[HN Gopher] Not All There
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Not All There
Author : diodorus
Score : 10 points
Date : 2022-04-12 01:08 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Arthur: What does it say?
|
| Ford: Harmless.
|
| Arthur: What? Is that all it's got to say? One word!
|
| Ford: Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and
| only so much space in the book, and no one knew much about the
| Earth of course. I managed to transmit a new entry off to the
| editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement.
|
| Arthur: What does it say now?
|
| Ford: Mostly harmless.
|
| I think this History Today essay by Alexander Lee is about
| "marginal discourse". Things start off recorded in excruciating
| detail, then refactored through history like Chinese whispers.
| Boiled down, eventually into a set of snappy aphorisms and sound-
| bites, at each stage something gets filtered. Some things get
| amplified, some get omitted, some get distorted. Marginal
| hermeneutics is analysis, much like the model in signal
| processing where if you know a source and final signal you can
| infer the parameters of the intervening filters [1]. Instead we
| ask, what kind of writers, societies and norms did this narrative
| pass through to end up this way? By doing so one might work out
| which voices were off-centre by observing which ideas get
| filtered.
|
| It is a more sophisticated version of "History is written by the
| victors", instead there's a long chain of victors, revisionists,
| reinterpretations and exaggerations.
|
| [1] this is how speech analysis and synthesis works
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(page generated 2022-04-12 23:01 UTC)