I cannot tell you how many comments or emails I get which are the history equivalent of Collier's example 'dark matter/dark energy' question, where it is "what about my theory?" where the theory doesn't even make sense because it lacks a fundamental understanding of the foundations. 6/
Hate to tell you, but as someone who used to do a LOT of public-facing outreach (and someone who publishes on black holes…) people have always contacted (astro)physicists with their ‘theories’ which are exactly ’vibes physics’. The movie ‘What the Bleep Do We Know?’ Is exactly the sort of thing we
Get (with worse production values, usually), when someone decides they understand the words we use… and they do not… but then goes on to use those words. They’ll insist that speed is made of light or something similarly bogus, without understanding those terms HAVE DEFINITIONS… As someone who has
Dabbled in the humanities (& who has a great deal of respect for them), I know damn well that terms used in history papers might seem like plain text, but they have meaning & connotation that takes time & attention to learn. Dunning-Kruger means plenty of folks don’t notice, in humanities OR STEM.
Yes, I'm only an undergraduate-level history student, but I'm already having to explain to my PhD-in-Physics partner who proofreads all my papers that some words are "terms of art." Fortunately he's interested in understanding and is a helpful pair of eyes.
Physics cranks also got really out there with their crankery. I think many of us have the misfortune of remembering Time Cube (Not that history cranks don't — Ancient Aliens and Ancient Giants crackpots abound)
the funny thing about this is this sort of pseudohistory shows up in for example neil degrasse tyson's Cosmos because the contempt for humanities is pervasive
Can you give an example of such a question in the context of history?
And what occurred to me is how the anti-intellectualism that is at the core of this is enabled by the ability to interact or *pretend* to interact with a field in plain language. Folks assume if a field requires its own language, it is hard and those who do it are super smart...7/
the same dudes who are assuming this have entire vocabularies for discussing cartoon pornography
Quite an 𝘢𝘥 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘮! Anyways, while I cannot confirm or deny whether that's true, I'll just note something unrelated - that, surely, if it were true, then, regardless, anti-intellectuals like that would only make up a tiny minority of cartoon pornography enjoyers and conversationists.
RFK jr seems like this kinda guy
...whereas if a field is largely done in plain language, the assumption is that it is easy, that it requires no special skills. "Anyone," they assert, "can be a historian(/classicist/art historian/etc/etc)" with no real training. The insight of the not-even-amateur valued with the expert. 8/
the apotheosis of this might be the pervasive derision of "English majors"
The strange part is that the derision mostly comes from people who would have to take a month to read a novel, but wouldn't even start one in the first place
A supporting note to this: a lot of people think that they can *write* fiction because they can *read* fiction. Or that they can *act* by replication of an emotion because they *have* emotions. Those skills are opaque but distinct from what the expression of them feels (or 'vibes') like.
Amen. I've been writing for a good few years now, and I'm still doing what I can to refine my craft.
Or assuming they're musical because they own a lot of CDs
Particulary pertinent to singing (well, either you can or you can't, and I can...) and conductors (yeah, anyone can wave around at a playing orchestra, easy peasy)!
But how well can they wave? 🤔 💭
And what - if anything - and when does the orchestra play in response to their wave?
This is not unrelated to how Gen Z has become completely entranced by what is a very objectively evil company as not a company but a medium of information (YouTube)
But it turns out 'anyone' cannot just do that. To take a field other than mine, a capable art historian comes to a problem having honed their eye for artistic methods & styles, with a huge catalog of motifs and references that even as a historian, I don't have. There's skill & training there! 9/
But without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt - @acollierastro.bsky.social hits this when she talks about how little value these folks had for art, until a machine could do it. 10/
As an aside, you can see this blustery incompetence on display any time you see, for instance, the Spartans held up as examples of the very best soldiers - a position held by functionally no actual expert on Sparta - or in something like Musk's regular Roman hot-takes, invariably not even wrong. 11/
But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there *are* but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible. 12/
I'm intrigued by this table of strange symbols. Where can I learn about them, their development, and other such info? I'm asking as a hobbyist that loves writing systems, and symbology. I probably haven't the knowledge needed to grok the symbols in context. So I'm interested in the "Cliff Notes."
History requires a wide range of skills, across a number of disparate fields and most importantly a burning contempt for your subject.
Can you digress and tell me about the tables of strange historical symbols?
Oh, sure. My thought here was jumping to things like pay records on papyrus from the Roman period, where you have an accounting document in Latin written in Old Roman Cursive, or something like ship registers inscribed on stone in Greek.
--oh! I thought you meant something like narratology, which was some fascinating formula-like bits. Narrative, levels of narrators, knowledge, reported knowledge, etc. I did see some fascinating use of that on what Mini Pliny reported vs. could really know about Pliny's death.
That sounds interesting. Who and what are you thinking about?
OK, I see what you mean. I was hoping historians had some kind of secretive catalogue of operations that could be used to interpret data.
Also off topic, but is there a historian who came up with a theory that "The Greeks" is a post-hoc category that "The Greeks" wouldn't have recognised themselves? I've tried searching for this a few times, but never come up with anything. Not sure where I heard it.
Alas, no, but we do have important reference works that might be pretty difficulty to parse (or even be aware of) for a non-specialist. Like, here's a page from the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, a standard reference work in ancient history:
That’s psychohistory. Asimov wrote about that a fair bit.
By way of example, here is the form we actually get best preserved early Greek law code in. Archaic characters, no spaces, punctuation or line breaks, both left-to-right AND right-to-left (boustrophedon) with a ton of breaks for damage and missing stones.
Can I ask why this was made? I can't imagine the purpose but I'm sure we have some hypotheses
Needless to say, your average enthusiast can't do *anything* with that raw text, even if they've taken some Greek. Turning that into easily readable Greek text is the job of one kind of specialist (epigraphers) at which point other specialists get to translating and understanding it.
To return to the topic of the video then, I wonder if what @acollierastro.bsky.social is reacting to is the experience of having physics, for the first time in a long time, (fake) pulled by LLMs into that plain-language-breeds-contempt space that the humanities have been in for a long time.13/
Though also her Feynman video goes into detail on one such crank who the creep had to deal with, who reminds me very strongly of vibe physics/history guys
If so, that seems pretty bad because like the humanities, physics (and science more broadly) is important, but one clear impact of the plain-language-breeds-contempt interaction is that it makes people both hostile to actual experts and hostile to funding the development of expert knowledge. 14/
'Vibe physics' may be utterly useless - but 'vibe history' wasn't any more useful and it still took over bookstore shelves and is used to justify stripping funding from history departments and hostility towards actual good-faith trained historians. I fear the same coming to the STEM fields. 15/
I'm hoping for the reverse, that actual good work and good science will be respected as the slop now also overcrowds the fields that STEMbros care about
Because LLMs haven't even pulled physics really into plain language (as the video explains), they've merely pulled *pretend* physics into plain language (just like non-expert plain language history is mostly pretend history). The 'tool' is a toy to play at physics like a child plays at house. /end
I agree with most of the thread, but what are examples of ´vibe history´ taking over bookstores and, more importantly, being used as a reason to strip academic funding? I haven´t seen direct examples of either, so I´m curious.
My field is computer science and… yeah, definitely starting to see this happen (I think ‘vibe coding’ was even the first use of the ‘vibe ___’ terminology). Nothing wrong with code being more accessible to everyone, of course, but there’s been a real shift in recent years where suddenly people think
I would say I'm interested in history, but am not a professionally trained historian. How do I know if I am reading "vibe history" or not? Should I just assume that everything I read that wasn't from an academic press was all vibes? I know you've discussed the place of popular history in the past.
Agreed. We also have "vibe law" in the form of so-called sovereign citizens and the like. The law is written in (mostly) comprehensible language, so not-even-wrong takes can proliferate, and meet the harsh reality of the courtroom.
There’s an intersection with research on reading where there’s a suggestion that more accurate understanding of the information in text requires ‘active’ processing but text written to be easy to read can induces a feeling of understanding that reduces active questioning approaches to text
Sadly, good popular science can have a similar effect. People like Feynman or Hawking make clear that physics *is* the equations, and popular science is only a poetic description of what it feels like to understand the equations; but some readers ignore that and insist they understand the physics.
Yeah, I remember the point in high school physics where the teacher patiently explained that *every* explanatory model we were learning was a polite, noble lie and that the truth was a ton of math. And then I took AP Physics and learned math is *very hard.*
Good lord. I remember what that was like in my AP Physics class. So much math, and so much of it I barely understood at all. Frankly, I still have no idea how I managed to pass that class.
That is true...up to a point. The "Shut Up and Calculate" turn in physics has not ultimately been a positive one. It's remarkable how often fairly advanced grad students are completely incapable of articulating conceptually the physical processes represented by the equations. They have the math...
I demonstrate my expertise in implied physics heat transfer every time I pulling something hot out of the microwave or toaster oven.
I think it may also annoy the sort of man who cares about these things that there is no genius shortcut in history. And sometimes, the smarter you are, the harder the work is - because you do that to yourself.
one of my mentors in grad school pointed out there are no prodigies in historical studies. actually, i knew a few, but for the most part it’s not like, say, mathematics where some geniuses flower early and then wilt.
It's hilarious that the "Norsemen" comedy Netflix series made by & starring actual Scandinavians was cancelled because White American men were upset that it didn't portray "Vikings" as brave & heroic. Everything is now just pandering to inferior White US men. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpMv...
If you're interested it's available on Apple and Amazon. Genuinely one of the funniest comedic series ever 😂 Especially the Viking with a collection of dildos 😂
Do you have any recommendations of books for a non historian to learn how to study history properly?
I remember my brother telling me not to write so clearly, because if engineers can understand what you're writing, they won't take you seriously.
That’s why I have such mixed feelings about Wikipedia
This is why it is important that the real experts share what they know on Wikipedia
Yes, I try to contribute in my area, but I find it frustrating when my edits are overridden by amateurs
Wikipedia's "anyone can edit" tagline was fairly accurate 20 years ago, but it's misleading now (except as a cautionary warning). Modern Wikipedia is itself a fairly specialised type of writing. I rarely edit in the specific areas I have real expertise because it means going head-to-head with myth
Much of that myth stems from the coverage of ecology in general biology textbooks, and plant ecology in general ecology texts I'm no historian, but trying to improve Caribbean history I see the same pattern - myths and misunderstandings are repeated by actual scholars writing "background"
Still, one of the best things about Wikipedia is the rule about "no original synthesis" - report what the sources say, don't draw conclusions. Because conclusions should be drawn by (cited) experts. And when you're writing Wikipedia articles, you're not writing as an expert, even if you are one.
Where there is a lack of secondary literature, it’s difficult to do what you say.
I mean like the example higher up this thread where someone was drawing “new” insights based on a bad Latin translation.
Not sure what you mean by ‘myth’, in Southeast Asian Studies it’s often driven by nationalism. Agree that Wikipedia shouldn’t be analytical at all higher level, but all reporting involves some kind of analysis.
Nationalism is a huge problem on Wikipedia, of course. And often intractable. One thing I was thinking of about “myth” was the notion that Trinidad’s original inhabitants were “Caribs and Arawaks”. I saw that in an otherwise excellent book written in 2022. The author is a sociologist…
The draw in the business world is similar: you are an amateur in whatever part of the business you're trying to llm your way into, but it doesn't make you *feel* like it
This happens a ton with computers and programs, something about it being on a computer makes people think that its all just like, easy, magic, and the ideas are the hard part. So many people coming to you telling you their app idea like they should be instant millionaires. The work is the thing!
You're going to end up inventing the 'History' version of the Crackpot Index: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackpo...
You surely have a point, but if it’s any comfort, people are not really stopped by maths, code, engineering knowledge or chemistry either 😂🤦♂️