/lit/ - Literature

Because it's bad history.

Because it gives straightfoward and rational answers to questions that meme philosophers would rather spend years pulling metaphysical answers out of their ass for.

>Jared diamond

>diamond

Because it was required reading for me in 8th grade.

>>6536075
HE'S GOLD JERRY

>>6536067
What philosopher has said anything about this book?

It gives the perspective of a scientist and not a historian to explain history.

>>6536075
This is the real answer.

Because he thinks americans and the west have a cult of youth

>>6536087
Listen faggot, didn't you get the memo? Big idea history is what its all about now, and scientists are better at that than historians. Lol, "historians" -- shitty scientists more like.

It's not factual.

>>6536095
Historians seem like parrots who do nothing but repeat what was written in antiquity. no need for them, really.

>>6536095
You are denser than a neutron star. Big idea history is what it is all about for scientific analysis in fields like biology, it is terrible at actually determining history, that's the entire point.

>>6536134
Couldn't agree more. >2015

Still thinking historians have anything original to say

>>6536136
What is big idea history?

>>6536136
>actually determining history

Is this what historians do now? What does this involve?

>>6536136
he was obviously memeing you autist.

>>6536145
Using scientific tools to build historical frameworks, instead of using scientific models that best fit conclusions. Both are valid and are used for different purposes obviously.

>>6536149
I know, I'm not stupid enough to let someone get to me when they decide to pretend to be retarded.

>>6536142

You know what a high concept movie is? That but for popular history.

/lit/ hates it because it's popular and explicitly anti-racist. the first part pisses off the patricians and the second part pisses off the /pol/ ex-pats which make up about half of /lit/'s posting community

it's a decent if unexciting book that makes a good case for a pretty unambitious thesis (basically that "geography has a big effect on culture"). some of the details in the later chapters about the spread of langugae are more interesting than any of the general stuff. worth reading but deserves neither its reputation nor the hate on it.

>>6536177
That's the thesis? I thought it was about how Europeans ruined the rest of the world.

>>6536162
Could you spoonfeed please? The analogy doesn't really clarify and a cursory google search gave me nothing, so I kinda wanna assume your just pulling my dick.

>>6536177

I'm not clear why we'd be reading any history anyway? It's not literature. Why is literature taken to = any printed matter? Why can't these people all fuck off to /pol/?

>>6536142
Big idea history is an older kind of historical writing in which it is proposed and argued that all of human history can be explained/is the result of general, large forces at work, from which the complex, varied, and at first glance chaotic details of human history emerge and to which they can be causally reduced.

This sort of history fell deeply out of favor with the rise of modernism and postmodernism because Narrative was effectively assassinated as a means of truth telling.

From that point, historians have pretty generally been mucking about in the minutiae of history - worrying about what dialects were spoken where, what the disease statistics for given periods were, whether or not Roman soldiers wore leather sandals, etc. The little details that can be safely examined without getting into arguments about narrative.

That's understandably really frustrating for a lot of people, who would like to use human history as a sort of prediction tool for explaining current and future human behavior, as well as for understanding our connection to the past - basically, the things that history as an endeavor is actually useful for.
To that end, people like Diamond have been trying to get around the critique of Narrative in history by building narrative from as scientific a basis as possible, in order to retrieve some usage from history, as science is really the only thing that has a decent defense against the postmodernist virus.

That has worked out to varying degrees; Diamond's materialist view of history, along with similar materialist views of pop "historians" like Sid Meier, has been really popular with our generation, which has learned not to trust anything which people tell us is not rigorously backed by "science."

>>6536246

It's big baggy answers for stupid people.

>>6536252
Because /pol/ is for politics, not history.

>>6536263

History is politics. It's usually not culture. Old canonical writers, sure, but not some dipshit who's praised for 'explanatory power'. If that's literature, I'm going to start a thread on soccer player autobiographies.

>>6536322
i have no objections to that, you could probably learn something from a soccer player's autobiography. ever seen the two escobars documentary?

you're a god damn faggot by the way.

>>6536333

Of course I haven't, this is /lit/.

>>6536253
I can't believe I just read an intelligent post on 4chan.

>>6536401

hehe! samefag

>>6536095
Spengler, Hegel and Toynbee are still the most famous of Big Idea History.

>>6536439
>T, ya hear what I told him? I said he was a samefag.

>>6536050
It's historically and scientifically inaccurate. No one really takes that book seriously except for High-Schoolers and maybe a few undergrads that should have ended their education at High School

>>6536453
>no Mackinder

>>6536095
dude, scientists don't know shit or prove shit. we need metaphysicians.

>>6536489
you realize that was bait though, right?

Honestly OP if you want to talk about history take it to /tg/. As evidenced by this entire thread /lit/ doesn't know shit about history.

>>6536497
>>6536253

(I actually AM samefag, unlike that earlier post)

Not true.

>>6536497
>implying tg does

>>6536497
Discussions about heresy and how orky my shooter is does not equal historical discussion.

>>6536493
nope, guess i got caught. didn't read entire thread.

scientists are good at specialization, but specialization is not what we need at all if you want to understand the world.

>>6536497
/tg/ is best board so this could be said about literally anything.

That said you shouldn't invade /tg/ specifically with your off-topic non-sense.

>>6536518
no argument here.

>>6536050
Because it's obvious that Jared Diamond's conclusion (that there's nothing inherently special about Europeans or European culture) was determined from the outset, and that rather than sincerely researching the questions he's addressing, he merely worked backwards from his predetermined conclusion to craft a scientific explanation supporting it. He goes to such extraordinary lengths to avoid even considering the possibility that Europeans are better than the peoples they conquered that the book becomes more propaganda than history.

His reasoning is akin to finding a man shot to death in an alleyway, and exclaiming that he surely must have tripped and fallen on a pile of bullets that all happened to be in just the right position to be set off by the impact. Never mind the robber with a pistol standing a few feet away...

>>6536651
I think it's more like he's starting from the scientifically well-founded premise that aside from perfectly normal stochastic variation, there are no big genetic advantages enjoyed by Europeans.

Where he may go wrong (I've not actually read the book but I get the gist of his argument) is culture. Europe definitely developed a culture that was highly geared toward expansion and domination at any cost, though not consciously. That kind of cultural adaptation definitely has as big, if not a bigger, effect on the propagation of a culture than the materials and geometries of its locale.

>>6536679
What do you mean, not consciously? Do the crusades mean anything to you?

Because ideas rule the world, not biogeography or economics

>>6536679
>I think it's more like he's starting from the scientifically well-founded premise that aside from perfectly normal stochastic variation, there are no big genetic advantages enjoyed by Europeans.
Except for higher IQ.

>>6536689
Well, if you read what Europe has always written about the Crusades, you come away with the notion that europeans viewed these campaigns as essentially defensive in nature.

They began as a means of RETAKING the Holy Land, continued on as a means of combating the growing influence of Islam, and ended as a disgusting series of mass banditry that was allowed to continue for way too long because it meant that Europeans didn't have to fight each other to kill off spurious male heirs.

TL:DR Europeans of the time thought of the Crusades as essentially defensive in nature. They weren't trying to change the way Europeans thought about the outside world in any directed way, even though of course the Crusades directly did just that. It was not consciously done, is the point.

>>6536714
>IQ

I hope you're still a long way from suffrage

>>6536702
What, elucidate please.

>>6536732
Nope, I'm in my mid twenties.

there's extensive shit on reddit /r/askhistorians about why it's bad

i dropped it and read a book by Charles C Mann instead

>>6536714
IQ tests are a relatively new phenomenon and we have no idea where people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago would place on the scale. Further, IQ has a lot to do with culture and education. If you look at raw scores on IQ tests you'll see that results are continually rising decade by decade, and it sure as hell isn't because people's genes are rapidly improving.

>>6536743

The important part of the ideas of humans being determined by economics or biogeography isn't the content of the ideas themselves, but the fact that they are ideas and therefore always contestable and an imperfect representation of reality.

Presenting them as ultimate explanations of society is therefore ridiculous, you should start with the concept of explanation itself, that is much more intrinsic

>>6536769
Thanks, I understand you know.

>>6536762
>IQ tests are a relatively new phenomenon and we have no idea where people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago would place on the scale.
IQ is just an approximate measure of intelligence. Intelligence wasn't invented when IQ tests were invented.

We can get a pretty good estimate of the intelligence of past peoples by looking at their historical accomplishments.

>Further, IQ has a lot to do with culture and education.
Up to a certain point.

But within a given population sharing the same culture and same education, IQ results will vary, illustrating varying degrees of intelligence.

>If you look at raw scores on IQ tests you'll see that results are continually rising decade by decade, and it sure as hell isn't because people's genes are rapidly improving.
Yes, the Flynn effect. The rise is probably due to better nutrition, but it has recently come to a stop, probably because nobody in the western world is malnurished anymore.

>>6536748
It is extremely unfortunate we have allowed you to make it this far, and yet remain so ignornant.

IQ really is close to useless as a measurement. There are tons of people out there with absolutely monstrous IQs that don't accomplish anything.

More to the point, IQ tests have well-established difficulty measuring the IQ of people not familiar with western culture. So you can see why results might be biased (even though, properly adjusted, modern attempts at global IQ measurement show very little bias between cultural groups).

>>6536799
>thinks that all of europe was retarded after the black death because very little was accomplished

>Thinks that varying IQ due to stochasticity implies the possibility of variations in the average across cultures

>Doesn't realize that the Flynn effect is most likely simple evidence that their precious IQ test is a flawed sack of shit with little applicability.

>>6536803
>It is extremely unfortunate we have allowed you to make it this far, and yet remain so ignornant.
Yes, too bad we don't live in a country where political enemies can be liquidated.

>IQ really is close to useless as a measurement
It's really not.

> There are tons of people out there with absolutely monstrous IQs that don't accomplish anything.
And there are exactly zero people with low IQs who accomplish great intellectual achievements.

>More to the point, IQ tests have well-established difficulty measuring the IQ of people not familiar with western culture
So what? Wether you like it or not, the world culture is now based on western culture. Your hunting and gathering skills are useless in today's world, where intelligence is the deciding factor in one's success.

>So you can see why results might be biased (even though, properly adjusted, modern attempts at global IQ measurement show very little bias between cultural groups).
All right.


All this is besides the point though. Even if we accept that IQ is completely meaningless, intelligence is not. And intelligence varies between different ethnicities.

>>6536844
>thinks that all of europe was retarded after the black death because very little was accomplished
Ever heard of the Renaissance?

>Thinks that varying IQ due to stochasticity implies the possibility of variations in the average across cultures
Not across cultures, across ethnicities.

>Doesn't realize that the Flynn effect is most likely simple evidence that their precious IQ test is a flawed sack of shit with little applicability.
That's your own speculation.

So is Guns, Germs, and Steel worth reading despite its failings?

It sounds interesting and I'd like to read some history stuff, but I'm concerned about its relevance/validity. Are there similar books that are equally interesting but less problematic?

>>6536866
>That's your own speculation.

so is your nutrition bs

>>6536903
>so is your nutrition bs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Nutrition

>>6536910
alright, so is someone else's nutrition bs

>>6536915
You're quite the intellectual, aren't you?

>>6536878
No. it's pop history with a clear bias. I can give you some specific recommendations for better books if you tell em what time period/culture you're interested in.

>>6536923
i'm keeping the level of pseudness in this thread at a constant

read back through your own comments and say to me genuinely that they are convincing or in the very least engaging

posting empty responses doesn't help you win an argument because you "stuck around"

>>6536938
>posting empty responses doesn't help you win an argument
That's what you've been doing from the start.

>>6536930
I'm not much of a history buff so I can't say that I'm interested in a specific time period or culture. In the past I've always just memorized what I needed to for tests and then deleted from my brain afterward, but now I'm interested in history.

What would you recommend? Being an American, I'm not very interested in American history; it's been pounded into us since elementary school.

>>6536945
my 'start' was about five minutes ago and i haven't been trying to win an argument since then

>>6536965
yah but you probably only have bogus department of education version of american history.

I can only imagine how bad that is.

I'd be really interested to learn, based on your experience with the American pedagogy, say, for example, how the American revolutionary war was won?

>>6536965
I would start off with an overview of the history of civilization. Just so you can gauge what happened when and in what context then move from the beginning on.

A good book for an overview is A short history of the world by HG Wells. But if you want something more in depth I would recommend the story of civilization by Will Durant.

If you want to skip this and jump to the beginning of recorded history and civilization I would recommend A history of the near east by Marc Van die Mieroop.
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/A_History_of_the_Ancient_Near_East.html?id=oknsEhcALLEC&hl=en

Also the Histories by Herodotus is quite a good accessible primary source if you want to "start with the greeks"

>>6537067
>didn't recommend the outline of history

>>6536723
>tl;dr
why

>>6537067
Also I forgot the outline of history by HG Wells. He kind of skimps on the enlightenment and certain Greek & Roman philosophy but overall not a bad summary of humanity.

>>6536050
>we

Jews cannot be trusted when writing about sociobiology and genetic differences in humans, they have too much of a interest in keeping such disciplines marginalized (for good reasons). So they basically lie their ass out. See Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewotin.

>>6537215
You've got the intellect of an earthworm.

>>6536050
>>6536067
>>6536087


Basically it says that Rome shouldn't have been created because everyone who succeeded was privileged.

Why does it say Rome didn't exist?

Because Rome was a swamp full of disease and infestation and smart people, not privileged, discovered a way to drain the water and start building.

>>6537215
>>6537226
he's not wrong.

>>6537226
>redditinsults