The collapse of Jared Diamond.

Another one — along with Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer — I thought was bullshit long before anyone else seemed to catch on to the scent. I don’t know exactly how I tell — reading scientific papers with their (justified) hedging and uncertainty, versus the stone certainty of people like Diamond helps immunize one from being duped, even if not an expert in the field.

As I am an expert in no field nor do I wish to be (it limits creativity and flexibility enormously), having reliable heuristics for judging validity and relevance is important.

There was a post on Making Light recently about how everyone has a superpower. If I had to list one, I’d say it is being able to look at a massive amount of data (whether a book, some numbers, it really doesn’t matter) and say, “That doesn’t look right.” Often without being able to articulate why. And then being right about that incorrectness at far better than the rate of chance.

Diamond, Lehrer and Gladwell immediately set off that detector in me, with Lehrer making it go off like the foghorn of a steamer ship.

I agree with some of this piece, but this portion is fundamentally wrong.

My point was if his products and business models were so great, he could succeed on his own, by attracting private capital.

Almost nothing actually innovative attracts private capital. The internet, for instance, never would’ve amounted to anything if we’d had to depend on private capital to fund it as the returns were 20-30 years in the future. For a private company, anything more than 2-3 quarters away is also known as “eternity.”

Private capital only attracts to what is already nearly-sure to be profitable, for the most part. It’s not some magical arbiter of what is actually a good idea, especially for society at large.

Why do people insist on believing that against all evidence?