Why history needs to be completely reformulated

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Such examples are scattered across historians’ explanations of various events: stuff like “such-and-such event caused such-and-such war/social movement”, etc. Historians will tell you that the ancient civilizations were based where they were because of the rivers, but shrug when you ask why similar civilizations were not found on the banks of the Danube, the Congo, the Amazon or the Murray-Darling basin.

One of the most revealing examples I have seen is the notion of a General systems collapse: the idea that complex societies collapse because “they get too complex”. This isn’t an explanation! It’s no different from saying “because magic”, or “energy makes it go”, as Feynman warned.

Another important example, crucial to the economic history of the world, is what Shashank Nayak on Quora calls the Great Man theory applied to technologies. The historiography of the Industrial Revolution is formulated around “railroads” and “the steam engine”. These are obviously post-fitted explanations: there is no clear reason why “railroads” would bring a fundamental change in economic history but not e.g. the assembly line. While a “great man theory” may make sense to a certain degree for political changes, it does not make sense for economic and technological changes, in which growth is intuitively just exponential, as opposed to the discontinuities observed at the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The question “Why did this sudden break in economic growth rates occur in 10,000 BC and never at any point before that?” needs to be answered in terms of social science, in terms of some change in political systems, rather than something purely technological like “agriculture was invented”.

Various “political” biases play a role here: for example, it is rare for ancient historians to consider the effects of historical economic policies, beyond relatively trivial matters like infrastructure and centralized governance, because historians don’t really view economics in a fundamental way like they should. The desire to be unbiased itself often manifests as a bias, as it means avoiding explanations subject to political controversies.

The following excerpt from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) is relevant:

“There’s a tale I once heard about some students who came into a physics class, and the teacher showed them a large metal plate near a fire. She ordered them to feel the metal plate, and they felt that the metal nearer the fire was cooler, and the metal further away was warmer. And she said, write down your guess for why this happens. So some students wrote down ‘because of how the metal conducts heat’, and some students wrote down ‘because of how the air moves’, and no one said ‘this just seems impossible’, and the real answer was that before the students came into the room, the teacher turned the plate around.”

“Interesting,” said Professor Quirrell. “That does sound similar. Is there a moral?”

“That your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality,” said Harry. “If you’re equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. The students thought they could use words like ‘because of heat conduction’ to explain anything, even a metal plate being cooler on the side nearer the fire. So they didn’t notice how confused they were, and that meant they couldn’t be more confused by falsehood than by truth.”

Historians’ deductions are like Sherlock Holmes’s deductions – not an actually rational, reproducible method but rather something you make up, and then everyone nods their head in agreement, because it feels like it makes sense, although you could have made anything else up and people would still agree with you.

Failure to acknowledge uncertainty.

* *I’ve wrote about this at length in Everything you know about history is a lie. The experimental data we have available to us at present is small, and the inferences we can make from it have high uncertainty. This uncertainty should be acknowledged, and not just in the form of “criticism”. It is important to be able to organize and track uncertainties rather than leave them separate, without any influence on the mainstream narrative.

This should be just obvious. Every serious discipline has ways of quantifying and dealing with uncertainty: the problem doesn’t go away with a field like history.

If you think the issue is that history is too uncertain to make clear inferences from, then that is all the more reason to worry about uncertainty.

Instead, we see academics simply turning a blind eye to it, and pretending that whatever we know of the field is definite fact.

Definitions not clear and fundamental.

When in literature classes at high school, I was introduced to the statement “there are three types of irony: verbal, situational and dramatic”. Verbal irony means sarcasm, situational irony means surprise, and dramatic irony means lack of information.

Except those three concepts are completely unrelated, and it makes no sense to call them “irony”, as if they were special cases of an abstract notion called “irony”.

Efficient definitions are important. They reveal the right way to think about things: what is a special case of what, what abstracts what, etc. In physics, you wouldn’t say “there are two types of dingles: the potentials in chemical bonds and the probability densities of leptons are called goobeldingles, while mass times speed squared and probability amplitudes of quarks are called feebeldingles” – heck, even reading that was probably painful.

In history, here are some examples of arbitrary definitions made that aren’t really fundamental:

• The notion of a country or culture
• The notion of a political entity (What exactly makes a distinct political entity? Is it a specific degree of autonomy? What even is autonomy? What even is a government?)
• The notions of borders and territory (Are we talking borders of political control? But most historical entities really didn’t control much except some core urban areas, roads and maybe resource-extraction areas.)
• Arbitrary divisions on continuums, e.g. the demarcation of a language or a script. Incidentally, this is similar to historians historically demarcating races (while genetics actually runs on a continuum), which modern historians wouldn’t dream of doing because of moral reasons. But the objective objections remain the same.)
• The notion of a religion or political ideology (Are we really talking about clear, principled ideologies here or more social categorizations? The latter shouldn’t be the basis of an academic definition.)
• What counts as a historical text (vs. mythology), the notion of historiography.
• The distinction between prehistory and history.
• Notions such as proto-industrialization (there was no such thing).

To solve this, we should make really precise, positivist statements, e.g. “Alexander instituted such-and-such satrap at Babylon who had such-and-such powers”, rather than “Alexander’s empire had such-and-such territory”, and then work our way up to see what we can abstract, what kinds of political entities should be defined.

Narratives, emphasis and bias

History seems to be told in terms of narratives rather than in terms of actual physical events. This is in part because the social science that the humanities are based on is itself formulated in terms of Marxian social theory, which is more of a narrative than an operational scientific theory, and more generally because the social sciences and humanities (and for whatever reason, philosophy) has always and everywhere been evaluated through the lens of advancing a social movement, rather than objective criteria/truth.

So when it comes to e.g. the New York Times’s “1619 project”, I align neither with its supporters nor its critics. What does it mean for a country to be “founded on” something? These are entirely social, “emotional” notions, i.e. having to do with what associations people personally make in their minds, and has nothing to do with history itself. Yet “interpreting history” seems to be the main focus of history academia.

In particular, this leads to what I call emphasis-gaming, something that is also practised by media organizations. Without actually being factually inaccurate, you can choose to formulate history around a narrative of your choice and pick all the right aspects to place emphasis on in your account. Because the discipline lacks objectivity, this actually has an influence on the inferences made regarding the history you’re describing (see the “uncertainty” point). 

I can understand the use of narratives for pedagogical reasons – as a way for people to organize and store historical information efficiently. But this should be after collecting and calculating historical information, not as a way to “pre-formulate” the discipline. Otherwise, a history textbook becomes indistinguishable from a historical movie.