We’re uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It’s classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

Diamond is pointing to a common hierarchy in modern academia and popular culture: “hard” sciences are treated as more rigorous than fields that study human societies. By noting that history is labeled a social science and then treated as “not quite scientific,” he highlights discomfort with applying scientific standards—hypothesis, evidence, causal inference, and comparative testing—to singular, complex past events. The remark fits Diamond’s broader project of arguing that large-scale historical patterns can be investigated systematically (often through cross-cultural comparison and natural experiments), even if they cannot be replicated in laboratories. It challenges the assumption that contingency and narrative automatically preclude scientific explanation.