Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

ian-leslie.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 256 posts

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

#31

Post by rectang »

dotancohen wrote: post #30

> 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.

I 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.

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

#33

Post by jowea »

simbolit wrote: post #3

I 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 s…

And I naively thought meta-narratives in history were supposed to be over decades ago.

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

#34

Post by iepathos »

demondemidi wrote: post #29

[flagged]

Historians 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.

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

#35

Post by lsmeducation »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #21
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…

I’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.

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

#36

Post by nextaccountic »

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…

> History is written by the victors

Not necessarily; history is written by those that are literate. Here's some threads about it

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xcqgc/they_a...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1903ac/is_hi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/516t6c/is_hi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2becnq/i_hea...

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/5grjf1/how_true_is...

A selected quote

> well, in case of the Vikings it was mostly the other way round. The monks who got plundered were the "literate class" of their time, hence in this case it was written by the "losers".

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

#38

Post by verisimi »

rectang wrote: post #26
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.

History 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?

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

#39

Post by lsmeducation »

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.

It feels like you just described war propaganda. Americans lie one way, the Russians the other. The better question is why are we in a war over current events (to your point over the news). Left propaganda and Right propaganda, for some invisible war.

The low hanging fruit to me appears to be the fact that propaganda is profitable, ::shrugs::

Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use.

Edit: this actually got downvoted, yikes

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

#40

Post by Apocryphon »

cauch wrote: post #24
supazek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 tha…

> 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.

Since this is about checking textual references, as opposed to laboratory work, would it be possible for an LLM to do that? Seems like the hardest thing would be for the A.I. to log into the requisite gateways for the databases hosting the papers.

Post reply on HN