Yep, which is why we know aesthetics emerged from biology! And we’ve come full circle. Story and data both.
4 Likes
Maybe only semi-long but I found it interesting
7 Likes
What sort of political system will the internet bring us…?
https://thepointmag.com/2019/politics/the-sound-of-my-own-voice
1 Like
There’s a spot in hell for historians who misunderstand where the economics profession differs from history. The difference is that the stakes for the rich are much more immediately affected in their favor when choosing self-serving ideas to allow or fund.
A small spot in hell that’s small in both term and dimension. The rest is pretty good.
4 Likes
It also doesn’t help when the farther back you go, the more your “facts” are the opinions of the rich and powerful, especially given our strong literary bias: we believe that a contemporary written account is more authoritative than a story passed down orally. But let’s imagine some point in time where the only written material that survives are the diaries of Musk, Bezos, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. Is that going to give those future historians an accurate picture of our times? They might well teach that McConnell was a “well respected elder statesman, based on the writing of his contemporaries” and ignore as mere myth tales of an evil malevolent turtle who cheated his way into power and left his people to die sick and hungry.
Unbiased history is the same thing as unbiased journalism: a mythical unicorn that farts rainbows and pisses lemonade. If you think you’ve found it, it’s simply because the bias matches your own.
9 Likes
5 Likes
Howard Zinn noted that history is a weapon for a reason, precisely because the past was so often written by the elites. He and other historians were (and are) trying to be more attentive to the voices left out by big man history, reinsert the oral transmission of the past into the narrative, and to shift our popular focus to something more representative of what really happened as opposed to a triumphant narrative of European men over history and reality. I think if that made him (or me, or other historians) biased, so be it. It’s not like the proponents of some supposedly unbiased great man narrative are as they claim to be…
11 Likes
I know a conservative guy (friend of friends) who fancies himself a historian (bs in history) who cherry picks his data to “prove” conservative values. Very irritating.
7 Likes
Indeed. I think as the article points out, that it’s not just about establishing facts as it is about giving them meaning for us. Cherry picking facts to “prove” something is “true” isn’t the same thing as interpreting facts, I’d argue. It’s a very pale imitation of that, and probably what your conservative friend of a friend sees himself as doing, but it sounds like he’s failing…
5 Likes
Another good one, about non-elites going to elite institutions and how that is sort of missing the point with regards to democratic engagement:
3 Likes
That’s kind of my point. Instead of accepting anything as unbiased, we need to look at the bias inherent in it. But history, as generally taught still has that bias towards the written. Recognising that lets us question if we’re getting a good look at the whole picture.
Even the whole “significant dates” approach is biased towards power, because things like wars usually do not start by decree.
Being biased is not the problem. Being biased and refusing to recognise it, and say that you are operating only from facts – that is the problem.
5 Likes
I’ve always wanted to explain the contemporary understanding of geology to an imagined audience consisting of Lord Kelvin. Just to rub his face in it. It’s a lovely science for being easy to catalog huge amounts of random factoids in a spatial-temporal mental map. Everything’s literally connected.
5 Likes
To be fair to Lord Kelvin, the uniformitarians like Hutton were also wrong in supposing the earth to be infinitely old. It is not, and someone who worked out the laws of thermodynamics was well justified in dismissing that as impossible. Saying the earth formed by cooling millions of years ago is actually far closer to the truth; it just happens to have been an error less useful for understanding geology.
The shame is that the real answer was figured out as early as 1894. John Perry realized what was actually wrong with Kelvin’s model – it presumed the earth was a static body. Seeing the way rocks could shift over time, he proposed the interior might undergo convection, in which case the calculations would change to several billion years old. But the idea seems to have gone unnoticed for another half century.
7 Likes
Wasn’t there also a question as to what would possibly be driving things for longer than a few million years, before radioactivity was discovered?
6 Likes
There definitely was for the sun, and it’s usually assumed the age of the earth was the same problem. But Perry was able to get the right order of magnitude without it, and I’ve read that on its own radioactive heating wouldn’t actually have changed Kelvin’s calculations that much.
6 Likes
I was confusing the earth and the sun. Thanks!
3 Likes
I think I would be riffing on a theme that starts with “Hmmm. Nobody can figure this stuff out because nothing connects together. Well, I don’t know if you’ve tried this before, but have you thought about asking the Navy for answers about what’s going on… all over the place here?”
Anachronistic comment, I know, but maybe that’s the kind of question that needs to be asked for this kind of situation.
1 Like
5 Likes
Amusing that it’s Bezos that’s going for the kill, outing Trump for being a fake rich asshole. It may actually get to Trump more than thiefbigotrapistandnowmassmurderer.
7 Likes
If Michelle Wolf calling him out for the same at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner didn’t faze him, I doubt Bezos will achieve more than a “FAKE NEWS!”
5 Likes