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Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

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Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#21

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Mr_Modulo wrote: post #14

Today 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.

Fairly 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".

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#22

Post by verisimi »

History 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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#23

Post by HPsquared »

verisimi wrote: post #22

History 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 stor…

"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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#24

Post by cauch »

supazek wrote: post #16
whatshisface wrote: post #7

I 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.

>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

But 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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#25

Post by OfSanguineFire »

supazek wrote: post #16
whatshisface wrote: post #7

I 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.

>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

I provide language revision for academics who are non-native speakers of English, so I read a hell of a lot of papers, theses, and grant applications, while also continuing to publish and peer-review in my own field. My impression is that peer review in the social sciences and history isn’t necessarily the major force for conformance to whatever contemporary social narratives. Papers often deal with minutiae, and both author and peer reviewers alike are nerds who like delving into those minutiae. They don’t necessarily want to be drawn into any wider topic like in the case of the paper discussed in this article.

Rather, the force for ideological conformity may instead be funding bodies. I have seen so many grant applications where the author(s) clearly want to explore minutiae, but are forced to appeal to some grand social-justice cause in order to secure funding. I’ve participated through series of revisions of grant applications where 2–3 paragraphs claiming the research would benefit some minority or another, are inserted at a late stage after someone mentions that the application would stand no chance without them.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#26

Post by rectang »

verisimi wrote: post #22

History 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 stor…

This 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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#27

Post by verisimi »

HPsquared wrote: post #23
verisimi wrote: post #22

History 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 stor…

"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.

It 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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#28

Post by next_xibalba »

rectang wrote: post #19

I 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 skept…

> look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks.

Care to practice what you preach? Which textbooks, specifically? How are they ahistorical?

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#30

Post by dotancohen » 

  > 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.
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