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Comment by jesuscript | Hacker News Reader

It would hurt historians feelings to know that they are essentially just, what we call today, “hot takes” on history. It’s often well written and credentialed (appeal to authority), but ultimately it’s just one dude’s hot take on events.

For example, many people in America have a hot-take about what life is like in China. How? We heard it from somewhere, never lived a day there.

Can’t be that simple right? You say you heard it from a scholar?

Welp, hate to break it to ya, but unless you were there yourself, it’s just not 100% the truth.

It’s the main reason you’ll eventually see a book that says “we got Abraham Lincoln all wrong, let me tell you my hot take”. You’d have to read 30 of these hot takes before you can even mix the black and white into a gray truth (which the truth is, always gray).

Anyway, word on the street is the Queen is a saint. Give it a year, we’ll get the other hot take. Then another one.

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Hate to break it to ya, but if you were there yourself that is just an anecdote or a single data point and doesn’t tell you a lot about the general population.

> It would hurt historians feelings to know that they are essentially just, what we call today, “hot takes” on history.

Interestingly, the actual historians I came accros would not be shocked by such claim at all. They do make their own claims of that sort.

However, arbitrary fans of Ancient Greece would be shocked.

Yeah this is my experience too. A lot of "fans of history" who've never actually studied historiography make big bold claims about the limitations of the field like historians didn't learn that in their early 20s.

I'm married to a historian.

I don't think this would hurt historians feelings. The idea that there are an infinity of different narratives one can express through the archive and that each author places part of themselves into the writing and that one can never achieve the TRUE HISTORICAL RECORD (TM) is not interesting or frustrating information for historians. They teach that shit in year one of grad school at the latest.

You will see books that are "here is my hot take on Lincoln" but you won't see them say "we got Lincoln all wrong." They'll simply see how their different view and analysis fits into the wider tapestry of historical writing.

You can say the Earth is shaped like a cube, or like a sphere. Both are hot takes because it is in fact shaped like something we circularily (no pun intended) called a geoid.

Yet wouldn't you be more interested in listening to the "sphere" guy?

It’s complicated. We’re so sensory overloaded that I might wanna hear just how far the flat earth guy can take it.

Tall tales are a guilty pleasure for many. Clinically we call this conspiratorial thinking (or really clinically, paranoid schizophrenia?).

Some people really indulge in their campfire ghost stories. I would be interested in the “Lincoln actually loved slavery” lol, just want to see how far some asshole can take an idea.

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