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> as they aren't full-on manipulations of reality, I view them as a useful entry point into a subject.

But then, this is exactly the critique the article advances: in this book Gladwell presents a narrative that gives readers (to put it charitably) an incomplete understanding of the nature of American air doctrine in WWII. Omission of facts IS manipulation of reality, and what Gladwell has created seems to be more akin to a third- or fourth-order representation of reality where a heavily biased selection of (to be fair, mostly true) facts is then glossed and presented in a form where one "can read it in the bathtub with a cold beer" and have a good time. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's pretty remarkable to assume that such a work gives you any meaningful grasp of a subject in addition to being entertainment.

I think by "manipulations" the parent's implication is, manipulation to some purpose, as in to fabricate support for some political or philosophical belief. It's so common to manipulate reality for the purpose of entertainment that we have a fairly benign term for it: poetic license.

Then label Gladwell's works as the fictions they are.

Who'd assume that though? Reading through a book does not give me a robust understanding of a subject. If that were true, why would people go to school? I read for a perspective and some entertainment, and maybe retaining some details. I read the God Delusion, but I wouldn't presume to know all that much about the intricacies of evolutionary biology. I have at most a cursory understanding of how natural selection works, and a few examples to go on that I didn't know about previously. Why would I care to know everything about "American air doctrine in WWII" when I hadn't previously paid the subject any thought at any level?

Truth having layers of detail seems accurate to me. Outer layers conflicting with inner layers is foolish and means that the outer layer wasn’t true at all.

Fiction claiming to be non-fiction is annoying and should at least be labeled accurately.

You'd not be able to label anything as non-fiction, unless it were from the mouth of Cthulu. No matter how dryly something is presented, the reader should still be skeptical.

I think it’s hard to be 100% accurate, but that doesn’t mean we should give up and purposely, or incompetently, include falseness when we’re trying to tell the truth.

> Truth having layers of detail seems accurate to me. Outer layers conflicting with inner layers is foolish and means that the outer layer wasn’t true at all.

That just seems like how most teaching works. I.e. No one starts out learning physics as it works in any physical space, you start with a simplified fake version to start to understand concepts before you can start to handle greater complexity and approach greater truths.

There’s honest fake and dishonest fake.

Using simplified, fake versions to learn concepts makes perfect sense.

Teaching people that fake versions are actually true just to learn concepts is counterproductive. There’s no advantage to lying about training models and it’s not healthy, I think, to pretend I’m doing this for the good of my audience.

> Nuanced and rigorous history requires careful and objective study to truly understand.

Have you read https://acoup.blog/?

Another reader above (@iainctduncan) said:

> Years ago he was a springboard for me to read further on various topics, each time leading me to conclude he doesn't give a shit about presenting the truth if it gets in the way of his story. :(

If everyone were like her or him, it would be fine to write sloppyly and engagingly about science and history posing as if you were a real authority. But that doesnt seem to be the case (this is HN).

> Nuanced and rigorous history requires careful and objective study to truly understand.

It seems like the most objective account of history one can create is merely a recollection of all facts, with no room for editorialization. I've read some books by historians and I find it hard to follow when reading in the 20 minute increments my free time is divided into. Maybe that's just my problem, but it makes me understand why some people reach for pop history.

Academic history is storytelling rather than a recollection of facts. This is why there are different analysis modes and multiple views of the same events can all be valid work.

That said, it is definitely the case that academic history is written for other academics and is often terribly dry for people outside of the field. There are exceptions, but little about a book itself will tell you whether it is one of the ones that are well suited for amateur readers.

Given finite resources (limited pages in a book), the decision to put some facts over others into said book is by nature a form of editorialization.

And that's fair enough, except he doesn't present his work as merely "first ring of truth" - he presents it as a deeper ring, or at least certainly does not indicate that it's merely an introduction.

So laypeople read his books and listen to his podcasts and don't know that the truth has been fudged so much for the sake of storytelling that it borders on outright misleading. But it was so entertaining in the meantime that it feels like additional insight - which of course is the brilliant trick of his marketing.

I like Adam Curtis for the same reason

Curtis is trying to create a certain sort of dream state in which the free association of ideas takes place and you reframe your perspective on society.

I'd hesitate to call it even something that could be true. It's more like an abstract painting.

I went through quite a hostile phase, as it's clearly masquerading as something it isn't. It's more a work of aesthetic-political creation, than any kind of "history".

It's a made up history of a possible world view possible dead people might have had; for the sake of saying something about our world views today.

> It's more like an abstract painting.

Or a music video: Massive Attack x Adam Curtis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e3I1mLc3RM&t=54s

> There is one objective truth, of course

Not necessarily, I think it's very likely that the foundation of truth is ever changing in itself, nothing has to be fixed in time and space.

> but there are higher-order concentric rings of abstractions above those that aren't strictly true but serve as an accurate enough first-order approximation of the truth

I think one thing that was a big "haha" moment for me was actually reconsidering what I'm even trying to accomplish when discussing "truth". I realized that in actuality, we are simply framing facts and observations into conceptual models that allows us to predict or infer further conclusions. This means we really only care about the practicalities.

Like you said, quantum physics and general relativity are simply two conceptual models, in practice they each work well for certain things, but we've found they are incompatible right now, and what one is good at the other not so much. And that's fine, unless you wrongly obsess over "truth", which you will never find. But if you focus on your practicalities, then it's a question of finding the most effective conceptual model you can, and then applying it to your life.

When it comes to history, it's the same. It doesn't really matter what actually happened and why. What matters is the conceptual model you use to look at the artifacts you've got, and what that allows you to do today in your life. It might be that one framing of history helps you keep together a free society and keep authoritarian agents at bay, if so, it's a pretty good model of history. If it doesn't allow you to do this, and actually does the opposite, and that's not your goal, than it's a bad model of history.

Start thinking that way, and history becomes a means to protect yourself from future mistakes using past data. Now your model of history can be objectively measured in how good it is at doing that.

This 'means to an end truth' should never be confused for the actual truth. QM and GR are both as true as we can make them. Newtonian mechanics is even more useful of a model, since it's much easier to work with, but it just isn't true at some point.

The lesson to learn from the current limits of physics isn't that you should construct whichever narrative best serves your propaganda and stop obsessing about the truth. The only lesson they should teach you in history is to not obsess too much about details that just can't be known (like the internal motivations or beliefs of historical figures) and instead to focus on what actually happened (like the impact their actions had).

I'm not sure you understood my "haha" moment.

"Means to an end" generally assumes that the means is justified by the end goal, which isn't what I'm talking about. I'm saying that seeking truth is misguided, searching and defending any truth is always a falsehood, because there are only models of the world and their practical applications.

This applies to history as well, we have fragments of the past, we will never know the truth of what happened and why, you can insist that your assessment is the true one, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. What matters is that your assessment is useful to you or to me right now, and that is the only thing we can successfully argue about, otherwise everything else is just our opinion of our own belief in the interpretation of the past.

Generally this is implicitly ackowledged in science, it rarely claims an absolute truth, simply a model that best fits all the data, and which affords us the best predictions and the best methods for accomplishing some desired outcome. The model that succeed the best at that will be the agreed on "truth" and how we go about understanding things until a better model shows up. In that sense, the scientific "truth" is a moving target by design, because the success criteria for truth is just: the current most practical understanding.

What that means for history is that yes, the science of history is very much grounded in this practical reality. You are successfully studying history if the lessons you take from the past allow you to predict the future or increase the likelihood of your desired outcome for some decision you need to make today.

Effectively I'm arguing against the narratives of truth that serves people's agendas, but I'm doing so by pointing out that my "haha" moment related to this was realizing that truth is irrelevant, believing in truth itself is a mistake. If you start to instead seek practical relevance and start to see all truth as "models of the world" and not the real truth, you'll now be able to actually judge truths for what they really are and that means how useful and helpful they are to you or me at predicting events or generating some desired outcome.

I still think my position is very different, and your position still sounds to me like it would ignore known facts if they don't fit a useful narrative.

Let's take some concrete examples. Say that a Volkswagen engineer came to a hypothetical ethical manager and said that they had discovered some of their cars' emissions were much higher in real life conditions than in the lab tests they reported. If the manager cared about the truth, they would investigate to find out how this came to be. If they cared about utility, they would hide this information, as it may cause Volkswagen to lose an edge.

Similarly for historical purposes - an ethical historian who is interested in helping the English public have a good image of itself would discard information about the horrors that the British Empire forced many people through, and only discuss the nice things they did. After all, truth doesn't exist, so why complicate the story?

Hum, okay it definitely seems I've not explained myself clearly, and I'm not too sure how to best communicate what I'm trying to share, so bare with me.

I can see that you're getting hooked on the utility side of things, when I say practical I do not imply benefitial to you in a selfish way. In fact, I'm making no moral implications, I'm not speaking to ethics or morals at all.

So it seems you're thinking I'm saying that you can simply make up falsehoods to your benefits, lie and deceive others is a great way to achieve a goal, so why not. Okay, that's not what I'm saying at all, I'm not arguing that the ends justify the means.

What I'm saying is that any argument to the truth is actually a way to deceive yourself and others. It's a dogma:

> Dogma - a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true

You'll tell me this is the truth and argument it to death until I concede defeat and agree to your truth, or we'll just agree to disagree.

Now what I am saying is that this truth of yours, it's simply a hypothetical model which fits the data you have, or at least best tries to fit and explain the data you have. That it is true or not is unknown. What we can know though, is how practical of a model it is.

So replace the word truth with model everywhere and hopefully you'll come to the same "haha" moment as me, when looking at people's truth as simply models they came up with that best explains their current data, everything becomes clearer and starts to make sense.

So in that way, I'm saying someone's truth (which in my head I think of as model of reality, or explanation and understanding of something), is only as "true" (which in my head I think as accuracy of the model to predict or create a desired effect), as it can be used practically to predict the outcome or allow us to design methods that generate some desired outcome.

That means that when a historian explains what happened in the British Empire, why they did what they did, what effects it had on people and our modern times, how it felt to live in that era, etc. I will assess how correct they are based purely on if any of that information can predict anything or allow for any applicable learnings that actually works. Otherwise I will simply conclude that that's just their opinion, and it's probably biased from their frame of reference and beliefs.

So your examples are a little beside my point. But for example, in the case of the ethical manager, let's assume since they are ethical, they don't want their cars to cause harm to the environment. If they followed what I'm saying, they would not look for some absolute truth about the cause of global warming, instead they would look for the current models of climate and emissions that have best predicted the changes in the climate or have shown the most promesse in changing the climates outcome, and use that to figure out what best to do about it. Not try to argue that the model is not the real absolute truth, because of bla bla I believe and I think and therefore, and so don't you get it...

Ok then, thanks for taking the time to re-word this, I think I get your point and I agree with it. Your use of 'practical/useful' was what was throwing me off - I'm used to seeing it in the way you meant it in physics,bbut when moving to history it took on other connotations for me.

The important thing is that we both agree that finding facts that your model can't account for means you have to replace/augment your model,nk matter how useful it's conclusions had seemed so far. This is the core of what I consider important for a theory of 'truth' to seem acceptable to me personally, and yours does pass this test.

Again, thanks for bearing with me!

> The important thing is that we both agree that finding facts that your model can't account for means you have to replace/augment your model,nk matter how useful it's conclusions had seemed so far

Ya I think we agree on this. Maybe I go one step further though, and I'm proposing that even if your model accounts for everything, it is still not the truth, just a good model, and that it works perfectly today does not guarantee it will work perfectly forever or that reality is exactly as your model explains it to be.

I can imagine both a reality which changes in time and space, thus a model could be perfect given some specific time and space, but no longer apply in another. And I can also imagine equal models that are both just as accurate, yet they differ in their explanation. So a model which would have perfect prediction still might not be the true reality, it could be an equal model with similar behavior, but how you've modeled things could still be very different from how reality works.

Which is where I'm kind of suggesting that the search for truth is irrelevant, and trying to argue for or against truth is futile. It be better to search for models with practical benefits instead, that the model is true to reality or not isn't something we should fight over, because it doesn't matter, and it's not objectively provable.

So when I say "search for truth", I don't mean the search for an understanding that enables better prediction or manipulation of outcomes. I take it to mean the search for what reality actually truly is like. And I'm saying the search for that, while it sounds noble, it really just ends up being dogma, and each of us can believe whatever we want. But the search for the former, the search for models of reality that have practical benefits is something we can all discuss and benefit from. And so I think our focus should move away from this "truth seeking" and towards this "practical model seeking".

Hope that made sense too. I guess in a way I'm saying that for example, if someone says that "this is what really happened in the past", and then they show you evidence as to why, there's this parchment, this old painting, this focile, well that's still just someone's belief of what happened, even if it constructs an explanation that fits the data. It might not be what actually happened at all, it's just a good model that fits the current data. So practically speaking, all you can do is nod and smile, or ask: ok what can I do with this? Can I use it to accurately predict what will happen in the future? Can I use it to make better decisions today so that the future ends up in that way instead of some other way? If no, well your explanation is crap, and all we can do with this explanation if you insist it is true is get mad at each other.

Oh, and the last thing is, with this frame of mind, it is perfectly acceptable for contradicting models to coexist. A model doesn't have to be "absolutely true to reality" to be practical. In fact, a not true to reality model could be more useful sometimes, an approximate model for example can sometimes be more easily computed, or put to use, it can make it that predicting things (while possibly less accurate), can be done more quickly or at higher scale, or with less data, etc. So again, I'm trying to show that if you discuss practical models, you kind of remove all sense of nobility and righteousness and pride and whatever that a belief in "truth" brings.

Edit: Oh and if anyone has read this far, to bring it back to Malcom Gladwell. What this means is that if you don't look at his revisionist history as a claim to the truth, but instead consider it a model of the past. The question isn't if he is right about the truth or not, but how practical is his framing of history for the reader. Can I leverage it to make better decisions today about political policies? About work policies? In my day to day life? Can I apply it to predict social trends? This is now what becomes important, how good a model is it, not how truthful is it.

I completely agree that a model that fits all data ever thrown at it is still not 'the truth', and that there is in fact no way to access ultimate truths about the world.

Unfortunately in the past I have seen people using this type of reasoning to then argue that, if truth is illusory, so is falsehood - that everything is a matter of opinion and utility (for example, Peter Jordan has argued this in the past). This does not at all follow from your my and your beliefs about ultimate truths, but it is tempting for some to extrapolate.

> ...allows us to predict or infer further conclusions. This means we really only care about the practicalities.

Exactly.

What's this called? Post-Popperian? Predictionist? Predictionatarian?

The last 4 years have transmuted me from a Popperian to a predictionist. Due to the futility, I've stopped trying to inform, refute, persuade. Now I only care about the quality and utility of predictions a model can make.

Young Earth Creationism? Cool. What can I do with that bit of wisdom? Nothing? Ok, well, thanks for sharing, I guess.

“Cogito ergo sum.” There is, by nature of anything existing at all, definitionally some objective reality.

Descartes take is refuted by almost all philosophers that followed him, because it's just not a convincing argument.

> The problem with Descartes’ standard for knowledge is that almost no beliefs meet it. Descartes thought he could show how our ordinary knowledge claims are ultimately based on the Cogito, but most philosophers have not been convinced by his case

-- https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2018/11/26/descartes-i-think-...

Now I don't deny the existence of a reality, I'm not saying everything is an illusion and we're not even real. I'm saying that reality need not be a constant, which would mean that truth can be a moving target, as it can change in time and space.

And then I'm saying that irregardless of if that reality (or ground truth let's call it) is constant or ever changing, when we humans explain that truth, we are always simply modeling our understanding of it for practical purposes. Our search for truth itself is driven by this practical drive, understanding of the ground truth is researched in order to better predict the future or act upon our environment to create the future we'd prefer.

If you instead think of our explained truths as the absolute ground truth, you are entering the world of human dogma and beliefs, that is a world of personal opinion, with no way to argue or debate anything, its only practical benefits are seeking comfort and/or power.

For me, this was a big "haha" moment. I realized that the opposite of dogma is pragma. Your claim to the truth are useless, and in many cases harmful dogmas. It's much better to focus on practicalities that one model has over another. Most people's "truths" have glaring flaws anyways, that doesn't always invalidate their practicalities though, and that matters much more in the end.

> If you're pragmatic, you're practical. You're living in the real world, wearing comfortable shoes. If you're dogmatic, you follow the rules. You're living in the world you want, and acting a little stuck up about it

-- https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/pragmati...

That is fine, of course, but be careful not to believe the conclusions you draw from Gladwell alone and be very careful about asserting those conclusions as guides to future behavior without going to the effort of finding out where he is simply wrong.

In this day and age, ignoring the deeper layers of truth which are available to you as a writer is disingenuous. It is a choice.