The Big Lessons from History | Hacker News Reader

The Big Lessons from History

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72 pointsyarapavan34 comments

The 2nd lesson resonates with me a lot. Particularly the bit about being a pessimistic saver and an optimistic investor.

I'm 34. It's dawning on me that I have been a pessimist all of my life. I have saved and saved, cut expenses here, minimized consumption there. I have known a bit of poverty in my earlier days and while my minimalism may reflect an on-going poverty, I have done ok for myself by two metrics: I own a home and I never let a price tag prevent me from buying what I want at the grocery store. These metrics are paramount to me. If I cannot guarantee them for myself, I am poor. If I can, I am financially unbreakable. It's my own, very humble version of 'fuck you' money.

It has served me alright but not on the flip-side as the article mentions. I am constantly concerned about the next crash and the future seems bleak whether it's climate change, decreasing class mobility, the return of feudalism, or simply the ugliness of an overly complex tech-driven world. In my life, I have only known an irrationally exuberant market and even as I try to overcome my pessimism, it's difficult to tell whether it's not all at all-time-highs. I am loathe to embarrass myself by investing right as everything is about to come down. Now, I am trying to figure out the the right diversification and dollar-cost averaging strategy for myself. (Yes, I should have invested in March. I've made some profits since then but I would've liked to be more deeply invested rather than take profits from quick trades.)

Like everyone else, my friends/associates/colleagues are potential business partners in that we have the same interests, expertise, and drives. I have noticed that the successful ones are usually the optimists. Surely all enterprising begins with hope. But obviously, like any pessimist, I see myself as a realist, and I am sincere and frank in my discussions with others, but at what cost? It's realistic to acknowledge that pessimism drives away opportunity, so I must become an optimist. But how?

I think part of the optimism (in investing) is finding the opportunity in the bad. For example the best time to buy is after a crash kind of thinking.

Also I would argue that most of us are more optimistic than we think, why else would we buy workout equipment or get gym memberships over and over when our past history would prove pretty solidly that what we think will happen likely won't. It's because we are secretly optimistic that it can/will happen this time. Granted this isn't true for everyone but the point that we are more optimistic than we think is in broad strokes true.

I hear you.

Once you change your beliefs about what is required to achieve something. It’s not cold hard “facts”, but belief.

You must believe to see. Not see to believe. I stole this from a devote religious man and it has helped me greatly to take more risks and thus become more optimistic.

(I’m not religious)

>History is full of specific lessons that aren’t relevant to most people, and not fully applicable to future events because things rarely repeat exactly as they did in the past. An imperfect rule of thumb is that the more granular the lesson, the less useful it is to the future.

I think this is throwing away something incredibly important. The way things are today is because of events in the past. Things have provenance. It is important to understand why historians have put so much weight on things like the french revolution and the trappings of the Roman Empire. The specifics of the french revolution are what matter when we consider what happens next. People were thinking about the "ideas of 1789" (and other momentous years during that revolution) when they attempted revolutions again in 1830 and 1848.

I would say that suprisingly lots of history is relevant today because all history is revisonist history. Historians look at past people and situations through today's lenses and bringing up what resonates with todays problems and dilemas. Also the human nature isn't changeable so political and social and personal dilemas of ancient Athens, Rome or China can resonate with us. It only requires a good author to show us past events in new, interesting light.

> all history is revisionist history

That would be the revisionist view.

But history is also one of the sciences, and with a methodology that predates postmodernism.

The history as field starts with Roman historians who literally felt free to make things up or guess them where it suited them.

If anything, history as field is getting more accurate and more complete. Especially with digitalization and when writing about eras that left tons of written material after them.

where would you put Herodotus or Thucydides or xenophon? the first historians weren't Roman really. there are other works less self consciously historical that predate them too, right?

The problem with history is the lessons are long, complicated and easily tainted by the historian's bias.

And, interestingly, in politics people tend to look into history for grievances rather than looking for what works. One of the interesting trends that characterises China's current successes is decades of asking "what are other people doing that is working?". That seems to make them a little unusual.

I dont think this is true. In politics, they often look for great grand past to return to or they look for myth to inspire people from.

It can be social like "more natural living uncorrupted by artificial modernity" or "when the men were real men and women real women". Or it can be ambitious like past grand project or imperium of good to emulate with grand projects now. It can be any kind of claiming to go into own roots, who we really are. It is often mythologization and idealization of past and past figures in order to push for current goals.

Majority of historical figures quotes are out of context, but still used for contemporary politics. Historical figures are painted as flawless greatest, so that we can take their words and use them for ourselves. All that is politics.

Look at how often politicians quote King - as cynical and out of context as most of it is, it literally represents looking into past for what works.

> Historians look at past people and situations through today's lenses and bringing up what resonates with todays problems and dilemas.

Historian here. This is bias is among the first things you learn to discern as an undergraduate. Historical research never starts from a premise "We can observe X in current events, is it possible to find similar events and patterns in the past?" Why? Because the trap here is to apply modern concepts, schools of thoughts and ideas in a past context where they absolutely did not exist.

> Also the human nature isn't changeable so political and social and personal dilemas of ancient Athens, Rome or China can resonate with us.

The resonate with us because the past can inspire us and helps us reflect on human nature. But that's about all it does. Transposing societal structures, ideas, thinking and so on from Ancient Rome to the current day is a fallacy because it denies the 2.000 years of history and evolving societal, cultural, religious, economical, political thinking that happened in between.

Another fallacy is in this way of thinking is that history is teleological and ends with today being the end of human evolution and history; that today is the only logical outcome of everything that led up to today. Determinism really doesn't work well when you want to narrate and explain history.

It's also the reason why I'm skeptical of Yuval Harari's work. His re-telling of human history is thought provoking and prompts for reflection and debate. But in no way does it mean that his take on history is the definitive story.

Bad historians, write works showing past events through the new lenses of current cultural/political affairs. Good historians reveal ancient perspectives, their differences to ours, so that the supposition of two different perspectives with their similarities and differences is what we can reflect and learn from.

There is no such thing is single ancient perspective. All past events had multiple players with multiple different perspectives on what is going on and what should happen. And there is no such thing as single modern perspective either.

I think that the big mistake people do when representing past is that they take one representant of "what past people thought" and proceed to ignore opinions and perspectives of everyone else in that period.

yes, this was the reason for my use of plural when talking about perspective

That said most people, i.e. the non revolutionaries (which is the HN crowd), survive and will survive just fine not knowing anything about revolution or revolutionaries.

My favourite example of such a survivor is Joseph Marie Jacquard inventor of the Jacquard Loom (that which inspired Charles Babbage). Jacquards town would be taken over by revolutionaries on one day, counter revolutionaries on another, local royalty on a third and Napoleans armies on a forth, to the point were the townsfolk had no clue on any given day, who they were fighting with or against.

Jacquard worked to a ripe old age, through all that chaos, seeding the creation of the computer and retiring to a nice beautiful cottage on a beach.

That strategy works until the power-of-the-day decides that your race/class/religion is the Enemy. Good luck being Jewish in 1940s Germany, or a Kulak in 1930s Soviet Union, or a Christian during the Cultural Revolution, etc.

Yeah, young engineer Korolev was purged by Stalinist USSR for no good reason and while he survived the ordeal, his health was compromised. It is possible that his comparatively early death slowed Soviet space program down.

In history you can find any story you want.

Some guy says well Lavoisier lost his head. Well Legrange didn't.

And here is a quote from him - "I believe that, in general, one of the first principles of every wise man is to conform strictly to the laws of the country in which he is living, even when they are unreasonable"

He lived a pretty good life.

Not everyone is a revolutionary (that should be obvious looking at what modern psychology tells us about human nature)

Nor does everyone care about what revolutionaries care about (which should be obvious if you look at what marketing depts reveal about ppl).

And if you are not interested in psychology or marketing, history will show you thousands of such people, famous people and ordinary people, survived comfortably and happily through every revolution and war and how to do it.

Didn't work out so well for Lavoisier.

Maybe a more general lesson to learn here is that there are winners and losers in the great events of history. Mask manufacturers are certainly doing well from the current pandemic. Most Australians have only experienced about 2 months of lockdown. While Americans have got pretty much the worst possible pandemic outcome.

In defense of the specifics of history. The french revolution was an incredibly pro-science revolution. Scientists who took advantage of the situation stood to become wealthy and be given the resources to do the science they wanted to.

> It is important to understand why historians have put so much weight on things like the french revolution and the trappings of the Roman Empire.

It's true that things have provenance. However, one of the things you learn as a modern history undergrad is this: be skeptical and critical of the historical record.

The historical record isn't a perfect reflection of the past. It's always coloured. Why is so much emphasis put on the French Revolution? Or the American Revolution? Because both events are re-purposed to support national identities of both modern France and America. Those identities encompass a vast range of cultural and moral values that permeate daily and societal life. It provides an answer to the question "Who are we?"

However, when the Parisians took to the Bastille on the 14th of July or the Bostonians decided to throw British tea overboard, they didn't do so with the decisive notion "Well, this will lead to the establishment of the Republic with all it's modern trappings and entire national mythology." No. They just did that as an expression to their grievances to their legitimate sovereign at that particular time in history, and not much more.

It's the responsibility of historical researchers to undo history of the many layers of meaning and value, and re-tell the story as it unfolded at the time based on established facts.

The Morgen Housel posts always get on the front page of HN and they are always full of pablum. You can take anything he says and turn it around, say the exact opposite, and it would also make you nod your head. For instance "Important things rarely have one cause." Or you could say "Important things usually have one cause." The pandemic has one cause, the virus. Or "People believe what they want to believe" is literally a tautology. Or "progress requires optimism and pessimism" could be turned into "progress requires blind optimism" which would be equally true. Finally, I don't think Morgen Housel exists. Look at his photo, it's obviously generated by an AI, as are his tripe-filled posts.

> tripe-filled posts

I enjoyed the article and found it thought provoking. Maybe I have tripe for brains.

Very much agree. I prefer"The Lessons of History" by Durant [1], more focused and less "fluffy" IMHO.

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

I would reach a different conclusion than you based on the flaws you identified, namely that argumentation and language is a flexible instrument in the first place. If I was reading a (peer reviewed) history text and the author suggested something like the Great Depression had one cause, frankly I would put the book down.

According to Wikipedia the most famous book on the depression, Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 offers a single cause for the great depression, falling money supply. That might be right or wrong, I don't know. But I know that Housel's "it was a lot of things" is lazy thinking that sounds like wisdom.

He is the narrative fallacy made human. And the fact that so many people enthusiastically support his platitudes is truly a sign of the intellectual barren that the current social-media era is.

Let me copy a previous comment of mine [0].

One quasi-actionable lesson of history the governments can try to remember is: do not sacrifice your strategic goals for a short-term gain, or "avoid hotfixes in production".

Example 1: Septimius Severus raised the legionary's yearly pay from 300 to 400 denarii while decreasing the amount of silver in a denarius by a half. The upset Roman economy would never fully recover.

Example 2: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine on 9 February 1918. Ukraine obliged to deliver grain to Austria-Hungary to relieve the food shortage. In exchange, Ukraine was given lands that Polish people considered their own. When the news went public, the Poles, hitherto the most loyal nation to the Habsburgs, changed the orientation to anti-Austrian. In due time, their Regency Council declared independence. (And Ukraine never delivered the grain; Austria-Hungary had to be sent 500 truckloads of grain and flour from Germany.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20172763

Oh, and another example from Ukraine, this time in 2020: threatened by the International Monetary Fund with being denied loans in the midst of the pandemic, the Ukrainian parliament allowed the sale of the largest asset they are left with, the agricultural land, to foreign entities [0]. Who thinks this will end well for Ukraine, raise your hand.

[0] https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/international-monetary-fund...

I would rewrite Lesson 4 as "In many disasters the attempted treatments made things worse." In the case of the Great Depression, scholarship is focusing on the failed response of the FED [1]. The current thinking is that WWI precipitated the farm crisis by (a) generating a huge demand for US farm products (b) caused a labor shortage as men were being drafted (c) farmers took out loans to purchase new farmland and equipment [2]. When farm prices dropped with the end of WWI, many regional banks failed in the 20s leaving behind a damaged agriculture sector. In 1930, when many hoped the economy would recover from the great Stock Market crash, it was the collapse of Caldwell and Company which was a huge holding company that triggered a massive wave of bank failures [3]. This most recent wave of bank failures greatly damaged manufacturing output [4]. What was the Federal Reserve doing in all of this? It turns out they did nothing because either those banks were not part of the Federal Reserve system. Or they made things worse by actually increasing interest rates which made troubled banks even less likely to survive. Bernanke and others now think the FED's failure to keep the banking system alive led to the Great Depression.

[1] https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-depressio... [2] http://www.iowapbs.org/iowapathways/mypath/great-depression-... [3] https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/banking_panics_... [4] https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/mezzanotti/docu...

Surprised to see Oliver Stone's documentary (Untold History) mentioned. It's very approachable, generally accurate stuff. Far better fare than most History Channel stuff. There is a companion text with comprehensive footnotes, with an audiobook narrated by Stone.

few people before January assumed an infectious disease would ever impact their lives. It was hard to even comprehend.

That seems like an odd thing to say even just for the US, after the SARS and MERS scares, hantavirus, lime disease, not to mention HIV/AIDS.

Very well written and an enjoyable post. Although, when it comes to how Covid-19 started you left out a couple huge reasons: the carelessness of the CCP, and (as far as within the U.S.) the disgusting politics involved.

I'd suggest, regarding social impact, the lesson is about the importance of manufacturing consent. This is where we really failed – and did so systematically (and this is not limited to a specific country).

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