6 ms·

Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history. Altering primary documents to make them mor

Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history. Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions of what history actually was like and how we know what it was like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense. (Well, I should say it's not history of Hamilton's time. It will be studied as an important part of the history of our time.) The folks running these upscaling operations understand the concerns: > Antic and Kelley aren’t under any illusions that images treated by DeOldify will come out historically accurate, though their reservations are with the practicalities of training a neural network. Making sure colourised films are accurate is “a literally impossible problem,” Antic says. DeOldify uses modern images to train its AI on, he explains, “and we know that's a big weakness, because, amongst other things, it biases people to wearing blue jeans.” The challenge is, once they create one of these films and post it for the public, the implications and effects are out of their hands. You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more information (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate (e.g. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand.

ev1 6y ago
> You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more information (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate (i.e. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand. I can confidently say there is a 100% chance that ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content in every possible way in terms of outreach. Just look at any "today in history" youtube or twitter channel and compare it to any actual museum or historical society's website/channel/social media. Orders of magnitude difference. On the tweets you see replies commenting about how beautiful and vibrant a [false colour, invented content] image is. Hell, those places will post blatantly totally false content (like.. a comedian) and say it's a historical image: https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/ https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/ They are not there for historical accuracy, or accuracy of any kind, those accounts are 100% purely to farm clicks and likes to spam with later.
- codegladiator 6y ago
  > ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content I think you are missing OPs point. Better (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) is not more accurate. Any change is worse from the original because now its modified (however ugly the original is). It suddenly becomes a fake.
  - jerf 6y ago
    Then the original is a "fake" too. The past was not black and white, jittery, and silent. It isn't taking a true record and making it fake, it's taking a fake record and making it differently fake.
    - kibwen 6y ago
      This would be usefully true were it not for the fact that laypersons understand that the past was not black-and-white and silent. Nobody other than Calvin is misled into thinking that those records are faithful recreations of color and sound. But without those obvious markers, people lose their incredulity. What you're seeing in these modified records pretends to be real in a way that the originals do not. I would expect tech people to understand the risks here by comparison to using AI to perform image upscaling: you are inventing detail based on what the AI expects to see. For artificial works, this is often great. For, say, a police department trying to upscale grainy CCTV footage, it produces a work of fiction that has the potential to become outright dangerous. It's fine to present these as works of art, and with the proper context, even as records of history. But pop culture rapidly divorces the art from the context, and I would expect any responsible historian to be extremely clear about the processes use here, even to the point of protest (it is analogous to how astronomers have a hard time expressing to people that false-color photography and artistic illustrations of far-off bodies do not represent reality).
      - jerf 6y ago
        The conscious mind knows, and that only if you think to ask it. The subconscious does not. I wrote about this in reaction to one of the videos earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369 I would assert that even with the errors, people get a more realistic view of the past through these reconstructions than by watching the original footage. The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a historical lesson for the masses. The reconstructions make it seem like a real place that had real people in it. Moreover... what terrible, horrible thing are we worried about with these reconstructions anyhow? People will have slightly wrong ideas about what color roofs were in the past? People might have wrong ideas about exactly how slidey people's gaits were in the past? It's not like you feed in footage about a train ride or people riding horses down the street and the AI is adding in cell phones, translating people's speech to modern slang, and changing political posters to features modern politicians. We're fighting videos that increase people's connections to the past because we're afraid they... what, exactly? By all means keep the original and label the reconstructions, but I see no reason to start complaining about them or running around telling people "STOP! Watching these videos might give you WRONG IDEAS about COLORS! What if that BLUE WINDOW was in actuality MAUVE?" This seems more like Victorians having conspicuous cases of the vapors than a real concern.
dheera 6y ago
> You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original On the other hand, unless there was a 4K full color film those millions of people wouldn't even watch the original. The debate then becomes -- is no knowledge better than minorly-distorted knowledge?
- notriddle 6y ago
  > The debate then becomes -- is no knowledge better than minorly-distorted knowledge? Yes. No knowledge is much better than distorted knowledge.
  - dheera 6y ago
    But almost all knowledge we receive is at least slightly distorted, if not severely distorted.
- shard 6y ago
  I've always had the thought that religious texts should be updated with modern prose and sensibilities. Not for the believers of the religion, but for the non-believers. People are not incentivized to slog through some text that was written centuries ago, using phrasings that they've hardly ever encountered. But if a modern twist was put on it, perhaps it would be better accepted as a good yarn by the general population, and widen the readership.
disown 6y ago
> Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history. No. Academic historians are concerned with maintaining the dominant historical narrative that they themselves have created. > "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense. Sure, but academic history is no more "true" or "accurate" than the Hamilton play. The historical concept of Hamilton is fiction created by historians affected by their own biases. History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science. > That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand. That's true for any "history". Nevermind that almost no historical document/artefact/etc is the "original", but the "history" we know is ultimately manufactured fiction. There are facts and then there is history ( which is what is colored in between the facts by historians ). There is Hamilton the actual person, then there is the historical adaptation of Hamilton, the play adaptation, movie adaptation, documentary adaptation, etc which are all fiction.
- mcguire 6y ago
  As a note, if you are going to go all post-modern, you should go all the way. Inconsistency is bad. "History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science." Science is interpretation. Scientists are concerned about maintaining their dominant narrative. "Facts" are very scarce on the ground. (I'm willing to act as if Mumbai exists, but I have no personal experience of it and therefore no positive reason to believe it does.) In more serious terms, a good academic historian will point to evidence as a way to explain why they want you to believe some statement, and---because they recognize the perils of what they're doing---many of them will complain about potentially misleading modifications to that evidence.
hutzlibu 6y ago
Technical points aside: I doubt those youtube historians could possibly do more damage to false history lessons, than all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies. And the youtube historians I have seen, were very good. So mostly on the right side in battle to truth (dramatically speaking) and mostly not on the side of cheap effects for drama, or even intentional misleading for political reasons. (seriously, there is nothing wrong with historic fiction - but it disturbs me deeply that a) most movies/books are not labeld that way, even if they should and b) even if it is labeled, most people probably do not notice)
- razakel 6y ago
  >all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies There's a British cartoon from 2003 called Monkey Dust, where a recurring feature is completely historically inaccurate Hollywood movies ("Dedicated to all the Americans who died in the early Middle Ages").
- sthomas1618 6y ago
  Most expensive "historical" movies are wrong too. Otherwise I totally agree with you. I just don't think how much a movie cost to make matters much with regards to historical accuracy.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    With cheap I meant the dramatic effects, not the cost to produce ..
Vvector 6y ago
"Altering primary documents..." No one is altering the original documents. They still exist, right? "actually less accurate (e.g. wrong color instead of no color)." That's debatable. Why is "no color" more accurate? The world wasn't monochrome.
- michaelt 6y ago
  > Why is "no color" more accurate? If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you colourise it to look more like an army uniform, or a different country's uniform, you've made it less accurate as it looks like they're in a different branch of the military. If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white from age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made them look younger and maybe given them a hair colour they never had. If you've got a photo of a famous scientist or war hero who had a Mediterranean complexion and you colourise them with more of a pale complexion, you've made it less accurate as it looks like they're a different race. (Of course, these sorts of accessibility-accuracy trade-offs aren't unique to colourising photos - they also apply to everything from translations of historical documents, through illustrations and selecting what content makes it into books, to questionably accurate history facts shared on social media)
  - animatedb 6y ago
    You may have missed one more part. When you see a black and white picture, you assume that the black, gray and white are not real. When you see color, it biases your brain to think the color may be close to correct.
  - Vvector 6y ago
    > If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white from age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made them look younger and maybe given them a hair colour they never had. But what about the opposite? What if a B&W photo shows someone with white hair, but his hair was blonde. Now the colorized photo is more accurate than the B&W photo. I just don't think you can claim B&W is more accurate absolutely. > If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you colourise it to look more like an army uniform Do you understand that the typical consumer of this media cannot tell the difference between air force, and army uniforms from 100 years ago? Get people interested in history, then worry about the little details like the color of someone's hair or uniform. Get out of your ivory tower and into the real world. Most people's knowledge of history is abysmal. History is boring, as it is taught in schools today.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Bayart 6y ago
>Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions of what history actually was like and how we know what it was like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense. That's such an arrière-garde cause. It doesn't take too much time nor too much effort for any self-examining historian to understand that you can't create a "right impression" of history at the level of the general public. It will always be partial, truncated, falsified. Your cherry-picked period is misunderstood by the general public ? Too bad, that's part of the job. The best you can hope is making somebody interested enough that someday they'll have to reflex on historiography, philology and epistemology.
anticristi 6y ago
Another way to put it, is that it creates a more precise history, which is, however, not necessarily accurate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
188201 6y ago
I think the purpose of colarization of a video is same as mimicking a drawing in ruin that lost its paint. It is an interpretation of history from current time. If historian find the color is not represent the event accurately, it can be changed anyway, just like a painting.
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
> Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history. So they want to ban textbooks and force kids to learn dozens of languages to read primary sources and to travel to places of their origins?
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  The current history taught is fairly blatant propaganda, I wouldn't be surprised if academic historians would prefer it taught in that manner.
runarberg 6y ago
I keep thinking about dinosaurs in this context. How do we know how dinosaurs looked like? All we have are some scattered fossilized bones (and footprints) found in a layer of sediment, which experts have carefully (and perhaps wrongly) puzzled together. Is it wrong to extrapolate the missing pieces to make a complete skeleton? Some experts are able to make really good academic guesses on if the dinosaur species in question had feathers or scales, the size of its lips and toungue, and sometimes even its color. Is it wrong to create a drawing or a 3D rendering of these guesses? I suppose, to an extent, it is really important to understand how we can know these things from only a few fossilized bone fragments. But to a layperson it is certainly more interesting to see our best guess of how it looked like in reality. Just a picture or description of the original pieces of fossils in that layer of sediment certainly does not do justice to an amazing animal that once walked the earth. I suppose you could also make the case that we can get it wrong and a false picture of dinosaurs would enter the popular discourse. But I would argue that it would probably be even worse if experts wouldn’t paint their best guess at the time, and left it to the imagination of fiction media to recreate it for the population.
- bamboozled 6y ago
  I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today. But a high definition video is what we've naturally been used to "believing in" as being real. Of course the next generation of people will grow up with deep fakes, so they will not trust anything they watch unless it's digitally signed or something.u I feel that is the difference.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    I remember as a kid that dinosaurs felt just as alien to me as lions. Neither existed in the country where I grew up. They had real footage of lions, but they also had what felt like real footage of dinosaurs. Off course I knew lions existed today in Africa, but dinosaurs existed in the past all over the planet (except on the island where I grew up). To me it didn’t feel like neither the lion nor the dinosaur were reconstructed. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. They were able to capture the fascination of a kid by making the dinosaur look as real as a lion, and that’s really cool. It turned out their recreations were wrong, e.g. the T-Rex didn’t have any lips and no feathers in these pictures, but now we think they had both. That’s OK. Growing up I learned that they don’t know everything, and there are still things left to discover. I bet a future teenager will be astonished to find out they didn’t have high quality color film in the early 20th century, that the films they’ve seen from that period have been colored in using modern technology. Just as I was astonished to find out that they didn’t actually know how dinosaurs looked like, but were able to guess using varying techniques.
anigbrowl 6y ago
But they're not altering primary documents, any more than someone who writes a new history of some well-covered topic is trying to destroy all other commentary on the period, or artist's renditions of what ancient societies looked like are an attack on archaeologists, or new translations of works in other languages are meant to prevent people from learning those languages.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
> Altering primary documents The original films were not altered in any way. They still exist and were not destroyed or compromised by the process. They can still be studied by historians while others are free to enjoy the colorized versions.

ev1 6y ago

> You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more information (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate (i.e. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand. I can confidently say there is a 100% chance that ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content in every possible way in terms of outreach. Just look at any "today in history" youtube or twitter channel and compare it to any actual museum or historical society's website/channel/social media. Orders of magnitude difference. On the tweets you see replies commenting about how beautiful and vibrant a [false colour, invented content] image is. Hell, those places will post blatantly totally false content (like.. a comedian) and say it's a historical image: https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/ https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/ They are not there for historical accuracy, or accuracy of any kind, those accounts are 100% purely to farm clicks and likes to spam with later.

codegladiator 6y ago
> ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content I think you are missing OPs point. Better (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) is not more accurate. Any change is worse from the original because now its modified (however ugly the original is). It suddenly becomes a fake.
- jerf 6y ago
  Then the original is a "fake" too. The past was not black and white, jittery, and silent. It isn't taking a true record and making it fake, it's taking a fake record and making it differently fake.
  - kibwen 6y ago
    This would be usefully true were it not for the fact that laypersons understand that the past was not black-and-white and silent. Nobody other than Calvin is misled into thinking that those records are faithful recreations of color and sound. But without those obvious markers, people lose their incredulity. What you're seeing in these modified records pretends to be real in a way that the originals do not. I would expect tech people to understand the risks here by comparison to using AI to perform image upscaling: you are inventing detail based on what the AI expects to see. For artificial works, this is often great. For, say, a police department trying to upscale grainy CCTV footage, it produces a work of fiction that has the potential to become outright dangerous. It's fine to present these as works of art, and with the proper context, even as records of history. But pop culture rapidly divorces the art from the context, and I would expect any responsible historian to be extremely clear about the processes use here, even to the point of protest (it is analogous to how astronomers have a hard time expressing to people that false-color photography and artistic illustrations of far-off bodies do not represent reality).
    - jerf 6y ago
      The conscious mind knows, and that only if you think to ask it. The subconscious does not. I wrote about this in reaction to one of the videos earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369 I would assert that even with the errors, people get a more realistic view of the past through these reconstructions than by watching the original footage. The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a historical lesson for the masses. The reconstructions make it seem like a real place that had real people in it. Moreover... what terrible, horrible thing are we worried about with these reconstructions anyhow? People will have slightly wrong ideas about what color roofs were in the past? People might have wrong ideas about exactly how slidey people's gaits were in the past? It's not like you feed in footage about a train ride or people riding horses down the street and the AI is adding in cell phones, translating people's speech to modern slang, and changing political posters to features modern politicians. We're fighting videos that increase people's connections to the past because we're afraid they... what, exactly? By all means keep the original and label the reconstructions, but I see no reason to start complaining about them or running around telling people "STOP! Watching these videos might give you WRONG IDEAS about COLORS! What if that BLUE WINDOW was in actuality MAUVE?" This seems more like Victorians having conspicuous cases of the vapors than a real concern.

dheera 6y ago

> You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original On the other hand, unless there was a 4K full color film those millions of people wouldn't even watch the original. The debate then becomes -- is no knowledge better than minorly-distorted knowledge?

notriddle 6y ago
> The debate then becomes -- is no knowledge better than minorly-distorted knowledge? Yes. No knowledge is much better than distorted knowledge.
- dheera 6y ago
  But almost all knowledge we receive is at least slightly distorted, if not severely distorted.
shard 6y ago
I've always had the thought that religious texts should be updated with modern prose and sensibilities. Not for the believers of the religion, but for the non-believers. People are not incentivized to slog through some text that was written centuries ago, using phrasings that they've hardly ever encountered. But if a modern twist was put on it, perhaps it would be better accepted as a good yarn by the general population, and widen the readership.

disown 6y ago

> Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history. No. Academic historians are concerned with maintaining the dominant historical narrative that they themselves have created. > "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense. Sure, but academic history is no more "true" or "accurate" than the Hamilton play. The historical concept of Hamilton is fiction created by historians affected by their own biases. History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science. > That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand. That's true for any "history". Nevermind that almost no historical document/artefact/etc is the "original", but the "history" we know is ultimately manufactured fiction. There are facts and then there is history ( which is what is colored in between the facts by historians ). There is Hamilton the actual person, then there is the historical adaptation of Hamilton, the play adaptation, movie adaptation, documentary adaptation, etc which are all fiction.

mcguire 6y ago
As a note, if you are going to go all post-modern, you should go all the way. Inconsistency is bad. "History is interpretation. It isn't fact. It isn't science." Science is interpretation. Scientists are concerned about maintaining their dominant narrative. "Facts" are very scarce on the ground. (I'm willing to act as if Mumbai exists, but I have no personal experience of it and therefore no positive reason to believe it does.) In more serious terms, a good academic historian will point to evidence as a way to explain why they want you to believe some statement, and---because they recognize the perils of what they're doing---many of them will complain about potentially misleading modifications to that evidence.

hutzlibu 6y ago

Technical points aside: I doubt those youtube historians could possibly do more damage to false history lessons, than all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies. And the youtube historians I have seen, were very good. So mostly on the right side in battle to truth (dramatically speaking) and mostly not on the side of cheap effects for drama, or even intentional misleading for political reasons. (seriously, there is nothing wrong with historic fiction - but it disturbs me deeply that a) most movies/books are not labeld that way, even if they should and b) even if it is labeled, most people probably do not notice)

razakel 6y ago
>all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies There's a British cartoon from 2003 called Monkey Dust, where a recurring feature is completely historically inaccurate Hollywood movies ("Dedicated to all the Americans who died in the early Middle Ages").
sthomas1618 6y ago
Most expensive "historical" movies are wrong too. Otherwise I totally agree with you. I just don't think how much a movie cost to make matters much with regards to historical accuracy.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  With cheap I meant the dramatic effects, not the cost to produce ..

Vvector 6y ago

"Altering primary documents..." No one is altering the original documents. They still exist, right? "actually less accurate (e.g. wrong color instead of no color)." That's debatable. Why is "no color" more accurate? The world wasn't monochrome.

michaelt 6y ago
> Why is "no color" more accurate? If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you colourise it to look more like an army uniform, or a different country's uniform, you've made it less accurate as it looks like they're in a different branch of the military. If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white from age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made them look younger and maybe given them a hair colour they never had. If you've got a photo of a famous scientist or war hero who had a Mediterranean complexion and you colourise them with more of a pale complexion, you've made it less accurate as it looks like they're a different race. (Of course, these sorts of accessibility-accuracy trade-offs aren't unique to colourising photos - they also apply to everything from translations of historical documents, through illustrations and selecting what content makes it into books, to questionably accurate history facts shared on social media)
- animatedb 6y ago
  You may have missed one more part. When you see a black and white picture, you assume that the black, gray and white are not real. When you see color, it biases your brain to think the color may be close to correct.
- Vvector 6y ago
  > If you've got a photo of someone whose hair was white from age, and you colourise it as blonde, you've made them look younger and maybe given them a hair colour they never had. But what about the opposite? What if a B&W photo shows someone with white hair, but his hair was blonde. Now the colorized photo is more accurate than the B&W photo. I just don't think you can claim B&W is more accurate absolutely. > If that person is wearing an air force uniform and you colourise it to look more like an army uniform Do you understand that the typical consumer of this media cannot tell the difference between air force, and army uniforms from 100 years ago? Get people interested in history, then worry about the little details like the color of someone's hair or uniform. Get out of your ivory tower and into the real world. Most people's knowledge of history is abysmal. History is boring, as it is taught in schools today.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Bayart 6y ago

>Altering primary documents to make them more palatable to modern audiences is great for emotional engagement and attracting attention, but it risks creating false impressions of what history actually was like and how we know what it was like. "Hamilton" is a powerful piece of art--today--but it's not accurate history in an academic sense. That's such an arrière-garde cause. It doesn't take too much time nor too much effort for any self-examining historian to understand that you can't create a "right impression" of history at the level of the general public. It will always be partial, truncated, falsified. Your cherry-picked period is misunderstood by the general public ? Too bad, that's part of the job. The best you can hope is making somebody interested enough that someday they'll have to reflex on historiography, philology and epistemology.

anticristi 6y ago

Another way to put it, is that it creates a more precise history, which is, however, not necessarily accurate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision

188201 6y ago

I think the purpose of colarization of a video is same as mimicking a drawing in ruin that lost its paint. It is an interpretation of history from current time. If historian find the color is not represent the event accurately, it can be changed anyway, just like a painting.

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

> Academic historians are concerned with not just what happened in history, but how we know what happened in history. So they want to ban textbooks and force kids to learn dozens of languages to read primary sources and to travel to places of their origins?

boomboomsubban 6y ago
The current history taught is fairly blatant propaganda, I wouldn't be surprised if academic historians would prefer it taught in that manner.

runarberg 6y ago

I keep thinking about dinosaurs in this context. How do we know how dinosaurs looked like? All we have are some scattered fossilized bones (and footprints) found in a layer of sediment, which experts have carefully (and perhaps wrongly) puzzled together. Is it wrong to extrapolate the missing pieces to make a complete skeleton? Some experts are able to make really good academic guesses on if the dinosaur species in question had feathers or scales, the size of its lips and toungue, and sometimes even its color. Is it wrong to create a drawing or a 3D rendering of these guesses? I suppose, to an extent, it is really important to understand how we can know these things from only a few fossilized bone fragments. But to a layperson it is certainly more interesting to see our best guess of how it looked like in reality. Just a picture or description of the original pieces of fossils in that layer of sediment certainly does not do justice to an amazing animal that once walked the earth. I suppose you could also make the case that we can get it wrong and a false picture of dinosaurs would enter the popular discourse. But I would argue that it would probably be even worse if experts wouldn’t paint their best guess at the time, and left it to the imagination of fiction media to recreate it for the population.

bamboozled 6y ago
I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today. But a high definition video is what we've naturally been used to "believing in" as being real. Of course the next generation of people will grow up with deep fakes, so they will not trust anything they watch unless it's digitally signed or something.u I feel that is the difference.
- runarberg 6y ago
  I remember as a kid that dinosaurs felt just as alien to me as lions. Neither existed in the country where I grew up. They had real footage of lions, but they also had what felt like real footage of dinosaurs. Off course I knew lions existed today in Africa, but dinosaurs existed in the past all over the planet (except on the island where I grew up). To me it didn’t feel like neither the lion nor the dinosaur were reconstructed. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. They were able to capture the fascination of a kid by making the dinosaur look as real as a lion, and that’s really cool. It turned out their recreations were wrong, e.g. the T-Rex didn’t have any lips and no feathers in these pictures, but now we think they had both. That’s OK. Growing up I learned that they don’t know everything, and there are still things left to discover. I bet a future teenager will be astonished to find out they didn’t have high quality color film in the early 20th century, that the films they’ve seen from that period have been colored in using modern technology. Just as I was astonished to find out that they didn’t actually know how dinosaurs looked like, but were able to guess using varying techniques.

anigbrowl 6y ago

But they're not altering primary documents, any more than someone who writes a new history of some well-covered topic is trying to destroy all other commentary on the period, or artist's renditions of what ancient societies looked like are an attack on archaeologists, or new translations of works in other languages are meant to prevent people from learning those languages.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> Altering primary documents The original films were not altered in any way. They still exist and were not destroyed or compromised by the process. They can still be studied by historians while others are free to enjoy the colorized versions.