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Comment by aaplok | Hacker News Reader

What about history? Don't people perceive it as even more unnecessary than maths? Shouldn't we expect to see all sorts of theories on how history should be taught in more practical ways if your explanation is correct?

I'm only picking on history or languages as examples. I could have picked literature, or almost anything, really. A lot of what is taught at school isn't necessarily a bunch of super applied skills

There are lots of bad teachers in every discipline, and I'm sure that everything could be taught a lot better. I'm still not getting why maths is singled out.

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History is about stories of people in the real world. Learning dates of battles or treaties was and is also hated, but otherwise it is just stories, one can more or less relate to.

Plain math is abstract. No humans involved, just numbers and formulas. Nothing to connect to, unless the teacher brings in the real world. Because math is awesome at describing and predicting real world events. But that is usually applied math, like physics. And I loved physics (and history) in school. But math? My brain refused as it saw no benefit except for the needed grades.

History is not abstract. It does not give you generalizations, abstractions and models, just historical facts. Many of those facts are useful in understanding why things around you are the way they are.

The attempts to make history more "scientific", usually for religious or political reasons (e.g., explaining past events throgh class struggle), end up looking like propaganda.

If you learned history as a set of facts then you did not learn history. History is about the connections between those facts and the overarching story.

Science is also taught as a set of facts to be memorized, but that is also not science. In both science and history, the most important question is not "what do you know?" but "how do you know?".

If history was about making the connections, those connections could be used to make predictions that could be tested.

You can, but the world is still an chaotic place, so making a forcast on human geopolitics, is like making a weather forecast. Likely valid for the next days, but increasingly bad for longer timeframes.

But one can make for example the prediction that the war in Ukraine will be going on for a little bit longer.

Weather forecasts can easily be compared to actuals, and distribution of residuals can be calculated. That’s how weather forecast models are quantitatively evaluated. A seven day weather forecast has 95% confidence interval of around plus-minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, way better than “it’ll be like today”.

Your prediction about the war in Ukraine is not falsifiable.

Look, I am not going to make a detailed geopolitical analysis here, but there are lots of sites and institutes who do, you can check them out. The difference with weather forcast is only, that human analysis of geopolitical events often hope to influence the outcome. But the weather will come whether we think it will be sun or rain.

And the prediction about the war in Ukraine would not be "it'll be like today". The current prediction is, that russia will continue to slowly make ground and move the front lines to the west. There are actually predictions how much and where exactly. I think that gets also falsified in some institutes, but is probably classified.

Are you saying there is some classified science also called history that makes quantitative, testable, falsifiable predictions?

Maybe so, but I have no clearance and have not seen it. And it would be completely different from history I studied in school. There wasn’t a single prediction, let alone quantitative prediction with time horizon and confidence interval in any of the history books I’ve read.

"how do you know?"

And that is exactly the question allmost never being asked in (my) school. "No time for it. Here are the facts. Accept it and learn them, we will determine your future on how well you memorized them"

But to be fair, some of my teachers tried this approach as much as possible, but within the whole framework of the curriculum, not much was possible.

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