No Big Bang

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by MrFun
What did annoy me though, is that BuRjaCi thinks that the pratical application of history is through fortune telling.

If someone is going to try to do that sort of 'fortune telling' I would appreciate it more if they tried to use history (imperfect tool that it may be), over reading the entrails of a goat or something.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Geronimo
Specialize away!

But history students should be required to have a general overview of the history of every major region of the world such that there aren't any civilizations whose history is a total opaque mystery to them.

That is what survey courses are for in undergraduate school.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by MrFun



That is what survey courses are for in undergraduate school.

but how large are the gaps that taking a few such survey courses are allowed to leave?

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Geronimo

but how large are the gaps that taking a few such survey courses are allowed to leave?

Depends on the college's cirriculum and how professors incorporate their teaching philosophy in their classes.

[_BuRjaCi_]

Originally posted by MrFun
What did annoy me though, is that BuRjaCi thinks that the pratical application of history is through fortune telling.

No, I didn't mean fortune telling. I meant relative understanding of trends and the appreciation of the complexity of the modern world.
(I hate the cultural gap; it’s really hard to translate phrases into English. I always get misunderstood.)

I hope you can agree with me that someone who doesn’t have the faintest clue about human history should (and I stress should) not be allowed to vote since he would be an easy target to ideological manipulation. I mean there is no international issue that you can understand without some knowledge of the history of the conflict.

The only point I had was that the average (even super specialized historian), knows much more about all fields of history that the average layman (which I KH isn’t, and in fact the average hard-core civ gamer isn’t ). His original post sounded like the there is no need for general history.

[KrazyHorse]

And my point is that nobody who isn't a physicist (or very close to one) knows more about almost any branch of physics than I do.

And that's the difference.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe

Articles dealing with matters other than physics are more easily grasped.

If you go by purely the amound of mathamatical knowledge you would be correct. Biology is based more on concepts then math, but the concepts in biology are often as dificult to grasp as the math in physics and are often very conterintuitive. Even very smart, educated people can misunderstand things like natural selection, Punctuated Equalibria, etc. The notion of "Social Darwinism" is a good example of what happens when smart, educated lay people don't fully understand natural selection, it seems counterintuitive that natural selection can select for altruistic behavior, but it can.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Ned
Studies have shown that physicists are the most arrogant of all professions.

QFT!

One annoying thing I noticed is that physicists have a tendency to arrogantly think that they can beat other scientists at thier own game. The most famous example of this is Lord Kelvin attacking Darwinian Evolution and Uniformitarianism because "proved" using thermodynamics that the Earth was only 20 million years old, so the data of the biologists and geologists showing the earth to be far older must be wrong. That the discrepancy indicated that there was some unknown physical process (which we now know to be radioactivity) allowing for a very old Earth never crossed his mind.

[Odin]

Originally posted by _BuRjaCi_


Well that isn't completely true, since to understand the American civil war you need to understand the socio-political relationship between north and south, which resulted in disputes on import tariffs from Europe which are linked to Europe’s supremacy at the period which is a direct result of the Mongol invasion and the black death together with the early period of migration after the fall of the Roman empire. That allowed cultural synthesis of belief systems and coincided with the rise of Christianity and so planted the seeds of the 14 to 17 century rise out of the shadow of Islam.

You see KH , all fields highly complex fields are prone to over-simplification, and the statements above could lead many complete laymen to disastrously wrong conclusions and leave them open to ideological manipulation.

And this is fact: You do have to know most of the history of the human race if you want to understand (and not just bloody memories) a particular period.

I have always seen human history as a chain of cause and effect, you need broad knowledge, but if you could somehow block out my memory of the 20th century and asked me to predict what happens I would probably get most of the big events right.

It seems to be that both History and many parts of Biology (such as Ecology) require "holistic" thinking while the physical sciences are based far more on "reductionist" thinking. Different fields require different types of intellect.

[Odin]

Originally posted by _BuRjaCi_


Most historians memorize history and that’s what I despise, they offer only descriptions
(I can’t seem to remember the term, I think its used in physics too, for describing something in great detail and but having no understanding as to why it is so).
This may be hard to understand but there is beauty in the flow of history and the way connections are made among civilizations, you see influences can reach a country century’s after the parent culture has died, like the light of long dead stars reaching us. And history is like the sea in that respect; there are wrinkles and tiny chaotic waves on the surface, which change rapidly but the undercurrent stays strong. Its useless to memorize the waves its only useful to recognize the currents and those currents are global.
A holistic view is difficult to achieve but is the only one that gives any practical application to history, the only one which can make predictions and the only one which can help to reduce the horrible subjectivity of the matter (time helps, but also makes the material evidence scarcer).

Good point. History classes and courses, unfortunately, tend to be mostly rote memorization. The essence of history is finding the patterns that come together when the facts are put together is a coherent whole.

[Odin]

Originally posted by MrFun
What did annoy me though, is that BuRjaCi thinks that the pratical application of history is through fortune telling.

History dosen't repeat itself, but it rhymes. -Mark Twain.