Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewcon | Hacker News Reader

This seems naive at best. The goal of studying history is not to be paralyzed and constrained by it, but to learn from it. Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes.

Nor is every goal of our existence is about “building stuff”, it can also be about just living a just and considered life.

These types of boorish egotistical statements from tech talking heads masquerading as cerebral contrarian thought are much of what’s contributed to our current mess.

View on HN

> Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes.

It strikes me that this an argument for the uselessness of reading history. People are basically the same as they always have been and just as you can’t simply explain to a teenager that they’ll feel differently about the world when they’re thirty, every generation has to figure life out for itself.

> People are basically the same as they always have been

And you came to this conclusion without reading any history? This is too absolutist a statement. Sure, some things need to be relearned through experience, but there are also plenty of cases where you don't want to waste time reinventing the wheel.

The downvoters are thrashing a straw man. Obviously nobody believes you're supposed to recreate society every 20 years ex nihilo. What I'm arguing is that the case for reading history has been overstated. Specifically, I was reacting to the claim that, "Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries." I agree. It is. Human beings react to the same emotions and incentives they always have and there's no library big enough to change that.

This is like arguing about whether dieting "works." On the one hand, obviously, yes, it works. There's no credible debate about the efficacy of calorie restriction for losing weight. It simply works. On the other hand, most human beings can't actually follow a diet, so, no, it doesn't actually work, for any reasonable definition of "works."

Reading history is probably a lot like that.

Fine, but by your own argument, reading history gives you some insight into how the humans of today will react to certain situations. You can read history to find out what humans actually are like, not what theory says they're like.

I like this framing quite a bit :)

> Human beings react to the same emotions and incentives they always have

And we know this... how? Studying history!

> and there's no library big enough to change that

Who's trying to change human nature? This is a strawman you are thrashing. Studying history is about understanding human nature, not changing it. Just like studying physics is about understanding projectile motion, not about changing the gravitational constant.

The idea behind studying history is that we use the insights gained from it to try to solve new challenges in reasonable ways, instead of ways we'd know were likely to fail if we'd just cracked open a book.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com