4 ms·

There must be incredible pressure on historians to be contrarians. Who is going to pay any attention if you are like "yeah, I've been employing novel technique

There must be incredible pressure on historians to be contrarians. Who is going to pay any attention if you are like "yeah, I've been employing novel techniques and new tech and discovered that all the stuff everyone has been saying is spot on" Not criticizing this article in particular but I am skeptical of this sort of stuff because I feel like the outcome of the research is predetermined.

socalgal2 8mo ago
Yea, well, how do historians from ~100 BC really have any clue what actually happened 100-300 years previously. Even down to claiming so-and-so said "..."
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 8mo ago
  You can say the same thing about what happened 200-300 years ago. The thing is major events tend to have a lot of remnants left behind, nobody is going to pretend the American Civil war didn’t happen. The specifics of any given battle quickly get murky, and lesser events only have so many witnesses. Degrees of verification are a thing. LBJ being the US president isn’t in doubt. My family story where a relative was studying at the white house (with his daughter) and he came in and told them not to have so many lights in is jumping through a bunch of hops before it gets to you so you should only put so much weight on it. And that’s history in a nutshell.
mmooss 8mo ago
> contrarians There is pressure to discover something new, to publish. That does not require being contrary.
cryptonector 8mo ago
If it's media attention they want, you'd be right, but in fact you have the opposite pressure because no one wants to be judged a quack by their colleagues. You know what Max Planck said about how science advances, right? One obituary at a time.
hippo22 8mo ago
I’m sure there is pressure to be contrarian, but there’s also a huge amount of shared delusion. It’s completely illogical to assume one can know much about society thousands of years ago unless there is widespread evidence. And yet, archeologists frequently present their isolated “findings” as facts.

socalgal2 8mo ago

Yea, well, how do historians from ~100 BC really have any clue what actually happened 100-300 years previously. Even down to claiming so-and-so said "..."

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
Retric 8mo ago
You can say the same thing about what happened 200-300 years ago. The thing is major events tend to have a lot of remnants left behind, nobody is going to pretend the American Civil war didn’t happen. The specifics of any given battle quickly get murky, and lesser events only have so many witnesses. Degrees of verification are a thing. LBJ being the US president isn’t in doubt. My family story where a relative was studying at the white house (with his daughter) and he came in and told them not to have so many lights in is jumping through a bunch of hops before it gets to you so you should only put so much weight on it. And that’s history in a nutshell.

mmooss 8mo ago

> contrarians There is pressure to discover something new, to publish. That does not require being contrary.

cryptonector 8mo ago

If it's media attention they want, you'd be right, but in fact you have the opposite pressure because no one wants to be judged a quack by their colleagues. You know what Max Planck said about how science advances, right? One obituary at a time.

hippo22 8mo ago

I’m sure there is pressure to be contrarian, but there’s also a huge amount of shared delusion. It’s completely illogical to assume one can know much about society thousands of years ago unless there is widespread evidence. And yet, archeologists frequently present their isolated “findings” as facts.