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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   3280 thread views

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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It's too bad because video games can offer a really neat way to learn about history, by putting you in the shoes of historical decision makers. Pirates showed why a nimble fast ship that can sail close to the wind is better than a more powerful one. Europa Universalis makes it easy to set up the 30 years war and really get why incentives were on leaders at the time to act the way they did.

Only if the games accurately identify, and code in, relevant historical factors. Which are often extremely non-sexy, and hard to make interesting games about.

Using video games for this is just a special case of "beware fictional evidence".

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