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.
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.