Papua New Guinea) in the first person, but the story turns out to be factually incorrect on several points. Most importantly, the presumed victim was never shot by an arrow, and is in fact not paralyzed, so it seems that someone or multiple people at the New Yorker failed at basic fact-checking. Diamond also reported this using the driver's full name, did not bother to inform the driver that this story was going to be in a major publication, and did not obtain consent (which is standard practice in anthropology and other fields with human subjects). I've never met Diamond, but this story gave me the impression that he is a narcissistic jerk and a sloppy scholar.
The first half of the comments on the article were mainly devoted to discussion of the libel suit that the driver brought against the New Yorker. The consensus seemed to be that the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed in court, but it might produce negative publicity for the New Yorker. At some point, the conversation shifted to a more interesting discussion of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and some anthropologists weighed in on problems in the book. I had heard that anthropologists were upset about the book before I came upon this post, but I had not seen a good summary of reasons. It seems that the primary problem is that it gets enough facts wrong that the central thesis is quite ill-supported. I don't think I can do justice to the arguments concerning Eurocentrism, so further details are perhaps best found by reading either Burke's article or the relevant comments by, e.g., Doctor Slack at Crooked Timber linked above.
More mundane lessons I picked up include:
- Evolutionary Psychology is a bad (compound) word, unless you're a genetic determinist/fan of Stephen Pinker. Apparently, the practitioners generally fail at rigor, and are often informed by racist or sexist preconceptions.
- The mention of racism makes people fight. A typical dialogue could be A: B, your article has a lot of verbiage in common with racist movement X. B: How dare you call me a racist! *flame war ensues*