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Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was

by bambax 8y ago

Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.

tsenkov 8y ago
I honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed. Same thing in programming - starting up with something you can immediately use like JavaScript or Python is a nice thing because it will 'fool' you (in a good sense) that you are now a programmer. (I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"). You can only do a couple of iterations back, before it gets too complicated to go backwards. It's like discovering the usefulness of an integral (Calculus) and then going backwards in order to understand it if you have no prior math knowledge and experience... I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph.
- ellius 8y ago
  I think it might actually work. In teaching "history," you are always picking an essentially arbitrary starting point. I think you could easily start with something like nuclear negotations between the Soviet Union and the USA, then work backwards from there. Why was it these two powers that had nuclear weapons? Well, let's talk about World War 2... How did this Hitler guy come to power in Germany in the first place? Well, let me tell you about World War 1... Obviously there would need to be some linearity to each individual chapter, but moving backwards in time at the thematic level absolutely seems possible and even advantageous in certain respects. History is a very different subject from the sort of applied technical things you're describing. But in fact you might be making a good argument for doing it this way: you're describing the need for some kind of anchor in a knowledge graph. There probably isn't a better anchor than the current existing world as everyday people experience it. Why not start there?
  - skellera 8y ago
    I think it only sounds like a good idea because you already know the details of what comes before. If you had absolutely no knowledge of history, I think this method would not work well. There are so many details that led up to WW2 that going backwards would just feel messy. All the things happening in Europe would have to be described in a way where you already know about the next war but now have to list off these different events. I don't think that going backwards is going to make things interesting for anyone who isn't going to be interested in it forwards. The technique of teaching (a good teacher) will do more for this than teaching things backwards.
    - ellius 8y ago
      I see what you mean but that's sort of what I meant by doing it linearly at a topic level. Absolutely, you don't want to start with the end of World War 2 and then move backwards to its causes. But I think it's entirely feasible to learn about the Cold War, then study WW2, then study WW1, etc... I don't know, I don't have especially strong feelings about it, but it definitely seems at least viable.
    - setr 8y ago
      I would imagine ww2 best described in both orders: you start with the main participants, their alliances, and their general strategies/incentives, then you iterate over each country prior to the war, and why they started to get involved in it, and finally you discuss the war itself, and its major events
  - benbreen 8y ago
    I think people in this thread might be overstating the degree to which history isn't already taught this way. I just got done teaching a world history class (from the Paleolithic to 1500) at a university. Granted, we don't tend to teach classes like this in a completely reversed chronological order, like Pulp Fiction or something. But I began the course with the famous "hockey stick" graph of human population and had them think throughout the class about how we got to where we are. Was farming inevitable? Were world empires? Was the Industrial Revolution? If yes, why? And if not, how might it have gone differently? The class was oriented entirely around the starting point of our present (both as a group of people living in a university town in California and as a global society). We worked backward from that present to key in on some of the main changes of the past several thousand years, notably the origin of written language, agriculture, urbanized societies, global trade, and science. Teaching world history without that present-day hook would be virtually impossible because there is just too much to cover and you need some kind of limiting factor. As you note, the best anchor is the current existing world, so that's what world history teachers tend to use.
- olavk 8y ago
  I had a history book in school which basically attempted to tell history backward. It didn't work very well in my opinion. The problem is, telling history backwards makes for en extremely "whiggish" view of history where everything is understood in the frame of how it lead to the current state of the world. It makes it very hard to escape hindsight bias.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- jacobolus 8y ago
  > I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph. This is the best way to learn new things (besides spending time face to face with an expert tutor). You have a motivating problem, an idea of where you are going, and a whole graph to traverse backward until you fit the pieces together. You will remember the parts you come across because they are connected together (both forward and backward), and you will be working closer to the edge of your capabilities. It is much easier to achieve flow doing this kind of learning. If you have too many unconnected edges in the graph, then sometimes you have to give up and pick a closer/easier subject to study, but the time spent was still not wasted, as it provides useful orientation for future attempts. Not sure how well it works if a lecturer or textbook is guiding you though. The whole point is picking your own problems and questions, and then figuring out how to solve/answer them. > I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend" Not sure about “never”, but doing many of these little projects is often a more valuable use of time than banging against a project whose scope is so big you have no idea where to start.
  - methodover 8y ago
    This is a great comment. As an adult, the way I’ve come to learn is exactly the same as you. It’s way more efficient, too: if you begin with the end and work backwards, you can ignore the things that aren’t very useful. Like if you’re learning how to make a graphics engine and you don’t know linear algebra, you can learn only those parts of linear algebra that are relevant to the work of creating an engine and leave all the other useless stuff behind. (And in linear algebra there seems to be a ton of pretty useless stuff.) This is probably a bad idea for a mathematician or scientist, but for a programmer who’s in the trenches just trying to build stuff, it’s great.
- blazespin 8y ago
  Simple. You pick a current event. A, and say how it was influenced by this historical event B, and how it was motivated by an even more historical event C. The only real advantage over starting with C, is that you have the motivating current event A to capture the attention of your students.
olavk 8y ago
I think it is a valuable approach to art history, but I am doubtful it will work for history in general. Going backwards, looking for the causes of what happens later, is very prone to hindsight bias.
- vidarh 8y ago
  In a history lesson, the teacher will not be looking to students to uncover new explanations, so I'm unsure why that would matter - the narrative is already set. Which direction you're describing it in boils down to how to best convey the knowledge to students.
  - olavk 8y ago
    I guess this depends on how it is taught. If it is just memorization of historical events then it probably wouldn't matter. But if the students are expected to try to understand the mindset of the people acting throughout history, then it is quite important to avoid "presentism" and "hindsight bias".
dgellow 8y ago
History is about what happened, not what could have happened. You can then speculate on how things could have been given some specific changes, but the fact is that we don’t know how the alternate universe would develop and evolve, and you are now closer to fiction than history. In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could have.
- Retric 8y ago
  Unfortunately when we have no idea why things happened there is zero predictive power. So, history without context is little more than a story and at best interesting. Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds. So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. The most critical part is filtering and thus ignoring 99.99999% of what happened. Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
  - dgellow 8y ago
    > Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds. I don’t believe that to be correct, actual history studies seem to be a lot of back-and-forth on topics surrounding, let’s say, a particular event that we know happened or believe to happened. Then in this back-and-forth you will have the spotlight on some specific characters who seem to be related to the event (and then, as you said, a huge part of the actual details are filtered out, I don’t see how that could be otherwise). So of course you have to go in the past to focus on an event. > So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. Aren’t topics studied because they are believed to be true, or because researchers think that there is some interesting knowledge to find? What are those reasons that we hide? > Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now. Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that.
coldtea 8y ago
>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. That, besides being totally unintuitive to our sense of time, puts even bigger emphasis on making the future seem inevitable (the past harvested as the "seed for post events").
- bambax 8y ago
  Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently. Think about your family tree: does it make more sense to try and search for your ancestors, or to find some guy in the 13th century and compile a list of all of his descendants? You can do both, of course, and for some very important historical figures it's important to list their descendants; but for you personally, what approach feels more logical?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently. You can far more easily make the same argument in the normal forward taught history (in fact that's what you do above, when you say: "some seeds grow, some's don't". Teaching history backwards it's harder to point that, because you start from what's already established (grown).
drb91 8y ago
Just chuck causality out the window and it’s fine.
droidist2 8y ago
I agree! Starting from the beginning in history is boring because it has little relevance to other things you know. Going backwards would solve that. You'd be engaged at the beginning and then for the next part you'd remember what you learned, etc. Also by teaching from the beginning you tend to learn the same things over and over. I probably learned about Paul Revere in 3-4 different US history classes growing up, but the Cuban Missile Crisis only once.
partycoder 8y ago
Learning history is fun, for example: The British East India Company was the largest drug cartel of the 19th century. They forced the Chinese to buy opium, and decades later that opium made it to the Americas. Each time you turn on the TV and hear about of some random dude overdosing with illegal opioids, you can blame the British for that. Lawrence of Arabia, the Sykes-Picot agreement, among other British interventions, helped create a state of permanent war in the Middle east. Each time you hear of war or violence in the Middle East, or some kid being blown up by a drone or burned alive with white phosphorus, you can blame the British for that. However, they're not seen as the villains of history, we speak their language and some idiots wear t-shirts with their flag. Go figure.
- ljw1001 8y ago
  I think a better grasp of history would lead you to believe that there's nothing especially British about these activities. This is the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, and is a close to a universal law throughout history as you're likely to find.
  - partycoder 8y ago
    So, in your revisionist mindset, the opium wars were just like any other war? The motivation of the opium wars was to fix the British Empire trade deficit by selling opium to China, turning them into drug addicts in the process. When the Chinese started seizing their opium they declared war. It's fucked up to just imagine what kind of morally bankrupt psycho could have thought of that as a solution to an economic problem, and what kind of society it takes to get everyone aligned to execute it.
    - ljw1001 8y ago
      in my revisionist mindset it's a lot like King Leopald in the Congo, the near extermination of native Americans (to get their land), the slave trade, the proxy wars in Asia and Africa to fight (or expand) communism and other horrors.
limsup 8y ago
Not for science history. It's very hard to grasp what the hell the LHC is about. First tell me why how they figured out water wasn't an element but a combination of two.
- tim333 8y ago
  It can kind of work for that. Looking at Wikipedia the LHC article links to "Composite particles" to "History of atomic theory" to "Leucippus (/luːˈsɪpəs/; Greek: Λεύκιππος, Leúkippos; fl. 5th cent. BCE) is reported in some ancient sources to have been a philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms." The LHC is about looking for more "indivisible elements" by smashing stuff harder. And so on.
jaredklewis 8y ago
This would not only be a great way to teach history, but also literature and probably other things like philosophy as well. In literature, it is not uncommon to start with the past reading things like the Odyssey, moving forwards to Beowulf, then Canterbury Tales, then Shakespeare, then John Milton, then Dickens, and on and on. The result is you start with the least accessible work and move forward to the most accessible. On the hand hand, by starting with a modern work like Catch 22 or whatever, you start with an accessible work that is more likely to be an enjoyable to the reader in its own right, not just as an important work. As you move backwards the reader is also gradually increasing their reading prowess, becoming more attuned to the finer points of literature, and thus more able to enjoy the older, less naturally accessible works. Having middle and high school students wade through Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne always seemed like such dumb idea to me. For every one student that is interested by such texts, another 10 are turned off literature completely by the dense diction and distant context. Better to start with J.K. Rowling than Herman Melville if it lets more students discover the joy of reading.
- nautilus12 8y ago
  I disagree in the sense that this will end up putting an overemphasis on contemporary work, and not enough on classic works. Think about how often cirriculum never gets to the end of, when such seminal and formative works such as Plato and Aristotle are fit into the last weeks you will inevietably gloss over them. We already make Gods out of our contemporary world view at the expense of downplaying the brilliance of past thinkers. I dont think we need to fan this flame. We will end up with an aesthetic that is so devoid of the basics that it barely comprehends itself, and if ever hits a dry spell will never be able to recreate its former greatness
  - karthikb 8y ago
    Specifically with history, contemporary topics being skipped over is not only common but an incredible disservice to humanity. Many schools spend months on Columbus but only 1-2 weeks on the entire post Cold War era. Which one is more important for future voters to understand?
c3534l 8y ago
There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?" Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn't?" down to "Why did agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than corn spread to the Americas?" It's a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it's resolved. By asking a series of "why" you broadly expand a person's view and they understand why you're talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the "why are we talking about this" up front, and teacher's answers were always just "it's in the syllabus." I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  > It's a wonderful rhetorical device. It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of "trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures".
  - c3534l 8y ago
    I don't think we know if history was inevitable. How much do we attribute to specific events because they're the ones that happened, rather than simply the result of deeper, sociological, economic, and cultural causes? The best we can do is explain what we can explain, and I don't know if trying to teach people that history is essentially random is even a goal that you should strive for to begin with.
    - ramshorns 8y ago
      Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."
UncleMeat 8y ago
But this is not how historians think about history. This risks presentism. History should be understood in its own context, not by the events that came afterwards. Presenting history backwards makes it feel like prior events happened in the context of future events when historical actors had no understanding of those future events. Instead history is best understood in the context available to the people at the time.
- drb91 8y ago
  The academic work of history and teaching history to non-historians have different constraints; the latter requires certain reduction to causality. Or at least that seems like the current state of affairs. I’m not necessarily a fan, but it’s better than no education at all.
  - UncleMeat 8y ago
    Disagree totally. It is more important here. The reason we teach the humanities to non-experts is to teach empathy and the ability to fully separate from your own context. Teaching history backwards sabotages this effort.
    - drb91 8y ago
      Where and when and with whom would you propose teaching people? This is a solvable problem, but you have to justify being ABLE to just do it right the first time.
woodandsteel 8y ago
>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. No, that's completely wrong. For one thing, any good history book will include numerous accidents that could well have happened differently, and sent history off on an entirely different direction. I am surprised you were unaware that is how good history books are written. As to an infinite number of possible futures, there are a far larger number one might imagine that are in fact impossible, like humans decided a thousand years ago to walk to Mars, and doing it. They are impossible because of basic realities, and history is a key way you discover and teach them. And that is important because many of these basic realities are of the greatest importance for intelligent decision making today.
s-shellfish 8y ago
> However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance. I'm convinced the 'human' mind loves causality because the human mind loves to believe it is the cause of 'things happening'. This especially holds in chaotic situations where the mind feels it has zero control over anything, down the very nature of itself. This however, is not always the ideal philosophy to hold (at least to me). I don't know about current culture, but much of eastern philosophy does not share the same sentiment about causality. It's often both, a sort of 'yes-no', the individual self being neither the controller nor the controlled. Forwards, backwards, I don't think it matters. People fill in the gaps regardless. People see what they want to see, until that gets boring. Then they do something different, wait and see if that changes things. Does it? Maybe.
woodandsteel 8y ago
One reason to teach history backwards is that people are already interested in what is happening today, and so it is easy to get them interested in what lead up to it. And one reason this is so is that learning what caused present problems helps you in figuring out what to do about them.
taeric 8y ago
Predicting the past based on the present is rather difficult. To the point that I suspect we would just be wrong in other ways.
ekianjo 8y ago
I think the backward thinking has problems too. If you ask the wrong questions you will inevitably get to an improper understanding as well. Things make a lot more sense when taken in their proper chronological context, since thats how humans perceive time in the first place.
bane 8y ago
I agree. History backwards is a "this is why this is so" lesson. While history forwards is..."here's some stuff, it'll all make sense in a few years if you keep studying". Understanding how we've arrived here, and all the connections going backwards can be profoundly enlightening, allowing you to try to project events forwards, because cause and effect are laid out for you. Memorizing books full of facts just turns you into an encyclopedia and don't really let you try to understand how to break the present down to get at what the driving forces are behind the now.
madhadron 8y ago
No. We already know this is a bad idea. It's seen most clearly in the history of science, where people want to trace back just the theories that worked as opposed to looking at all the options being worked on at a given time. See the Strong program. In more general history, it leads you to founding myths and connecting largely unconnected things like modern France to Charlemagne's Frankish empire.
SubiculumCode 8y ago
I see you don't subscribe to determinism. Are there alternative futures?
rumcajz 8y ago
Seconded. I've learnt history forwards at the school and all I've got was a mess on weakly connected facts. Since then I was learning about the history the other way round: I kind of know what happened during my lifetime, I have an vague idea of what followed from what. What people thought, what people did etc. I can get further back by asking my parents or reading press from. say, sixties. Books written by folks at the time help as well. I can get as far back as WWII by remembering what my grandparents said. Going even further back is hard as there's not a lot of survivors anymore, but you still have contemporary press and books. Even further back... I've moved to Switzerland few years ago and I've started to understand how European culture worked before WWI. Switzerland, not taking part in the wars of XX. century preserved that past to some extent. Going even further back is hard. The documents are starting to get scarce. Also, the world is getting more alien in XIX. century. There was an article discussed on HN about a message from 1880. The world there is strange on not one you can easily relate to: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44265475 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44265475 But with enough trying, I think I can cover at least second half of XIX. century in next few decades, meaning that I will be able to think about it as if I was living at the time.
pvaldes 8y ago
Traversing a tree backwards is easy only if you focuse in following only one of the branches. Otherwise you would be arriving to the same places and in need to repeat/refresh/redone the basal parts all the time.
canes123456 8y ago
History told backwards makes events seem more inevitable and not less. You are looking for the cause of what will happen instead of wondering. Knowing the end colors how you read all the events leading up to this. I believe this is the problem with traditional history. It is told forward but the people writing it are looking for the seeds of the cause and overfitting the narrative.

by bambax 8y ago

tsenkov 8y ago

I honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed. Same thing in programming - starting up with something you can immediately use like JavaScript or Python is a nice thing because it will 'fool' you (in a good sense) that you are now a programmer. (I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"). You can only do a couple of iterations back, before it gets too complicated to go backwards. It's like discovering the usefulness of an integral (Calculus) and then going backwards in order to understand it if you have no prior math knowledge and experience... I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph.

ellius 8y ago
I think it might actually work. In teaching "history," you are always picking an essentially arbitrary starting point. I think you could easily start with something like nuclear negotations between the Soviet Union and the USA, then work backwards from there. Why was it these two powers that had nuclear weapons? Well, let's talk about World War 2... How did this Hitler guy come to power in Germany in the first place? Well, let me tell you about World War 1... Obviously there would need to be some linearity to each individual chapter, but moving backwards in time at the thematic level absolutely seems possible and even advantageous in certain respects. History is a very different subject from the sort of applied technical things you're describing. But in fact you might be making a good argument for doing it this way: you're describing the need for some kind of anchor in a knowledge graph. There probably isn't a better anchor than the current existing world as everyday people experience it. Why not start there?
- skellera 8y ago
  I think it only sounds like a good idea because you already know the details of what comes before. If you had absolutely no knowledge of history, I think this method would not work well. There are so many details that led up to WW2 that going backwards would just feel messy. All the things happening in Europe would have to be described in a way where you already know about the next war but now have to list off these different events. I don't think that going backwards is going to make things interesting for anyone who isn't going to be interested in it forwards. The technique of teaching (a good teacher) will do more for this than teaching things backwards.
  - ellius 8y ago
    I see what you mean but that's sort of what I meant by doing it linearly at a topic level. Absolutely, you don't want to start with the end of World War 2 and then move backwards to its causes. But I think it's entirely feasible to learn about the Cold War, then study WW2, then study WW1, etc... I don't know, I don't have especially strong feelings about it, but it definitely seems at least viable.
  - setr 8y ago
    I would imagine ww2 best described in both orders: you start with the main participants, their alliances, and their general strategies/incentives, then you iterate over each country prior to the war, and why they started to get involved in it, and finally you discuss the war itself, and its major events
- benbreen 8y ago
  I think people in this thread might be overstating the degree to which history isn't already taught this way. I just got done teaching a world history class (from the Paleolithic to 1500) at a university. Granted, we don't tend to teach classes like this in a completely reversed chronological order, like Pulp Fiction or something. But I began the course with the famous "hockey stick" graph of human population and had them think throughout the class about how we got to where we are. Was farming inevitable? Were world empires? Was the Industrial Revolution? If yes, why? And if not, how might it have gone differently? The class was oriented entirely around the starting point of our present (both as a group of people living in a university town in California and as a global society). We worked backward from that present to key in on some of the main changes of the past several thousand years, notably the origin of written language, agriculture, urbanized societies, global trade, and science. Teaching world history without that present-day hook would be virtually impossible because there is just too much to cover and you need some kind of limiting factor. As you note, the best anchor is the current existing world, so that's what world history teachers tend to use.
olavk 8y ago
I had a history book in school which basically attempted to tell history backward. It didn't work very well in my opinion. The problem is, telling history backwards makes for en extremely "whiggish" view of history where everything is understood in the frame of how it lead to the current state of the world. It makes it very hard to escape hindsight bias.
- deleted 8y ago
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jacobolus 8y ago
> I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph. This is the best way to learn new things (besides spending time face to face with an expert tutor). You have a motivating problem, an idea of where you are going, and a whole graph to traverse backward until you fit the pieces together. You will remember the parts you come across because they are connected together (both forward and backward), and you will be working closer to the edge of your capabilities. It is much easier to achieve flow doing this kind of learning. If you have too many unconnected edges in the graph, then sometimes you have to give up and pick a closer/easier subject to study, but the time spent was still not wasted, as it provides useful orientation for future attempts. Not sure how well it works if a lecturer or textbook is guiding you though. The whole point is picking your own problems and questions, and then figuring out how to solve/answer them. > I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend" Not sure about “never”, but doing many of these little projects is often a more valuable use of time than banging against a project whose scope is so big you have no idea where to start.
- methodover 8y ago
  This is a great comment. As an adult, the way I’ve come to learn is exactly the same as you. It’s way more efficient, too: if you begin with the end and work backwards, you can ignore the things that aren’t very useful. Like if you’re learning how to make a graphics engine and you don’t know linear algebra, you can learn only those parts of linear algebra that are relevant to the work of creating an engine and leave all the other useless stuff behind. (And in linear algebra there seems to be a ton of pretty useless stuff.) This is probably a bad idea for a mathematician or scientist, but for a programmer who’s in the trenches just trying to build stuff, it’s great.
blazespin 8y ago
Simple. You pick a current event. A, and say how it was influenced by this historical event B, and how it was motivated by an even more historical event C. The only real advantage over starting with C, is that you have the motivating current event A to capture the attention of your students.

olavk 8y ago

I think it is a valuable approach to art history, but I am doubtful it will work for history in general. Going backwards, looking for the causes of what happens later, is very prone to hindsight bias.

vidarh 8y ago
In a history lesson, the teacher will not be looking to students to uncover new explanations, so I'm unsure why that would matter - the narrative is already set. Which direction you're describing it in boils down to how to best convey the knowledge to students.
- olavk 8y ago
  I guess this depends on how it is taught. If it is just memorization of historical events then it probably wouldn't matter. But if the students are expected to try to understand the mindset of the people acting throughout history, then it is quite important to avoid "presentism" and "hindsight bias".

dgellow 8y ago

History is about what happened, not what could have happened. You can then speculate on how things could have been given some specific changes, but the fact is that we don’t know how the alternate universe would develop and evolve, and you are now closer to fiction than history. In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could have.

Retric 8y ago
Unfortunately when we have no idea why things happened there is zero predictive power. So, history without context is little more than a story and at best interesting. Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds. So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. The most critical part is filtering and thus ignoring 99.99999% of what happened. Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
- dgellow 8y ago
  > Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds. I don’t believe that to be correct, actual history studies seem to be a lot of back-and-forth on topics surrounding, let’s say, a particular event that we know happened or believe to happened. Then in this back-and-forth you will have the spotlight on some specific characters who seem to be related to the event (and then, as you said, a huge part of the actual details are filtered out, I don’t see how that could be otherwise). So of course you have to go in the past to focus on an event. > So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. Aren’t topics studied because they are believed to be true, or because researchers think that there is some interesting knowledge to find? What are those reasons that we hide? > Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now. Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that.

coldtea 8y ago

>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. That, besides being totally unintuitive to our sense of time, puts even bigger emphasis on making the future seem inevitable (the past harvested as the "seed for post events").

bambax 8y ago
Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently. Think about your family tree: does it make more sense to try and search for your ancestors, or to find some guy in the 13th century and compile a list of all of his descendants? You can do both, of course, and for some very important historical figures it's important to list their descendants; but for you personally, what approach feels more logical?
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently. You can far more easily make the same argument in the normal forward taught history (in fact that's what you do above, when you say: "some seeds grow, some's don't". Teaching history backwards it's harder to point that, because you start from what's already established (grown).

drb91 8y ago

Just chuck causality out the window and it’s fine.

droidist2 8y ago

I agree! Starting from the beginning in history is boring because it has little relevance to other things you know. Going backwards would solve that. You'd be engaged at the beginning and then for the next part you'd remember what you learned, etc. Also by teaching from the beginning you tend to learn the same things over and over. I probably learned about Paul Revere in 3-4 different US history classes growing up, but the Cuban Missile Crisis only once.

partycoder 8y ago

Learning history is fun, for example: The British East India Company was the largest drug cartel of the 19th century. They forced the Chinese to buy opium, and decades later that opium made it to the Americas. Each time you turn on the TV and hear about of some random dude overdosing with illegal opioids, you can blame the British for that. Lawrence of Arabia, the Sykes-Picot agreement, among other British interventions, helped create a state of permanent war in the Middle east. Each time you hear of war or violence in the Middle East, or some kid being blown up by a drone or burned alive with white phosphorus, you can blame the British for that. However, they're not seen as the villains of history, we speak their language and some idiots wear t-shirts with their flag. Go figure.

ljw1001 8y ago
I think a better grasp of history would lead you to believe that there's nothing especially British about these activities. This is the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, and is a close to a universal law throughout history as you're likely to find.
- partycoder 8y ago
  So, in your revisionist mindset, the opium wars were just like any other war? The motivation of the opium wars was to fix the British Empire trade deficit by selling opium to China, turning them into drug addicts in the process. When the Chinese started seizing their opium they declared war. It's fucked up to just imagine what kind of morally bankrupt psycho could have thought of that as a solution to an economic problem, and what kind of society it takes to get everyone aligned to execute it.
  - ljw1001 8y ago
    in my revisionist mindset it's a lot like King Leopald in the Congo, the near extermination of native Americans (to get their land), the slave trade, the proxy wars in Asia and Africa to fight (or expand) communism and other horrors.

limsup 8y ago

Not for science history. It's very hard to grasp what the hell the LHC is about. First tell me why how they figured out water wasn't an element but a combination of two.

tim333 8y ago
It can kind of work for that. Looking at Wikipedia the LHC article links to "Composite particles" to "History of atomic theory" to "Leucippus (/luːˈsɪpəs/; Greek: Λεύκιππος, Leúkippos; fl. 5th cent. BCE) is reported in some ancient sources to have been a philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms." The LHC is about looking for more "indivisible elements" by smashing stuff harder. And so on.

jaredklewis 8y ago

This would not only be a great way to teach history, but also literature and probably other things like philosophy as well. In literature, it is not uncommon to start with the past reading things like the Odyssey, moving forwards to Beowulf, then Canterbury Tales, then Shakespeare, then John Milton, then Dickens, and on and on. The result is you start with the least accessible work and move forward to the most accessible. On the hand hand, by starting with a modern work like Catch 22 or whatever, you start with an accessible work that is more likely to be an enjoyable to the reader in its own right, not just as an important work. As you move backwards the reader is also gradually increasing their reading prowess, becoming more attuned to the finer points of literature, and thus more able to enjoy the older, less naturally accessible works. Having middle and high school students wade through Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne always seemed like such dumb idea to me. For every one student that is interested by such texts, another 10 are turned off literature completely by the dense diction and distant context. Better to start with J.K. Rowling than Herman Melville if it lets more students discover the joy of reading.

nautilus12 8y ago
I disagree in the sense that this will end up putting an overemphasis on contemporary work, and not enough on classic works. Think about how often cirriculum never gets to the end of, when such seminal and formative works such as Plato and Aristotle are fit into the last weeks you will inevietably gloss over them. We already make Gods out of our contemporary world view at the expense of downplaying the brilliance of past thinkers. I dont think we need to fan this flame. We will end up with an aesthetic that is so devoid of the basics that it barely comprehends itself, and if ever hits a dry spell will never be able to recreate its former greatness
- karthikb 8y ago
  Specifically with history, contemporary topics being skipped over is not only common but an incredible disservice to humanity. Many schools spend months on Columbus but only 1-2 weeks on the entire post Cold War era. Which one is more important for future voters to understand?

c3534l 8y ago

There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?" Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn't?" down to "Why did agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than corn spread to the Americas?" It's a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it's resolved. By asking a series of "why" you broadly expand a person's view and they understand why you're talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the "why are we talking about this" up front, and teacher's answers were always just "it's in the syllabus." I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.

vanderZwan 8y ago
> It's a wonderful rhetorical device. It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of "trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures".
- c3534l 8y ago
  I don't think we know if history was inevitable. How much do we attribute to specific events because they're the ones that happened, rather than simply the result of deeper, sociological, economic, and cultural causes? The best we can do is explain what we can explain, and I don't know if trying to teach people that history is essentially random is even a goal that you should strive for to begin with.
  - ramshorns 8y ago
    Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."

UncleMeat 8y ago

But this is not how historians think about history. This risks presentism. History should be understood in its own context, not by the events that came afterwards. Presenting history backwards makes it feel like prior events happened in the context of future events when historical actors had no understanding of those future events. Instead history is best understood in the context available to the people at the time.

drb91 8y ago
The academic work of history and teaching history to non-historians have different constraints; the latter requires certain reduction to causality. Or at least that seems like the current state of affairs. I’m not necessarily a fan, but it’s better than no education at all.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  Disagree totally. It is more important here. The reason we teach the humanities to non-experts is to teach empathy and the ability to fully separate from your own context. Teaching history backwards sabotages this effort.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Where and when and with whom would you propose teaching people? This is a solvable problem, but you have to justify being ABLE to just do it right the first time.

woodandsteel 8y ago

>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. No, that's completely wrong. For one thing, any good history book will include numerous accidents that could well have happened differently, and sent history off on an entirely different direction. I am surprised you were unaware that is how good history books are written. As to an infinite number of possible futures, there are a far larger number one might imagine that are in fact impossible, like humans decided a thousand years ago to walk to Mars, and doing it. They are impossible because of basic realities, and history is a key way you discover and teach them. And that is important because many of these basic realities are of the greatest importance for intelligent decision making today.

s-shellfish 8y ago

> However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance. I'm convinced the 'human' mind loves causality because the human mind loves to believe it is the cause of 'things happening'. This especially holds in chaotic situations where the mind feels it has zero control over anything, down the very nature of itself. This however, is not always the ideal philosophy to hold (at least to me). I don't know about current culture, but much of eastern philosophy does not share the same sentiment about causality. It's often both, a sort of 'yes-no', the individual self being neither the controller nor the controlled. Forwards, backwards, I don't think it matters. People fill in the gaps regardless. People see what they want to see, until that gets boring. Then they do something different, wait and see if that changes things. Does it? Maybe.

woodandsteel 8y ago

One reason to teach history backwards is that people are already interested in what is happening today, and so it is easy to get them interested in what lead up to it. And one reason this is so is that learning what caused present problems helps you in figuring out what to do about them.

taeric 8y ago

Predicting the past based on the present is rather difficult. To the point that I suspect we would just be wrong in other ways.

ekianjo 8y ago

I think the backward thinking has problems too. If you ask the wrong questions you will inevitably get to an improper understanding as well. Things make a lot more sense when taken in their proper chronological context, since thats how humans perceive time in the first place.

bane 8y ago

I agree. History backwards is a "this is why this is so" lesson. While history forwards is..."here's some stuff, it'll all make sense in a few years if you keep studying". Understanding how we've arrived here, and all the connections going backwards can be profoundly enlightening, allowing you to try to project events forwards, because cause and effect are laid out for you. Memorizing books full of facts just turns you into an encyclopedia and don't really let you try to understand how to break the present down to get at what the driving forces are behind the now.

madhadron 8y ago

No. We already know this is a bad idea. It's seen most clearly in the history of science, where people want to trace back just the theories that worked as opposed to looking at all the options being worked on at a given time. See the Strong program. In more general history, it leads you to founding myths and connecting largely unconnected things like modern France to Charlemagne's Frankish empire.

SubiculumCode 8y ago

I see you don't subscribe to determinism. Are there alternative futures?

rumcajz 8y ago

Seconded. I've learnt history forwards at the school and all I've got was a mess on weakly connected facts. Since then I was learning about the history the other way round: I kind of know what happened during my lifetime, I have an vague idea of what followed from what. What people thought, what people did etc. I can get further back by asking my parents or reading press from. say, sixties. Books written by folks at the time help as well. I can get as far back as WWII by remembering what my grandparents said. Going even further back is hard as there's not a lot of survivors anymore, but you still have contemporary press and books. Even further back... I've moved to Switzerland few years ago and I've started to understand how European culture worked before WWI. Switzerland, not taking part in the wars of XX. century preserved that past to some extent. Going even further back is hard. The documents are starting to get scarce. Also, the world is getting more alien in XIX. century. There was an article discussed on HN about a message from 1880. The world there is strange on not one you can easily relate to: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44265475 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44265475 But with enough trying, I think I can cover at least second half of XIX. century in next few decades, meaning that I will be able to think about it as if I was living at the time.

pvaldes 8y ago

Traversing a tree backwards is easy only if you focuse in following only one of the branches. Otherwise you would be arriving to the same places and in need to repeat/refresh/redone the basal parts all the time.

canes123456 8y ago

History told backwards makes events seem more inevitable and not less. You are looking for the cause of what will happen instead of wondering. Knowing the end colors how you read all the events leading up to this. I believe this is the problem with traditional history. It is told forward but the people writing it are looking for the seeds of the cause and overfitting the narrative.