Talk:Jared Diamond

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NPOV again[edit]

this was already brought up above, but this article still features no assessment whatsoever of Diamonds career. The only book descriptions that feature even a single line of critical assessment are Upheaval (2019) (which ironically mentions issues with his earlier work, which a reader of this article wouldn't have known about before this point) and the "Vengeance is Ours" controversy (2008).

The Guns, Germs, and Steel section features no criticism whatsoever. The criticism section of that books article has six paragraphs, groups of academics have written entire books about Diamonds claims, and there is absolutely nothing here. When you write very popular things about a subject, and experts in that subject criticize you for two decades straight it probably deserves a mention, and the lack of it requires addressing it, not discussing the appropriateness of having a template at the top of the article rather than in a subsection. The next step would be synthesizing some kind of overall assessment of Diamonds work beyond individual reviews of his book, but this article is miles removed from even attempting that.

Besides that, when taking out the book descriptions of this article the biography itself might get mistaken for a stub. Compare that to economist Daron Acemoglus article who is one of Diamonds detractors, while Diamond used to be a vastly more well known person to the general public [1]. --jonas (talk) 22:59, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It is funny that Diamond is almost universally considered by the scientific communities he treads into to be a misinformation peddler that actively misleads the general public into false knowledge about subjects. But there's only tiny bits of that shown in this article, like the part I had to add about Questioning Collapse. SilverserenC 23:12, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed additions[edit]

I've been updating the article a bit, but I now see that this article has been the target of some controversy. So before doing too much more work, I wanted to propose some of the additions I'm thinking about (and of course anyone else who wants to edit the article is welcome to do so). Also, for transparency, I'll repeat what I said when I last edited the article, over 10 years ago: Diamond is a member of my extended family, a distant cousin by marriage. We live in different parts of the country and I have met him at a few family events many years ago, and I also met him at one of his lectures several years ago, but I wouldn't say we were close. Anyway, suggestions are:

  • Some discussion/summarization of his peer-reviewed articles and research, such as what's been published in Nature. Like his work on gall bladders and hormone-sensitive cells, as well as discoveries and research he's accomplished related to bowerbirds and pythons.
  • A couple of the current sections on his books only contain negative reviews. I'd like to balance things by adding some positive reviews from reliable sources.
  • An expansion in his "Career" section that covers more of his explorations of New Guinea and its many mountain ranges

All additions would of course include references from reliable sources. Thoughts? --Elonka 09:13, 15 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]