Tanner Greer has a post up, A Study Guide for Human Society, Part I, where he says this:
…I have collected fifteen separate 400+ page books that try to answer the question “why did the West get rich first.” And that was seven years ago! The number of books tackling this question has only grown larger. But if that is all you read, you are in trouble. How will you know who is right and who is wrong? If you have not read widely in history and anthropology, who are you to judge? There is absolutely no point, for example, in reading one of Peter Turchin’s books if you don’t have the background knowledge needed to assess whether his models match the historical record. There is no point reading Diamond’s explanation for why China stagnated and why Europe did not if you do not know anything about Chinese or European history yourself (I am not convinced Diamond does). Grand theories of civilization should be at the bottom of your list. They are worth reading, but not before you have the foundation in facts that you need to distinguish between the good work and the ill.
This is good advice for history. It is a theory-poor data-rich field. And, as Tanner implies, a knowledge of history is excellent as a tool for meta-cognition.
But it is different in science. Fields with lots of formal theory are such that instead of local empirical deep-dives, it’s more useful to pick up a survey of the broad frameworks so that you develop some intuitions about how to approach problems. Principles of Population Genetics is what I recommend because it introduces you to a way of thinking about biology as a set of algebraic relations. After that, you can engage with the literature. In evolutionary and population genetics that means papers.
Today a friend emailed me about similarities he noticed between young men radicalized by the logic of Islamic fundamentalist and white nationalism. He himself at one point in his life had associations with Islamic fundamentalists. One thing I told him is the problem here is a certain type of young male is attracted to radical movements based on logic, but the vast majority of humans have no great investment in logic.
Profiles of Salafi radicals from the 2000s noticed that at the elite and core groups there was an enrichment for engineers and scientists. Within Muslim subcultures, this is almost a caricature or stereotype.
The attraction of young men with highly systematizing ways of thinking to what can only be described as the logical necessity of evil is a function of peculiarities in their cognitive process which make them atypical. Though I have never been religious myself, in my 20s I too was attracted to generalizing in this sort of way of thinking, though luckily never to the point of believing in the necessity of evil.
In my mid-20s reading cognitive anthropology “cured” me of this problem. Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust made me rethink everything I believed about religion.
The writer Rod Dreher has talked about the contrast between himself and his sister and father when it comes to religion. Rod is a seeker and a thinker. Raised a Methodist, he became an atheist, and then converted to Roman Catholicism, and finally Eastern Orthodoxy. Dreher’s sister and father remained Methodist and were suspicious about his religious peregrinations. Though they did not reflect upon the fine points of faith or struggle with their beliefs, they were sincerely religious as a matter of custom, habit, and disposition.
The type of person who is a New Atheist imagines religious people like Rod Dreher. The . reality is that for every Rod Dreher, there are hundreds of people like his sister and father.
If you take religion and turn it into a vessel for apodictic logic, it will blow up in your face. Conversely, I do wonder if some of the online “social justice” subcultures are at the opposite extreme, taking feeling, and making it the measure of all things.
Russian Land of Permafrost and Mammoths Is Thawing. When I was a kid I loved reading books about the wildlife of Siberia. Huge hardcover books with color illustrations, often dating from the 1960s and 1970s.
The PIE homeland controversy: August 2019 status report.
Europeans Don’t Necessarily Share American Values. I want to see quantitative analysis!
Identity Politics Roil Most Diverse House Democratic Caucus Ever. This makes me happy.
Low coverage whole genome sequencing enables accurate assessment of common variants and calculation of genome-wide polygenic scores. This is a big deal.
Internalizing cooperative norms in group-structured populations.
Haplotype-Resolved Cattle Genomes Provide Insights Into Structural Variation and Adaptation.
Evolutionary constraints in regulatory networks defined by partial order between phenotypes.
In an Apparent First, Genetic Genealogy Aids a Wrongful Conviction Case.
Scientists are making human-monkey hybrids in China. How about “In China” instead of “In Mice.”
Evidence that pleiotropic alleles underlie adaptive divergence between natural populations.
Detecting genotype-population interaction effects by ancestry principal components.
Doctors In The U.S. Use CRISPR Technique To Treat A Genetic Disorder For The 1st Time.
Hmm… I’m not sure about this; regarding starting points I would tend to think it’s OK to start with Turchin’s theory, for’ex, and then “work back” and test against history.
Have people with very thick historical narrative knowledge made more cogent criticisms of his models than people who simply have a good understanding of data coding or who have a general working knowledge of world history?
It seems to me that the criticisms they make are not qualitatively better and tend to be “addicted” to arguing for contingency, narrative, specific biographies and specific battles and make arguments which are lost in the weeds, rather than that they tend to make solid criticisms that strike to the heart of the general, impersonal dynamics that Turchin argues for (rightly or wrongly).
Specifically as well, beyond I’d also argue that it’s actively bad advice to argue that an audience should try and swallow thick historical narrative and facts whole before looking into the econ history of the Industrial Revolution and the “Great Enrichment”.
Knowing huge lists of battles, kings, aristocratic and privileged personalities (most of which are rather dry concerns about an elite and stodgy society that moderns rightly care little for), should not be a prerequisite to knowing that Sven Beckert or Shashi Tharoor are full of it!
Not only is the Siberian permafrost thawing, the Siberian taiga is burning right now in unprecedent scale:
http://siberiantimes.com/ecology/others/news/fire-and-flood-apocalypse-with-wildfires-raging-and-dire-threat-to-baikal-worlds-deepest-lake/
I don’t know whether it was the forest fires that also sparked this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-49243675/siberia-arms-store-fire-triggers-huge-blasts
Hmm… I’m not sure about this; regarding starting points I would tend to think it’s OK to start with Turchin’s theory, for’ex, and then “work back” and test against history.
i think tanner doesn’t distinguish btwn something like turchin, which has formal tools as part of the core, as opposed to jared diamond, which is more like an extended essay.
so good point
You are right, I am not making the distinction between Diamond and Turchin.
But the best criticism of Turchin I have seen were 1) An essay written by Mark Edward Lewis in one of those books with ten essays all by different authors, where he attacks Turchin’s “big empires” paper for not matching the actual events of any of China’s unifications, putting question to the theory his neat quantitative tools supposedly showed. 2) The recent attack on seshat by a bunch of evo anthropologists claiming that the base data for his project are poorly coded [false] representations of the actual societies in question.
I have similar concerns with Ages of Discord, which I think plays around with the data re: what counts as violence and what does not in order to fit facts to theory instead of the other way around. But I wary of going too far with the critique without nailing it down solid first. Turchin doesn’t respond well to criticism.
The bigger problem though with Matt’s suggestion: whose theory do you start with? There is no consensus! Turchin though he would revolutionize the social sciences. He hasn’t. Some like his work and agree with; some push alternate models. But Turchin is lucky, as he is working in a field with very little attention from other social scientists. Go back to the field I used as my main example (where does economic growth come from?) or one of the core questions IR people focus on (why is there war?) and all of the sudden you have dozens of models, all using formal tools, many using calculus based models. So how do you know whose formal model is the model by which to judge the history by?
Until we have the sort of consensus you see evolutionary biology, starting with the theory is the wrong way to go about it.
Possibly my arguments may have conflated the questions of big theories vs lots of factual knowledge and of traditional history vs econ and materialist history. Those may not be totally able to be decoupled, but let’s try an approach that explicitly splits those questions:
On theory: I would argue that you don’t need much base of facts to get a lot out of knowing which theories can be easily falsified or held dubious by working econ historians. This is the likes of “Empire of Cotton” and various pop theories of the IR and the breakout to modern growth. I mean, there is some consensus, it’s not a total chaos of competing theories and ideas.
You can learn which theories definitely don’t work before you can even hope to be able to meaningfully assess which theories do! That’s a lot more than many people know and something I wouldn’t want gated behind the need to first accumulate a very thick knowledge of historical fact, which is not going to be for everyone, because these are pretty important questions for the modern world (and questions where knowing what doesn’t work gives you a lot to start with).
You don’t need to take an attitude of complete agnosticism to theory before mastering a large wedge of specific facts – it’s OK to accept what is understood not to work, without having that much of that actual specific factual case in your head.
I would also qualify that I would not expect it to be that disastrous to start from big theory over facts first, so long as you are aware that what you are looking at is not settled, and it’s a scaffold to be tested with factual information. Some people understand better working from that basis than trying to learn what would seem to them to be a laundry list of information that doesn’t connect into any central question or idea.
On focus on non-econ vs econ history: Reading economic data centered history, agnostically of these big theories, should not have to wait until traditional histriography is completed and understood. Partly for reasons of consequence it seems to me that individuals who are rich in histriographical knowledge but poor in the knowledge of the material and economic constraints – econ history facts – may go wrong in ways that seem particularly off. Ultimately, the kind of facts you need to asses big theories in econ history must certainly be econ history facts, as well (they’re also more interesting than “one damn thing after another”).
“Federal Election Commission investigating ex-AOC chief of staff Chakrabarti” by Alana Goodman | August 06, 2019
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/federal-election-commission-investigating-ex-aoc-chief-of-staff-chakrabarti
Two organizations linked to Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her outgoing senior aides are the subject of a Federal Election Commission investigation into alleged campaign finance violations, the Washington Examiner has learned.
The FEC opened an official case on March 7 to examine complaints against Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, two campaign committees started by Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff Shaikat Chakrabarti, according to an FEC confirmation letter disclosed to the Washington Examiner. … Ocasio-Cortez also sat on the board of Justice Democrats from December 2017 to June 2018, the Daily Caller reported.
* * *
Justice Democrats is currently run by activist Alexandra Rojas and is no longer affiliated with Ocasio-Cortez or Chakrabarti. Chakrabarti, an influential liberal organizer who was widely seen as the architect of Ocasio-Cortez’s successful 2018 campaign and legislative priorities, stepped down as the congresswoman’s chief of staff last Friday, the Intercept first reported. Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesperson Corbin Trent, a liberal activist who was previously affiliated with Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, also resigned from her office.
Chakrabarti is reportedly joining an environmental activist group called New Consensus to work on building support for the Green New Deal policies. Trent will move over to Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 reelection campaign where he will lead her communications team.