FWIW, I traded an email with Professor Marks, the author of the post and he stopped by this thread. In his email he said he didn't have anything to add to the discussion other than: All I would have to add to that discussion is that I think there is a lot of overlap these days between history and anthropology, especially in areas like history of science.
It was a kind email, he's just not much of a "joiner", is what he said. Fair enough.
We need a Jerry Springer show for academia. And this could go on the pilot. And also from Taleb. One wonders what the author thinks of economist and banker 'experts'. If there's a generalization to be made, it is that academic fields have reputations, and their reputations are independent of each other. Lots of people know better than symbolic AI experts. That's why there aren't very many pure symbolic AI experts anymore. Same goes for eugenicists, alchemists, and freudian psychotherapists. Lots of people know better than bankers. That's why I don't invest in stocks or read Paul Krugman/<insert economist here> anymore. Investigative journalism is going to die without ever having had formal experts. Evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and literary critics I'm still undecided on. But this article/rant didn't actually teach me anything about anthropology. All it showed was that there's drama there just like anywhere else. It could have benefited from just focussing on Napoleon Chagnon and the Yanomamo, and leaving the Godwinning to the comment thread.That convinced me that Diamond thinks he knows more than the experts. Where have we heard that before? Well, from the creationists. From the climate-change deniers.
This coherent criticism of Jared Diamond puts the entire QC ruckus in context.
Minor point of disagreement here, but historians are also very well qualified to talk about human history and its development, probably more so than anthropologists. Buncha young whippersnappers thinkin' they can just come on my lawn, lectureme and mah friends 'bout the dawn of civilization and what have you. Ne'er even pay a tad bit of attention to the interconnectedness of historical events, dumb kids.
Historians are great when they are descriptive and sourced.
But when they become theorists they are treading in waters to deep for them.
The historical sciences just can not be experimental sciences, paleontology included. Documents can suggest, imply etc but they can not prove causality. The problem of course is in the nature of time not in the brains of the historians.
History is the study of past events, particularly macro events. It's a broad category of things, and it absolutely can create theories. What subject of intellectual inquiry doesn't have theories? It's not a subject if it has no theories, it's a fact, or a collection of facts, which history most definitely is not. Historians are absolutely qualified to talk about humanity's development, same as biologists. Creating harsh divides between subject matter is ridiculous- there are many ways to look at the idea of human history, and a lot that any particularly style of inquiry can extract- and make no mistake, the "subjects" as they're divided in grade school are just different inquiries about the same problems. Math included, before anyone thinks I've forgotten about it.Documents can suggest, imply etc but they can not prove causality.
I think that this is deeply flawed. Nothing, at root, can prove causality, but the agreement we've come to is that a common understanding of past iterations of something does imply causality, until an event should disprove it.
Experiment gives a quality of understanding that is impossible in historical science.
Historical experiment is impossible so what we have instead.has a hard time raising above a just so story. In paleontology one can lay out a series of fossils and make arguments about lineage.
bird-hipped dinosaurs -> birds In intellectual history
Hegel -> Marx these are extremely defensible views but are qualitatively different than an observation of gravity or magnetism. My claim that history is impotent when looking beyond recorded history is not unreasonable but a known limitation of the field. It is embedded in the word prehistoric. Non-literate cultures are similarly outside the scope of a Historian.
Or least he is diminished in the historical tool-set his can employ.
What can a historian do with the Sentinelese?
He can cite historical records of contact then what? I would never accuse history of being a collection of facts. tldr; When a historian uses the language of causality without qualification he is invariably talking out his ass.
Nonliterate cultures are actually very well within the scope of history, it simply takes more effort than reading documents in a library. I will give you a hypothetical example; I would cite something that really happened but I don't have the luxury of time (I have to pack for vacation basically right now). Say there is an isolated tribe of North Africans who have had no written documents about them, ever. Period. Zero documents. They rely entirely on an oral record. Now, as a historian, you are attempting to discover the history of the tribe prior to the 1900s, when documents about them were made by the French as part of their colonization efforts in the area. So what do you do? First and foremost you visit the tribe and listen to their oral record, from a variety of sources. Let's say this tribe is about thirty thousand people in all, and three hundred of them are considered knowledgeable in the history of the tribe and its oral tradition. So, over the course of some time, you listen to the entire oral history of the tribe from a good statistical sample of all 300 orators. You then take all of these versions and compare them with each other. What events are consistent across the board? What only have minor differences, and what is told only by a handful of the sample? Let's say you narrow it down and for the purposes of the hypothetical example, you find three major events that are generally agreed upon as having occurred in the way told. The first is the slaughter of the tribes Great Leader before they were nomadic by what are described as "silver-red devils." The second is the arrival of Screaming Men on Horses, and third is trading gold for guns with the blue-coated men who are described as not being from across the sea. You can safely assume that these three events occurred in some way, shape, or form. There is nothing mystical about the events, not really, and the events do not rely upon anything magical or out of the realm of possibility. Before you can comment on what the events likely are, you must first compare them to what you already know. So you know that Roman armor was iron (silver colored) with red cloth or paint. And you can check by the general age of the tribe, its lifespan, and how many generations ago the event occurred (statistically averaged of course) to see if it matches up with the Roman Empire's incursions in to North Africa. Let's pretend that it does. Second event coincides with the Arabic invasion and is also right around the time mention of a polytheistic dynasty tends to stop; let's say you notice a trend that less and less events are explained through mysticism when the screaming men arrive. This is likely the Arabic conquest of North Africa, and so you chalk it up to that. The third event has you confused initially. Blue coats imply the French, but the French have no documented evidence of ever meeting a nomadic tribe in North Africa at the time described. So you go to your reference and check for all countries that have blue uniforms at the time, as well as any mercenary companies or smaller nations that had bought blue uniforms even if they weren't standard issue. In the process, you realize that the United States had blue uniforms at the time, and so you cross-check the date with your timeline of United States history and find that it occurred very close to the U.S. retaliation against the Barbary pirates. You then check further in to records of ships and discover that a Captain was fined a year's salary for trading a small stock of gold taken from Tripoli to a tribe of "desert Arabs" when the ship stopped for a quick resupply. The description of the tribe is similar to the traditional garb worn by the nomadic tribe you are trying to understand. Thus, you can safely assume that the tribe has had three major interactions with other areas. They were 1. Invaded by the Romans, 2. Conquered and converted by the Arabs, and 3. Had contact and were introduced to firearms by the Americans. Yes, this is a hypothetical example and thus of course leads to that conclusion. Field work would not be that easy, and at times would probably require the help of an anthropologist. But, you are still able to determine to a pretty high degree of certainty just how valid an oral tradition is. This has actually been a thing in history for more than two decades; the acceptance of oral tradition was kicked off by the revisionist movement to a much more thorough degree than it had in the past and it really did bring a much more broad perspective on the subject. The view of history as solely a written tradition is very, very outdated in the field. That being said, you are confusing history with a straight line in the first part of your post. Hegel -/-> Marx. Hegel + Social Conditions + Burgeoning German Identity + Rise of Industrial Society + everything else happening at the time = Marx. It is not Hegel leads to Marx with nothing in between. Its Hegel leads to thousands of other things, some of which connect to Marx, but also connect to American Capitalism, to Bismarck, to basically everything. Its not a straight line so much as a gigantic web of connections between people, technology, and events, and trying to classify a part of this tapestry as "intellectual history" is assuming operation in a vacuum when operating in a vacuum is impossible. History is a study of the events and connections. By its nature, it avoids straight lines. Just look at JFK for a little brief example. JFK wins the presidency because he comes in at the right social time (postwar boom), has the right image for the public (young, hip, energetic), and looks good on television (as compared to Nixon.) But why were the social conditions like that? What had shaped the public desire? Who had created that concept of good looks, and who brought about the television as a means of delivering media? Answer those questions and you have history.
So not much about the Sentinelese eh? My argument is not that historians can't know things or sequences they just can't know that one thing caused another. To say otherwise is hubris.
Pretty sure scientists can't know that either. Causality is beyond proof.
The way scientists "can't know" is qualitatively different then how historians can't know. I think technology is a huge example of this. We understand the cause and effect qualities of transistors, wire and spun glass enough for us to have this conversation. I am not saying historians can not make arguments I am saying that their assertions are largely un-testable. (pending fixing the tardis). There is a difference between using calculus to predict the motions of the planets and saying that Europe is powerful because it is wide. Am I wrong?
Yes. Applied economics are proof that you are wrong. Modern political theory are proof that you are wrong.
I'm not sure I can agree about modern political theory. The vast knowledge gained from reproducible experimentation makes a very good case for causality. In fact, countless theoretical breakthoroughs have been elucidated by experimentation. However, experimentation in political theory is severely limited in scope and predictive power. I'd bet my life on the valence of carbon based on atomic theory, but never on any prediction of a political theory, no matter how it was derived.
The tests take longer and it's harder to run them in parallel, but it's just a slower version of the same steps.
I think that is an argument that cannot be proven, as you could always fault the experiment or the time allowed. It's not that I think that political theory isn't important or worthwhile, but without demonstrable reproducibility, it's just fundamentally different to something like physics.
The track records of both of those fields suggest I am right. both of them are at the level of medieval blood letting. But they may be getting better . good article
I think this ordering illustrates my views. math physics chemistry biology ecology sociology/anthropology political science /economics phrenology astrology homeopathy Austrian school economics (notice history is not on the list because it is orthogonal to science. It is a valid and noble pursuit it just is impotent when it comes to causality.)
I think this ordering illustrates my views. math physics chemistry biology ecology sociology/anthropology political science /economics phrenology astrology homeopathy Austrian school economics (notice history is not on the list because it is orthogonal to science. It is a valid and noble pursuit it just has nothing to do with causality.)
I agree that historians are also well qualified, but isn't the scope of their work different from the scope of anthropologists?
Somewhat. A historian is looking at a broader picture, even if they are speaking about a small section of it. If I say "what was the effect of the Civil War on the city of Richmond in terms of economic damage" then I am analyzing a few things. I'm looking at the actual damages, how much of it was affected, the impact on the economy, the economy prior to the war, the effect of freemen replacing slaves in terms of wages, any money being spent in the area, how much trade was changed by the war, what major tobacco fields took a hit, how much damage the roads took, etc. While this documents the economic impact on Richmond, it also gives a wider view of the Civil War. In turn, that broadens our perspective onn reconstruction, the Southern Revival, and the culture of the United States after that time period. The perspective is much larger than the initial topic, all from that investigation. Human history is not happening in a vacuum. What, say, the Greeks developed is actually much less important than the fact that Alexander the Great spread it, or that the Arabs and Persians preserved it. The importance of a discovery, or of a culture, can only be measured by the number of connections it makes to other countries. When people say "but Tibetan Monks could've discovered the cure for cancer 400 years ago" they are missing the point. Discoveries, and cultures, are irrelevant in terms of human history (a very broad subject) if they are not connected to other cultures even on a small scale. When an anthropologist interviews an isolated tribe in Brazil they are giving you the image of an isolated tribe in Brazil. When a historian tells you about the history of that tribe, they are weaving a more thorough picture of the cultures within the region and likely giving some insighht in to Brazilian history at the same time. In terms of raw connections, we have Malaria to thank for the Gasoline Engine, and we have the Ottoman Turks to thank for Satellite Navigation.
So, if I understand correctly, historians are looking for connections in history. Anthropologists on the other hand isolate culture/events in order to study it. This means that a historian does more macro-culture while a anthropologist is looking at micro-culture. Seems to me that those are 2 different things. In the case of the isolated tribe, an anthropologist will be looking at the small things like relations between people while the historian will be looking at the larger picture. Please tell me if I am mistaken. I now want to understand what historians and anthropologists actually do. And really? Malaria to thank for the gasoline engine? How did that work?
I avoid commenting too much on the difference between historians and anthropologists because they overlap quite a bit. Here's how Malaria gave you the gasoline engine. So Britain in particular is trying to get quinine because everyone in its island colonies off in the Far East is getting Malaria and dying by the droves. Now this is actually not terrible because the British, at this point basically in control of every trade route worth mentioning, have a decent enough supply of quinine plantations. The problem is that quinine tastes disgusting, and you really can't avoid the taste because at the time, the way you take it is by dissolving it in water. Well in the process of trying to get it to taste less like a rancid human asshole, the Brits end up discovering that depending on how you mix the solution, it becomes carbonated. Add a little bit of sweetner and it does help with the taste a little bit, and all those bubbles are at least interesting on the tongue. So they promptly find a way to bottle this new fizzy soda and find a way to dispense it from said bottle. How? Well, a spray nozzle. Jump ahead a bit. That spray nozzle is now being used in the latest marketing triumph, perfume, and its being used everywhere, only this time its much, much smaller and the nozzles don't send out a stream of fizzy liquid, they aerosolized the liquid perfume so that it comes out in the cloud we know today. That part is important. Now, two Germans are working on their gasoline engine, but they have a problem. They can get it to run, but not efficiently; if you just burn the gasoline it uses up a huge amount and doesn't get nearly enough bang - if you'll pardon the phrase - for your buck. So what do they do? Well, first they get a perfume style nozzle, which means that instead of liquid gasoline they are injecting a small, explosive cloud of gasoline in to a cylinder. Then they make one that is adjustable; change the mixture to make it pump in more or less gasoline. This explosion drives a pistol, which turns a crankshaft, which makes your wheels spin, which propels the car. And how did they make this explosion? With aerosolized gasoline, which they made by creating a cloud like perfume, which traces the origins of the spray nozzle back to the tonics first used to make quinine taste better, because quinine tastes awful but is necessary for the prevention of malaria, which was an issue because the British needed people to run their plantations. Mother. Fucking. History.