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> In a sentence: I think we should read history for concept instantiations, not lessons.

By this, the author seems to mean reading for patterns instead of rote facts. And if you go to anyone teaching history in any college anywhere, they'll tell you something similar.

If only this autodidact had studied history . . .

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> In response, some folk back into the weak form of the argument. The weak form is what you get when you hear someone say “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes” — that is, perhaps the lessons of history are too specific to a particular context to generalise, but that some … similarity is consistent over time

Well, it seems you're drawing on the same argument that has already been addressed (or at least mentioned in passing) in the article.

So ... pop quiz: how is reading for concept instantiations different from reading for patterns?

The article isn't about reading for facts vs. patterns. Rather, the author's point is that you should be very careful about identifying these patterns, otherwise you'll likely overfit.

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