Very well written and an enjoyable post. Although, when it comes to how Covid-19 started you left out a couple huge reasons: the carelessness of the CCP, and (as far as within the U.S.) the disgusting politics involved.
The Big Lessons from History
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Re: The Big Lessons from History
#32The Morgen Housel posts always get on the front page of HN and they are always full of pablum. You can take anything he says and turn it around, say the exact opposite, and it would also make you nod your head. For instance "Important things rarely have one cause." Or you could say "Important things usually have one cause." The pandemic has one cause, the virus. Or "People believe what they want to believe" is litera…
I would reach a different conclusion than you based on the flaws you identified, namely that argumentation and language is a flexible instrument in the first place. If I was reading a (peer reviewed) history text and the author suggested something like the Great Depression had one cause, frankly I would put the book down.
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Re: The Big Lessons from History
#33The Morgen Housel posts always get on the front page of HN and they are always full of pablum. You can take anything he says and turn it around, say the exact opposite, and it would also make you nod your head. For instance "Important things rarely have one cause." Or you could say "Important things usually have one cause." The pandemic has one cause, the virus. Or "People believe what they want to believe" is litera…
I would reach a different conclusion than you based on the flaws you identified, namely that argumentation and language is a flexible instrument in the first place. If I was reading a (peer reviewed) history text and the author suggested something like the Great Depression had one cause, frankly I would put the book down.
According to Wikipedia the most famous book on the depression, Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 offers a single cause for the great depression, falling money supply. That might be right or wrong, I don't know. But I know that Housel's "it was a lot of things" is lazy thinking that sounds like wisdom.
Re: The Big Lessons from History
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> all history is revisionist history That would be the revisionist view. But history is also one of the sciences, and with a methodology that predates postmodernism.
The history as field starts with Roman historians who literally felt free to make things up or guess them where it suited them. If anything, history as field is getting more accurate and more complete. Especially with digitalization and when writing about eras that left tons of written material after them.
where would you put Herodotus or Thucydides or xenophon? the first historians weren't Roman really. there are other works less self consciously historical that predate them too, right?
Re: The Big Lessons from History
#35The Morgen Housel posts always get on the front page of HN and they are always full of pablum. You can take anything he says and turn it around, say the exact opposite, and it would also make you nod your head. For instance "Important things rarely have one cause." Or you could say "Important things usually have one cause." The pandemic has one cause, the virus. Or "People believe what they want to believe" is litera…
He is the narrative fallacy made human. And the fact that so many people enthusiastically support his platitudes is truly a sign of the intellectual barren that the current social-media era is.
Re: The Big Lessons from History
#36I would rewrite Lesson 4 as "In many disasters the attempted treatments made things worse." In the case of the Great Depression, scholarship is focusing on the failed response of the FED [1]. The current thinking is that WWI precipitated the farm crisis by (a) generating a huge demand for US farm products (b) caused a labor shortage as men were being drafted (c) farmers took out loans to purchase new farmland and equipment [2]. When farm prices dropped with the end of WWI, many regional banks failed in the 20s leaving behind a damaged agriculture sector. In 1930, when many hoped the economy would recover from the great Stock Market crash, it was the collapse of Caldwell and Company which was a huge holding company that triggered a massive wave of bank failures [3]. This most recent wave of bank failures greatly damaged manufacturing output [4]. What was the Federal Reserve doing in all of this? It turns out they did nothing because either those banks were not part of the Federal Reserve system. Or they made things worse by actually increasing interest rates which made troubled banks even less likely to survive. Bernanke and others now think the FED's failure to keep the banking system alive led to the Great Depression.
[1] https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-depressio... [2] http://www.iowapbs.org/iowapathways/mypath/great-depression-... [3] https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/banking_panics_... [4] https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/mezzanotti/docu...
Re: The Big Lessons from History
#37>History is full of specific lessons that aren’t relevant to most people, and not fully applicable to future events because things rarely repeat exactly as they did in the past. An imperfect rule of thumb is that the more granular the lesson, the less useful it is to the future. I think this is throwing away something incredibly important. The way things are today is because of events in the past. Things have provena…
That said most people, i.e. the non revolutionaries (which is the HN crowd), survive and will survive just fine not knowing anything about revolution or revolutionaries. My favourite example of such a survivor is Joseph Marie Jacquard inventor of the Jacquard Loom (that which inspired Charles Babbage). Jacquards town would be taken over by revolutionaries on one day, counter revolutionaries on another, local royalty…
Maybe a more general lesson to learn here is that there are winners and losers in the great events of history. Mask manufacturers are certainly doing well from the current pandemic. Most Australians have only experienced about 2 months of lockdown. While Americans have got pretty much the worst possible pandemic outcome.
In defense of the specifics of history. The french revolution was an incredibly pro-science revolution. Scientists who took advantage of the situation stood to become wealthy and be given the resources to do the science they wanted to.
Re: The Big Lessons from History
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad historians, write works showing past events through the new lenses of current cultural/political affairs. Good historians reveal ancient perspectives, their differences to ours, so that the supposition of two different perspectives with their similarities and differences is what we can reflect and learn from.
There is no such thing is single ancient perspective. All past events had multiple players with multiple different perspectives on what is going on and what should happen. And there is no such thing as single modern perspective either. I think that the big mistake people do when representing past is that they take one representant of "what past people thought" and proceed to ignore opinions and perspectives of everyo…
yes, this was the reason for my use of plural when talking about perspective