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Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
- DanielBMarkham 3y agoI love history but I'm just a layman. I get quite angry when people get reductionist about history, usually because of story or narrative (pre-templated story patterns re-applied over and over again) The beauty of history is that the same event can have multiple, conflicting, powerful narratives associated with it. Looking at these narratives challenges our understanding of our own humanity. If we're smart, we end up realizing as Solzhenitsyn did, that "...If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?..." And then we _really_ begin our study of history, humanity, wisdom, and the rest of it. It's far too powerful to buy into a story and get blinders on. I think it's probably a great thing when beginning your journey, but you should never stay there. And if you're a historian stuck in a version of a story I'd argue you don't know your own profession.
- bdw5204 3y agoThere's nothing wrong with stories, either in history or elsewhere. But good vs evil stories are bad history and almost always bad writing too. Reality is almost always either different shades of gray or blue and orange morality. If you can't get beyond your own personal view of morality to be capable of understanding a different perspective, you're probably incapable of doing good history or creating good fiction because you're inevitably going to end up writing unbelievable comic book evil kind of characters for your villains.
- DanielBMarkham 3y agoI generally agree. As I learn more, I realize how much we teach kids younger in their lives is oversimplified, bowlderized BS, no matter the topic. I think that's unavoidable. You have to learn some comic book version of, say, physics before you're ready to talk about the Kuhn and paradigm changes and so forth. But there's also a real danger here: whatever your dumbed-down version of a topic is, it had better be a positive one, one that engages and challenges students to learn more. Negative stories and narratives have the self-destruction of passionate learning built into them. It's poor-quality pedagogy. If I teach a class of fourth graders that clowns are evil, have always been evil, circuses are the work of the devil, and so forth? I can guarantee you that nobody in that classroom will ever become an expert on the fascinating history of circuses, animal shows, clowns, and so forth. It's extremely tough to get students wound up enough to spend a huge amount of time diving in somewhere, but it might take ten seconds to turn them off to an entire area of future study. And frankly, those simplistic good-vs-evil stories are not only bad history, they're boring. They make consumers dumb. They make for idiotic public discussion. (Like I said, I tend to rant. I feel that we are cheating an entire generation out of the deep and beautiful vista of the humanities in our endless search to sell stuff to one another)
- ip26 3y agoIt doesn’t have to be oversimplified baulderdash. As the whole “ELI5” thing has shown, skillful reduction can preserve the truth and spirit. It’s just not easy. (It’s actually a lot of fun as a parent trying to do a good job of this)
- drewcoo 3y ago> There's nothing wrong with stories I disagree. When there's pressure to piece together a story, it can easily become a search for facts to fit a narrative, motivated reasoning. Data that doesn't fit that narrative must just be outliers. New details not substantiated by facts enter the picture because they improve the story. Stories tend to lose some truth. That's dangerous.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoStories convey insight, not truth.
- Waterluvian 3y agoIt’s a tool of abstraction, I think? If you study almost any major historical event in detail, I think you inevitably discover deep layers of nuance and complexity. But we can’t really manage such depth and breadth at the same time as hoping to eke out meaningful lessons to be propagated into the future. So a moral is distilled and committed to story and song. History is written by the victor… or the bard.
- simbolit 3y agoI think the authors confuses stories and /grand stories/ (sometimes called "meta-narratives"). I don't see how it is possible to do history without stories. That literally is what history is, telling stories about the past. Yes, the stories should have a factual basis, and some don't, but that's not a problem with stories as such. The problem lies with the desire for all stories to fit a /grand story/. Such a grand story is comforting, perhaps even pleasurable, when it gives a feeling of omniscience, of everything falling in place. But it is seldom helpful as a tool for prediction and problem-solving. But what is helpful is small stories. The world is messy and contradictory, everywhere and all the time. Without simplified stories we can't make proper sense of it (it is far too complex for individual humans to 'understand').
- stephendause 3y agoAgreed. Surely the authors don't mean that stories qua stories make you stupid. The love of your own stories combined with confirmation bias, perhaps.
- coldtea 3y ago>But it is seldom helpful as a tool for prediction and problem-solving. I'm not that sure. Perhaps that is the prejudice of an age with lesser historical ambitions.
- simbolit 3y agoCan you please elaborate? what grand stories (or meta-narratives) historically shown to be good tools for prediction and problem-solving do you have in mind?
- coldtea 3y agoThe grand story of "stages of historical development of the means of production" in Marxism for example. Or the grand story of the rise and decline of civilizations in Spengler.
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- whatshisface 3y agoI guess it's impressively bad that a blatant conspiracy theory made it past peer review and into Wikipedia, but this article is a summary of a review of a rebuttal to a bad paper.
- dang 3y ago> this article is a summary of a review of a rebuttal to a bad paper I think it manages to be a bit interesting a bit beyond that. The title is baity so I replaced it with a somewhat representative sentence from the article.
- supazek 3y ago>made it past peer review I don’t think that’s an especially difficult thing to do. It seems any paper dealing with social sciences or history that fits the current narrative is lauded and “reviewed” favorably. I think the mechanism which facilitates this is relatively simple and similar to how USSR officials would rather bring good news than bad facts
- cauch 3y agoBut how could the reviewers have found the errors in this article? The article can tell "Cort was informed about the new techniques from a family member back from Jamaica". How do you verify that? The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them. It's a huge work. This article was later debunked by experts who have taken time and effort to do that. But peer-reviewing does not allow reviewers to pause they own work to do such extensive checks. More realistically, the article passes the peer-reviewing process because the peer-reviewing process does what it is supposed to do: the article is "believable", it does not have things that looks not coming from the scientific process. The reviewers don't have time and it is in fact not even their jobs to redo the study. All they do is to check if the guidelines seem to be respected. If you want more than that, you want a "replication study", which is the next step in the scientific process of building trust on a study (and which also have difficulties). And, sure, they may have flagged that some conclusions may need more convincing demonstration, but it is a Gaussian curve: sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, some passes through the gaps. I think there is a problem with layman people who don't understand that the peer review process is not a magical tool that remove all the incorrect studies (on top of that, due to statistical fluctuation, some studies are false while the authors have done 100% everything perfectly). I'm not saying it's the case here, but this is one explanation that should not be ignored. Ironically, it is a bit funny that for your conclusion you jumped immediately on the story you wish to be true: social sciences or history are ideologically biased. This is a valid hypothesis, but not the only one explaining what we observe.
- tpmx 3y agoIt feels like almost every history-related research news item I've come across on HN lately on closer inspection appears to involve lots of guessing and wishful thinking, often in 3+ convoluted steps. I suppose only the most sensational things make it here and they probably tend to be more bogus than the non-sensational findings.
- 23B1 3y agoOne thing this article doesn't address is the pressure that many academics are under in the process of their research, and the 'meta-narrative' of their careers writ large. When you are competing for eyeballs, attention, grants, and tenure – when the community you work in is so small and so tightly networked – there can be a ton of pressure to make leaps of logic or narrative in order to paint a picture that resonates within that community. I'm not excusing this behavior, but I understand it. It's the same reason UX designers build dark patterns they know will degrade the experience, it's the same reason we vote along party lines, it's the same reason trends are adopted and movies become mega-blockbusters. In most cases – even in academia – the stakes are low and so it doesn't really matter. But the stakes are much greater when that academic research influences policy – especially in the medical and political fields. Supposedly peer review & professional codes of conduct are supposed to solve for much of this – but, to me anyway, doesn't seem sufficient these days for those higher-stakes fields of study...
- godelski 3y agoI wrote a longer post that has similar themes. I fully agree. The system encourages fast work and true believers. I think a big part is we try to run academics like a business. But it's very different and the goals should never be about direct profits. We often ask if our metrics make sense, but we fail to ask if there's easy ways to hack these same metrics.
- dang 3y agoRecent and related. Others? Does history have a replication crisis? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306078 - Aug 2023 (20 comments)
- webel0 3y agoThis essay seems to be nothing more than a rehash of, “Does history have a replication crisis?”
- Mr_Modulo 3y agoToday we have news for conservatives and different news for liberals. That's stupid. News doesn't need built in commentary. Now it seems like history is going the same way. We will have conservative history and liberal history. But I hope not.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoFairly sure this is wrong, on both fronts. History is story telling about a period of time for which we do not have easy access to all the information, nor full access to the participants and their motivations and self-conceptions. In addition, even with the benefit of hindsight, it is common to be unable to identify conclusively which possible elements of the story are the most significant (and as a corollary, which are cotemporal but irrelevant). Consequently, there are different ways to tell the story, and no "objective" set of rules to decide which to choose. Like all human story telling, history must come with a point of view that is critical in framing the elements used in the telling. Now repeat everything I've just said, but substitute "news" for "history".
- lsmeducation 3y agoI’ll do you you one better, replace everything with “bullshit”. History is susceptible to narratives because anything that isn’t clear cut (slavery, holocaust, etc) is open to subjective interpretation. It’s the conspiracy theorists that are the real wildcard in all of this. They will take the clear cut (slavery, holocaust) and make that open to subjective interpretation. Funny stuff.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoI tend to think of subjective interpretation as "That was good" or "This is bad". But there's something required beforehand: definining what this or that is. It's not really a subjective process, but it certainly isn't objective either. Before you can decide whether or not William the Conqueror's invasion of the British Isles was a good or a bad thing, you first need a description of how the invasion was carried out and "all" the consequences. But there is no "objective" or "clear cut" version of this. What do you include? What do you exclude?
- drewcoo 3y agoI strongly considered pursuing a PhD in history a couple of decades ago. I figured there was so much disprovable BS published following dominant narratives that it would be easy to make a mark as a debunker. Then I realized that if the problem was so widespread, I'd be up against the whole educational ecosystem.
- Apocryphon 3y agoPlenty of opportunity to [for a book](https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281 https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/07...) or [two](https://www.amazon.com/Lies-Across-America-Historic-Sites/dp/1620974339 https://www.amazon.com/Lies-Across-America-Historic-Sites/dp...)
- godelski 3y agoGuess what happens when you have to publish novel work frequently. About subjects that people have been writing about for decades or centuries. Not just that, but you don't get access to certain documents and archives unless you follow certain narratives of certain counties and regimes.
- allturtles 3y agoWhat you are describing basically just what all historians do. All historians are "debunkers," because to be doing novel research, they have to be disputing prior claims about their historical field of interest. e.g. Bulstrode is here "debunking" (incorrectly, it seems) the prevailing story about Cort's ironmaking progress.
- rectang 3y agoI would find this piece more convincing if it had sampled stories from different sources in service of its thesis rather than focusing on a single work the author finds particularly galling, as there is no shortage of fictional narratives anywhere — look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks. Given the narrowness of the material cited, this piece seems to me like unequal application of skepticism and status-quo gatekeeping.
- next_xibalba 3y ago> look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks. Care to practice what you preach? Which textbooks, specifically? How are they ahistorical?
- rectang 3y agoHere's an article which compares meta-narratives in Texas vs. California: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-c... Fights over textbook content are ancient and written about constantly. Since these battles are more heavily scrutinized outright falsehoods won't be found easily — rather meta-narratives are achieved by omission or emphasis. I would not argue that these meta-narratives are "ahistorical", though — rather, I would say that they reflect the interests of certain parties. Perspective is inseparable from "history".
- _gabe_ 3y ago> I would not argue that these meta-narratives are "ahistorical", though That seems to be what you were claiming though in your original comment: > as there is no shortage of fictional narratives anywhere — look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks.
- slau 3y agoAs I read this thread in the early morning before the family rouses, my tired eyes keep misreading “ahistorical” as “shitstorical”, which, amusingly enough, isn’t far off the intended meaning.
- verisimi 3y agoHistory is written by the victors, and then endlessly rewritten after that. At present, historians are very busy writing the history of subaltern voices - ie introducing stories from marginalised perspectives into the historical record. At the other end of this sausage factory are the consumers who are fed this information which is presented as fact - hardly ever are we presented with the raw evidence that these stories are based on. I'm very glad that this angle on history is receiving greater attention; it is absolutely equivalent to the replication crisis in science. It seems that all academic endeavours are politicised and bent towards some ends that are predetermined - rather than a natural unfolding of ever increasing understanding.
- HPsquared 3y ago"I never discuss anything else except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss." -GK Chesterton Every thought is subject to the ideology in the thinker's mind.
- verisimi 3y agoIt is. But academic fields (perhaps all fields across society) are all bent towards a progressive liberal outlook. This outlook is also highly intolerant of divergent views - if they disagree with your voice, they will not fight for your right to speak anyway - you will be deplatformed. That intolerance is the most pernicious element to me.
- rectang 3y agoThis piece does the opposite of acknowledging that history is written by the victors. It it is an attack on the credibility of a particular perspective, striving to paint the author's opponents as fictional story tellers while the author is objective and rational.
- verisimi 3y agoHistory ought to be an evidence driven practise - the evidence (primary, secondary, tertiary) should drive the theory. It ought to be the scientific method applied to historical evidence. As I read this post, the author is saying that Bulstrode had very little or no evidence to claim the story that was then widely circulated in many media outlets. The author is using that one example to illustrate a wider principle in play - that not many of the historical stories are based in sound reasoning. This is my assessment too. If there is little or no evidence, where is the greater bias? Is it in the person that conjures up the story (Bulstrode) or in the author who is saying the story is not well supported?
- demondemidi 3y ago[flagged]
- lsmeducation 3y agoI just hate everybody if you need an anecdote that HNers don’t hate historians in particular.
- iepathos 3y agoHistorians aren't hated here, rather sensationalism at the expense of facts and logic are despised here. Finding people leaning towards sensationalism across media types and disciplines unfortunately. Techies here are especially sensitive to click-bait and articles devoid of evidence to back up their claims.
- rectang 3y agoThere's great synergy between critics of non-mainstream historians and the voting apparatus of HN which ensures that unpopular perspectives are rendered unreadable.
- reckon3r 3y agoIsn't "ideological emotional-string pulling" what the original historian was after by writing a story that fit the current popular narrative within academia? Wouldn't holding one fraudulent historian accountable be withholding the credibility of historians, rather than 'despise'ing them? Are you not the nihilist to be so pessimistic about the intentions of people who agree that the story was fabricated for popularity? Honest questions that I would be interested in hearing a response to.
- dotancohen 3y ago> The discipline, or a sub-set of it, has become helplessly in thrall > to one of the archetypal narrative forms: Good vs Evil. Naturally, > the academics are on the side of the Good. I find that this sums up more academic works that I feel comfortable admitting. And not just in the arts, but also in some of the less rigorous sciences as well, such as history and psychology.
- rectang 3y agoI think that "helplessly in thrall to one of the archetypal narrative forms: Good vs Evil" sums up everyone commenting on this page who claims that their version of history is objective, while that of [insert opponent here] is not.
- goatlover 3y agoNo, they're saying the claims made about Henry Cort in a paper lack historical evidence in favor of telling an ideological story, which shouldn't have passed peer review. A couple of historians have already done the fact checking. Edit: Oh I misread your post. You're referring to commenters critiquing ideological opponents, not the author.
- zogrodea 3y agoThat excerpt you quoted reminds very much of Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History. The introduction starts by directly talking about that topic, on page 3 of the following PDF if anyone cares to read a little. He starts talking about the perception of the historian as an avenger, beating the high and haughty while raising the downtrodden, and that it would be better for the historian to be a reconciler instead rather than one who divides large swathes of humanity in good and evil, black and white. He prefers a historian who finds common unity between two different sides and pities these two sides who perhaps had no pity for the other. His comments in the intro also touch on a phrase I personally dislike, "the right side of history". http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Butterfield,_The_Whig_Interpretation_of_History_highlights.pdf http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Butterfield,...
- deleted 3y ago
- troupe 3y agoIncreasingly? Herodotus comes to mind.
- swagasaurus-rex 3y ago> And so, Herodotus – the myth-maker – talks up the Spartiates at Thermopylae (you know, the brave 300) and quietly leaves out the other Laconians (who, if you scrutinize his numbers, he knows must be there, to the tune of c. 900 men), downplaying the other Greeks. Spartan leadership is lionized, even when it makes stupid mistakes. Thermopylae, to be clear, was a military disaster and Spartan intransigence nearly loses the battle of Plataea, but Herodotus represents this as boldness in the face of the enemy https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/ https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
- QuadmasterXLII 3y agoSir you are getting in the way of telling the story of modern decadence
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brindlejim 3y agoThe title slightly obscures what's going on here. It's not *just* about stories. It's about the propagation of a dogma in academia. The paper in question is 1619, but for Industrial Age metallurgy. And one of the reasons that lies like this make it through the review process is because academics are afraid of challenging racialist narratives. They win their jobs and promotions by toeing an ideological line.
- coding123 3y agoI think that's what's called rewriting the history books. The narrative du jour causes people to fit everything in a neat little box. Clicks, views -> land better jobs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 10g1k 3y agoAustralia's most famous historian, Charles Clark (called himself Manning Clark to be special) admitted before he died that he made things up, because he was more interested in telling a story fitting his own ideas, rather than reporting facts. They still name roads and such after the guy.
- ggm 3y agoThis is an exceptionally hot take. Manning was Charles Manning Hope Clark. You can verify this easily. His status in Australian history is mixed, because of the strong left/right axis of history as a field in Australia. Manning Clark was unquestionably of the left. The Australian, and its tame philosopher-historian Gerard Henderson makes much of this, and Manning Clark being awarded an order of Lenin for history by the Soviets. Guess what? The Australian, Keith Windschuttle and others reject Aboriginal "black armband" history, working class history, and dislike Manning Clark immensely. They are unquestionably of the right (side) I suspect you're partisan in this war. "making things up" has been part of what Historians do since Thucydides. We don't call it making things up but any time you see the word "infer" you can go there. History is complicated. Even documents don't tell the whole story. Do you think Cabinet Minutes record verbatim what everyone said?
- Almondsetat 3y ago>"making things up" has been part of what Historians do since Thucydides historians up until quite recently had nothing to do with the modern academic profession. they were paid writers who made tons of stuff up to sing praises to whomever would pay them.
- thagsimmons 3y agoReading Windschuttle's "Fabrication of Aboriginal History" along with the heavily critical responses in "Whitewash" was a fascinating intellectual exercise. I went in quite neutral on the issue and came out convinced that, while there are some factual issues in Winschuttle's account, the thrust of his argument was correct and that Australian history was in deep trouble as a discipline. The essays in Whitewash show all the weaknesses described in the article above - they are filled with motivated reasoning by people who are very strongly constrained in the conclusions they are able to reach, both by ideology and by social pressures from their peers. https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/1876492058/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1 https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/1876492058/ref=dbs_a_de... https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Windschuttles-Fabrication-Aboriginal-Melbourne/dp/0975076906 https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Windschuttles-Fabrication-A...
- Animats 3y ago1780 was way late for claiming the invention of a slitting mill. The first slitting mill in the Americas was built around 1640. It still exists, as a historical site and museum.[1] Some of the original slitting rollers for making bar stock are on display.[2] That wasn't the first slitting mill; there were earlier ones in Britain. [1] https://www.nps.gov/sair/index.htm https://www.nps.gov/sair/index.htm [2] https://www.nps.gov/sair/planyourvisit/placestogo.htm https://www.nps.gov/sair/planyourvisit/placestogo.htm
- spiantino 3y agoI think a slitting mill is a different thing than the iron foundries described here
- OJFord 3y agoThe claim is that that is when the Cort process was invented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cort#Rolling_mill_and_puddling_furnace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cort#Rolling_mill_and_pu... Wikipedia also says Cort was born around 1740, so that's a good lower bound even if the 1780s patents came a little late ;)
- WalterBright 3y agoThese attempts to rewrite history to fit a narrative happen all the time. For example, I see constant attempts to deny that the Wrights' 1903 Flyer was the first powered, controlled flight. The evidence presented is always a pile of fanciful conjecture. This rewrite occurs with modern events, too. For example, the narrative on the 737MAX crashes. I've posted about it here many times. On a recent trip, I ran into a 737-800 captain on layover, and struck up a conversation. I chided him a bit about remembering the stab trim cutoff switch. Well, that opened the floodgates. He told me in no uncertain terms that those accidents would have never happened to him, because he knew how to fly the 737. He told me one way they could have recovered the airplane was the one I mentioned here many times - trim to normal and turn off the stab trim system. He said there was another way. The EA airplane was operating at full throttle. The overspeed warning could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder. The pilots ignored it. Overspeed is a very dangerous situation, as the air loads on the airplane exceed design limits. All the pilots had to do was just pull the throttle back. Then they could have manually retrimmed the stabilizer, which they tried to but could not because of the overspeed. He added that all the 737 pilots he knew knew about this, but were afraid to speak up. Remember all the narrative about the pilots could not have diagnosed stab trim runaway? This infuriated him, because when the trim runs, it spins two wheels right by the pilots' knees, making a loud and unmistakable clack-clacking sound. Something I was told about by Boeing engineers, but it was nice to hear it from a captain. I suspect that the reason the single point of failure design of the MCAS went through is Boeing simply assumed that the pilots would just turn off the stab trim system if it misbehaved. And this is exactly what happened in the first MCAS incident - the crew turned it off, and continued the flight normally and landed safely.
- jncfhnb 3y agoAs someone who did not follow this in great detail, I don’t anyone claiming it was not possible to diagnose, merely that the signals towards it were very poor and that training for things was bad, and that the crews that experienced crashes had fewer safety features than typical western crews or something like that. Your position here seems zany to me. Clack clacking sounds are not sufficient. Assuming that pilots would just turn off the system is not sufficient.
- anonuser123456 3y ago"Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories which gain attention and make ‘impact’" Asserted without evidence in an opinion piece arguing for the use of evidence. Not super compelling. Historian's have had incentives for dramatic narratives since the age of Homer.
- asu_thomas 3y agoSee: increasingly strong
- raxxorraxor 3y agoI wouldn't know how you would be able to present evidence of this, but the economic realities of liberals arts and niche fields of research is a pretty well known circumstance. Funding arctic expeditions and research tends to be easier if you find some man-eating killer penguins that were frozen in the ice and now resurface due to climate change. Getting funding is politics and politics needs to make headlines. Since headlines do get more sensationalist due to the attention economy, it could be concluded that scientific claims have to follow the trend. The example given about the iron inventions was likewise asserted without evidence and purely from conjecture (at least that is how it is described). This is no empirical evidence to prove a systemic effect, but nevertheless interesting.
- mihaaly 3y agoThe writing is reporting on a sensationalist article praised by peers and famed by media debunked perhaps completely by an other article with a potential motive picked that is not too far from what we all experience in the sensationalist world around us but now sweeping into peer reviewed articles too. What sort of evidentic proof you need that measures the incresing (observe the meaning of this word please when referring to Homer) incentives for being sensationalist exactly? Is there some sort of objectic measurement for dramatic storitelling you miss? Isn't enough considering this piece what it is as an educated speculation on what has happened here? Must not come up with a theory before have all the empirically evidence forming an ironclad around it?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chargingmarmot 3y agoTyler Cowen gave a great TED talk on a related topic: "Be suspicious of simple stories" (2009) https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_simple_stories?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_simpl... (Because it's such a great story I still remember the talk a decade later.) """ So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm wondering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? One story you might be like the story of the quest. "Tyler was a man on a quest. Tyler came here, and he told us not to think so much in terms of stories." That would be a story you could tell about this talk. It would fit a pretty well-known pattern. You might remember it. You could tell it to other people. "This weird guy came, and he said, 'Don't think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!'" And you tell your story. Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories but then I heard Tyler Cowen and now I think less in terms of stories!" That too is a narrative you will remember, you can tell to other people, and again, it may stick. You also could tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories about how other people think too much in terms of stories. """
- gdwhther 3y agoSame with climate change stories.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoYeah, but we aren't supposed to say that. We are supposed to agree that it's the end of the world and run around screaming and flailing our arms like Kermit the frog.
- skibidiboop 3y agoThe difference there is you can just look at the numbers and see that climate change is a slow-motion catastrophe. No amount of spin or storytelling can change the facts that temps are rising, icecaps are melting, Canadian forests are incinerating at record levels, etc. etc.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoThe Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by the Iraqi military setting fire to a reported 605 to 732 oil wells along with an unspecified number of oil filled low-lying areas...The fires were started in January and February 1991, and the first oil well fires were extinguished in early April 1991, with the last well capped on November 6, 1991. It was predicted by experts that the fires would burn for between two and five years before losing pressure and going out on their own. Although scenarios that predicted long-lasting environmental impacts on a global atmospheric level due to the burning oil sources did not transpire, long-lasting ground level oil spill impacts were detrimental to the environment regionally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires Over the years, I have read story after story after story where the initial predictions were extremely dire and everyone was extremely upset and concerned and when things got cleared up in relatively short order, there was no celebration on par with the amount of bellyaching that occurred. But if you try to say anything like that, you get dismissed as a clueless nutter who just does not understand how bad things are. So regardless of how bad it really is, we still are emphasizing things in a way that is inaccurate and excessively negative.
- paganel 3y agoThat's why La longue durée put forward by the Annales School and by Braudel is the way to go, because with all its minuses it focuses not on the individuals or on specific events, but on the great "waves" of history. So, and back to the article, in that respect for the Annales School it doesn't really matter if it was Cort or a Jamaican man that "invented" the "Cort process". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_dur%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_dur%C3%A9e
- pomodoro1980 3y ago[dead]
- mycall 3y agoSign of the times in a nutshell.
- totetsu 3y agoI didn't read this (and i don't plan to) but; I thought that the oldest of human history was recorded aurally in songs, ballads and epics, where the more dramatic things were the better they could be remembered. So to call the incentive to be dramatic increasing, is to selective over which time frame you are talking.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- theonlybutlet 3y agoWe just have to look to History channel to see this effect on the wider public, it was only a matter of time.
- hef19898 3y agoThe History Channel is entertainment, it never was anything else, especially history.
- godelski 3y ago[dead]
- theonlybutlet 3y agoIt was always dramaticised and perhaps from a certain point of view. But they've taken it to the next level, just look at ancient aliens.
- hef19898 3y agoAncient aliens are myth. As shown, the forst contact we had was in 50s, Jeff Goldblum can testify for that (I saw it on TV and in the cinema). But yes, this whole edutainment thing got way way to far. Edit: Or aren't they? I think there might be an ancient pyramid under some glacier on some antarctic island...
- theonlybutlet 3y agoLol yes that's what I mean. Perhaps back in the day the day it was dramaticized script, but the overall story was based on historic record. Nowadays it's completely made up reality TV bullshit.
- godelski 3y agoLet's think about academia for a second and the metrics we use. You must publish often and your work most be "novel." The more novel, the more prestige, the more frequent the faster you rise. This is a system that's problematic for science, but crazy in humanities. One reason in science is it discourages replication. But there is a parallel here in something like history, reinvestigation. Something like the Roman Empire is well studied and there's lower novelty to be gained. But do we want to discourage such research? Discourage modern people for maintaining such records? Under the current system, we can encourage these people to continue studying popular areas but do we encourage maintaining historical truth and integrity? I conjecture that the answer is no. It encourages making things up, especially to fit a modern narrative. It's a system that makes people not know they're lying because they are true believers and no credible experts push back. This isn't a problem unique to the study of history, but you can find issues like this is all research in academia. It is very hard to measure the quality of research. Citations, h-index, and so on do not mean a lot. We've seen in the past few months very popular researchers found to be frauds, with high positions in prestigious institution like Stanford. Even in practical areas that should be treatable: psychology, medicine, machine learning, and more. We want to believe, but do we have strong evidence and strong understanding? We make easy metrics at first to be "good enough" or because we lack better ones. But we often forget the limitations of those metrics as time goes by because we get caught up in the rat race. You can't just ask yourself if the metric makes sense, but instead need to ask if there's an easier way to score on the metric that isn't the intended object of measurement. We can see here that citations can be hacked easily by fun stories, surprising results, and we'll never uncover them because the only people who attempt to replicate are those in junior positions like undergrads and grad students, who are more likely to question their results than the original work. Those failures never get written about. Science is really about progressing knowledge. Publications are really about communication. Both these are very vague and can be accomplished in many different ways. I say instead of making narrow easy to define metrics that will never be good enough we embrace the chaos and noise. Let the researchers be free and let ̶G̶o̶d̶ time sort it out. We don't know what is good research until 5-20 years down the line. We don't know who's a good teacher until the same. By removing the metrics you force nuance to not be ignored. Most of the time it's a "know it when you see it" definition and if that's true we have to be careful about levels of confidence. The thing that makes us human is the ability to handle nuance. It is what differentiates us from animals and LLMs. If the downside is that in a field where people are required to think hard and carefully have to... Think hard and carefully, then that's okay. ML is very successful with the arxiv model because despite much hype, noise, and even many bad actors, us researchers can sniff it out. We have to do it anyways, as that's our job. I fear if we don't fix things we will continue to just degrade our foundation. We've seen this experiment fail over the last century. It's time to just get rid of the bureaucracy. Let academics be academics. Micromanagement isn't helping. Research can take decades, but people concerned with the next quarter will never allow that. Academics is about risks, challenging the status quo, and nuance. It is not to be run like a business. I am happy for this sector to not be profitable because I know the profits are indirect and benefit everyone. But returns on investments may take centuries, and that's okay.
- adaml_623 3y agoIs this in the top 10 things I should know about history?
- slowmovintarget 3y agoA recent paper [1] purporting to reveal "the evils of imperial Britain, stealing from black slaves" is shown to be utter nonsense [2], and the article charitably blames "story" for the failure of academia to declaim the paper. [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2023.2220991 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2023.2... [2] https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rp5ae/ https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rp5ae/
- martindbp 3y agoI don't think "Stories are bad for your intelligence" is the right conclusion here, more like "ideologically motivated thinking is bad for your intelligence". As another piece of evidence for this I can recall from Superforecasters that the ones who did the worst at forecasting were ideologically motivated people and people with "one big idea".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qznc 3y agoStories make things memorable. That is useful and not bad for intelligence. Simple example: An apple dropped on his head and so he discovered gravity. Story telling is a tool which can be misused to make wrong or bad things memorable.
- Fluorescence 3y agoIt's interesting to try and define what good and bad forecasting is. When you consider the outsized calamity of black swans, it is practical to have some diversity of prediction, not unanimity around a single prediction. You don't want to over-value predicting non-extreme events, you need that Israeli 10th man to persuade others of the improbable to ensure your plan is resilient. The insightful ideologue will be right about the intentions of a Hitler... but they also predict a few too many Hitlers.
- martindbp 3y agoSure, but ideologically motivated reasoning will only provide "broken clock" predictions. What good forecasters would do with hard-to-predict events like the pandemic, the next recession or political revolution is to admit ignorance and revert to the base rate (e.g. once a century on average). Truly black swan events are things we don't even know we should try to predict. An example of ideologically motivated reasoning would be "The US is about to collapse because Biden/Trump is president". Unfortunately many if not most people think like this, that's one reason why so few are good at forecasting according to the book.
- bArray 3y ago> Bulstrode hasn’t yet responded to Jelf or Howes in public, but it’s hard to see how her paper can be creditably defended. > I doubt that Bulstrode set out to deceive. No, I think she did. If your intentions are good, you would address the concerns and correct the record. Those around her have a _duty_ to strongly encourage her to do so, otherwise they are complicit. > It’s one thing for a young and passionate academic to make mistakes; it’s quite another for a series of experienced academics to let her make them. The reason these other experienced academics are onboard is because it fits a narrative that has involved rewriting history in front of our very eyes. You just need to take a quick look at the language used, it has swallowed academia. To get grants in academia now (particularly in some spaces), you have to justify how it will have some form of social justice impact. The work itself could be completely abstract, but now the results are tainted by the lens you were forced to put on the work in order to receive funding. I am not surprised for example that a University funded a history paper that showed Jamaican metallurgists used ancient black magic, but it was stolen by the evil white man. There are some pockets of academics holding out, but they evaporate quickly. They are leaving academia and receiving a minimum of double salary in the private sector. Expect to see more and more work like this come out of academia, as they replace these people with those who echo the proper narrative to get the grant funding.
- throwaway2037 3y agoThey are leaving academia and receiving a minimum of double salary in the private sector. Historians? If so, can you name a few example? I find this hard to believe.
- rightbyte 3y agoGood academics don't need to work in their field. Just any generic clerk position will do.
- zztop44 3y agoI have a friend who was a historian and now works as a data analyst for a SEO agency and makes more than double their previous salary. They had no particular expertise in SEO or data beyond being able to use Excel and being able to think and write clearly.
- RugnirViking 3y agoIronically the thesis is not that strong but the story within is compelling
- fefe23 3y agoIronically this article is in itself a compelling narrative. You might even call it a dramatic story! :-) Joking aside: I found this very interesting, probably because it's a topic I have literally zero exposure to normally. Now I'd like to hear the other side.
- hef19898 3y agoBy education I am an industrial engineer. I also am a hobby historian, read I like reading on history. As a result, the industrial revolution and historical impact of manufacturing technology is right down my ally. I jave to say, I love it when historians, and those come with all kinds of secondary expertise, try talking about post-industrial technology (and sometimes earlier one, generally zhose are easiwr to understand on a superficial.level, but then some e.g. Roman engineering feats are hard to get without a proper engineering or crafts background) without a solid knowledge basis. Results range from hilarious to ignorant to outright embarassing. Not sure what category the article, and the paper, fall in. I'll settle for hilarious.
- choudharism 3y agoYou're saying it has gotten stronger since Herodotus?
- scotty79 3y agoI started to hate natratives. The narratives authors construct reflect their biases. If their bias is weird enough it gets popular (because it's not boring). It's most attractive for people that are already (lightly) biased in the same direction. It makes them more biased. All it does is draw people away from correct understanding of objective reality. And yet narratives are praised as a way to understand reality better. So if you want to indulge in fantasies of twisted minds about how the world works read literature. If you want to improve your model of reality read a coursebook or a manual.
- cwmoore 3y ago"to warn against 'story bias'. Cowen argues that any time someone believes in a story they are effectively subtracting ten points from their IQ (by which he means, broadly speaking, their analytical intelligence)"
- yttribium 3y agoCourt historians telling the stories the ruling class wants in an effort to buttress their legitimacy is absolutely not new.
- hdarshane 3y agointriguing to consider how many personal/oral accounts of historical events might be exaggerated simply due to the witness' propensity to signal an "I was there" type of notion to others.
- bumbledraven 3y ago> Cowen argues that any time someone believes in a story they are effectively subtracting ten points from their IQ… Cowed proposed that rule of thumb for stories about good and evil, not stories in general. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/they-have-transcribed-my-tedx-talk-on-stories.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/th... It’s puzzling to me how an essay about factual inaccuracies would include such an easily checked misstatement.
- pyinstallwoes 3y agoNot only do they have strong incentives, they collectively organize to change the way they frame the stories based on the zeitgeist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography
- goodbyesf 3y agoSince the epic of gilgamesh, bible, homer, etc, historians have been dramatic. There is a reason why history is called 'his story'. The best and most dramatic story, usually favored by the elites, get tolds. More often than not, historians are commissioned by the elites to write stories. Even today.
- jeegsy 3y agoWhile the author is of course correct in his assessment, I do wonder if he is doing the same thing. Certainly his point could be better or at least simpler made without such a "dramatic" attack on storytelling. Stories make us less intelligent?!! Easy does it lad!