I found these two chapters of Diamond’s novel to be incredibly interesting when read together. It took a long time for the first chapter to pick up and for me to grasp onto any concept that would be used to connect this reading to our class. However, as soon as it began to talk about Easter Islanders and their overuse of their resources, I immediately made the connection that the society would fail due to their own choices. I finally had my connection to critical thinking.

Diamond raised to mind reasons why societies fail, with the four main reasons being: failing to anticipate a problem before it occurs, failing to perceive a problem when it is occurring, failing to solve a problem after individuals have perceived it, and failing to resolve the problem itself. It was interesting to see him bring these up because I felt that they were kind of useless. He was very hypocritical when talking about instances involving hindsight bias, but he was also very quick to judge the inhabitants of Easter Island for their choices.

It is easy to see how the Easter Island society failed now that the situation is removed from us, but we generally won’t apply this same mindset when trying to dissect problems with our own lifestyles. It is far easier to point our finger at the example on paper rather than direct our criticisms at the ways we need to amend our own lives for the betterment of society. For example, we may look at their need to create massive ahu and moai as rather excessive and state that had they not wasted their effort and resources to create these structures than the society would not have fallen apart. However, at the same time people could point to our use of cars eating away at the atmosphere and say that without cars/other technology we would not have destroyed Planet Earth in the ways that we have.