[HN Gopher] Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to ... ___________________________________________________________________ Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories Author : jseliger Score : 69 points Date : 2023-09-03 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.ian-leslie.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.ian-leslie.com) | [deleted] | DanielBMarkham wrote: | I love history but I'm just a layman. | | I get quite angry when people get reductionist about history, | usually because of story or narrative (pre-templated story | patterns re-applied over and over again) | | The beauty of history is that the same event can have multiple, | conflicting, powerful narratives associated with it. Looking at | these narratives challenges our understanding of our own | humanity. If we're smart, we end up realizing as Solzhenitsyn | did, that "...If only there were evil people somewhere | insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to | separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line | dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human | being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own | heart?..." | | And then we _really_ begin our study of history, humanity, | wisdom, and the rest of it. | | It's far too powerful to buy into a story and get blinders on. I | think it's probably a great thing when beginning your journey, | but you should never stay there. And if you're a historian stuck | in a version of a story I'd argue you don't know your own | profession. | bdw5204 wrote: | There's nothing wrong with stories, either in history or | elsewhere. But good vs evil stories are bad history and almost | always bad writing too. Reality is almost always either | different shades of gray or blue and orange morality. | | If you can't get beyond your own personal view of morality to | be capable of understanding a different perspective, you're | probably incapable of doing good history or creating good | fiction because you're inevitably going to end up writing | unbelievable comic book evil kind of characters for your | villains. | drewcoo wrote: | > There's nothing wrong with stories | | I disagree. When there's pressure to piece together a story, | it can easily become a search for facts to fit a narrative, | motivated reasoning. Data that doesn't fit that narrative | must just be outliers. New details not substantiated by facts | enter the picture because they improve the story. Stories | tend to lose some truth. That's dangerous. | DanielBMarkham wrote: | I generally agree. | | As I learn more, I realize how much we teach kids younger in | their lives is oversimplified, bowlderized BS, no matter the | topic. | | I think that's unavoidable. You have to learn some comic book | version of, say, physics before you're ready to talk about | the Kuhn and paradigm changes and so forth. But there's also | a real danger here: whatever your dumbed-down version of a | topic is, it had better be a positive one, one that engages | and challenges students to learn more. | | Negative stories and narratives have the self-destruction of | passionate learning built into them. It's poor-quality | pedagogy. If I teach a class of fourth graders that clowns | are evil, have always been evil, circuses are the work of the | devil, and so forth? I can guarantee you that nobody in that | classroom will ever become an expert on the fascinating | history of circuses, animal shows, clowns, and so forth. It's | extremely tough to get students wound up enough to spend a | huge amount of time diving in somewhere, but it might take | ten seconds to turn them off to an entire area of future | study. | | And frankly, those simplistic good-vs-evil stories are not | only bad history, they're boring. They make consumers dumb. | They make for idiotic public discussion. (Like I said, I tend | to rant. I feel that we are cheating an entire generation out | of the deep and beautiful vista of the humanities in our | endless search to sell stuff to one another) | Waterluvian wrote: | It's a tool of abstraction, I think? If you study almost any | major historical event in detail, I think you inevitably | discover deep layers of nuance and complexity. But we can't | really manage such depth and breadth at the same time as hoping | to eke out meaningful lessons to be propagated into the future. | So a moral is distilled and committed to story and song. | | History is written by the victor... or the bard. | drewcoo wrote: | I strongly considered pursuing a PhD in history a couple of | decades ago. I figured there was so much disprovable BS published | following dominant narratives that it would be easy to make a | mark as a debunker. | | Then I realized that if the problem was so widespread, I'd be up | against the whole educational ecosystem. | Apocryphon wrote: | Plenty of opportunity to [for a | book](https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told- | Everything/dp/07...) or [two](https://www.amazon.com/Lies- | Across-America-Historic-Sites/dp...) | whatshisface wrote: | I guess it's impressively bad that a blatant conspiracy theory | made it past peer review and into Wikipedia, but this article is | a summary of a review of a rebuttal to a bad paper. | supazek wrote: | >made it past peer review | | I don't think that's an especially difficult thing to do. It | seems any paper dealing with social sciences or history that | fits the current narrative is lauded and "reviewed" favorably. | I think the mechanism which facilitates this is relatively | simple and similar to how USSR officials would rather bring | good news than bad facts | cauch wrote: | But how could the reviewers have found the errors in this | article? | | The article can tell "Cort was informed about the new | techniques from a family member back from Jamaica". How do | you verify that? The only way is to redo the all work from | scratch, refound all the historical references and cross- | validate each of them. It's a huge work. | | This article was later debunked by experts who have taken | time and effort to do that. But peer-reviewing does not allow | reviewers to pause they own work to do such extensive checks. | | More realistically, the article passes the peer-reviewing | process because the peer-reviewing process does what it is | supposed to do: the article is "believable", it does not have | things that looks not coming from the scientific process. The | reviewers don't have time and it is in fact not even their | jobs to redo the study. All they do is to check if the | guidelines seem to be respected. If you want more than that, | you want a "replication study", which is the next step in the | scientific process of building trust on a study (and which | also have difficulties). | | And, sure, they may have flagged that some conclusions may | need more convincing demonstration, but it is a Gaussian | curve: sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, some passes | through the gaps. | | I think there is a problem with layman people who don't | understand that the peer review process is not a magical tool | that remove all the incorrect studies (on top of that, due to | statistical fluctuation, some studies are false while the | authors have done 100% everything perfectly). | | I'm not saying it's the case here, but this is one | explanation that should not be ignored. | | Ironically, it is a bit funny that for your conclusion you | jumped immediately on the story you wish to be true: social | sciences or history are ideologically biased. This is a valid | hypothesis, but not the only one explaining what we observe. | Apocryphon wrote: | > The article can tell "Cort was informed about the new | techniques from a family member back from Jamaica". How do | you verify that? The only way is to redo the all work from | scratch, refound all the historical references and cross- | validate each of them. It's a huge work. | | Since this is about checking textual references, as opposed | to laboratory work, would it be possible for an LLM to do | that? Seems like the hardest thing would be for the A.I. to | log into the requisite gateways for the databases hosting | the papers. | cauch wrote: | I doubt it is so naively simple as "querying a database". | For example, before the publication of this article, the | majority of the "databases" were simply saying "the | inventor is Cort", which is one example of thing that the | A.I. will get trivially "wrong" when reviewing the paper. | | And if it is true, then this A.I. review method can also | be applied to mathematics, theoretical physics, computer | science, ... | | And even if it is doable, you will still have things that | will pass the review process when ideally it should not. | It is just an hard limitation, same as the one in | "justice" (impossible to not sometimes judge a guilty | person "innocent" or an innocent person "guilty", anyone | who thinks otherwise just don't understand how | complicated it is) | OfSanguineFire wrote: | I provide language revision for academics who are non-native | speakers of English, so I read a hell of a lot of papers, | theses, and grant applications, while also continuing to | publish and peer-review in my own field. My impression is | that peer review in the social sciences and history isn't | necessarily the major force for conformance to whatever | contemporary social narratives. Papers often deal with | minutiae, and both author and peer reviewers alike are nerds | who like delving into those minutiae. They don't necessarily | want to be drawn into any wider topic like in the case of the | paper discussed in this article. | | Rather, the force for ideological conformity may instead be | funding bodies. I have seen so many grant applications where | the author(s) clearly want to explore minutiae, but are | forced to appeal to some grand social-justice cause in order | to secure funding. I've participated through series of | revisions of grant applications where 2-3 paragraphs claiming | the research would benefit some minority or another, are | inserted at a late stage after someone mentions that the | application would stand no chance without them. | davidktr wrote: | Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. | dang wrote: | > _this article is a summary of a review of a rebuttal to a bad | paper_ | | I think it manages to be a bit interesting a bit beyond that. | | The title is baity so I replaced it with a somewhat | representative sentence from the article. | demondemidi wrote: | Predictably, HN commenters despise historians. I wasn't here when | HN was formed but is this hatred persistent from day one, or is | it a consequence of the recent shit-flooding of all channels to | turn everyone into nihilists that can be easily led by | ideological emotional-string pulling? | rectang wrote: | There's great synergy between critics of non-mainstream | "historians" and the voting apparatus of HN which ensures that | unpopular perspectives are rendered unreadable. | lsmeducation wrote: | I just hate everybody if you need an anecdote that HNers don't | hate historians in particular. | iepathos wrote: | Historians aren't hated here, rather sensationalism at the | expense of facts and logic are despised here. Finding people | leaning towards sensationalism across media types and | disciplines unfortunately. Techies here are especially | sensitive to click-bait and articles devoid of evidence to back | up their claims. | tpmx wrote: | It feels like almost every history-related research news item | I've come across on HN lately on closer inspection appears to | involve lots of guessing and wishful thinking, often in 3+ | convoluted steps. | | I suppose only the most sensational things make it here and they | probably tend to be more bogus than the non-sensational findings. | dotancohen wrote: | > The discipline, or a sub-set of it, has become helplessly in | thrall > to one of the archetypal narrative forms: Good vs | Evil. Naturally, > the academics are on the side of the | Good. | | I find that this sums up more academic works that I feel | comfortable admitting. And not just in the arts, but also in some | of the less rigorous sciences as well, such as history and | psychology. | zogrodea wrote: | That excerpt you quoted reminds very much of Herbert | Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History. | | The introduction starts by directly talking about that topic, | on page 3 of the following PDF if anyone cares to read a | little. | | http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Butterfield,... | rectang wrote: | I think that "helplessly in thrall to one of the archetypal | narrative forms: Good vs Evil" sums up everyone commenting on | this page who claims that _their_ version of history is | objective, while that of [insert opponent here] is not. | simbolit wrote: | I think the authors confuses stories and /grand stories/ | (sometimes called "meta-narratives"). | | I don't see how it is possible to do history without stories. | That literally is what history is, telling stories about the | past. Yes, the stories should have a factual basis, and some | don't, but that's not a problem with stories as such. | | The problem lies with the desire for all stories to fit a /grand | story/. Such a grand story is comforting, perhaps even | pleasurable, when it gives a feeling of omniscience, of | everything falling in place. But it is seldom helpful as a tool | for prediction and problem-solving. | | But what is helpful is small stories. The world is messy and | contradictory, everywhere and all the time. Without simplified | stories we can't make proper sense of it (it is far too complex | for individual humans to 'understand'). | stephendause wrote: | Agreed. Surely the authors don't mean that stories qua stories | make you stupid. The love of your own stories combined with | confirmation bias, perhaps. | jowea wrote: | And I naively thought meta-narratives in history were supposed | to be over decades ago. | coldtea wrote: | > _But it is seldom helpful as a tool for prediction and | problem-solving._ | | I'm not that sure. Perhaps that is the prejudice of an age with | lesser historical ambitions. | simbolit wrote: | Can you please elaborate? what grand stories (or meta- | narratives) historically shown to be good tools for | prediction and problem-solving do you have in mind? | zeroCalories wrote: | I have mixed feelings on this. While trivially it's true that | we need to compress the world with stories, I do think there is | a problem with people constructing grand narratives. We should | be moving away from "story" and towards "hypothesis" so that we | don't commit too strongly to a story that isn't supported by | evidence. | rectang wrote: | I would find this piece more convincing if it had sampled stories | from different sources in service of its thesis rather than | focusing on a single work the author finds particularly galling, | as there is no shortage of fictional narratives anywhere -- look | no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks. | | Given the narrowness of the material cited, this piece seems to | me like unequal application of skepticism and status-quo | gatekeeping. | next_xibalba wrote: | > look no further than US state-approved high-school history | textbooks. | | Care to practice what you preach? Which textbooks, | specifically? How are they ahistorical? | rectang wrote: | Here's an article which compares meta-narratives in Texas vs. | California: | | https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas- | vs-c... | | Fights over textbook content are ancient and written about | constantly. Since these battles are more heavily scrutinized | outright falsehoods won't be found easily -- rather meta- | narratives are achieved by omission or emphasis. | | I would not argue that these meta-narratives are | "ahistorical", though -- rather, I would say that they | reflect the interests of certain parties. Perspective is | inseparable from "history". | bsder wrote: | There is, sadly, a _vast_ difference in accuracy between a | "state-approved high school textbook" and a "peer-reviewed | scholarly publication". | | A state-approved high-school textbook is subject to myriad | business and political agendas that practically, by definition, | compromise its truth and accuracy. | | A peer-reviewed scholarly publication is supposed to have a | chain back to actual sources and facts that anchors it _in | spite of_ any agenda or narrative it may propound. | | The issue here is that Bulstrode presented a bunch of claims | with no evidence or even _contradicting_ evidence in the actual | sources she cites. There are also some engineering issues: | sugar mill rollers are oriented differently from steel mill | rollers because they serve very different purposes. | | The comment from here was good: | https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-cort-case | | > Historians, myself included, often make leaps of intuition | from limited evidence. But speculation ought to be explicitly | signalled as such, rather than presented as certainty. | Especially when that certainty creates a narrative so | compelling that it makes major newspaper headlines. Bulstrode's | narrative requires multiple smoking guns to work, none of which | are in the evidence she presents. | troupe wrote: | Increasingly? Herodotus comes to mind. | verisimi wrote: | History is written by the victors, and then endlessly rewritten | after that. At present, historians are very busy writing the | history of subaltern voices - ie introducing stories from | marginalised perspectives into the historical record. At the | other end of this sausage factory are the consumers who are fed | this information which is presented as fact - hardly ever are we | presented with the raw evidence that these stories are based on. | | I'm very glad that this angle on history is receiving greater | attention; it is absolutely equivalent to the replication crisis | in science. It seems that all academic endeavours are politicised | and bent towards some ends that are predetermined - rather than a | natural unfolding of ever increasing understanding. | rectang wrote: | This piece does the _opposite_ of acknowledging that history is | written by the victors. It it is an attack on the credibility | of a particular perspective, striving to paint the author 's | opponents as fictional story tellers while the author is | objective and rational. | verisimi wrote: | History ought to be an evidence driven practise - the | evidence (primary, secondary, tertiary) should drive the | theory. It ought to be the scientific method applied to | historical evidence. | | As I read this post, the author is saying that Bulstrode had | very little or no evidence to claim the story that was then | widely circulated in many media outlets. The author is using | that one example to illustrate a wider principle in play - | that not many of the historical stories are based in sound | reasoning. This is my assessment too. | | If there is little or no evidence, where is the greater bias? | Is it in the person that conjures up the story (Bulstrode) or | in the author who is saying the story is not well supported? | nextaccountic wrote: | > History is written by the victors | | Not necessarily; history is written by those that are literate. | Here's some threads about it | | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xcqgc/they_a... | | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1903ac/is_hi... | | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/516t6c/is_hi... | | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2becnq/i_hea... | | https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/5grjf1/how_true_is... | | A selected quote | | > well, in case of the Vikings it was mostly the other way | round. The monks who got plundered were the "literate class" of | their time, hence in this case it was written by the "losers". | verisimi wrote: | But do you realise that the research you present here is not | actually evidence? It is a link to a historian's opinion. It | would be like reading a quote from the guardian about how | Bulstrode is presenting remarkable research. | | Meta analysis such as this, based on hearsay rather than | personal verification and assessment of the actual evidence, | is assuredly not the way to get to the truth of the matter. | HPsquared wrote: | "I never discuss anything else except politics and religion. | There is nothing else to discuss." -GK Chesterton | | Every thought is subject to the ideology in the thinker's mind. | verisimi wrote: | It is. But academic fields (perhaps all fields across | society) are all bent towards a progressive liberal outlook. | This outlook is also highly intolerant of divergent views - | if they disagree with your voice, they will not fight for | your right to speak anyway - you will be deplatformed. That | intolerance is the most pernicious element to me. | 23B1 wrote: | One thing this article doesn't address is the pressure that many | academics are under in the process of their research, and the | 'meta-narrative' of their careers writ large. | | When you are competing for eyeballs, attention, grants, and | tenure - when the community you work in is so small and so | tightly networked - there can be a ton of pressure to make leaps | of logic or narrative in order to paint a picture that resonates | within that community. | | I'm not excusing this behavior, but I understand it. It's the | same reason UX designers build dark patterns they know will | degrade the experience, it's the same reason we vote along party | lines, it's the same reason trends are adopted and movies become | mega-blockbusters. | | In most cases - even in academia - the stakes are low and so it | doesn't really matter. But the stakes are much greater when that | academic research influences policy - especially in the medical | and political fields. Supposedly peer review & professional codes | of conduct are supposed to solve for much of this - but, to me | anyway, doesn't seem sufficient these days for those higher- | stakes fields of study... | dang wrote: | Recent and related. Others? | | _Does history have a replication crisis?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306078 - Aug 2023 (20 | comments) | Mr_Modulo wrote: | Today we have news for conservatives and different news for | liberals. That's stupid. News doesn't need built in commentary. | Now it seems like history is going the same way. We will have | conservative history and liberal history. But I hope not. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | Fairly sure this is wrong, on both fronts. | | History is story telling about a period of time for which we do | not have easy access to all the information, nor full access to | the participants and their motivations and self-conceptions. In | addition, even with the benefit of hindsight, it is common to | be unable to identify conclusively which possible elements of | the story are the most significant (and as a corollary, which | are cotemporal but irrelevant). Consequently, there are | different ways to tell the story, and no "objective" set of | rules to decide which to choose. Like all human story telling, | history must come with a point of view that is critical in | framing the elements used in the telling. | | Now repeat everything I've just said, but substitute "news" for | "history". | lsmeducation wrote: | I'll do you you one better, replace everything with | "bullshit". | | History is susceptible to narratives because anything that | isn't clear cut (slavery, holocaust, etc) is open to | subjective interpretation. | | It's the conspiracy theorists that are the real wildcard in | all of this. They will take the clear cut (slavery, | holocaust) and make _that_ open to subjective interpretation. | | Funny stuff. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | I tend to think of subjective interpretation as "That was | good" or "This is bad". | | But there's something required beforehand: definining what | _this_ or _that_ is. It 's not really a subjective process, | but it certainly isn't objective either. | | Before you can decide whether or not William the | Conqueror's invasion of the British Isles was a good or a | bad thing, you first need a description of how the invasion | was carried out and "all" the consequences. But there is no | "objective" or "clear cut" version of this. What do you | include? What do you exclude? | lsmeducation wrote: | It feels like you just described war propaganda. Americans lie | one way, the Russians the other. The better question is why are | we in a war over current events (to your point over the news). | Left propaganda and Right propaganda, for some invisible war. | | The low hanging fruit to me appears to be the fact that | propaganda is profitable, ::shrugs:: | | Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-03 23:00 UTC)