41–50 of 256 posts
I 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.
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?
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".
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
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 bot…
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/co…
Meta analysis such as this, based on hearsay rather than personal verification and assessment of the actual evidence, is assuredly not the way to get to the truth of the matter.
> 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.
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,...
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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…
A state-approved high-school textbook is subject to myriad business and political agendas that practically, by definition, compromise its truth and accuracy.
A peer-reviewed scholarly publication is supposed to have a chain back to actual sources and facts that anchors it in spite of any agenda or narrative it may propound.
The issue here is that Bulstrode presented a bunch of claims with no evidence or even contradicting evidence in the actual sources she cites. There are also some engineering issues: sugar mill rollers are oriented differently from steel mill rollers because they serve very different purposes.
The comment from here was good: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-cort-case
> Historians, myself included, often make leaps of intuition from limited evidence. But speculation ought to be explicitly signalled as such, rather than presented as certainty. Especially when that certainty creates a narrative so compelling that it makes major newspaper headlines. Bulstrode’s narrative requires multiple smoking guns to work, none of which are in the evidence she presents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
And if it is true, then this A.I. review method can also be applied to mathematics, theoretical physics, computer science, ...
And even if it is doable, you will still have things that will pass the review process when ideally it should not. It is just an hard limitation, same as the one in "justice" (impossible to not sometimes judge a guilty person "innocent" or an innocent person "guilty", anyone who thinks otherwise just don't understand how complicated it is)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?