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Originally posted by notcasesensitive
Just back for tonight or just back starting tonight? You should come by once Spanky has read Collapse, for our discussion of it.
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I liked Guns more, maybe because I have this inate dislike for people misreaching their conclusions over their data, and, while I don't count Diamond as one of "those" authors in the main, I thought he stuck far closer to the provable and proven in that one than in Collapse. While he generally takes few liberties, ("there were four more earthquakes in 1921 than in 1920, signaling a massive, almost 12% rise which results in a 1200% rise over a hundred years . . . "), he is generally more willing, in Collapse, to interpolate data.
But he's still fun to read. His logic is very good, to the extent that you sometimes think "wow, I wouldn't have seen that at all, but it works."
(ETA) - I have to add that Diamond appeals to the same kind of people who like Ayn Rand. There's a reason for everything, there are right and wrong things to do, and to ignore that is to die. When you move to the frozen north, where one crop grows per year, you can't eat two.
