5 ms·

"false history" -- is there any other kind? It is like the difference between a cult and established religions: the main difference is scale and time.

• eru 4y ago
  If you have trouble with the concept of 'truth', just go by what's useful. That's eg why financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth: their readers want to be able to play the markets, so need something with a bit of a reality check, instead of just playing to their ideological preferences only.
  • robocat 4y ago
    > financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth Are you sure? From my limited experience, there is a huge amount of fictitious narrative in financial news. I just had a look at https://www.barrons.com/ https://www.barrons.com/ - hard to say how much is just opinions of the journalist, but not much looked fact based.
    • Kinrany 4y ago
      Older articles are easier to check for correctness.
      • robocat 4y ago
        If a journalist made random predictions, how would you know? If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know?
        • eru 4y ago
          > If a journalist made random predictions, how would you know? If they consistently randomly get lucky, that's fine. Just check multiple stories to get a sense of the distribution. > If a journalist made a random prediction, and market participants believed the prediction, so the market then did what the journalist predicted, how would you know? If all you care about whether the prediction is accurate (so you can trade on it), you don't need to worry about the philosophical differences between an accurate prediction and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • wyager 4y ago
    Importantly, this only applies to the subsets of financial media that traders pay money for. Bloomberg's free news is garbage opinion pieces, but the stuff you pay (a lot) for is generally decent.
• coffeeblack 4y ago
  Correct. History in an ideal world tries to record what happened. But realistically, history is a tool for politics. But judging by the heavy downvotes of your comment, that fact doesn’t seem to be popular.
  • panick21_ 4y ago
    > that fact doesn’t seem to be popular. No its because he question to concept of truth itself. Literally everybody knows history writing is manipulated for many reasons. But in my observation, however in my view historiography is often far more complex then reflecting simply political desires.
    • d0mine 4y ago
      I don't question "concept of truth." Ironically, the truth is corrupted already. To answer the question "is there any other kind" would be enough to provide one [just one] example of a truthful history book (it is ok if it is imprecise in details as long as it is accurate overall--think physics theories within their application domain--we are far far away from history resembling hard sciences). The example would demonstrate falsehoods you believe in.
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Even a biased account of history is a record of history, in some ways even more interesting when you have other biased accounts to compare with. Goofy as his methods are, Herodotus is a very compelling read specifically because it's not one coherent narrative, but a collection of points-of-view (none of which may be entirely correct, but reflect what people claimed at least).