Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

> Many scholars have found themselves ‘baffled and confused by the enormous proportion of forged, remade, confected, and otherwise mutilated documents’ that form the premodern historical record.

I'm sure they do. Nonetheless, they make the best of it. This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up story is as good as your carefully researched one."

Similar to intelligent designers saying, "hey, if you throw a bunch of car parts on the floor, they'll never assemble themselves into a car! So it had to be a Designer."

Or homeopaths saying, "There's so much conventional medicine cannot explain. So my herbal cure and natural diet is as good as their chemotherapy!"

View on HN

>This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up story is as good as your carefully researched one."

It is essentially a denouncement of historical revisionsm though...

While elaborate it is also unconvincingly unspecific. You could write whole books like that without really saying anything.

> This article tries to say, without saying it, "hey, my made-up story is as good as your carefully researched one."

That itself is a great story!

I wonder how many people fell for it. At least one.

Critical thinking and discernment in evaluating information are inportant

The airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is roughly 20.1 miles per hour.

Without the evidence of firsthand observation to stand upon, what have you got?

> what have you got?

you've got a discipline that isn't quite a science, but usually makes a best effort to resemble one.

Which still ends up better than the wild ravings of uneducated conspiracists.

Or the calculated lies of propagandists. The fact that ancient histories were written with an agenda in mind may be true, but that does not mean they are improved by adding further layers of ‘constructed truth,’ IE, lies.

You are only imitating the homeopaths and creationists here.

You are technically describing your interpretation. Careful, the supernatural can be found in what would seem like the very most unlikely places.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Do you have some of that for "the supernatural" ?

Do you have proof that you are omniscient?

didn't say I was. And the fact that you dodged the question kinda indicates your answer is "no."

Perhaps I misinterpreted you.

What is the intended meaning of: "You are only imitating the homeopaths and creationists here"?

Unfortunately, the people most invested in pushing alternative stories of history are not doing it out of some philosophical sense of solipsistic purity (which would at least be admirably consistent, if still useless), it's the people who have vested political interest in rewriting the past to suit their means, in the sense of "nothing happened in Tianenmen Square on June 4, 1989".

Tearing down our current, admittedly flawed, admittedly biased, admittedly fragmentary understanding of history does not cause truth to miraculously reveal itself, but rather creates a vacuum into which will rush the narrative pushed by the people in positions of power. Who controls the past, controls the future. Instead, we can do the best we can, which is to say: produce documents, debate over their veracity, and keep an open mind as to their inaccuracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com