Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Not just music history, but history in general.

History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures.

History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past.

However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.

View on HN

There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?" Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn't?" down to "Why did agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than corn spread to the Americas?"

It's a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it's resolved. By asking a series of "why" you broadly expand a person's view and they understand why you're talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the "why are we talking about this" up front, and teacher's answers were always just "it's in the syllabus." I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.

> It's a wonderful rhetorical device.

It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of "trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures".

I don't think we know if history was inevitable. How much do we attribute to specific events because they're the ones that happened, rather than simply the result of deeper, sociological, economic, and cultural causes? The best we can do is explain what we can explain, and I don't know if trying to teach people that history is essentially random is even a goal that you should strive for to begin with.

Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."

> Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."

Many times it's just luck. The existence of life at all, the death of the dinosaurs, the ice ages, droughts, famines, epidemics (e.g., the Black Plague) ... all luck. From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. And when a set of actions together have large consequences, sometimes it's just (un)fortunate coincidence.

> From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck.

Do we have cases of that in history at all? All the important scientific, technological and social breakthroughs I can think of are clear, incremental extensions of contemporary state of knowledge and societies. Individuals who were at the right place and with right skills are attributed the discoveries, but the truth is, if they didn't "make" those discoveries, short time later their colleagues would.

There is an endless debate among historians, AFAIK, about whether events are due to structural (that is, systemic) issues or due to personal agency - the 'great person' hypothesis.

You are talking about science, which if course is one narrow domain; and even in science, I tend to agree with you but if there were no paradigm shifters (using Kuhn's model) such as Newton, Darwin, or Einstein, would we have made those discoveries? Would the whole course of research in those fields have changed? Changed to where we are now? Soon after those people? At all? If it's inevitable, why weren't those things discovered outside Europe? Was the Enlightenment, the foundation of the scientific revolution, inevitable? Again, if so, why not elsewhere? Why not 1,000 years earlier?

In geopolitical matters, would the world be the same without Napoleon, the founders of the U.S., Lenin, or Hitler? What about Admiral Nelson? What if someone else was U.S. President on 9/11? Clinton? Trump? Would the world be the same without Moses, Jesus or Mohammad?

My point is not that I know the answers, but that it's not so clear cut that outcomes are due to structural reasons.

If you read Guns, Germs and Steel, it doesn't argue that the specific sequence of observed history was inevitable. In fact, it argues against an "inevitability" position.

The book's goal is to present a coherent explanation of the observed course of history for the general public, without resorting to and in fact debunking "western Europeans dominated because they are a superior breed of human and their culture is superior to other cultures, and superior people win" arguments.

Thus, it argues that the environments in which different groups of humans found themselves influenced the course of observed history (things like climate, geography, availability of domesticable species, etc. all can provide advantages or disadvantages to people in a particular area), but does not argue that these factors made the specific sequence of actual human history inevitable. I suspect the author would agree that if you could re-run human history a huge number of times, you'd see variation in the results; he'd just argue that the factors he covers make certain outcomes more probable than others, so they would occur more frequently in such a mass simulation of possible histories.

There's a book by that title. I havn't gotten a chance to read it yet, but was told its very good.

https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0...

Beware, historians don't like the book: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

The criticism seems to be mostly that it's too broad and lacks nuance rather than being something akin to pseudoscience. When I read the book I never thought the book was meant to be the be-all and end-all of history, so I never really understood that criticism. Yes, history is complicated. I'd just keep that in mind. It kind of reminds me of when people criticize the book Code for not being a technical enough discussion of computer hardware.

That's not really the criticism. Jared Diamond is very extremely wedded to the environmental determinism theory (this becomes more obvious after you read Collapse; it's somewhat more muted in Guns, Germs, and Steel), and this theory has serious gaping holes that Diamond never really addresses.

One of the problems of GG&S in particular is that the book presupposes that the European colonization of the Americas was inevitable. For anyone who's actually studied that topic--and Diamond pretends that no one has ever done that before, which is a big fat lie--the most immediate and important conclusion is that it was not inevitable. Pre-Columbian history is already a topic where pretty much everything you were taught is completely and totally wrong [1], and Diamond takes these wrong facts as axiomatic, and people constantly suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel to help reinforce the explanation--it's no wonder there's a large amount of exasperation on the topic.

[1] If you want a good book on this, read Charles Mann's book 1491. It's also a great way of showing how a non-specialist in history can competently approach the topic.

I'll check it out. But yes, Jared Diamond definitely believes in maybe not determinism per se, but definitely geographic, erm, importantism.

The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from evidence.

For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it. But... the Americas won the agricultural jackpot (there's a reason why potatoes became a staple crop in much of the world). And the European conquest of the Americas was anything but preordained: the Spanish only conquered Tenochtitlan (which was a larger city, it should be noted, than likely any of the Spanish had ever seen before) with the help of their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies.

[1] The astute will notice that there's a related question that Diamond 100% completely ignores... why didn't China dominate?

> For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot

This is oversimplified to the point of either being disingenuous or misinformed, and China was discussed in the book. There are valid issues with the work, including environmental determinism[1], but it was a wide ranging pop sci book and as such has many surfaces and incentives for attack.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism

> including environmental determinism[1]

Why is this considered an issue? Is there a good discussion of this that you could recommend?

https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-ger...

  I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points,
  his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a
  distorting disservice to the real historical record.
  Diamond claims that the differential success of the
  world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture,
  except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does
  not withstand scrutiny. [...] Unfortunately his 
  story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has
  seduced a generation of college-educated readers.

100% completely ignores... why didn't China dominate?

Have you even read the book? It's mentioned and he gives possible reasons for it, even though it isn't the focus of the book.

I read the book, a very long time ago, but my understanding is that China was never interested in expansion, culturally. China itself was a vast, insular monarchy for thousands of years, protected by the Himalayas to the west, an ocean to the east and south, and vast steppes to the north. The Chinese, culturally, were convinced of their innate superiority (like most cultures!) and only wanted to perfect their kingdom, not grow it.

European culture, on the other hand, was not homogenous and the in-fighting between "white" nations forced each one to find advantage anywhere they could find it, including overseas, and the valuable raw-materials a globe-spanning empire can give the homeland. The technical difficulties of running large navies, building ships, lead to lots of engineering advances.

So, I guess if China hadn't been unified, and had been more vulnerable, parts of it would also have been forced to seek advantage in trade, and history would have been a very different story.

China did dominate. Everybody that invaded China, became Chinese. It's a massive success story. If you're asking why it didn't colonize, that answer can also come down to geography. It's landmass was so good, it literally had no need for colonization. Once Europe chopped down its forests and got everything it could out of mines, it had a surplus of people that craved more things, this drove it to expand outwards.

China's just big and resourceful enough to provide. Once it collapsed into one big polity, something made necessary by lack of natural barriers like in Europe preventing individual nations from being able to protect themselves, everybody could work together to build China.

Europe's geography just wasn't as good. Good enough to get to colonization, but not good enough to avoid the need to.

You see this happening now in the US, which boasts the second best geography in the world after China. We had a few colonies, but really, our landmass provides us with everything we need. It just wasn't good enough without European horses.

> the Americas won the agricultural jackpot

I Don't think so. The trouble with America was that the people wiped most big fauna before doing any serious domestication attempts. America always lacked force-power for agriculture by lacking suitable animals. Deer and antelopes are un-trainable and intractable, specially when in heat; big cats pose a lot of problems; bears are too solitary and individualistic and pronghorn were skittish, designed to run fast and go away, not easy to confine in small spaces. And Lamas, almost the only big animals available suitable to domestication, are still too small and lack power to help with a plow. Maybe glyptodonts would made marvelous and valuable domestic animals. We'll never know.

The old world instead had the horse and the bull, that made an huge success in agriculture. Small details like egyptians having a small friendly carnivore around made a huge difference in an economy based on grain. And the carp recycling agriculture debris and the chicken where a blessing for China also.

The essay you read might have been by Yanis Varoufakis. (Former Greek finance minister.) The aboriginal peoples of the world .... had everything they needed, so tend not to invade for "more." To answer the question, "why" maybe a bit deeper view is worthwhile.

An alternative way to look at it could be Yanis Varoufakis passage:

"Debt, money, faith and state all go hand in hand. Without debt there is no easy way to manage agricultural surplus. As debt appeared, money flourished. But for money to have value, an institution, the state, had to make it trustworthy. When we talk about the economy, this is what we are talking about: the complex relations that emerge in a society with a surplus."

> The aboriginal peoples of the world .... had everything they needed, so tend not to invade for "more." To answer the question, "why" maybe a bit deeper view is worthwhile.

I don't think this works as an explanation. Could not all countries in what we now call Europe have sustained themselves if they so chose?

And anyway, assuming we all agree on what is meant by aboriginal peoples, aren't there plenty of examples of aboriginal peoples carrying on extended wars and raids?

Except that Jared Diamond cherry picks material to fit a theory he already came up with. His "history" has little to no relation to actual course of history.

He's one of the authors, like Gavin Menzies and Ayn Rand, that make me automatically disqualify my interlocutor from knowing what they're talking about.

If I recall correctly that's literally how the book starts.

I honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed.

Same thing in programming - starting up with something you can immediately use like JavaScript or Python is a nice thing because it will 'fool' you (in a good sense) that you are now a programmer. (I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"). You can only do a couple of iterations back, before it gets too complicated to go backwards.

It's like discovering the usefulness of an integral (Calculus) and then going backwards in order to understand it if you have no prior math knowledge and experience... I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph.

I think it might actually work. In teaching "history," you are always picking an essentially arbitrary starting point. I think you could easily start with something like nuclear negotations between the Soviet Union and the USA, then work backwards from there. Why was it these two powers that had nuclear weapons? Well, let's talk about World War 2... How did this Hitler guy come to power in Germany in the first place? Well, let me tell you about World War 1... Obviously there would need to be some linearity to each individual chapter, but moving backwards in time at the thematic level absolutely seems possible and even advantageous in certain respects. History is a very different subject from the sort of applied technical things you're describing. But in fact you might be making a good argument for doing it this way: you're describing the need for some kind of anchor in a knowledge graph. There probably isn't a better anchor than the current existing world as everyday people experience it. Why not start there?

I think it only sounds like a good idea because you already know the details of what comes before. If you had absolutely no knowledge of history, I think this method would not work well.

There are so many details that led up to WW2 that going backwards would just feel messy. All the things happening in Europe would have to be described in a way where you already know about the next war but now have to list off these different events.

I don't think that going backwards is going to make things interesting for anyone who isn't going to be interested in it forwards. The technique of teaching (a good teacher) will do more for this than teaching things backwards.

I see what you mean but that's sort of what I meant by doing it linearly at a topic level. Absolutely, you don't want to start with the end of World War 2 and then move backwards to its causes. But I think it's entirely feasible to learn about the Cold War, then study WW2, then study WW1, etc... I don't know, I don't have especially strong feelings about it, but it definitely seems at least viable.

I would imagine ww2 best described in both orders: you start with the main participants, their alliances, and their general strategies/incentives, then you iterate over each country prior to the war, and why they started to get involved in it, and finally you discuss the war itself, and its major events

I think people in this thread might be overstating the degree to which history isn't already taught this way. I just got done teaching a world history class (from the Paleolithic to 1500) at a university. Granted, we don't tend to teach classes like this in a completely reversed chronological order, like Pulp Fiction or something. But I began the course with the famous "hockey stick" graph of human population and had them think throughout the class about how we got to where we are. Was farming inevitable? Were world empires? Was the Industrial Revolution? If yes, why? And if not, how might it have gone differently?

The class was oriented entirely around the starting point of our present (both as a group of people living in a university town in California and as a global society). We worked backward from that present to key in on some of the main changes of the past several thousand years, notably the origin of written language, agriculture, urbanized societies, global trade, and science. Teaching world history without that present-day hook would be virtually impossible because there is just too much to cover and you need some kind of limiting factor. As you note, the best anchor is the current existing world, so that's what world history teachers tend to use.

Yeah you're entirely right. I was a history student in undergrad and graduate school, and obviously this sort of thing does occur naturally in some courses. But I do think it's still fairly rare that someone intentionally strategizes working backward in a rigorous way. I mean again, I don't consider this some be-all-end-all, I just consider it a viable strategy (among many alternative viable strategies). Mostly I'm responding to the opinion that this couldn't feasibly work.

I had a history book in school which basically attempted to tell history backward. It didn't work very well in my opinion. The problem is, telling history backwards makes for en extremely "whiggish" view of history where everything is understood in the frame of how it lead to the current state of the world. It makes it very hard to escape hindsight bias.

> I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph.

This is the best way to learn new things (besides spending time face to face with an expert tutor). You have a motivating problem, an idea of where you are going, and a whole graph to traverse backward until you fit the pieces together. You will remember the parts you come across because they are connected together (both forward and backward), and you will be working closer to the edge of your capabilities. It is much easier to achieve flow doing this kind of learning.

If you have too many unconnected edges in the graph, then sometimes you have to give up and pick a closer/easier subject to study, but the time spent was still not wasted, as it provides useful orientation for future attempts.

Not sure how well it works if a lecturer or textbook is guiding you though. The whole point is picking your own problems and questions, and then figuring out how to solve/answer them.

> I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"

Not sure about “never”, but doing many of these little projects is often a more valuable use of time than banging against a project whose scope is so big you have no idea where to start.

This is a great comment.

As an adult, the way I’ve come to learn is exactly the same as you. It’s way more efficient, too: if you begin with the end and work backwards, you can ignore the things that aren’t very useful. Like if you’re learning how to make a graphics engine and you don’t know linear algebra, you can learn only those parts of linear algebra that are relevant to the work of creating an engine and leave all the other useless stuff behind. (And in linear algebra there seems to be a ton of pretty useless stuff.)

This is probably a bad idea for a mathematician or scientist, but for a programmer who’s in the trenches just trying to build stuff, it’s great.

Simple. You pick a current event. A, and say how it was influenced by this historical event B, and how it was motivated by an even more historical event C.

The only real advantage over starting with C, is that you have the motivating current event A to capture the attention of your students.

This would not only be a great way to teach history, but also literature and probably other things like philosophy as well.

In literature, it is not uncommon to start with the past reading things like the Odyssey, moving forwards to Beowulf, then Canterbury Tales, then Shakespeare, then John Milton, then Dickens, and on and on.

The result is you start with the least accessible work and move forward to the most accessible. On the hand hand, by starting with a modern work like Catch 22 or whatever, you start with an accessible work that is more likely to be an enjoyable to the reader in its own right, not just as an important work. As you move backwards the reader is also gradually increasing their reading prowess, becoming more attuned to the finer points of literature, and thus more able to enjoy the older, less naturally accessible works.

Having middle and high school students wade through Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne always seemed like such dumb idea to me. For every one student that is interested by such texts, another 10 are turned off literature completely by the dense diction and distant context. Better to start with J.K. Rowling than Herman Melville if it lets more students discover the joy of reading.

I disagree in the sense that this will end up putting an overemphasis on contemporary work, and not enough on classic works. Think about how often cirriculum never gets to the end of, when such seminal and formative works such as Plato and Aristotle are fit into the last weeks you will inevietably gloss over them. We already make Gods out of our contemporary world view at the expense of downplaying the brilliance of past thinkers. I dont think we need to fan this flame. We will end up with an aesthetic that is so devoid of the basics that it barely comprehends itself, and if ever hits a dry spell will never be able to recreate its former greatness

Specifically with history, contemporary topics being skipped over is not only common but an incredible disservice to humanity. Many schools spend months on Columbus but only 1-2 weeks on the entire post Cold War era. Which one is more important for future voters to understand?

> Specifically with history, contemporary topics being skipped over is not only common but an incredible disservice to humanity. Many schools spend months on Columbus but only 1-2 weeks on the entire post Cold War era. Which one is more important for future voters to understand?

Contemporary events are often thought to be outside the scope of "history":

History depends on perspective: We don't know the consequences and thus the significance of many events; what will happen with climate change? The consequences of the Iraq War and 9/11? And also we are emotionally lost in the trees and can't see the forest, so to speak.

Also, history depends on having lots of information, much of which isn't available for a long time (declassified info, memoirs, archives, other things later revealed, etc.).

Finally, arguably history is studied so we can learn from it, not act on it.

I think the topics the parent brings up are very important, but arguably they belong in another class.

No, you are misunderstanding what he is suggesting. He didn't say cover all of contemporary literature. He is saying spend a few years getting students hooked on contemporary literature, and then get them into say 19th century literature like with Dickens, and so on working backwards.

And let me ask you this, do think the way literature at present is taught in elementary and secondary schools is effective in getting students involved, such that they voluntarily read high-quality works for the rest of their lives?

I don't think that would work with literature, because modern literature often makes allusions to earlier literature.

In addition to alluding to older literature, modern books also routinely refer to historic events, philosophy, developments in science, politics, religion, and just about everything else. So what, don't read any novels or poetry until you know the rest of human history and knowledge, inside and out, lest you miss a few allusions?

If we turn students off reading entirely, because we made them slog through the whole Bible (the ulitmate all-time most-alluded-to-by-English-literature champion) before letting them read something that might actually interest them, then what does it matter if they "get" the allusions?

By the way, not a slag on the Bible. I thought it was a pretty good read actually with exception of a few boring chunks in the old testament. But my humble opinion is that it will bore the shit out of the majority of high school students. I also wouldn't recommend Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce's Ulysses to high school students. They're great books if you come to them at the right time, but probably not the best tools for teaching literature.

> I don't think that would work with literature, because modern literature often makes allusions to earlier literature.

I think the article's idea is that people engaged by the current book will be motivated to look up the references.

But this is not how historians think about history. This risks presentism. History should be understood in its own context, not by the events that came afterwards. Presenting history backwards makes it feel like prior events happened in the context of future events when historical actors had no understanding of those future events.

Instead history is best understood in the context available to the people at the time.

The academic work of history and teaching history to non-historians have different constraints; the latter requires certain reduction to causality. Or at least that seems like the current state of affairs. I’m not necessarily a fan, but it’s better than no education at all.

Disagree totally. It is more important here. The reason we teach the humanities to non-experts is to teach empathy and the ability to fully separate from your own context. Teaching history backwards sabotages this effort.

Where and when and with whom would you propose teaching people? This is a solvable problem, but you have to justify being ABLE to just do it right the first time.

No. We already know this is a bad idea. It's seen most clearly in the history of science, where people want to trace back just the theories that worked as opposed to looking at all the options being worked on at a given time. See the Strong program.

In more general history, it leads you to founding myths and connecting largely unconnected things like modern France to Charlemagne's Frankish empire.

I agree! Starting from the beginning in history is boring because it has little relevance to other things you know. Going backwards would solve that. You'd be engaged at the beginning and then for the next part you'd remember what you learned, etc.

Also by teaching from the beginning you tend to learn the same things over and over. I probably learned about Paul Revere in 3-4 different US history classes growing up, but the Cuban Missile Crisis only once.

>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past.

That, besides being totally unintuitive to our sense of time, puts even bigger emphasis on making the future seem inevitable (the past harvested as the "seed for post events").

Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently.

Think about your family tree: does it make more sense to try and search for your ancestors, or to find some guy in the 13th century and compile a list of all of his descendants?

You can do both, of course, and for some very important historical figures it's important to list their descendants; but for you personally, what approach feels more logical?

>Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently.

You can far more easily make the same argument in the normal forward taught history (in fact that's what you do above, when you say: "some seeds grow, some's don't".

Teaching history backwards it's harder to point that, because you start from what's already established (grown).

History is about what happened, not what could have happened. You can then speculate on how things could have been given some specific changes, but the fact is that we don’t know how the alternate universe would develop and evolve, and you are now closer to fiction than history.

In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could have.

Unfortunately when we have no idea why things happened there is zero predictive power. So, history without context is little more than a story and at best interesting.

Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds.

So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. The most critical part is filtering and thus ignoring 99.99999% of what happened. Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.

> Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds.

I don’t believe that to be correct, actual history studies seem to be a lot of back-and-forth on topics surrounding, let’s say, a particular event that we know happened or believe to happened. Then in this back-and-forth you will have the spotlight on some specific characters who seem to be related to the event (and then, as you said, a huge part of the actual details are filtered out, I don’t see how that could be otherwise). So of course you have to go in the past to focus on an event.

> So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied.

Aren’t topics studied because they are believed to be true, or because researchers think that there is some interesting knowledge to find? What are those reasons that we hide?

> Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.

Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that.

> topics studied.

Research is not the same as education. History education has frequently been used as indoctrination for example. This plays into why the focus is on rulers more often than say low level economic details.

Which is what I am getting at. We have a vast quantity of solid information about the past, teaching is mostly about picking what to present not how accurate something is. First grade history texts are full of inaccurate information, but that's not really relevant to their purpose.

Sure, research can get into nitty gritty details like the tradeoff in knot designs used on ships. It can be interesting, but it's impact on society is basically nonexistent.

This is not true. Ged Martin’s (critically acclaimed) ‘Past Futures’ is all about the importance of what might have happened when studying history.

https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/471921

What are you disagreeing with? I don’t see what is not true, based on your response.

Sorry, thought I’d included a quote in my original post.

Disagreeing with this:

> History is about what happened, not what could have happened.

This point of view is, I think, completely false and what I was arguing against.

If you toss a coin you will get one result; saying it was "inevitable" because it happened is to misunderstand everything about randomness and statistics, etc.

I think that you misunderstood my comment. I’m not arguing about probability, I’m saying that the toss of coins have already been done, and cannot be repeated or changed. That’s exactly what defines the past. You can spend time studying the details of why you got a specific result of your toss of coin (wind strength, forces applied to the toss, etc), and you can speculate that changing a parameter would have given different results, but you cannot change the toss that you did.

Now, let’s say that you have an actual toss of coin at one point in history that results in a missile being launched. The missile has been launched, that cannot be changed. The fact that tossing the coin n times more results in differents results doesn’t change the fact that the missile has been launched. Sure you can speculate what would happen if the result would have been different the first time, and your educated speculation may even be pretty good and based on strong facts, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now in a fictional scenario.

That seems to be a rational point of view to defend, I would be interested to know what flaws you see.

But saying "what happened, happened" isn't teaching us anything, it's just a tautology.

Also, random is just random. It's not "too many parameters for me to keep track of and account for". That's a very important distinction. Many people believe "chance" is a word used to cover our ignorance. But that's not what it means.

> But saying "what happened, happened" isn't teaching us anything, it's just a tautology.

That’s a very reductionist summary of what I wrote that I wouldn’t consider accurate.

I disagree that there is nothing to learn from what happened, even without considering alternative reality (by the way, I’m not arguing against that, as I said that’s just closer to fiction than history, but that’s still an interesting tool). You can see patterns and systems, name and describe them, try to see if we can find similarities with other events. But you cannot change their output, because it already happened.

Randomness is defined by the lack of patterns and predictability, in practice a system chaotic enough will be considered random (see your toss of coin, in fact it’s just a physic problem with a very high number of parameters).

I believe that you give way too much credit to the concept of pure chance (that you don’t define). I personally believe that human history is mainly the result of high level systems interacting with each other (thus can be described and analyzed), studying them backward seems to be prone to a lot of bias as we are trying to make them reach what we consider to be the contemporary state.

Learning history is fun, for example:

The British East India Company was the largest drug cartel of the 19th century. They forced the Chinese to buy opium, and decades later that opium made it to the Americas. Each time you turn on the TV and hear about of some random dude overdosing with illegal opioids, you can blame the British for that.

Lawrence of Arabia, the Sykes-Picot agreement, among other British interventions, helped create a state of permanent war in the Middle east. Each time you hear of war or violence in the Middle East, or some kid being blown up by a drone or burned alive with white phosphorus, you can blame the British for that.

However, they're not seen as the villains of history, we speak their language and some idiots wear t-shirts with their flag. Go figure.

I think a better grasp of history would lead you to believe that there's nothing especially British about these activities. This is the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, and is a close to a universal law throughout history as you're likely to find.

So, in your revisionist mindset, the opium wars were just like any other war?

The motivation of the opium wars was to fix the British Empire trade deficit by selling opium to China, turning them into drug addicts in the process. When the Chinese started seizing their opium they declared war.

It's fucked up to just imagine what kind of morally bankrupt psycho could have thought of that as a solution to an economic problem, and what kind of society it takes to get everyone aligned to execute it.

in my revisionist mindset it's a lot like King Leopald in the Congo, the near extermination of native Americans (to get their land), the slave trade, the proxy wars in Asia and Africa to fight (or expand) communism and other horrors.

Fair enough, those are good examples. I take back the ad-hominem.

The term to describe what happened in North America is settler colonialism (where settlers seek to replace population with their own rather than assimilating it).

I agree. History backwards is a "this is why this is so" lesson.

While history forwards is..."here's some stuff, it'll all make sense in a few years if you keep studying".

Understanding how we've arrived here, and all the connections going backwards can be profoundly enlightening, allowing you to try to project events forwards, because cause and effect are laid out for you.

Memorizing books full of facts just turns you into an encyclopedia and don't really let you try to understand how to break the present down to get at what the driving forces are behind the now.

Seconded. I've learnt history forwards at the school and all I've got was a mess on weakly connected facts.

Since then I was learning about the history the other way round: I kind of know what happened during my lifetime, I have an vague idea of what followed from what. What people thought, what people did etc.

I can get further back by asking my parents or reading press from. say, sixties. Books written by folks at the time help as well.

I can get as far back as WWII by remembering what my grandparents said.

Going even further back is hard as there's not a lot of survivors anymore, but you still have contemporary press and books.

Even further back... I've moved to Switzerland few years ago and I've started to understand how European culture worked before WWI. Switzerland, not taking part in the wars of XX. century preserved that past to some extent.

Going even further back is hard. The documents are starting to get scarce. Also, the world is getting more alien in XIX. century. There was an article discussed on HN about a message from 1880. The world there is strange on not one you can easily relate to: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44265475

But with enough trying, I think I can cover at least second half of XIX. century in next few decades, meaning that I will be able to think about it as if I was living at the time.

History told backwards makes events seem more inevitable and not less. You are looking for the cause of what will happen instead of wondering. Knowing the end colors how you read all the events leading up to this. I believe this is the problem with traditional history. It is told forward but the people writing it are looking for the seeds of the cause and overfitting the narrative.

> However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.

I'm convinced the 'human' mind loves causality because the human mind loves to believe it is the cause of 'things happening'. This especially holds in chaotic situations where the mind feels it has zero control over anything, down the very nature of itself.

This however, is not always the ideal philosophy to hold (at least to me). I don't know about current culture, but much of eastern philosophy does not share the same sentiment about causality. It's often both, a sort of 'yes-no', the individual self being neither the controller nor the controlled.

Forwards, backwards, I don't think it matters. People fill in the gaps regardless. People see what they want to see, until that gets boring. Then they do something different, wait and see if that changes things. Does it? Maybe.

>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures.

No, that's completely wrong.

For one thing, any good history book will include numerous accidents that could well have happened differently, and sent history off on an entirely different direction. I am surprised you were unaware that is how good history books are written.

As to an infinite number of possible futures, there are a far larger number one might imagine that are in fact impossible, like humans decided a thousand years ago to walk to Mars, and doing it. They are impossible because of basic realities, and history is a key way you discover and teach them. And that is important because many of these basic realities are of the greatest importance for intelligent decision making today.

I think it is a valuable approach to art history, but I am doubtful it will work for history in general. Going backwards, looking for the causes of what happens later, is very prone to hindsight bias.

In a history lesson, the teacher will not be looking to students to uncover new explanations, so I'm unsure why that would matter - the narrative is already set. Which direction you're describing it in boils down to how to best convey the knowledge to students.

I guess this depends on how it is taught. If it is just memorization of historical events then it probably wouldn't matter. But if the students are expected to try to understand the mindset of the people acting throughout history, then it is quite important to avoid "presentism" and "hindsight bias".

Not for science history. It's very hard to grasp what the hell the LHC is about. First tell me why how they figured out water wasn't an element but a combination of two.

It can kind of work for that. Looking at Wikipedia the LHC article links to "Composite particles" to "History of atomic theory" to

"Leucippus (/luːˈsɪpəs/; Greek: Λεύκιππος, Leúkippos; fl. 5th cent. BCE) is reported in some ancient sources to have been a philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms."

The LHC is about looking for more "indivisible elements" by smashing stuff harder.

And so on.

One reason to teach history backwards is that people are already interested in what is happening today, and so it is easy to get them interested in what lead up to it. And one reason this is so is that learning what caused present problems helps you in figuring out what to do about them.

I think the backward thinking has problems too. If you ask the wrong questions you will inevitably get to an improper understanding as well. Things make a lot more sense when taken in their proper chronological context, since thats how humans perceive time in the first place.

Traversing a tree backwards is easy only if you focuse in following only one of the branches. Otherwise you would be arriving to the same places and in need to repeat/refresh/redone the basal parts all the time.

Predicting the past based on the present is rather difficult. To the point that I suspect we would just be wrong in other ways.

I see you don't subscribe to determinism. Are there alternative futures?

Just chuck causality out the window and it’s fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com