...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?
Alas, I do not have names at hand! I did some narratology reading early in my dissertation research, but since I decided not to do my work on Pliny after all most of those details are buried somewhere for me. Might track it down later to avoid work & report back.
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.
Huh, unsure. Also clearly wrong - by Herodotus, if not earlier, the Greeks clearly understand themselves as a defineable cultural grouping, even if they often find smaller divisions (Athenians, Thebans, etc) more important.
It probably went all the way back to after the Trojan War, where the Greeks actually got the name they use to describe themselves.
I think this might be a confusion with Greece. I always ask my students how old Greece is and even knowing it’s a trick they’re usually surprised to hear the first state by that name was formed in 1830. Ancient Greek world included a lot of places (Anatolia, Italy, Egypt, etc.) that do not fit.
you might also be thinking of how they weren't literally calling themselves "Greeks" in homeric or classical times? as in, people from the times we're talking about weren't self-IDing as "Γραικοί", that's more what romans called them (and then they all became roman)
sorry, I just note that dr. devereux is responding below about whether they recognized themselves as having a shared cultural identity (100% yes) but there's also just the literal "did they call themselves that?" question
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:
I'd love to be able to read latin so that i can work with a better range of early modern texts. But even in English, the meaning and qualities of words and definitions shift drastically and you need reams of context not to get wildly off track.
One good example is "artificial", which has shifted in connotations from generally high quality to generally low quality. Is there a technical name for this shift?
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
The photo Bret has shared above is of the law code of Gortyn, a Greek city-state on the island of Krete. Sometime in the first half of the fifth century BCE, someone inscribed the text of the code on the interior circular wall of a building. 1/
The most widely accepted hypothesis among scholars is that the building on which the law code was inscribed was most likely a Bouleuterion or meeting house for the Boule or Council of the city-state in the fifth century BCE. 2/
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.
But no history book is going to just put the raw, unedited surviving text of the Gortyn Code into the main text of the book and expect the reader to do anything with it. Instead, you're going to get a translation into English.
Indeed it is - understandably! - quite rare to see untranslated Latin and Greek at any length in the core text of historical articles or books. Instead, we translate in the text and the original Latin/Greek usually goes in a footnote for the reader that wants to check the translation.
The epigraphers and papyrologists and numismatists do the work everyone else relies on, and it's really quite difficult to train new ones. Preach.
I deeply admire and greatly fear all three sets. Especially numismatists. /How do they do the coin magic?/
I'm really into an idea I got out of Mary Caruthers's Book of Memory that "the literature" includes the community who used it. I don't know if that resonates but i imagine it takes a huge amount of reading, related to reconstructing that community.
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
📌 vibe physics
Addendum: Of course folks will get grumpy if I do not clarify that not every history enthusiast is a 'vibe historian' (a term I love and will now use for this idea). Generally the distinction here is about the relationship with scholarship produced by others.
One certainly encounters folks 'on the road' to training, as it were, typified by a willingness to rely on the consensus of the field outside of their narrow interests and a desire to obtain and develop the skills professional historians have.
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
that because they can get an LLM to spit out a script or tell them what some piece of code is doing that they’re as good as a seasoned programmer. It’s been odd watching the profession/field being progressively devalued since everyone got their hands on chatgpt.
Yes, though we've arguably had vibe coding much longer than we've had GenAI. So many professional coders devaluing the field for decades, scoffing at documentation, processes, any actual engineering, as superfluous. "We just want to code!" they said, and now with GenAI they don't even want that.
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.
In any field of scholarship, the best way to tell vibes from scholarship is how people talk about uncertainty. There should be not just humility ("I may be wrong") but concrete details about how it's addressed ("I might have been wrong because X, so I did Y. I still might be because Z")
This. I'm not a historian, just a history teacher, and that's what I've learned too. Accurately reflect your level of certainty and be prepared to accept that you're wrong
I get asked this question a fair bit and there really isn't a good answer beyond 'seek out credentialed experts who are speaking within rather than against, the expert consensus.' I don't think there is a workable heuristic for a non-expert to easily evaluate scholarship.
What we really need is an @askhistorians.bsky.social monthly roundup of whatever pop history books have come out.
The reason is, when I read a historian's work, I am thinking in terms of 'what is the method, what is the evidence base, how do they handle topics I know well' and for the non-expert reader, you'd have to learn the historical method and the evidence in detail and that's just...building expertise.
Is there something to be said for the difference in experimentability between fields? You can't run experiments on Rome to see if a historical theory holds up, but physics supports experiments that will violently tell you if you're wrong (see: Titan submersible built with "vibe engineering")
An easy answer is anything footnoted, which is typically the line between academic and 'pop' history. But 'pop' history, vibes history, and partisan history are three different things and the latter two are often coded in academic or pseudo- language.
So the realest answer is to read multiple works to understand an event. Like with a lot of things, if you single point of contact an event, figure, idea, you introduce a ton of noise and bias. If you multi-point the same thing and triangulate what you read, you start to see the true thing.
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.
Yep. I did 2 years of undergraduate physics and left for the field of pure mathematics, which I found less confusing (I may be unusual in this respect).
I entered college thinking I might do physics, took two courses where the math was difficult to follow, and ended up graduating with a math degree with a focus on theory, discrete math, and computing algorithms, all of which I find *way easier* than the applied stuff in physics.
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...
...skills to do them and the pattern recognition skills to know when to use one or another, but they're at a loss to explain *what is going on.* And this has bled into the published scholarship, where increasingly esoteric mathematical conjectures are put forward with no real empirical evidence.
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.
Right, I’ve had to correct translations
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…
writing about the 19th & 20th century. So pre-contact populations aren’t relevant. But we’ve known better since the 70s. And people can’t still add that sort of narrative and cite recent scholarly work. Also currently trying to write about a 19th century American. Sources are thin, maybe too thin
But the few “well known” facts mix with what I’m pretty sure is incorrect information…specifically, the location of his farm where he hid people escaping on the Underground Railroad. They’ve conflated it, I think, with his son’s general store. In this case I can’t fix it - that’d take primary docs