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.
Also tricky and mostly wrong. So the word Classical Greeks use to describe themselves is Hellenes, of course, which appears only twice in Homer. But Homer uses Achaioi (Achaeans) to mean the same thing and that word appears to date from the bronze age, showing up in Hittite as Ahhiyawa.
To be clear, not as a term the Hittites gave the Greeks, but as a Hittite effort to transliterate what the Greeks - or at least some Greeks - were already calling themselves. Likewise, Homer uses Danaoi which is probably reflected in Bronze Age Egyptian 'Denyen.'
I've seen postulations that Achaean might also pop up in the Egyptian writings about the Sea People as Ekwesh.
The nature of the Linear B (=Bronze Age Greek) corpus is such that you don't get 'slam dunk' evidence either way but broadly I'd suggest it is plausible and perhaps likely that Greek-speakers recognized themselves as an ethnic group fairly early. It just wasn't the most important identity.
Among other indicators, while we're here, is that the bronze age Greek palace cultures have similar material culture - indeed, it is common to point to the emergence of more distinctive regional material culture after LBAC as a sign of the breakdown of interconnectedness.
The Greeks didn’t refer to themselves as the Sea Peoples?
'Sea Peoples' is, like, 66% a modern, invented term. The Egyptian documents present a multi-ethnic coalition of peoples, some of which - but not all - are described as 'of/from the sea' and so scholars coined 'sea peoples' to refer to the entire collection of different ethnic groups listed.
It’s rather unclear where those historical “sea peoples” came from. They were described folks they attacked. But they were multi-ethnic. That is clear. So, while they could have included some Greeks, it couldn’t have been just Greeks.
Personally, I’ve always been partial to the idea that the Sea Peoples started out as pirates from Sardinia.
I think the Fall of Civilizations podcast talks about them in episode 18, on the ancient Egyptians.
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?
Huh; I suppose that would imply a similar shift in "artifice" from emphasizing skilled construction to emphasizing the unreality of it.
Yes, exactly.
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/
Cool! Thanks
Later, in the first century BCE, the Romans incorporated the wall bearing the text of the code into their Odeion or amphitheater which stands at the site, which resulted in the preservation of the code through its incorporation into the later structure. 3/
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.
I’m working on translating a German text in Catholic theology from the 50s right now. ALL the quotes are in unglossed Latin, indicating the audience at the time was expected to just be able to read it. They’re making me find scholarly translations instead.
Catholic theologians? Certainly. But go back a little earlier and we'd be doing that just generally because Latin skills were almost as common as English skills today. It would, however, be normalized Latin with word breaks and no abbreviations - very unlike the original sources from antiquity.
Oh of course, I just thought it was a nice curiosity that the original audience was expected to read Latin, but the new audience is not (it’s a study of Augustine, and it deals with textual variants as well—a reminder that we don’t have originals)
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?/
Oh, so very much so. I took paleography and epigraphy coursework and still, honestly, I can only understand epigraphers and papyrologists as some kind of wizards. "Oh, this 13 character gap must be *these specific words*" 🙃 Even more so numismatics, where I didn't do a lot of coursework.
I once did a presentation for a Mystery Cults class on the sanctuary at Eleusis, and a particularly important article I read did so much with a tiny reference to Athens paying for bricks for the sanctuary. It was terrifying. (I guess archeologists kinda terrify me in general, in a good way.)
But numismatists are like another step beyond that. Especially once I learned how they could date specific coins by the different rates at which the top and bottom plates wore out when striking them. Dear god, it makes dendrochronology look straightforward and trivial. Numismatists! Terrifying!
Numismatics is dark wizardry.
"You see, this figure is holding a thrysus which means this coin is recalling the stylistic motif of this other coin two decades earlier, suggesting the moneyer had a connection to... Me: Wait, you can *see* what is in his hand?
And also that. I cannot make out /anything/ on coins. Like, there's a... figure? I guess? And maybe some letters? (And now I'm remembering a whole article that was clearly one stage in an extended academic slapfight over the expression of the infant about to be sacrificed in Carthaginian art.)
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 wonder to what degree it's falling back to antiquarianism. Disjoint factoids without any connective theoretical underpinnings.
The thing is, the road to training is long! Most enthusiasts will not proceed very far on it, because they have other things to do (nothing wrong with that!). The 'vibe historian' instead takes the easy path of dismissing the training itself, of insisting they don't need it, and falls into folly.
One thing that might contribute to this problem specifically with history is that popular history writers often take such widely divergent positions on very interesting issues. Im thinking specifically about new testament studies and Judaica which might be a special case where scholarship itself…
can be difficult to trust given the often quite transparent special pleading or at least motivated reasoning. If you are an interested amateur in that area, it’s occasionally difficult to take seriously the claims by some scholars that the “consensus” even exists let alone that it’s well-founded.
The hype around LLMs is very much a desire for a category of people to rid themselves of experts who have authority derived from hard work and knowledge rather than luck and vast fortunes.
agreeing very much
It is certainly the case that sometimes an enthusiast without formal training does, in fact, walk the 'road to training' in its entirety and reaches the edge of our knowledge - a rare bird indeed; my standard example is the late Peter Connolly. But the 'vibe historian' is a far more common bird.
What I note a lot of these very rich, very daft fellows share with the vibe historian is the assumption that they are so 'built different' that with just a few hours a day they can successfully exceed the skills and work of very talented people refined over decades. And...no...you can't.
Wait until you find out about vibe biomedical science - and I don't just mean RFK and his merry band of quacks. Pick some medical guidance that matters to you, and is supposedly evidence-based. Find out who's on the committee, and count up how many have advanced (PhD level) science training. 😬
Oh, so you've written a few papers. Big deal. I have ten thousand hours in Hearts of Iron 4.
There is a popular historian I otherwise quite like who got exited he had discovered an entirely new interpretation of a text, entirely because he didn’t speak Latin and he was reading a bad translation that rendered a clearly derogatory isti as a “these guys right here” isti.
I have a good story on that… too long to thread, though.
Sorry but you’re telling me…
Robert Forczyk and Rich Frank were both military officers who became excellent historians in retirement. But then they mainly wrote about military history.
This scares me as a civil engineer, that people will trust a computer to design buildings, bridges, roads, or other complex items without understanding all the complex interactions that are involved in design. Math, Physics, codes, environmental analysis, permitting, and review are all needed.
If Twitter posts are to be trusted, some numbnuts hooked up their AI Agent (LLM based) directly to their production database and it deleted the database and couldn't accurately report on what it did or why (two well known limitations of ANNs) So, yeah, I'm equally concerned.
Of course, I also see some real howlers from professional historians as well, my proudest moment as a history buff was getting some posts by professional historians deleted from r/AskHistorians for spreading utter nonsense.
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.
The point at which you can read work by a historian and critically assess its sources, method, theory foundation and level of care with details, you have at that point walked the 'road of training' at least in that subfield. But that road is not short!
I am a physicist, and the steps you've described are exactly what I'd have to go through if I wanted to understand work outside my sub-field too. So, that's very fair. Thanks for answering.
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")
after all, ignoring aeronautical engineers means you and your family die in a fiery explosion. ignoring historians means *maybe* you end up with fascism, and even if you do it's easy to say it wasn't because you ignored the historians
It's true that if you build a submarine or nuclear reactor based on vibe physics, you'll soon see the error of your ways. But in theoretical physics people can easily share misunderstandings, mystical notions and not-even-wrong takes. They've been doing that for ages but LLMs have given it a boost.
it’s definitely an issue that theoretical physics has become so esoteric and ungrounded that even the people doing it right have a hard time communicating that in a way that’s distinguishable from nonsense to a layperson
I mean, yes, but unless you want to reject the universe and move to another one with less confusing physical laws, I'm not sure there's a solution. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.
true, but are people using vibe theoretical physics to, like... do anything? chuds use vibe history to justify fascism; fools who use vibe engineering die. folks who use vibe theo. phys...? confuse the public about real theo phys, maybe?
Sure: quantum computing, quantum encryption, and similar are areas where vibe physics could at least result in serious mal-investment. The US military throws a lot of money at awfully stupid "advanced" research, and LLMs will make it easier for grifters to write hard-to-parse grant proposals.
It works great for selling wellness grifts. Buy these healing crystals, now with extra quantum! And, unfortunately, global warming denial is a thriving sector for not-even-wrong physics takes.
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.
Which is time intensive and hard to do, and why its so easy for people to read half a book on a subject and conclude theyve become an expert. Or, even worse, they read two halves of two things one of which nobody else talks about and starts posting on Reddit about it.
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.
I stuck with undergrad physics for two whole years before I bailed and switched to computer science, which is SO MUCH EASIER.
I also have a degree in computer science but I didn't think that worth mentioning here because it was easier than the math degree 😆.
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.