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Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

ian-leslie.com

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

#171

Post by stareatgoats »

bArray wrote: post #158

> Bulstrode hasn’t yet responded to Jelf or Howes in public, but it’s hard to see how her paper can be creditably defended. > I doubt that Bulstrode set out to deceive. No, I think she did. If your intentions are good, you would address the concerns and correct the record. Those around her have a _duty_ to strongly encourage her to do so, otherwise they are complicit. > It’s one thing for a young and passionate acade…

I don't think she set out to deceive, and your stated reasons for thinking so don't pan out. I believe the author of the article is right: historians have to be conscious of their narrative or the narrative will write the history. That's not being deceptive in the normal sense of the word, it's catering to a perceived true narrative, and unconsciously suppressing anything that might undermine it.

Politicians do it all the time, but historians in particular should not do it. They still do: in this case painting a skewed picture of the ingenious slave, in other cases they might paint a picture of the glorious supremacy of the western civilization.

Not getting caught in such narratives is ... difficult.

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

#172

Post by nvm0n2 »

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 The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them.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…

> This article was later debunked by experts who have taken time and effort to do that

It was debunked by a single non-academic with no publishing track record, who is currently completing a master's thesis. In other words it could have been debunked by anyone.

> the article passes the peer-reviewing process because the peer-reviewing process does what it is supposed to do

Indeed, it passed the process because the process is designed to create the illusion of consensus and credibility without actually blocking false claims. It worked wonderfully here.

> I think there is a problem with layman people

Yes that's right, those unwashed masses who expect scholars to not make shit up, who are these scoundrels? Do they not understand how the great processes of discovery work?

> social sciences or history are ideologically biased. This is a valid hypothesis, but not the only one explaining what we observe.

Yes it is the only one explaining what we observe. The claims were made up, completed with fake references, there is no scope for statistical P-hacking "oh bad luck old boy" explanations here (not that they're acceptable anyway).

It's not just scholars, the whole left is like this. Black Woman With Magical Powers is by now a Netflix trope. You can guess the plot of a lot of post-2015 Hollywood output just by looking at the race of the characters. This sort of scam is exactly what we'd expect from an academic culture in a state of advanced decay.

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

#173

Post by rightbyte »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #164
bArray wrote: post #158

> Bulstrode hasn’t yet responded to Jelf or Howes in public, but it’s hard to see how her paper can be creditably defended. > I doubt that Bulstrode set out to deceive. No, I think she did. If your intentions are good, you would address the concerns and correct the record. Those around her have a _duty_ to strongly encourage her to do so, otherwise they are complicit. > It’s one thing for a young and passionate acade…

They are leaving academia and receiving a minimum of double salary in the private sector. Historians? If so, can you name a few example? I find this hard to believe.

Good academics don't need to work in their field. Just any generic clerk position will do.

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

#174

Post by nvm0n2 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #40
cauch wrote: post #24

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…

It probably can be done, but does the academic establishment really want word to get out that their great research is being auto-reviewed because the "peers" were so bad at their job that an AI can do better? They've spent decades pushing the idea that peer review is a gold standard on the world, it would be quite a climbdown to admit ChatGPT can do it better.

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

#175

Post by harry8 »

hathchip wrote: post #168
harry8 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anytime school textbooks are mentioned I feel the urge to refer anyone who'll listen to the relevant chapter of "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" Feynman is popular around here and rightly so. Blatant corruption from top to bottom is the norm, it would seem. Feynman also loathed psychology and gave it as an example of "Cargo-cult science." Last I heard every single first year psych texbook contained the Stanford pri…

Ironically "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" is a great example of what the article talks about: compelling and repeatable stories whose basis in fact is often extremely dubious.

Ironically your story is dubious, but less compelling than Feynman's anecdotes.

My comment is as cheap as yours for illustration purposes. I don't believe Feynman fabricated his stories of textbook corruption. Do you?

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

#176

Post by zztop44 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #164
bArray wrote: post #158

> Bulstrode hasn’t yet responded to Jelf or Howes in public, but it’s hard to see how her paper can be creditably defended. > I doubt that Bulstrode set out to deceive. No, I think she did. If your intentions are good, you would address the concerns and correct the record. Those around her have a _duty_ to strongly encourage her to do so, otherwise they are complicit. > It’s one thing for a young and passionate acade…

They are leaving academia and receiving a minimum of double salary in the private sector. Historians? If so, can you name a few example? I find this hard to believe.

I have a friend who was a historian and now works as a data analyst for a SEO agency and makes more than double their previous salary. They had no particular expertise in SEO or data beyond being able to use Excel and being able to think and write clearly.

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

#177

Post by nvm0n2 »

godelski wrote: post #132

Let's think about academia for a second and the metrics we use. You must publish often and your work most be "novel." The more novel, the more prestige, the more frequent the faster you rise. This is a system that's problematic for science, but crazy in humanities. One reason in science is it discourages replication. But there is a parallel here in something like history, reinvestigation. Something like the Roman Emp…

This is such an academic take! There's tons of fraud, bias and false claims in research, therefore the fix is to get rid of whatever trivial checks and balances we already have and let researchers do or say whatever they want.

The "let the researchers be free" is the system we already have and it's not working. Researchers need much less freedom than they have today. They need to be micromanaged far more aggressively, by people who aren't impressed by them. Society needs to treat them as potential adversaries, regulate the hell out of them and toss them in prison when they step out of line, no different to company CEOs or corporate scientists (see Theranos). Also reducing their number by 20x or so would be a good start.

Whatever happens, they definitely need to lose the freedom to publish false claims. Also universities are run by people who will never do this. Academic fraud happens all the time and there's never any follow up. Therefore universities need to lose their freedom too.

There are really only two solutions to these sorts of frauds:

1. Defund it all, let the private sector seek the right level of management

2. Try to fix it with more micromanagement and regulation in the public sector.

"Let academics be academics" is exactly how large sections of the population have ended up holding academia in outright contempt.

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

#178

Post by nvm0n2 »

godelski wrote: post #139
gdwhther wrote: post #90

Same with climate change stories.

Media or research? These two are very different. Media may sell you canvas bags and paper straws, making you feel good with stories driven from big oil about your personal responsibilities. Climate science on the other hand is well studied and well replicated with lots of validation. But that doesn't mean media won't distort what a work actually says. These things are very different but many confuse the two. Just bec…

It's well studied, but not well studied. Climatology is essentially a branch of history and suffers the same issues with low quality sources that can't be upgraded via experiment because they're recordings of past events, ideological bias amongst practitioners and other issues.

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

#179

Post by nvm0n2 »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #128
DoreenMichele wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 year…

Ever heard the expression - only paranoid survives? Maybe it's a reasonable strategy to cry wolf 100 times, out of which 99 times no wolf materializes. Look at the recent catastrophes, from 2008 financial crisis, to COVID, to the currently raging war - who would have guessed? So we might be emphasizing things in a way that is inaccurate and excessively positive.

Sadly quite a lot of people predicted the broad strokes of the 2008 financial crisis, COVID and Ukraine war, although you can always argue that they should have predicted things more precisely.

- Crisis. It was just yet another round of banks making bad loans then getting bailed out by the government leading to a recession as credit was withdrawn. This has happened many times before and that it would happen again was obvious (and it will keep happening).

- "Scientists create virus that escapes and causes pandemic" was not only predicted but was such an obvious possibility that it was a sci-fi staple. Even if for some reason you still deny the lab origin, Gates/WHO and friends had spent the previous decade predicting a mega-pandemic of respiratory virus, albeit usually of flu rather than a coronavirus.

- Ukraine war, well ... there was not a shortage of words written about Russia over the past decade. And western intelligence did predict it I think, albeit only a few days in advance.

Crying wolf definitely has downsides. It's a children's parable for a reason.

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

#180

Post by bArray »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #164
bArray wrote: post #158

> Bulstrode hasn’t yet responded to Jelf or Howes in public, but it’s hard to see how her paper can be creditably defended. > I doubt that Bulstrode set out to deceive. No, I think she did. If your intentions are good, you would address the concerns and correct the record. Those around her have a _duty_ to strongly encourage her to do so, otherwise they are complicit. > It’s one thing for a young and passionate acade…

They are leaving academia and receiving a minimum of double salary in the private sector. Historians? If so, can you name a few example? I find this hard to believe.

> Historians? If so, can you name a few example? I find this hard to believe.

I was speaking more generally about academics who are under pressure from the current political bias. As other comments have mentioned though, the critical thinking required for good historian work is also quite broadly applicable elsewhere.

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