Jared Diamond has addressed many of his critics both directly and indirectly. Most of the sources you'll find online derive from a seminar held by The Amerind Foundation in 2007 called "Choices and Fates of Human Societies". This was a meeting of many prominent anthropologists to discuss the ramifications of Diamond's work (especially Collapse). It resulted in the the book Questioning Collapse.

Diamond has in turn responded to his critics numerous ways. Most publicly, he's written several articles directly responding to some. However, with works like Questioning Collapse, he has responded through more formal channels. It's a very complicated debate to track, so I'm not surprised you were unable to find any useful information on it.

Just curious. I purchased GGS from goodwill in hopes of reading it over summer. Too good of a deal to pass up. What's some of the criticism that the book is facing? And do you guys recommend reading it?

As a follow-up question, possibly for /u/AlotOfReading, I have read the book. He definitely did his homework in developing his theory. But it is so complex (e.g. most of his lemmas depend on a half dozen or more individual cases) it feels like a post-hoc analysis.

Does Jared Diamond or any other anthropologist think that they could actually use the principles outlined in his book to predict the way history actually unfolded when presented with the conditions of human civilization prior to 5000BC?

Another follow up: I'm sure there are a lot of valid critiques of his methodology... And I had some real problems with Collapse... But I still find his central insight to be incredibly powerful: that "civilization" (and specifically technology) advanced furthest in the Europe-to-China band because agriculture started there early and was able to spread laterally. From my perspective his biological viewpoint brought something valuable to the discussion.

Questions then: is this basic insight disputed? And is it original or was that commonly discussed before Diamond?

This might be a dumb question, but how doesn't this violate this subreddit's twenty year rule? Obviously it's cool if it's still here and answered by a flaired user, I'm just curious as to why.

Follow up question - How is Jared Diamond's latest book "The World Until Yesterday" perceived by academia compared to GGS and Collapse?

For all their legitimate faults, I did enjoy and learned from Diamond's earlier two books. Wondering if his newest book is worth the pick-up.

In this radio programme he engages with historian Thomas Carlyle Richard J. Evans on criticisms of the book. It's an interesting listen.

Follow up question. Maybe this gets into more about the politics of academic theories but...

So didn't read the book, saw the PBS series on it.

I took what I got out of GGS as "Hey here is this guy's interesting, plausible,.... theory ."

I just figured that proving how and why Eurasian civilizations did so well with any amount of certainty is pretty much impossible. You can have more plausible theories and theories with more evidence but ultimately you're not going to be 100% certain. Being an unknowable thing, complex question, maybe even the wrong question, of course there are some holes you could punch. Even if you got it right (let's say you just accidentally did get it right) being impossible to prove you could still seem to have holes you could punch in the right answer if there is one.

So as a layman I'm a bit surprised at what I perceive as the high level of criticism and and response to what seems to be a topic where you'll only have fairly unstable (needed a word there) theories. But serious business it seems to be and folks seem very confidant / passionate that they can disprove or prove the thing that.... you likely can't know.... what is the deal with that?

I do not understand critics of GG&S.
I remember on MapPorn subreddit they were astonish that Conservative people in USA leave in the most fertile part of USA.
Because they are mostly ex or current farmers....
So why his theory that Europe simply was lucky to have good geographical place is so strange?