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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31885 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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I think just as an example, in history, I’d ask students to write about counter factual versions of the events in question. How does history look different if Rome had adopted Mithraism instead of Christianity? How does history look different if the French or American Revolutions fail?

This isn't a history exercise, it's a creative fiction exercise and treating it like a history exercise does nothing but instill false confidence in students about their ability to reason about situations with far too many unknowns

Of course it’s a history exercise; building a credible case for a counterfactual relies on deep knowledge of pre-existing context and trends. You cannot explain how Rome would differ without understanding how Rome was and how Rome did change.

A counterfactual without utilizing the factual would be shoddy work.

There is no such thing as a credible case for the questions you posed. There are cases that superficially sound credible but actually make too many assumptions. In my opinion such a case is actually worse than just saying "I don't know".

The best political analysts of our time struggle to predict the economic impacts of a single peice of legislation a few years out with any decent accuracy. So when you ask a mere student to predict something orders of magnitude more difficult like the impacts of a grand change on a distant civilization that spanned centuries, you are only testing their ability to tell a story, not to get at the truth.

The only thing an avowed rationalist would say to such a question is "I don't know and neither do you"

This is exactly the goal of the exercise. And it wouldn’t be an everyday thing either. Most of the subjects would be taught in order to get those deeper understandings, studying the culture and history and personalities, learning the dates and geography and so on.

Although, it’s always been my contention that having the facts, theories, and procedures memorized is a big part of proper reasoning. If you know the names of great figures, their peers and rivals, what they did, and what the issues of the day were, understanding why things ended up as they did and how else things could have gone.

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