I think there's a weeeeeee bit of mote-baileyesque thing happening here. Most claims about presence of historical structure (whether forward-back or something more elaborate) are not claims about structure in fictions people make up about the past (in fact, I don't think there
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Replying to @0K_ultra @danlistensto
is a discipline directly dedicated to peculiarities of biases and trends in "free form theorising" human minds fall into when dealing with extremely information-impoverished circumstances, of which "the past" is a fair representative, even tho everything from history to
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Replying to @0K_ultra @danlistensto
psychology to psychiatry deal with this shit from time to time) Most claims about "historical structure" inevitably come back to claims about facts, and more importantly, about what future events will be like. The difference between "history is a forward-backward game" and
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Replying to @0K_ultra @danlistensto
"history develops in a spiral" (not actually a dichotomy, of course - many other options are plausible!) is, inevitably, in implications for future possible developments, not just a trite argument about what dead people were up to before they died.
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Replying to @0K_ultra @danlistensto
I think historians have really got burned on this whole (rather important, notably) "trying to discern predictive trends from low quality data about past" thing ever since Marxists stained the world with their bullshit, but still kind of want to engage with it because, well
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Replying to @0K_ultra @danlistensto
it would be incredibly useful if true, and without it, the activity of historical inquiry is a bit... hollow.
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Replying to @0K_ultra
I agree with a lot of what you're saying w.r.t utility of predictive frameworks. I was commenting a bit more narrowly about political narrative structures though. "We have a political culture based on linear metaphors".
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Replying to @danlistensto
Haha, fair. Tho, if neither "linear" nor "spiral" nor any other currently available accounts have any particularly strong predictive power, then there's no particular reason to believe a political system based on these alternate... views... would be any better, except maybe by
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Replying to @0K_ultra @danlistensto
some ridiculous neurocognitive coincidence. Perhaps an interesting consideration to pursue would be politics not married to any particular account of history (and any implicit claims about future development that carries)
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Replying to @0K_ultra
my observation is that, naturalistically speaking, there are cycles and epicycles in most observable phenomena that play out over time. our political narratives don't match this at all. so much political effort seems to be an attempt to evade cycles which may be inevitable.
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Dan listens to rain falling on the rooftop Retweeted Dan listens to rain falling on the rooftop
addressed by another reply herehttps://twitter.com/danlistensto/status/1040716918804672512 …
Dan listens to rain falling on the rooftop added,
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Replying to @danlistensto @0K_ultra
in terms of utility for human societies, well, I don't know how to connect the dots exactly. I have a preference to have a culture with fewer bad ideas in it though, and I think linear political history is a bad idea.
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Replying to @danlistensto
Well, it kind of certainly doesn't look like an accurate idea. I'm just not convinced that alternatives are necessarily more accurate, and more importantly, that there is enough info to make such judgement.
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