[UncleMeat]

This sort of content is intensely frustrating. OP is a software engineer and entrepreneur. There are actual people who actually study this stuff for a living. They are called historians and they work extremely hard for minimal pay in a field with few jobs and crushing hours.

Then some random startup person comes in and writes a blog post with a sentence like

> But there’s also another option if we don’t take it for granted that people in the past were really that different from us.

Like... this is the sort of sentence that makes people tear their hair out and scream into the void. It is like somebody coming to you and saying "wait... maybe we can... just hear me out... write a program in text and edit it over time to build software."

My wife is a professor of history and has done work on some of the questions raised in this blog post. Usually I show her these things because I know it'll be fun to rage at them together. But this one I chose not to show her because I do not believe that I have ever seen online writing that is more dismissive of her profession than this. Like, and I cannot express this clear enough, OP is just making shit up about a field of study that is centuries old and involves professionals who work 60+ hour weeks for shit pay because they are so invested in these topics.

[davidivadavid]

I gave this post a pass because it's not as arrogant as most HN-variety STEMlords, but yeah, it's pretty embarrassing.

[feoren]

I took "HN-variety STEMlord" as a poignant personal attack on me ... and one I absolutely needed to hear. Somehow it's the perfect phrase for something I've (ashamedly) done myself quite a bit. Thank you for this much needed slap in the face.

[zug_zug]

Bro I feel like you're mixing up a whole lot of entirely unrelated thoughts and feelings here.

One thing is a random blog post. One thing is your frustration that teachers/historians don't get paid well. A third thing is that people find blog posts more engaging than history text-books.

I also find your expression "making shit up" really weird. Anyways that's all for you to unpack -- this is a fun read, if you want to be angry at everyone who has a non-academically-rigorous idea that they type up that's one way to spend your energy.

[UncleMeat]

"Why did various people in the past use various forms of divination and how did they feel about it" is a real historical question with a commensurate amount of analysis. This article throws out three claims

> Well, sometimes building a consensus is more important than accuracy. A shaman’s random decision is better than a more optimal decision not everyone can get fully behind. This is especially true in war scenarios where conviction is key.

> Sometimes it is better to believe that a decision is sanctioned by a higher authority than to know that it rests on mere conjecture, as it usually does in the real world where we’re always dealing with incomplete information.

> And sometimes it is better to have a truly random decision than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Surely, the enemy will not be able to predict a shaman’s completely random decision.

The author then makes conclusions about the beliefs people in the past had about divination.

This appears to have been derived entirely from the hunches of the author. That's best described as "making shit up."

It starts with the epiphany: "hey, maybe it is actually possible to understand the past" and then doesn't make the barest effort to consider that there are approaches for doing this.

[loa_in_]

I think any non-scientific publication is someone's hunch more than less, and that's okay, because it's not a scientific publication. It's not peer reviewed either!

This serves as a proper inspiration or food for thought for scientists living their lives outside of work and industry. It makes the world go around and should be cultivated and fostered in my opinion.

[StrictDabbler]

The article even treats an Elizabeth Gilbert quote as though she invented memetics, a claim she would never make.

It's an incredibly shallow and ignorant pastiche of pop-culture science-like voodoo nonsense of the Carlos Castaneda/I am Ishmael type.

Fun conversation to have at 2 AM while drunk at an undergraduate party but pure cringe in the context of a published blog entry.

[olddustytrail]

Well all I can say is that you and your wife must be really poor teachers.

Here you have a child who knows nothing about history but has come to a realisation all by themselves about people in the past, and instead of praising them and saying, "here's where you can learn more" you decide to deride them for their ignorance.

That's not ideal.

[UncleMeat]

I am not deriding them for their ignorance. I am frustrated that there is a mountain of available resources for this person to actually learn from scholars and they've instead presented their initial epiphany as unique and insightful and then run in what seems like a completely random direction based on that epiphany and no additional information.

The blog post is not presented as "hey, I am now interested in history and would like to engage with it." It is presented as "I can drive through this sort of analysis purely based on baseless hunches." If the article stopped at "hey, I've been thinking about the past wrongly" then I'd have a completely different response.

[olddustytrail]

That's fair enough, but this isn't an academic paper. It's just a blog post - someone's random thoughts.

PreEdit: I was going to say they didn't know it would end up on HN but I thought I'd better check and sure enough it was submitted by the author. I think you may be righter than I am.

[UncleMeat]

I'm being a little mean to OP. I've certainly written stuff online that I'd be embarrassed to show to an expert.

I find this sort of thing to be frustrating in ways that go beyond just OP's post. The humanities are being hollowed out in both education and professional research. Students are told not to take courses in history. They are funneled into software and business because these fields pay well and these people become leaders of major corporations whose technology shapes our society in so many ways.

And they also write things like this, which simultaneously suggest that history is useful (the original epiphany being something learned basically right at the beginning of any study). OP clearly thinks that this is important. They think that this understanding has the capability of changing how we see people of the past and people today.

But then... they also seem to think that the field is worthless when they take the next step. I can think of no other way that a person could get from their initial epiphany to "I dunno, I bet this is why people in the past read entrails" and just roll with that. Like, what does this person think that a historian does all day?

Maybe the humanities really are dead. And the outcome of that won't be "nobody cares about history." It'll be this. The leaders of the next generation pretending to do history without understanding what the thing even is. And it'll be people reading that content and internalizing it. A whole society just hallucinating understanding of humanity through entrepreneurship newsletters.

This article is nowhere near the most harmful one I've seen. It is just very blatant. And it makes me sad.