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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

#101

Post by WalterBright »

tiahura wrote: post #79
WalterBright wrote: post #63

These 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 73…

Isn’t one of the legit criticisms of the max is that the behavior of the cutoff switch and the thumb control was changed without announcing it? Update from YKW: Yes, the trim system behavior in the 737 MAX differed from that in older 737 models like the 737NG (Next Generation). In older models, manually adjusting the trim using the thumb switch would generally interrupt and disable automatic trim adjustments, includi…

The MCAS system could be overridden with the electric thumb switches, and both crews did just that.

What they didn't do is then turn it off. The stab trim cutoff switch turns it off. When the MCAS reactivated, then it was time to cut it off.

The LA crew restored trim to normal with the thumb switches 25 times.

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

#102

Post by thagsimmons »

ggm wrote: post #82
10g1k wrote: post #53

Australia'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.

This 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 t…

Reading 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_de...

https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Windschuttles-Fabrication-A...

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #98
WalterBright wrote: post #63

These 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 73…

[deleted]

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by paganel »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #25
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

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…

> 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.

Funny, it's similar to "forced" mentions of Marxism inserted apparently at will in social science books/papers written in Romanian back when the Wall was still up. Towards the later years of the communist government being in power those Marx insertions had been replaced by quotes to what Ceausescu had said.

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

#105

Post by skibidiboop »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #91
gdwhther wrote: post #90

Same with climate change stories.

Yeah, 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.

The 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.

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

#106

Post by paganel »

nextaccountic wrote: post #36
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/co…

I'd say the monks and the society they represented were the winners in the middle to long term, after all the vikings that had gotten to the Loire and those whereabouts ended up speaking French and "becoming" French themselves, and not the other way round.

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

#107

Post by whatshisface »

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…

>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.

Sorry, but if the paper doesn't make its case, it isn't an academic work. If it needs to be 1,000 papers in order to explain why its assertions are reliable, great, that's 1,000 good papers to write. :)*

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

#108

Post by DanielVZ »

zeroCalories wrote: post #15
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…

I have mixed feelings on this. While trivially it's true that we need to compress the world with stories, I do think there is a problem with people constructing grand narratives. We should be moving away from "story" and towards "hypothesis" so that we don't commit too strongly to a story that isn't supported by evidence.

IMO academic Historians love when their hypotheses are challenged, it shows a path for further understanding history, and writing an article with a richer narrative.

That’s what I saw during my History degree from my professors and the books i read.

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

#109

Post by DoreenMichele »

skibidiboop wrote: post #105
DoreenMichele wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 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.

The 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.

The 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

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.

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