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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25585 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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The thing about Bret Devereaux, at least for me, is that he has a degree of genuine scholarship, but he's also way too online, too interested in arguing with strawmen or weak men, and willing to compromise his own commitment to truth for the sake of the latter. He does represent some useful insights to the public, but he's also wildly uncharitable to people he doesn't like.

Probably the best example of this is his series on Sparta, which is grossly ignorant of the latest academic writing on Sparta, is aimed primarily at owning 'Sparta bros' on Twitter, and by his own admission advances positions that he thinks are historically weak or less likely in order to more effectively win internet arguments.

Take, for instance, this post, in which he admits that the Hodkinson position is more plausible and better supported by evidence than the Cartledge position, but says that he made his case based on Cartledge position because "the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points". When someone admits to making an argument based on a weaker position purely for the sake of winning a debate, I think it is reasonable to conclude that that person is disingenuous.

I expect somebody with a reputation as a scholar to make only arguments that he himself believes to be strong or true. Some simplification for the public can be reasonable, especially when one is trying to educate children or undergraduates, but even so, I expect a scholar to as much as possible prioritise what is true over what can be used to persuade.

The whole thing is absurd at any rate because it is only an exercise in trying to defeat people he doesn't like on Twitter, exemplified by the weak man of Steven Pressfield.

It has always been striking to me that for everything we are told about Spartan values and society, the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States. If there is one thing I wish I had emphasized more in This. Isn’t. Sparta. it would have been to tell the average ‘Sparta bro’ that the Spartans would have held him in contempt.

I'm not sure what I can say here beyond, "Grow up, Bret."

The problem is that, using Sparta as an example, Devereaux is ignorant of the most recent scholarship, and misrepresents by omission the scholarship that he is aware of, in order to own a small, ignorant, and possibly imaginary audience.

This is not a serious thinker.

And if he's like that on classical Greece, which I've bothered to look into, why would I trust him on anything else?

He does sometimes convey useful insights in his other series, but in general I would caution people to always look up and independently research anything Devereaux tells you. He's clearly intelligent and well-read, but he is not a trustworthy source. He has a tendency to lump together periods centuries apart, for all that he criticises 'Sparta bros' he is something of a 'classical Rome bro' himself, he has a tendency to unhelpful political asides, and he tends to always be maximally uncharitable to people with whom he disagrees. I do not recommend ACOUP, if you want to learn about military history or the classical world.

I think he's just caught between a rock and a hard place.

If he wants to keep his position as "internet historian," it's essential that he has some genuine academic bona fides. Right now he's an adjunct professor, which is just barely enough to call himself "professor," even though everyone in academia knows he's not a "real" professor.

His specialty is an classics, specifically the military history of the Roman republic. That's a very old-school, white male coded, conservative interest. It's also been out of favor with the academy for, I don't know, at least 100 years. So if he bends too far towards his fan base, he'll get excommunicated by the academy and lose all of his professional bona fides. He'll become just another internet "roman statue guy." On the other hand, if he leans too far towards the academy, he'll spend all his time writing about the queer women of color in the roman republic, or whatever. He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about. They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.

In of his recent article, he did admit the contradiction- if he was a woman or Black person, writing about more academia-friendly topics, he'd probably be a full professor by now. Instead he's marginalized as basically a glorified grad student, despite having a huge internet following and way more funding than most full professors. And yet, he has to kind of look down on and despise his followers in order to maintain his standing. Truly a difficult position.

He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about.

When I read it, I did not think it was especially boring. I actually found it interesting to learn that a lot of productivity went into textiles. For myself, this contrast is larger than for food -- I still spend a couple of hundreds Euros a month on food, but perhaps only a couple of 100 Euro per year on clothes. A 50 Euro jeans can easily last for years.

Or you could say that the baseline requirements of labor for textiles (even after the invention of the spinning wheel) sets the stage for the industrial revolution as spinning machines were one of the early consumers of steam power.

even the primary sources of the time

Come on, that is an incredibly weak argument. Most of our sources were upper class, often aristocratic men interested in what their class viewed as appropriate interests. There is a ton of stuff -- details of industrial processes, demographic information, nutrition of the general population, etc -- which they could have trivially found out and written to us about, but did not bother for the most part.

Some of these a woke niche interests ("Okay, but what was life in the kingdom like for the 99%?") but others might allow us to understand why history happened the way it happened, why this society was stable and that one was not and so on.

I found it interesting, too.

Per gwern:

Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”, as the Industrial Revolution in textiles never stopped; employment in the US textile industry has cratered while garment per man-hour & per capita GDP in new textile-heavy economies like Bangladesh soars as textile automation continues.

I thought his article was the one with stats about the percentage of income spent on clothing, but I guess that was somewhere else. It was outrageous even through the 50s.

His specialty is an classics, specifically the military history of the Roman republic. That's a very old-school, white male coded, conservative interest.

Noted. But can't the same be said about anyone specializing in ancient Rome in general, ancient Greece in general and not just Sparta, or the Middle Ages in general, for example, or even military history as a whole?

Sure, but who else is like that, who writes prolifically on the internet for a general audience, in modern times? I think you'd have to either go back to much older sources, or look to some fairly obscure academics who don't even have a twitter or any sort of online presence. Academia in general just... doesn't do a good job of catering towards popular interests.

I think he's just caught between a rock and a hard place.

And you believe that this absolves him of responsibility? That it makes him a trustworthy source?

I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth." I just appreciate his perspective. He must be read in context, just like every single other human who ever dared to speak with authority. I so generally trust him about the specific factual details of life in the ancient world, but much less when it comes to editorializing or drawing broad conclusions.

I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth."

That's not what I asked, I asked you if being "caught between a rock and a hard place" absolved him of responsibility. and If it made him a trustworthy source.

If anything, your reply reads to me like a list of reasons to be intensely skeptical of any claim he makes.

I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth."

That wasn't the question. Do you think it makes him more likely to put forward an argument in good faith?

I think I answered @JeSuisCharlie's question of "is he a trustworthy source?" You're now asking a different question- "is he more likely to put forward an argument in good faith?" (presumably you mean, more likely because of his political beliefs?) To that I would say no, but neither is anyone else. Like everyone, you need to read him with an eye towards his potential bias.

I think I answered @JeSuisCharlie's question of "is he a trustworthy source?"

I don't think you did originally, and I don't think I did. "Trustworthy" doesn't usually mean "an oracle of truth".

They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.

It's at least a little funny that you've forgotten about the weaving and sewing part of clothes production despite apparently being aware of this checks notes five part series on clothes production.

From what I recall from the series, the lions share of work actually went into thread production, that is spinning. The weaving was much less, and the sewing much less than the weaving again.

Oh yeah, sewing, I recall that's on part 6 of the series.

In all seriousness it's not part of the series so you might want to recheck your notes.

I didn't actually read the series. Looking now, despite the name, it's really more about cloth production than clothing production, despite the name. Very troubling!

I took a quick look, and despite enjoying Youtube vlogs about textile content, nd enjoying beating wool with sticks, felting, and several other textile things, it looked pretty boring. I can see why someone wouldn't ever click through to knitting or weaving or anything else.

Real knitting, let alone crochet, was actually unknown to the ancients. There was a process called "nalebinding" which involved a single needle and passing the entire thread through each loop, joining threads to make a full garment. True knitting with two needles without passing the whole yarn through each loop came about around the 11th century.

Take, for instance, this post, in which he admits that the Hodkinson position is more plausible and better supported by evidence than the Cartledge position but says that he made his case based on Cartledge position... The problem is that, using Sparta as an example, Devereaux is ignorant of the most recent scholarship, and misrepresents by omission the scholarship that he is aware of, in order to own a small, ignorant, and possibly imaginary audience.

I think you're misrepresenting Devereaux here.

I think the Cartledge view on Sparta, in many of its particulars if not in whole, remains ‘colorable’ [plausible, consistent with evidence] as an academic matter... This is not to say that one cannot prefer Hodkinson’s arguments – I do on several points (discussed below) – but what I think one cannot do is go tell a public audience that someone following M.H. Hansen and Paul Cartledge doesn’t know what they’re talking about or is simply ‘out of date.’ The points are contested; I suspect given the nature of the evidence and the sensitivity of the question many of them will likely remain contested.

Of course I do follow Hodkinson on several points; here I think the critique mistakes my use of older scholarship for a lack of awareness of the newer scholarship. There are points, especially deeper into the series where I adopt Hodkinsonian positions: Sparta “follows this basic model” of polis government (more typical than not!). My take on Spartiate women owes quite a lot to Hodkinson’s “Female property ownership and empowerment” in Spartan Society (2004), ed. T. Figueira, including rejecting the notion that female inheritance was the fundamental problem motivating Spartan oliganthropia; I was taught the ‘female inheritance was the problem’ version in my MA and am convinced by Hodkinson that this was wrong. The argument that Sparta’s army is a fairly typical Greek army is likewise Hodkinsonian and leans into his arguments about Sparta not being so ‘militarized’ as our sources imply, contra Cartledge. Finally, while I do stress the rigidity of Sparta’s social structure and its inequality (in keeping with Hodkinson, Property & Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000)), I don’t believe at any point I argue for the ‘exceptional domination of state over society,’ except for the position of the helots. It is perhaps unfortunate that This. Isn’t. Sparta. comes behind my habit of bibliography paragraphs at the front of essays; there would have been quite a lot of Hodkinson, but also Powell, Figueira, I.M. Morris, etc. etc. Property & Wealth, especially, is a must read if you want to understand contemporary scholarship, though it is dense and written for scholars so you can’t start with it.

He does not concede that Cartledge is an implausible position nor does he leave out the Hodkinson position entirely. If he thinks that there's two positions, both of which are reasonable positions to hold, I don't see it as disingenuous to use the more convincing one where appropriate to argue against a third position that he thinks is not reasonable to hold.

I can't really think of a more charitable way to interpret this, I'm afraid:

First: why the Cartledge camp? Why so much of the old (if not busted) over the new hotness in Sparta scholarship? Of course part of the reason is that I think the Cartledge camp is right on some points (back that in a minute), but more broadly, in trying to persuade an audience that Sparta is not a society to be glorified or emulated, the Cartledge position is the obviously superior persuasive position.

[...]

And so if the goal is to persuade people of an argument about Sparta – recall that this series was immediately prompted by dueling essays about the value of Sparta as an exemplar for modern politics – the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points. That being my aim, I used it.

(emphasis original)

I take that as an explicit admission that he premised his argument on positions that he himself thinks are in dispute, but which he believes are instrumentally useful for persuasion. He himself says that is prioritising persuasion!

It might be one thing if he had prefaced those earlier Sparta posts with a note that there are several schools of thought, he find several of them plausible, and for the following he's going to proceed on the assumption that the Cartledge school is correct - but he does not do that. It sounds to me like he thinks that such an admission of uncertainty would give the 'Sparta bros' an excuse to dismiss what he says.

(Not that I think that's necessary, because a dedicated 'Sparta bro' is going to ignore him anyway. Devereaux's Sparta series is not a serious attempt to persuade, but rather a performative dunking, done for an audience already inclined to cheer him on. I understand that persuading third parties, rather than your actual interlocutor, is usually the goal of public debate, but surely even that would be enhanced by presenting your case in the most comprehensive and intellectually honest way possible.)

I think this is standard science explainer practice, for reasons that can be completely orthogonal to the political, that has the propensity to sound bad to laypeople who have an incorrect model of how the scientist's notion of "truth" works. I will, with apologies, admit that I have the sketch of a post to the effect of "newsflash: physicists and even mathematicians 'lie' to you in the exact same way all of the time" in mind but do not have the energy or time to produce it.

Instead, for a different argument that is more related to the political dimension of this specific issue, I think that his way of explaining it just stems from a broader sense of distrust that the engaged lay public insists in every public-facing academic entirely through its own fault. If you do quantum computing, it is almost impossible to even mention superposition unless you want to wind up being quoted in a procession of powerpoints about the possibilities of doing multiple computations simultaneously forever; and if you do neurobiology, even as much as acknowledging that something quantum might have something to do with chemistry including chemistry that happens in the brain will forever be used as ammunition by "due to their quantum souls capable of seeing every outcome simultaneously, humans will never be replaced by machines" type people even if you started your popsci career hoping to get the public acquainted with the mechanistic understanding of the brain. This doesn't have to happen to you or someone you know many times for you to start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is feeding them information selectively so that they arrive at the least wrong conclusion rather than feeding them information freely so that they motivatedly reason themselves into something much worse (here, probably, any acknowledgement of controversy would just put "Sparta bros" into "300 is a valid scientific theory" mode). Of course this sucks for those of your readers who can actually hold differentiated views and deal with uncertainty, but they can always read the literature. Besides, the ones who protest the loudest tend to turn out to be exactly those motivated reasoners upon cursory inspection all too often. (Similar to the fun "spot the Scientologist" game whenever public-facing criticism of psychiatry is involved.)

You're partially correct, but imo also far too naive about the way this is extremely prone to first devolve into disinformation "for the good of the people", and then as the students, being people, come newly into your field believing that bullshit and the disinfo becomes the obvious truth, how could you disagree? Even noticing that there are so many older scientist secretly believing things they've been told all their life are evil and wrong will, if anything, strengthen their conviction.

In the hard sciences, if people do this right , they're very open "this is a simplification, I don't believe this & it's not true, but for the lay-person it's close enough that it's better than knowing nothing". But once politics is involved, I've personally talked with scientists in my field who defended a position in public with such conviction that I was genuinely convinced that they believe it. Until only much later in a pub after a pint in a private round they admitted that no, they actually think as well the counter-position has the better evidence, but it is getting abused by his political enemies, so to weaken them he has to bring it down, and as a scientist in the field he is well-positioned to do so. This works for a while and might seem reasonable as a single person, but it (rightfully) erodes trust in science as whole.

Once you see the public as epistemic enemy, you honestly should excuse yourself and stop being a science communicator; Arguably you aren't one anymore already anyway.

Both for you and @Corvos, the thing is that scientists (this is in fact more true in the "hard sciences" than in History) don't generally think of theories in terms of "true" or "false" (or even "likely to be (...)"), but rather just as better/worse/incomparable, or often even just "more powerful" or "less powerful", models for generating predictions. A newer theory may be "more powerful" in that it generates more accurate predictions more often (but really, it will usually be the case that the newer theory does better than the older one in a few more contexts and worse than the older one in slightly fewer - "incomparable"), but also more finicky, in that it's harder to understand and apply correctly, and therefore inferior for a particular situation. Physicists will boldly use Newtonian physics to calculate the behaviour of slow heavy objects on Earth, and not mention anything about newer theories to any 6th graders they are tasked with teaching, without feeling like they are lying to anyone.

The psychology here is really more akin to if you ask an engineer for the best plane, no further instructions provided, and get a modern Airbus rather than an SR-71 Blackbird. The engineer might even in his professional context feel strongly that the SR-71 and YF-12 constituted the pinnacle of aviation engineering, and argue passionately about the particular design tradeoffs between the two, but he will not for a moment feel like he deceived you or betrayed his professional oaths by furnishing you with neither; they are simply not planes that it is reasonable for you to deploy or fly, and it is exceedingly unlikely that they will be actually better suited for your use case, whatever it is, than the boring reliable airliner that can even occasionally survive Indonesian airport infrastructure. Now, if you are a plane buff, have a cold war spy mission to run or happen to be an activist who spends every waking hour malding about the mothballing of the Concorde, you would probably feel a terrible sense of betrayal about this, but as someone who is not, would you think the engineer deserves condemnation?

I am a scientist. Newspaper articles have been written on my work, albeit ones over which I had little control; I have read them and I have sighed over their inaccuracies. I am well aware of what you meant, as I suspect is @RenOS.

I am telling you as a scientist that it’s really easy to use this reasoning to work yourself into some very shady places. Reaching its nadir when you start musing happily about how all the lay people don’t really understand how these things are done…

It’s precisely because it’s partly true that it’s so fucking seductive.

Well, same(ish) - I have not been featured in the news (nor is it likely to happen anytime soon given that I am in unfashionable theoretical CS), but then on the other hand I count some actual historians among my relatives so I have some inside view of that sausage factory. I think the main difference to me is that the thing you describe as a nadir does not feel particularly bad to me, on its own. The educator part of the job has always felt fundamentally adversarial to me - even well-selected students will at any point in time use 95% of their galaxy brains (or, well, of whatever fraction of those they are willing to invest in your course at all) only to engage in mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they are perfect just as they are, and to convince you that they learned and applied what you wanted them to without them actually having done those things. (The sheer inventiveness I've seen in schemes to circumvent automated plagiarism detectors in programming assignments that could be done with a fraction of the effort, or to hide transparently false lemmas in the bowels of a Rube Goldberg proof of a three-liner that was covered in class!)

To teach these students - not an anonymous public, and not on a topic of any political valence, but people you know and a subset of whom you hope to elevate to colleagues some day! - requires constant subterfuge and deception to get past the ego defenses of their monkey brains. That you would do all that and more when actually just talking to normies seems absolutely par for the course for me. It's not like I'm not bothered by the politically motivated deception cases @RenOS was hinting at, but there I see the problem somewhere else. It is only really bad if, before deciding to deceive the public, these scientists have already deceived themselves, or otherwise transgressed against the mental discipline that a scientist needs for science as a whole to function in the long run. (Many cases of this don't even involve politics, cf. every case of trash stats replication crisis just-so story zingers. I blame the general culture in US academia where idealism about science qua science is seen as cringe and unbefitting of a successful working adult.) If it were as he says, and these people indeed merely advanced their agenda when talking to the general public but treated evidence fairly while engaging in the scientific process, I would perhaps find them tasteless as politicians, but not compromised as scientists.

you [...] start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is [feed] them information selectively

But this is where you are in great danger of throwing away your soul and admitting you are not a scientist or a teacher but a shepherd of men.

Saying, 'the plum pudding model is less accurate than other models which I will explain later but I am using this now because the best model needs to be taken in bite-size chunks' is one thing. Similarly, avoiding hot-button words like quantum in favour of something equally descriptive when talking to people can be wise for the reasons you give: I have sat in on interviews where the beleaguered interviewer has twenty minutes to try and fish something out of the firehose of words coming from a professor and produces something obviously insane based on the word 'quantum'. But this is in aid of greater comprehension.

in trying to persuade an audience that Sparta is not a society to be glorified or emulated, the Cartledge position is the obviously superior persuasive position

this series was immediately prompted by dueling essays about the value of Sparta as an exemplar for modern politics – the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people

This is not epistemics.

This. Is. DIDACTIIIIICS!

(couldn't resist)

In all seriousness, the above is not a matter of being correct or incorrect about the facts. It's the author using scholarship which he suspects to be wrong ("old, if not busted") in service of the author's moral, political goal. And that, as someone intimately familiar with the difficulties of scientific explanation, strikes me as a very different ball game. Being less than 100% open and honest with people for the sake of their own edification slides so easily and neatly into being less than honest because it serves your own goals that it's really really dangerous to get into the habit of doing it. I'm not joking when I say this is how senior academics lose their souls.

I take that as an explicit admission that he premised his argument on positions that he himself thinks are in dispute

I don't really think this is the case. The Cartledge position, according to Devereaux, is fully within the mainstream understanding of Sparta. Maybe it's "in dispute" in the sense that some people dispute parts of it, but I don't really think that means much. The Hodkinson position is also "in dispute" by this definition.

It might be one thing if he had prefaced those earlier Sparta posts with a note that there are several schools of thought, he find several of them plausible, and for the following he's going to proceed on the assumption that the Cartledge school is correct - but he does not do that. It sounds to me like he thinks that such an admission of uncertainty would give the 'Sparta bros' an excuse to dismiss what he says.

To me, it sounds like you are implying here that the Hodkinson position would vindicate the "Sparta bro". It doesn't sound like that's the case according to Devereaux. The reason he didn't base his argument fully on the Hodkinson position is because it requires dismissing the primary sources which he says people would find unconvincing (which seems reasonable to me).

There's a difference between being indifferent to two positions versus believing one position while conceding that the opposing position is plausible.

What it seems suspiciously like here is that he privately believes X, while conceding that Y is plausible. But then in his writing he argues Y because he believes the normies will believe it more.

Now I would say that my argument here is actually a blend of the Cartledge and Hodkinson camps,

But what he's doing here can be framed as far worse than that. He can cherry-pick the worst of both camps in order to maximally dunk on the spartabros, without seriously making an effort to disclose that. His depiction of Sparta is likely more negative than either camp individually would accept.

There's a difference between being indifferent to two positions versus believing one position while conceding that the opposing position is plausible.

Casting Cartledge and Hodkinson as opposing positions seems like a false dichotomy. In any case, he seems to believe parts of both positions and used parts of both in his argument.

His depiction of Sparta is likely more negative than either camp individually would accept.

I haven't read his series and I certainly haven't read the actual historical scholarship so I can't comment on this. Would be interested if you can come up with examples where he depicts Sparta more negatively than the Hodkinson or Cartledge views support.

For context, this is what real history research looks like.

And they say homeschooling produces better results...

For unironic context, this is what real history research looks like.

Yes, you can still find new historical sources, not only from newly opened modern archives, but from older times too - there is still surprising amount of centuries old written material never properly classified and published.

This is shame, because raging modern culture war can use anything, no matter how old.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, or how serious you are? Aella's post is not really historical research? In a sense, I suppose, reading the works of historians and trying to discern common themes within them is something historians do, but I don't think it's a central example of academic history. It is a good thing for her to do, and I don't look down on it, but it's not something I would have leapt to as a good example of 'real history research'.

EDIT: Oops, sorry, I thought I was replying to QuantumFreakonomics here. I apologise. I agree that the post on the Maronite Chronicle is real historical research.

I agree that the post on the Maronite Chronicle is real historical research.

It does not seem to be revolutionary at all, no shocking secrets uncovered, no revelation that The Prophet was transgender woman of color that never existed. It well aligns with other sources we have for 7th century Middle Eastern history, it confirms that our general knowledge about these times is accurate.

And this is how real historical research looks like in most cases.

it's not something I would have leapt to as a good example of 'real history research'.

Well, she gets the black pill lesson of history that there is no such thing as ultimate "lesson of history"

Good luck getting experts and professionals to tell you so in such open way.

See my edit above for an apology.

I do agree that drawing ultimate or singular 'lessons of history' is a foolish endeavour. History teaches us a great deal, much relevant to today, but one of the things it teaches us is that events are extraordinarily contingent and you won't find simple, predictable laws.

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