7 ms·

It's quite frankly fantasy level absurd to use the past to try to predict the future. The past was not recorded in detailed resolution, it was written by victor

• Nomentatus 6y ago
  We can predict overconfidence, blindness, and egoism rather accurately from the past into the future. The leaders in every generation think they're the exception (think COVID planning) but they're not. We're not.
  • solosoyokaze 6y ago
    That's not actionable though. No one could predict what has happened with COVID and no one can predict what will happen.
    • HDMI_Cable 6y ago
      We probably could have though, looking at previous pandemics like SARS, MERS, and even Ebola.
      • solosoyokaze 6y ago
        To give an example, I don't think anyone could have predicted that wearing masks would be politicized. I also don't think you could make any useful predictions such as would Biden or Trump win the election. And of course, no one could have predicted that we would even have COVID in 2020. Black swans and chaotic systems drive history, which is why you can't predict it.
• salawat 6y ago
  Found the fool. Yes, you don't reason that everything will happen like it did in the past, but you take it into account aas a shared input space. Those that neither understand or learn from their history are doomed to repeat it, we're all the same in the space of our species' character flaws.
  • solosoyokaze 6y ago
    Social "science" hogwash. If the past had predictive ability, historians would be billionaires. When you can demonstrate repeatability in the predictive nature of your models, then you will be in a place to call others a "fool". Until then, realize you're standing on a house of cards.
    • salawat 6y ago
      Alright. So run something by me. If, as you say "history is always written by the victors"; wherefore do you get legitimacy to your claim this makes history a waste of time? It appears to me, in fact, you're drawing conclusions based on historical occurence to lend predictive credibility to your assertion that history is always written by the victor, and therefore, worthy of dismissing. If I accept your assertiom, your claim is baseless and bereft of any rhetorical power whatsoever. That's before we even touch on the factual errors. Some of the best and most valuable history is not that written by the victor, but that recorded by the eventual loser. Historians hunt for, and preserve these false starts, and spend lifetimes teasing out the circumstances around them. You want examples of predictive power? Power vacuums: why sometimes you don't kill the dictator you can get along with Involuntary relications: They never end well; ever. Regicide: Fun for the whole family Genocide: Fun for the entire ethnic group War: As the atrocity of the means of conducting war increases, the stomach for employing it consistently decreases sharply. Bugs and common defect classes: ever tracked a development teams bad habits? Great practice. Helps immensely in making you look like a psychic because you just learn where and how everything is going to break. Numerical interpolation/integration: History has non-human aspects as well. To ignore the impact or utility of history is to entirely dismiss the field and methods of simulation and engineering. Those mathematical constructs are underpinned by relationships that are predictive by their nature. I mean, I can go on. Look, I was like you once. I gave the history majors I knew endless amounts of guff. Then I actually read some, and wondered why I was seeing so many old issues rearing their ugly heads. History is critically important to ynderstanding and contextualizing the human experience. There are thoughts every human in their lifetime will think. Watch someone elses children and pick them out. Go ahead. We record history so that those that come after us can see how we reasoned, and how it turned out. That way. You don't end up repeating the mistakes of your forebearers. Which can only come to pass if you read the bloody thing and absorb it. Techne itself is a form of historical record; a network of interrelated knowledge, contexts, and applications thereof that are composable to bring about an end. Our history, the history of humanity, is a network of the excesses, vices, illusions of grandeur, tales of victory and crushing defeats laid bare before us. It is the path of cobbles that brought us to where we are. You know what? Go watch Connections if you haven't. If you had, you should have managed to absorb why understanding the past informs better decisions moving forward by priming your pattern recognition faculties and breaking you of that most horrible habit of "This time it'll be different."
• loveistheanswer 6y ago
  >The past was not recorded in detailed resolution, it was written by victors, it was not recorded in the first place The video camera has been capturing history in increasingly high resolution for ~100 years now. You don't have be a world war champion to own a video camera.
  • solosoyokaze 6y ago
    And what does that video tell you? At best, it's a surface level observation of a framed window of space. If you watch a video of me, do you know the thoughts in my head? Admittedly we are gaining resolution in our recording of history, but even today it's extremely sparse and I'd argue uncapturable in full.
  • macintux 6y ago
    Facts are negotiable, as the deep divide in the U.S. illustrates. Heck, look at the extensive video coverage of the attack on the Capitol, and how little agreement there is at the grass roots on what that video ultimately means.
• imtringued 6y ago
  You don't understand. Human nature hasn't changed. Not even after two thousand years. It's always following the same patterns. Paranoia and irrationality spread and anger (killing intent) is then directed toward a minority. The fact that human nature is so predictable is scary.
  • solosoyokaze 6y ago
    This isn’t about human nature though. It’s a prediction of events that will occur based on past events. AKA fiction.
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  I strongly disagree. I have spent a lot of time trying to find more esoteric details about the world wars, for the reason that I wanted to understand how we got into them (and therefor apply that gained knowledge to the goal of understanding how to avoid the next one), and I have found great value in understanding the past in this way. Unfortunately, very often history as it is taught in schools seems to tend to bypass these more important core reasonings as to the causes of things, so I can understand your viewpoint from that angle, but it doesn't mean there isn't an immense amount of value to be had in understanding the past (even if hidden) to understand the possibilities of the future. For me, this mostly centers around the analysis of soft-power machiavellianism at the upper echelons of government and it's shadow coterie, for example. Articles like this one miss the forest for the trees by getting too hung up on technology and not the people and ideas behind them. Allow me to demonstrate this by declaring a great irony of this article given the source of the document (the Carnegie foundation). In 1982, G Edward Griffin interviewed Norman Dodd, an banker who in 1954 was the staff director of the Congressional Special Committee to Investigate Tax-exempt Foundations (Reece Committee). In this interview, he said the following: Griffin: Mr. Dodd, you have spoken, before, about some interesting things that were discovered by Kathryn Casey at the Carnegie Endowment. Would you tell us that story, please? Dodd: Sure, glad to, Mr. Griffin. This experience you just referred to, came about in response to a letter which I had written to the Carnegie Endowment Center, National Peace, asking certain questions and gathering certain information. On the arrival of that letter, Dr. Johnson, who was then President of the Carnegie Endowment, telephoned me and said, "Did you ever come up to New York?" I said, “Yes, I did, more or less each weekend.” And he said, "When you are next here, will you drop in and see us?” Which I did. And again, on arrival, at the office of the Endowment, I found myself in the presence of Dr. Joseph Johnson, the President, who was the successor to Alger Hiss, two vice-presidents and their own counsel, a partner in the firm -- a fellow by the name of Cromwell. And Dr. Johnson said (again after amenities), "Mr. Dodd, we have your letter. We can answer all those questions, but it would be a great deal of trouble. We have a counter-suggestion. Our counter-suggestion is that, if you can spare a member of your staff for two weeks, and send that member up to New York, we will give to that member a room in the library, and the minute books of this Foundation since its inception. And we think that, whatever you want to find out or that the Congress wants to find out, will be obvious from those minutes." Well, my first reaction was they had lost their minds. I had a pretty good idea of what those minutes would contain, but I realized that Dr. Johnson had only been in office two years, and the vice-presidents were relatively young men, and counsel also seemed to be a young man. I guessed that, probably, they had never read the minutes themselves. And so, I said that I had somebody and I would accept their offer. I went back to Washington, and I selected the member of my staff who had been a practicing attorney in Washington. She was on my staff to ensure I did not break any Congressional procedures or rules. In addition to that, she was unsympathetic to the purpose of the investigation. She was a level-headed and very reasonably brilliant, capable lady, and her attitude toward the investigation was this: “What could possibly be wrong with foundations? They do so much good.” Well, in the face of that sincere conviction of Kathryn's, I went out of my way not to prejudice her in any way, but I did explain to her that she couldn't possibly cover fifty years of handwritten minutes in two weeks. So, she would have to do what we call “spot reading.” I blocked out certain periods of time to concentrate on. Off she went -- to New York. She came back at the end of two weeks, with the following recorded on dictaphone belts. We are now at the year nineteen hundred and eight, which was the year that the Carnegie Foundation began operations. And, in that year, the trustees meeting, for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance of the year, in a very learned fashion. And the question is this: Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people? And they conclude that, no more effective means to that end is known to humanity, than war. So then, in 1909, they raise the second question, and discuss it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war? Well, I doubt, at that time, if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the People of this country, than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. And finally, they answer that question as follows: we must control the State Department. And then, that very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? They answer it by saying, we must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country and, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective. Then, time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I. At that time, they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatch to President Wilson a telegram cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly. And finally, of course, the war is over. At that time, their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914, when World War I broke out. At that point, they come to the conclusion that, to prevent a reversion, we must control education in the United States. And they realize that is a pretty big task. To them it is too big for them alone. So they approach the Rockefeller Foundation with a suggestion: that portion of education which could be considered domestic should be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation, and that portion which is international should be handled by the Endowment. They then decide that the key to the success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American History. So, they approach four of the then most prominent teachers of American History in the country -- people like Charles and Mary Byrd. Their suggestion to them is this, “Will they alter the manner in which they present their subject”” And, they get turned down, flatly. So, they then decide that it is necessary for them to do as they say, i.e. “build our own stable of historians." Then, they approach the Guggenheim Foundation, which specializes in fellowships, and say” “When we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American History, and we feel that they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say so? And the answer is, “Yes.” So, under that condition, eventually they assemble twenty (20), and they take these twenty potential teachers of American History to London. There, they are briefed in what is expected of them -- when, as, and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. That group of twenty historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association. And then, toward the end of the 1920's, the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association four hundred thousand dollars ($400,000) for a study of our history in a manner which points to what this country look forward to, in the future. That culminates in a seven-volume study, the last volume of which is, of course, in essence, a summary of the contents of the other six. The essence of the last volume is this: the future of this country belongs to collectivism, administered with characteristic American efficiency. That is the story that ultimately grew out of, and of course, was what could have been presented by the members of, this Congressional Committee, and the Congress as a whole, for just exactly what it said. But, they never got to that point! Later in the interview, Dodd said "Yeah, I might tell you this experience, as far as its impact on Kathryn Casey is concerned. Well, she was never able to return to her law practice. If it hadn't been for Carroll Reece's ability to tuck her away in a job with the Federal Trade Commission, I don't know what would have happened to Kathryn. Ultimately, she lost her mind as a result of it. It was a terrible shock to her. It is a very rough experience for her to encounter proof of this kind."