[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.