Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

My father was a history professor who specialized in American history. I don't think the author of this post gives sufficient credit to history, historians, and people who teach history. These "shocking" facts, whether they're scandals, little ironies, or just things that contradict our present prejudices, are not secrets. They aren't hidden. Some people will trumpet them more than others, depending on various biases ideological, partisan, national, etc., but nobody is being silenced. The main problem is that it's hard to get people excited about them for more than a few seconds.

One thing I pointed out here recently is that all the "things they didn't you in school" books are populated with exactly the facts they taught you in school. Similarly, all these "shocking" facts here -- will you recognize them if you run across them a year from now? Two years from now? With that in mind, can you be sure that you haven't seen them before? Maybe multiple times? The strongest distortion of history is our limited ability to pay attention and then remember.

Do you think your father would disagree that history is written by the victors? Even today, there are two major factions in the US where the two sides not only disagree about what to do, but why, how, and even what things happened this year. No person is without bias, so clearly your father has to pick one of the viewpoints to write into history. Sure, major conflicts with two viewpoints are discussed in history class (like the Civil War), but what about the less obvious viewpoints?

I see this especially in writing about economics and markets, where 90%+ of the things people read, including the predominant views, are in my opinion partially or completely incorrect. You will often see a bunch of articles describing how the bear market has a ways to go at the very bottom, and vice versa, not to mention the pattern of headlines writing "Dollar falls 3% as <unrelated event happens today>." So aside from charts, I find there to be little else of use in studying economic history. Although Ray Dalio has some good data and a pretty reasonable first-principles based analysis of major historical economic cycles.

I would give historians a little bit more credit than that. Sure if you have some agenda and something too proof then you just have to go back X years to find something like a justification. The other day I was reading the transcript of the testimony of a Nazi SS officer at the Nuremberg trail that executed multiple extermination camp wardens and guards for the crime of lacking the right paper work for the killing of inmates under their care. A crime he discovered after someone shipped 2kg of dental gold to his office and he started to wonder how many teeth one had to pull to get that amount and where the death certificates where of the previous owners? Turns out that those teeth where pulled out of the mouth of jewish victims of the gas chambers by other jews who where collaborating in the destruction of their own kind. Nothing about this is controversial amongst holocaust scholars, just fucked up shit that happened. If you wanna conclude from this, Nazis good and jews bad, you are just not paying attention.

[1] http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/trials/konradmorgen.... [2] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/holocaust-n...

> The strongest distortion of history is our limited ability to pay attention and then remember.

Well said.

Also some events that become popular and persist over time, just like memes.

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