1/ *cracks knuckles* So... Once you know one field well, you get comfortable with (or at least aware of) how many people are very good at presenting smart-sounding and compelling evidence in favor of [anything].https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1170476053002776576 …
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2/ I don't mean that in a nefarious way. Complex systems are complex and often complicated, and well-trained people will present coherent and smart-sounding simplifications as arguments.
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3/ For this reason, history intimidates me. A LOT. And, it's why I hate historical claims as attacks of particular positions. I don't have enough historical knowledge to evaluate my own claims critically, let alone someone else's.
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4/ I mean, history is *really* BIG. But it's also lost by, like, thermodynamics. So you better know a lot of the pieces and how they fit together if you want to be robust against bullshit. And even then, I bet scholarship drifts for lack of information.
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5/ So most of the time now, when I hear historical arguments, I just assume people are generating projections backwards onto the past to suit what they want to "prove" in the present to select the future they want. Which...isn't terribly useful, except rhetorically.
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6/ I don't really have a point to this. It's just something I've been thinking about lately. If those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, what about those who hallucinate it?
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Replying to @generativist
Your every perception of the world is a hallucination conditioned on some skimpy observations. Often it works, occasionally not. Why should the log odds on "History"'s correctness be more than a couple nats worse?
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