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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

#221

Post by hef19898 »

andsoitis wrote: post #220
hef19898 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A weird way to say Germany started WW2. Glad we can agree they did so.

Nobody disputed who started WWII, but you claimed a motivation which was incorrect, so I wanted to help you get that right.

And the motivation was, in the Fuhrer own words none the less (!), Lebensraum in the east (and enslaving the slavs there while doing it) and gwtting rid of the made up jewish-bolshevik conspirancy by killing both groups. Hard to accept, I know, but none the less true.

Actually the only mistake the Allies might have made, might have because it is hindsight, is not invading Germany in the West while the Wehrmacht was busy in Poland. History is history so. Seeing the causes of WW2 so, and the motivation of the Nazis, as anything else than what they are ia something I will leave unadressed so.

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

#222

Post by cauch »

msrenee wrote: post #205
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 The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them.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 The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them.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. 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…

I agree with checking the references, but again, my point is that as a general rule it's really not that easy. You can think it's easy because you have had the work done for you for this particular article and that it is obvious in this particular article, but in general, it is way more complicated.

Properly checking that the citation is indeed saying that often requires studying the quoted paper quite in details. Again, it may not have been the case here, but it is an amount of work that a reviewer should plan in advance.

But more importantly, and it makes your point moot: if the article is misrepresentating the reference, then, rather than in the peer-review process, it will be the reference author that will notice it.

I think it is my point: people here are seeing peer-review and are thinking that it is the ultimate method to decide what is good or bad (or what is "consensus"). This is ridiculous. A peer-reviewed article has NEVER been considered as "obviously correct and uncriticable". A peer-review is just one of the step in the long process. If indeed the references were not saying what the article is saying they say, it will end up being discovered.

The peer-review is the first step before submitting the article to the whole community, and it is then that the majority of the discussion happens.

> If you're not double-checking dubious claims

While I agree with the previous things, this bit makes me pause: careful with that, historically, the majority of correct claims were, at first, sounding dubious, and the majority of incorrect claims were, at first, sounding totally not dubious.

Let's rather say: let's double-check everything.

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

#223

Post by martindbp »

Fluorescence wrote: post #169
martindbp wrote: post #140

I don't think "Stories are bad for your intelligence" is the right conclusion here, more like "ideologically motivated thinking is bad for your intelligence". As another piece of evidence for this I can recall from Superforecasters that the ones who did the worst at forecasting were ideologically motivated people and people with "one big idea".

It's interesting to try and define what good and bad forecasting is. When you consider the outsized calamity of black swans, it is practical to have some diversity of prediction, not unanimity around a single prediction. You don't want to over-value predicting non-extreme events, you need that Israeli 10th man to persuade others of the improbable to ensure your plan is resilient. The insightful ideologue will be righ…

Sure, but ideologically motivated reasoning will only provide "broken clock" predictions. What good forecasters would do with hard-to-predict events like the pandemic, the next recession or political revolution is to admit ignorance and revert to the base rate (e.g. once a century on average). Truly black swan events are things we don't even know we should try to predict.

An example of ideologically motivated reasoning would be "The US is about to collapse because Biden/Trump is president". Unfortunately many if not most people think like this, that's one reason why so few are good at forecasting according to the book.

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

#225

Post by bumbledraven »

> Cowen argues that any time someone believes in a story they are effectively subtracting ten points from their IQ…

Cowed proposed that rule of thumb for stories about good and evil, not stories in general.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/th...

It’s puzzling to me how an essay about factual inaccuracies would include such an easily checked misstatement.

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

#226

Post by onetimeusename »

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…

There are other examples of this genre of history. Here is a debunking from the claim that Vikings were Muslim because something resembling the word "Allah" in Sufic was found on a Viking textile. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/allah-viking...

There are more claims in this genre if you look for them: Hidden Figures, White House built by slaves, 1619 Project. There is probably more and there should be a compendium of false history. The common theme is that Europeans are evil and lack ability but their relative success is explained by theft and oppression from non-white people.

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

#227

Post by Fluorescence »

martindbp wrote: post #223
Fluorescence wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to try and define what good and bad forecasting is. When you consider the outsized calamity of black swans, it is practical to have some diversity of prediction, not unanimity around a single prediction. You don't want to over-value predicting non-extreme events, you need that Israeli 10th man to persuade others of the improbable to ensure your plan is resilient. The insightful ideologue will be righ…

Sure, but ideologically motivated reasoning will only provide "broken clock" predictions. What good forecasters would do with hard-to-predict events like the pandemic, the next recession or political revolution is to admit ignorance and revert to the base rate (e.g. once a century on average). Truly black swan events are things we don't even know we should try to predict. An example of ideologically motivated reasoni…

> will only provide "broken clock" predictions

I think it's a bit more than a random prediction, it's more like a heuristic.

Imagine the tree of all possibilities and all subsequent possibilities below those etc. It's just too vast to explore. The ideologue is not random a path through the tree but biased in a very human way with pessimistic assumptions about human motivations and behaviour that are sometimes true. A heuristic can be valuable without achieving more truth than fiction, just better than random.

> ideologically motivated reasoning would be "The US is about to collapse because Biden/Trump is president"

What I have in mind is the ideological forecaster would start with a set of assumptions and try to justify them against the odds e.g. they assume "Biden/Trump is a monster", they adopt the specific mindset of this monster and interpret the known events, which seem entirely innocuous on the surface, as contributing to a larger nefarious strategy and work through a chain of consequences to arrive at a compelling theory that hangs together. It's like exploring many moves ahead in chess without an evidence based goal function justifying continuing down a specific path.

A reasonable individual might not presume others are monsters or pursue a line of reasoning so unjustified for so long. The heuristic works because sadly "X is a monster" and "innocuous actions are actually part of a nefarious plan" is sometimes true.

I'm essentially defending conspiratorial thinking as a good thing in an adversarial situation so long as it's integrated sanely and not allowed to rule the day alone. If you don't have ideologues of different flavours in your intelligence unit, you might need to create them.

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

#228

Post by nsajko »

lsmeducation wrote: post #39
Mr_Modulo wrote: post #14

Today we have news for conservatives and different news for liberals. That's stupid. News doesn't need built in commentary. Now it seems like history is going the same way. We will have conservative history and liberal history. But I hope not.

It feels like you just described war propaganda. Americans lie one way, the Russians the other. The better question is why are we in a war over current events (to your point over the news). Left propaganda and Right propaganda, for some invisible war. The low hanging fruit to me appears to be the fact that propaganda is profitable, ::shrugs:: Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use. Edit: this…

> Just one more war machine that got repurposed for civilian use.

Already in 1928, Edward Bernays' book on PR and marketing was named Propaganda.

Another interesting point is that the term propaganda comes from the Latin "propaganda fide" (propagation of faith). Nowadays it seems to just be called evangelization in the Vatican and elsewhere.

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

#229

Post by jncfhnb »

verisimi wrote: post #199
jncfhnb wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you cannot use reason to evaluate claims, how do you evaluate the relevance, truthfulness, and implications of evidence?
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