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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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Agreed with premise. History classes today are half trivia and half moral lessons. The trivia is meaningless, and the lessons are faulty. WW1 and American Revolution lessons are entirely trivia, with no influence on your appreciation for reality or ability to live a meaningful life. Lessons on women earning the right to vote become faulty morality: men for most of history were simply evil and putting women down, pay no attention to the impossibility of female enfranchisement without modern technology and a safe modern state.

I’m trying to think if there’s anything of value to be gained from history, and indeed there is: art history, the history of philosophy, and music history will present you with beautiful things that can genuinely inspire you and make your life better. Everything? The battles, the dates, the elections? No value. We’re not raising military generals, we are raising median adults. “War bad” is not a legitimate moral lesson.

art history, the history of philosophy, and music history will present you with beautiful things that can genuinely inspire you and make your life better.

You're making the same mistake here. People who genuinely think "history useless" will have no use for art, music or philosophy history either. "What do I care who painted some dumb picture three hundred years ago? Yawn Rap is better than Mozart" and so on. We've had those very discussions on here before; 'schools should only teach STEM because those are real things that are useful when you get a job being creative and contributing to growing the economy, all that English and music crap can be faked up in ten minutes for an essay because there are no objective standards as in maths or physics".

"Beautiful things" that "make your life better" are meaningless by that metric because "nobody makes money off those, they don't grow the economy, they're dumb and useless". Why will we need artists, when AI Art is the way forward?

'schools should only teach STEM because those are real things that are useful when you get a job being creative and contributing to growing the economy, all that English and music crap can be faked up in ten minutes for an essay because there are no objective standards as in maths or physics".

Did you open with a single quote and close with a double quote to trigger me specifically?

Anyway, please let's not turn this into Wordcells vs. Shape Rotators, half of it seems to be friendly fire. As a proud STEMlord I have loads of respect for people who study history in order to preserve the beauty and wisdom of them past. On the other hand, half the post-modernist Brutalism-looks-good-actually people seem to come from the humanities. Surely we can get along, and unite against the Romans rather than the Judean People's Front?

Did you open with a single quote and close with a double quote to trigger me specifically?

Oh, I apologise! I am very stupid and can't remember how I started a sentence when I come round to finish it.

I absolutely don't want this to be Science Versus Humanities, Round 92. But there is a certain attitude that "well all this art and culture stuff is all very well, but it's not practical, is it? If you're rich and frivolous you can waste time on it, but us hard-headed productive types who are creative and contributing to the economy have better things to do, and really schools should be for practical ends" going about, where when funding is tight or time needs to be pared down off the school week, it's the arts and music and so on that get the chop.

I think that impoverishes people, and I very much resent the idea that Culture is something for our betters, that the common mass of the likes of us can't appreciate it any more than a gorilla could, and we should just get on with learning to be a good cog in the economic machine. Not everybody is going to love history or music or art or English or the rest of it, but somebody will, and maybe that somebody is a kid from a home where these things aren't in the picture at all, and the exposure at school is their first taste of it.

See the arguments about AI art. I think that there is a real danger of some people who produce art being replaced, but a lot of that is commercial work for commercial purposes (and could just as well, or even better, be produced by machine than people). That is going to affect people who are trying to make a living from producing such art, as well as all the people doing side-line commissions of fandom art etc.

But the same way that the camera did not replace art entirely, and photography has become an art itself, I think that AI art can also become another tool for artists.

So the argument "Well nobody needs to study art anymore, it'll all be done by AI in future" isn't a good one.

So the argument "Well nobody needs to study art anymore, it'll all be done by AI in future" isn't a good one.

I'll go a step further and say that if this was true, it would be even worse! If you press a button, and the computer reliably spits out a masterpiece that no human can hope to compete with, we'll just lose slowly lose the ability to express ourselves. It's a one-way ticket to Idiocracy.