Well, one could always just read the paper and judge the science. Your comment above almost sounds like you won't because you think it's not worth reading it.

That’s a fair point. I skimmed it and got the gist of their approach, but I didn’t deep dive. It’s very hard to do what they’re trying to do rigorously. The real problem lies in the formulation of the question. It also doesn’t feel like they’ve “steelmanned” the original thesis, which is suspicious (tbf it’s rare in most of academia to see folks genuinely try to disprove their own position).

So you are wary of the motives of academics saying ''this is wrong for these reasons', but you dont think that Diamond has any motives, so you take his argument at face value (because it aligns with your feelings on the subject most likely)?

Not sure why downvoted, maybe because it’s a bit of a personal attack on me.

Well, we can say everyone has motives but that does not mean some incentives are more misaligned than others. So it’s not really a counter argument to say “everyone has motives”.

I wouldn’t say it’s my “feelings”, but my common sense, which is mostly derived from wider reading.

Quite often we wish to overcomplicate subjects to make them seem sophisticated. But many topics just don’t lend them to the complex analysis of say, high energy physics, they’re just much more prosaic. It’s ok to say “someone who lives near the sea has accessed to an additional food source and that’s probably beneficial” (as a random example) without having to write a thesis on it.

I defer to Charlie Munger on this topic, as he expresses it so well.