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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

I'm an investor. To make that work, I'm not a historian, but a current-ian.

I avoid news like the plague - all narrative, all emotion, all written by English majors, not subject-matter experts. If a current-ian has to avoid the news, what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time, given only a storm of past-due emotional clickbait?

Future historians can learn more from dispassionate recording of facts, not local news. They would be better served by databases that have lists of facts about current times in simple data formats. Stats, voting records, laws, commodity prices, demographics, weather data, boring (but low-key fascinating) things like that.

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Historians need both those things. The hard facts on weather data, commodity prices, and voting records say exactly what was happening, but they can't tell a historian why it happened. The reasons behind voting records are inherently emotional, subjective, messy things which can't be boiled down to a series of hard facts.

Those reasons are also the important bit of history, because they're what allow us to (hopefully, we're not doing a great job of it lately) avoid making the same mistakes our ancestors did.

I'm sorry, have you ever spoken to a historian? Are you under the impression that they study the past by finding "unemotional" texts written by subjects matter experts about the current affairs of their day? What era do you think was full of these "dispassionate recordings of facts" for historians to peruse? What decade do you think local newspapers stopped being peer-reviewed journals?

Also, how do you plan to make investment decisions without considering emotion? Are you betting on perfectly efficient markets?

Where do I say newspapers have ever been good, or that historians do in fact study dry facts?

I'm saying newspapers are fundamentally incapable of giving unbiased and useful data that broader society can rely on. If you want a daily dose of outrage, perfect. If you want actionable information, look elsewhere.

You wrote: "future historians can learn more from dispassionate recording of facts, not local news."

Even if everything you say is true, such newspapers are still very valuable in a historical context because they preserve things like what the "daily dose of outrage" was about, its broader context etc.

> what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time, given only a storm of past-due emotional clickbait?

Expanding on that thought: What hope do we have of understanding history a hundred years or longer ago? Right now today, with a huge amount of true information available for anybody who takes time to look a little, almost everybody around us is 100% propagandized and will believe the opposite tomorrow of what they believed yesterday if the TV tells them to.

Taking history as it is "taught" as any truth value is ridiculous, since we know that the rulers of each age have used history mostly as a tool for their own political goals. Even today, it is quite apparent that most historians go into the profession as political activists primarily and researchers secondarily, often having decided first what they want to "discover".

I think the best bet is by focusing on multiple centuries ago. Nobody cares about the ancient Roman Reds vs Blues anymore.

They might not care about the teams anymore, but even going to antiquity, modern historians are always busy trying to shoehorn in their beliefs and ideology. A large non-English history publication I follow has in recent years started to explain every new archeological find with "they were trying to impress their neighbours".

Find the remains of a huge ship where you didn't expect it? - Trying to impress neighbours.

Find fortifications in a place and from an age where you have no record of conflict? - Trying to impress neighbours.

The reason of course is because these historians all have gone to universities and live in this city where the inhabitants are infamous for their anxiety to impress their neighbours.

So historians might not root for any team anymore, but they see historical research as mainly a tool to justify and spread their own beliefs. Of course there are much more polemic examples than the one I gave above.

There are huge fights that occur in historical accounts, often because it reflects on the present day and the understanding thereof.

Not that I would call Wikipedia the epicenter of truth, but...

> what hope will a historian have in a hundred years in understanding the truth of our time

It could be really insightful if it's possible to see how a specific wikipedia article evolved on an annual basis over the past 100 years, assuming it's still around.

E.g. for the most political topics, like "abortion", I imagine an annual snapshot and comparing the page between years/eras would provide a lot of historical insight on how "truth" shifts year to year.

Kiwix creates such snapshots on ~1 year cadence, but I don't know if anyone actually preserves the old ones.

In this universe, who will do things like uncover the Watergate scandal (originally Washington Post) or the Theranos scandal (Wall St Journal collaborating with a whistleblower)? Journalism is much more than a ticker tape of data or clickbait headlines.

This is the most quintessentially hackernews comment ever posted.

Historians aren't just interested in facts. How things were discussed is also important and what was and wasn't covered.

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