"to warn against 'story bias'. Cowen argues that any time someone believes in a story they are effectively subtracting ten points from their IQ (by which he means, broadly speaking, their analytical intelligence)"
Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
191–200 of 256 posts
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Regardless of what I believe, those stories are clearly not compelling evidence on which to build any kind of political argument.
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#193Australia'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…
> We don't call it making things up but any time you see the word "infer" you can go there.
If things are not presented correctly as being inferences, then that's the problem. I don't know if that's the case here, but there's a big difference between presenting your own imaginings as facts, and presenting them as theories.
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/remember-the-11-mi... > Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims — 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews. > “I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in a Jan…
6 million murdered jews is about right and well proven by facts. Then we have another 3 million soviet POWs, half a million Sinti and Roma and euthanasie victims plus 3 odd million other civilian victims of the Nazis. Depending or your exact definition of the holocaust, 11 millions victims is pretty accurate. Edit: General question, what is it with new accounts created, seemimgly, only for comments like yours? I don'…
> Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews.
I don't think that's true. It's a stupid point to start a war. Where's the profit for Germany in that?
While it's also true that Nazi Germany explicitly set to murder all Russians. There're numerous official Nazi documents confirming that. Most of the population was determined to be killed directly or by causing hunger (by capturing the only lands suitable for agriculture in the South-West of USSR).
But since the West in general always considered and continue to consider Russians as subhumans, there's no mention of this fact in western books, movies and articles.
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
6 million murdered jews is about right and well proven by facts. Then we have another 3 million soviet POWs, half a million Sinti and Roma and euthanasie victims plus 3 odd million other civilian victims of the Nazis. Depending or your exact definition of the holocaust, 11 millions victims is pretty accurate. Edit: General question, what is it with new accounts created, seemimgly, only for comments like yours? I don'…
> Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews. I don't think that's true. It's a stupid point to start a war. Where's the profit for Germany in that? While it's also true that Nazi Germany explicitly set to murder all Russians. There're numerous official Nazi documents confirming that. Most of the population was determined to be killed directly or by causing hunger (by capturing the only lands su…
The Nazis goal of the war was to eradicate all the jews. It was since, at least, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. It shows in their actions, in how they organized, who got which resources. It was their goal, murdering all jews, and went about it with murderous and frighting efficiency. They only stopped outright murder in has chamber to enslave a portion of people ending up concentrations camps, the vast majority being jews, when Nazi Germany ran into work force issues. It was Speer who convinced Himmler that was necessary, so the Nazis settled for murder through work.
No idea what you mean that the Nazis behaviour regarding slaws, not just Russians, isn't talked about in the West. I am in the West, and I defenitely didn't learn about from Russian books. Also, claiming the West sees Russians as sub-human is a strong claim, to put it mildly...
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#196> 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…
> To get grants in academia now (particularly in some spaces), you have to justify how it will have some form of social justice impact.
Correct. You need to show that your grant can “change the world” which is just another way of saying “create power”. And for whom? Who does this “research” or “studies” or “the science” (which isn’t actually science) give a claim to knowledge and thus power?
Follow the money as the journalists say.
So whatever you want to study has to generate power for someone. If your findings don’t show evidence of something that doesn’t then you’ll just stop receiving money and the ability to work. So of course academics have responded this way because it’s the incentive. It’s why everything is a “crisis”, etc.
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I haven't read anything by Windschuttle. But Charles Clark famously declared that he was pushing "my kind of history", which was a poetic and spitually uplifting narrative in his opinion. Shortly before his death, he gave an interview about this topic, admitted he had fabricated many things, but believed his motive was sufficient excuse for doing so. You can equivocate all you want about inferring and complication, b…
> The "You're probably a [insert anything]!" is one of those pesky little logical fallacies intended to divert attention from the subject.
It's shaming language meant to shutdown a discussion so that the predetermined conclusion held by the shamer cannot be disputed.
"If you think $FOO you're probably a Nazi/wife-beater/misogynist" isn't meant to make you rethink your argument, it's meant to shut you up.
After all, what would be the point of calling a Nazi a Nazi? They already know what they are and don't care.
But calling a well-intentioned person a Nazi does make them pause, even if only for self-reflection, and does make them shut up, because they don't want to be a Nazi or to appear as one.
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to think of subjective interpretation as "That was good" or "This is bad". 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…
> invasion of the British Isles was a good or a bad thing Why is this an important question at all?
Why is any question about history important?
I just plucked it out of the air as a historical event that took place a long time ago and occured in a culture with written history. It has no particular importance in the abstract (though the British and French do still seem to talk about it more than one would expect).
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of a flat earth is also a fairly intuitive claim too, as none of us experience any of the sphere earth attributes - we don't see a curve, experience the spin, etc. Intuition without evidence is really just a story.
Can’t say I agree that the earth being flat seems nearly as intuitive as monks, being the only literate faction at the time and place, were the only ones to record the written history of their time and place.
Personal verification of whatever-it-is is the only way to gain knowledge. The rest is belief, hearsay, gossip, hypothesis, stories.
Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/remember-the-11-mi... > Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims — 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews. > “I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in a Jan…
That seems more like nitpicking over definitions than anything relevant to this matter. Your quote and several other parts of the story focus on the number being "made up" and yet the same person quoted by you also says: > The problem, according to Bauer, who has debunked the number repeatedly in his writings over the decades, is not that non-Jews were not victims; they were. It is that Wiesenthal’s arbitrarily chose…
> ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’