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.
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.