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.
Wow. That's a huge error to make as a professional. If you can't assess the accuracy of a translation, you need to rely on the consensus of the field at large about said translation's accuracy before using it. This is true outside academia, too. We're in for a world of hurt.
Which is to say, if extremely well meaning popular historians can fall for these kind of traps, total amateurs with an axe to grind are doomed.
And which is also to say, we should go back to doing the humanities in Latin so we can be esoteric again.
I want to support this, because /damn/ the job security for me and my friends! But then I sigh and note grudgingly that English is actually probably a better language for the humanities anyway. (And no doubt several others, but the English vs. Latin is the one I can speak to.)
finally, a chance to use my degree
I don't get how people who don't consult with the original language text or at least critical editions would ever claim anything but the most surface knowledge on any source.
Yeah, that. Like, okay I read the Icelandic Sagas in English because it's interesting, but I'm not a historian and *studying* them in translated form is pretty obviously completely and utterly worthless. Being terrible at learning languages is a major reason I didn't become a historian.
Many years ago, for giggles, I tried reading the Norse Eddas* with original and English translations side by side (I forget the site that had them). And that attempt drove home just how context is the key, far beyond just vocabulary and grammar. * and years later again with Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.
Studying the translated form can still be interesting - but not as a historian interested in Iceland, rather as an english literary scholar interested in the period the translation comes from. Especially comparisons of translations are interesting, but you get better picture if you know the original
Yeah, I thought about posting a correction saying just that... but yeah, exactly, you'd still want to read the original to see what the translator did.
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.