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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

#201

Post by harry8 »

hathchip wrote: post #192
harry8 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you don't believe it's a fabrication either and we can agree it doesn't make a strong case that reform is unnecessary and school textbooks are incapable of being improved.

Of course the best evidence either way on the latter is the contents of textbooks that are actually being used. How did they get that way? Heard anything that might give us ideas on where to look a bit more closely?

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

#204

Post by axioms_End »

hef19898 wrote: post #195
anticodon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

One issue : Wansee takes place in 1942, that is in the middle of the war. Until now, most camps are "just" concentration (death by labour) camps, and Jews are mostly in the ghettos. Only after Wansee you have start of mass transports to death camps - most people who died in Auschwitz were never inmates there - they were brought from other countries, sorted on ramp and send to death. Not to mention - at that moment camps were already full of people (Auschwitz was started for Poles and Soviet POV). So no, they didn't "stop" with gas chambers - they have inmates in camps and Jews in ghettos (all having to work in one way or the other), and the idea of Final Solution wasn't complete until 1942 (and took place until 1944).

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

#205

Post by msrenee »

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.

You start by going through the citations the author has listed and seeing if those support their reasoning. Sounds like that's what the non-expert in the linked article did. It turned out that some of what she claimed was not supported by or was in direct opposition to the sources in her citations. That's what citations are for. They're listed at the end of the paper in a standardized way so they can be easily accessed by anyone who wants to know where an author got a piece of information from.

If this wasn't possible, there would be no point to peer review. I can understand an article getting through where the author falsified experimental data. That's hard to refute unless you can find evidence of the false data or you run the experiment again yourself. A history article, though? If you're not double-checking dubious claims by see what sources the author is using to support them, you may as well not bother reviewing.

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

#206

Post by andsoitis »

stareatgoats wrote: post #171
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 al…

> I don't think she set out to deceive, and your stated reasons for thinking so don't pan out.

If you don't think that, then you should read her Twitter, at which is pinned to the top her paper with this introductory text: "This paper details how an innovation some historians have called 1 of the top 10 of the industrial revolution was first developed in the late 18C by 76 Black Jamaicans in a foundry just west of Morant Bay, but the central concern of the paper is much more important.. 1/4"

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

#207

Post by msrenee »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #172
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…

> 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 pr…

I was with you on most of your points until you extrapolated this to "the left" and rolled on into Netflix shows as evidence of the degradation of academia due to politics you don't agree with.

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

#208

Post by ZeroGravitas »

StackOverlord wrote: post #200
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.’

Yeah, which is a quote relayed by a guy who disagreed with that person was doing and who seems to have a real bee in his bonnet about the topic under discussion, calling it a "lie" when I can't see any dispassionate observer agreeing with that characterisation.

Did the person allegedly quoted actually think it was lie? Seems amazingly lucky that he got so close to the real figure if he did. It feels like someone saying "sometimes you got to break the law to get things done" because they jaywalked in the middle of the night when out buying some milk. The drama of the comment just doesn't seem plausible at first glance.

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

#209

Post by nvm0n2 »

msrenee wrote: post #207
nvm0n2 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pr…

I was with you on most of your points until you extrapolated this to "the left" and rolled on into Netflix shows as evidence of the degradation of academia due to politics you don't agree with.

Do you think this attempt to rewrite British history isn't ideological in nature?

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

#210

Post by denton-scratch »

hef19898 wrote: post #188
thecrab wrote: post #187

Earlier 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'…

> the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews

Tim Snyder's explanation in Bloodlands is at odds with that story. There were very few Jews in Germany at the start of WWII. Initially, the goal was to deport them - somewhere (Madagascar!). The systematic killing of Jews came later, after Germany had invaded Poland (which contained a lot of Jews). The irony is that the Jewish population of Germany increased during the initial part of the war, with Polish Jews being interned in Germany.

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