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History Classes Are Mostly Useless

parrhesia.substack.com

SS: Americans are rather ignorant about history. Moral reasoning by historical analogy is bad. Historical examples can be misleading for making predictions. These facts suggest that the utility of history courses is overestimated. In fact, they are mostly useless.

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I think there are some places where it does seem to be structural and some places where you have a Great Man.

The fall of the Soviet Union seems mostly structural to me - long-running economic stagnation while the West got richer created widespread discontent, which eventually led to a situation where nobody could bail out the boat because everyone was bailing out of the boat. It could have ended differently, in the sense that there could have been WWIII instead, but I don't think any particular person destroyed the Soviet Union and I'm not sure any particular person could have saved it where Gorbachev failed (though perhaps someone else replacing Brezhnev might have had a chance).

The US's incredible military capability in WWII, basically carrying the Pacific War by itself, doesn't map onto anyone's then-recent decisions AFAIK; it really does just seem to be "the country was big and rich, and quantity has a quality all its own".

Bill Gates also doesn't seem like a Great Man to me. The time of consumer computers had come; remove him from the picture and somebody else founds a massive software company worth gigabucks a little bit later. The same applies to a lot of corporate tycoons, though Elon Musk has some claim to GMhood given that most of the things he's done are things widely thought infeasible.

I agree that GMT has a lot of applicability, and that the claims that nobody ever matters are wishful thinking born out of SJ doctrine, but trends do also matter.

I think with Gates, you could argue that, while nobody wouldn't exploit the second boom of home computing, the actual software landscape might look a lot different without MS's tactics with DOS and Windows. Still, it is somewhat structural, so this counterfactual world might still end up at something like what we have now.