Why Undergrads Should Take History Classes
I really liked Mauricio’s recent post, Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads. I agree that the majority of the value of college is outside of the classes, and that taking too many classes can detract from other very important things you could be doing.
Still, as a student, you do have to take classes in order to graduate. Most of those classes will be determined by your major and what you intend to do after college. But, at least in the US, some of your classes won’t be related to your major. What should you take?
As a computer science major, I have taken some non-CS classes that were far more valuable than the average CS class. Most of them were history classes. In general, I think that history classes can be quite useful, especially for people in EA. In this post, I’ll share some lessons I’ve learned from history.
First, a couple caveats:
I’m generally interested in history so this is likely to be biased. This might not be the advice for you if you’ve always hated history classes (but again, maybe you just haven’t had the right history class).
Yale (the university I attend) is supposed to have one of the best history departments in the world (according to dubious news sources). It’s possible this isn’t good advice at some universities with weaker history departments, but I doubt this.
With those out of the way, I’ll share what I’ve learned from history classes:
Well-meaning people can do very bad things. History is filled with people who we would now call immoral, because of the terrible actions that they took. While some of them acted purely out of self-interest, others were actually trying to do good.
The ends often don’t pan out. Consequentialism is obviously quite important in EA, for very good reason. That being said, history is filled with examples of consequentialism going wrong. Why? Because somebody was overconfident in their predictions about the value or probability of the ends. They put very high probability on very high value outcomes when they shouldn’t have. The imagined ends might actually have justified the actual means, but history shows there is a difference between the imagined ends and the realized ends.
The future is hard to predict. Humans like to make predictions about the future, and there are many historical examples. Lots of people end up being very wrong. Some end up being right, but not for the reasons they said. Others predict things eerily well. It’s sometimes useful to think about these successes and failures when making your own prediction about the future.
Morality changes, a lot. What people consider good and bad varies tremendously across time and space. Many EA’s are probably familiar with the idea of the expanding circle, but this is a relatively simplistic way of describing the fact that morality can change quite significantly and rapidly. What we believe is right today might not last.
Ideologies come and go. The majority of ideologies do not last as they were originally articulated. Many simply die; others are subsumed into other ideologies; others evolve with the times. Projects driven by all-encompassing ideologies sometimes succeed, but they are often eventually coopted by other ideologies.
Things have not always been this way. There are a lot of things that many of us take for granted in modern society, especially in Western countries. Bureacracies, secularism, peace at home, capitalism, borders, nation states… the list goes on. And yet, many of these things didn’t exist, or existed very differently, not very long ago. This knowledge can help with the realization that immense change could still be on the horizon.
Lots of these things are somewhat obvious. Still, taking the time to process history allows you to actually process them, in a way that I think is very important.
You might wonder what kinds of history classes to take. In the past, I’ve taken: European Intellectual History since Neitzsche, Eastern European History To 1914, A History of South Africa, and now a class on American history in the 20th century. Here are a few things I value in a history class:
Primary source readings. The best way to learn history is often from those who lived it. Stay away from classes that teach from textbooks and look for classes that teach from the primary sources.
Engaging lectures. Most history classes you’ll take are likely to be lectures. You will learn far more if they are engaging. Even if a class is on an area of history you find fascinating, you won’t learn much if the professor has a monotone style and slides with 200 words each.
Research assignments. Research is a good way to learn actively rather than passively. Also, in many cases, you can probably make the research on something that is relevant to EA. For instance, I am now writing a paper on the biological weapons convention.
Not much emphasis on memorization. Memorizing history facts is very unimportant. You want the key themes, not the key dates. You might have to memorize some facts for your classes, but the classes should be mostly not about memorizing facts.
Lastly, I will close by saying that like every professor, history professors have agendas. They have their own view of history and how they want to present it. The best history professors tell stories, and those stories often have morals. Don’t always take them for granted.
The next time you sit down to consider classes, and realize you need to satisfy a requirement or you have a blank space in your schedule, remember this post: consider history.
I like the post but I’m not entirely convinced. Even if these are optional classes to pad your degree out, you’d have to think taking history classes adds more value than all other potential options. I don’t entirely believe that’s the case even if I agree with many of your points in the post.
I appreciate this point a lot! I think the counterfactual value of taking history classes is pretty hard to generalize across university students because everyone has different tradeoffs. Some students might have more value from taking other kinds of classes, even other kinds of “padding” classes. Good candidates might be CS, economics, philosophy, math, and maybe a writing class. My general sense is that the value of those classes are more well known in EA (e.g. I see many people majoring in the first four) and probably don’t need an explanation. I think history might need more of an explanation, which is why I offered one here. In general, I do agree that people should be thinking about this counterfactually, but I think the outcome would be very dependent on the individual student.
I’m skeptical of your claim that primary sources are better than secondary books. In particular, it seems that the insight-to-effort ratio is very small, as given a secondary book which comes recommended by people knowledgeable in the field, it seems you can get approximately the same insights as a primary source, but with far far less effort.
Can you expand on why you think either the fidelity of the insight transfer from the primary to secondary source is small, or why I’m overestimating the difficulty of reading primary sources (or some other reason you think I should care more about primary sources which I haven’t thought of)?
I definitely don’t mean to say that classes shouldn’t have secondary sources; they should and these sources are important (I am less excited about tertiary sources). I think a key to primary sources is something like the ability to read current sources as primary sources. If you develop the skills to be able to understand primary sources in the context of history, it helps enable you to be able to evaluate primary sources of today. I see history as a good way to learn how to evaluate the world at present, and the world at present has more primary than secondary sources about it.
I think this post makes a better case that we should be interested in history than that we should attend history classes.
I agree that we could do well to learn from and meditate on the highs and lows of history and that I my opinions are parochial and shortsighted.
Thanks for writing.
I just want to second this recommendation. In my experience a lot of people are ignorant of various important facts about the world, including my past self, and don’t realize it because they don’t know what they are missing. Presumably my present self is also ignorant of important things that more history learning could fix.
Personally, I have tended to enjoy the history classes I took, but I also felt that actual history “classes” are not the most efficient way to learn broader lessons/concepts. For example, I took a Russian revolutionary (~1860–1921) history class, which I personally found interesting (especially since I was also studying Russian language). I feel like I learned quite a few interesting stories, and even learned some broader concepts about failure modes for democratic governance (e.g., division among more-moderate parties vs. cohesion among some of the more-militant parties), political power structures, foreign manipulation of domestic politics, etc. However, the class also required learning/memorizing a serious amount of dates, names, places, etc. for tests, despite not actually being pivotal to learning the broader concepts.
I certainly haven’t thought all that long about it, but I do feel like history could be taught much more efficiently for people like me who want to learn important lessons from history to update their models and/or get a sense of what might happen moving forward. For example, integrating short-ish (e.g., 3 week) history modules that don’t focus so much on the specific details into political science classes on specific themes like “political revolutions” or “social conceptions of morality”? Of course, if you like learning all the details and/or telling the stories in conversations, then the traditional format seems like a good route.
Classes are often not the most efficient way to learn things. History is certainly no different, and I think the idea of history modules sounds very interesting. That being said, I wrote this post mainly for undergrads who have to operate within the boundaries of classes to some extent.
I see your point but my response is that I don’t need historians to study history. Again, you keep saying that history is useful, I’m not contesting that(though it seems like you may think it is more important than me). I’m contesting that the way you are taught history in the classroom as being specifically useful. I’ve personally found reading macro history type blogs and doing very general overviews on wiki to be more useful than taking specific courses on a topic in school, in terms of understanding my place in the world/trajectory of the world. You say historians are not supposed to be predictive. That is literally my point. If historians are just a source of data, what makes a historian/history different than Wikipedia in any real sense, outside of the motivation to actually do the material because grades. Why would I take a history class that has no value added from reading sources when I could have a professional writer coach me on writing skills.
Again, how do you use historical data when attempting to predict things?
Take for example guessing about what politician wins some election. You might use historical data of how the previous elections went to make a prediction (hopefully your model isn’t fully just based on historical data with no account for how things have changed). However, it just doesn’t seem like taking academic history provides you with anything here. Maybe they are the people who combed the primary sources so that the data is on the internet in the first place, but absent them having a monopoly on that data, I’d trust a cs/rationalist type more to use that data in a useful way. Historians will probably claim some story about why something happened, IMO that is antithethic to what we are trying to do here, unless that story is more predictive.
Again like if some history professor at your school teaches in a really quantitative way or teaches a class that is like about large scale historical trends that seems like it could be useful but that has not been my experience taking history classes.
To be clear, I think history is important. I don’t believe that college history classes are the best forum for learning history\the important aspects of history for prediction was my point. Also, to reiterate: If history as taught by academics is so important for prediction, shouldn’t we then expect academic historians to be the best forecasters(to be fair maybe they are, I’m not an expert on who the best forecasters are but kind of assume its gonna be cs people\rationalists)? comment currently sitting at −7 but no one has even contested that point or said why it doesn’t make sense. Also I condone taking macro classes.
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I would like to address on the point “the ends don’t often pan out”. It appears that the issues you have discussed are involved with failures of instrumental reasons and epistemic failures as opposed to problems with consequentialism as a moral system. I believe learning from these failures don’t necessarily involve in history but can be also achieved from alternative sources. For example, a mechanical engineer would learn about Challenger disaster. Similarly, a nuclear engineer would learn from Fukushima disaster.
I see no reason to pay attention to academic history until historians start flexing their predictive abilities. If historians have nothing other than knowing more history to show for their studies, then history profs for the most part are just individual dewey decimals systems for their hyper niche topic. Anything I can learn from class I can learn from youtube/wiki, unless the prof structures it in a way where there is some thinking style that in tandem with the info helps you see the world more clearly (something I didn’t find to be true from the history classes I have taken, but obviously anecdotal).
To expand a little more(all personal opinions), the world is extremely complicated. History as an academic field provides basically no tools for understanding this complicated world, compared to other fields. Furthermore, we have even more incomplete information of the past, which is often extremely biased. Finally, the world changes incredibly fast incredibly quick these days. A priori, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to expect the overall patterns of society to continue. In order to use history in any meaningful sense, we need to find smaller patterns within larger systems that can be clearly defined and then carefully studied across many time periods. We would only study specific patterns that we know to be highly influential under certain conditions, there’s no reason to study noise. I guess this is possible. I don’t think this is easy. If this was easy, we should probably expect to see some ungodly levels of wealth among top macro economists and historians. Obviously many don’t care about money, but some do, so if they had huge predictive advantages you would expect huge gainzzz, or at the very least, we would all look towards historians to predict elections(this is sort of a straw man but one I think turns out to be correct).
When people say understanding history helps us understand ourselves, you should pause. Would you say that learning about math history/math? Why or why not?
That being said I agree with taking easier classes for most people who don’t have academic-related goals. However, I think communication/journalism/writing classes may be more useful.