[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)