Objective history ?
"I've said two things about it. One, that it's not possible. Two, it's not desirable. It's not possible because all history is a selection out of an infinite number of facts. As soon as you begin to select, you select according to what you think is important. Therefore it is already not objective. It's already biased in the direction of whatever you, as the selector of this information, think people should know. So it's really not possible. Of course, some people claim to be objective. The worst thing is to claim to be objective. Of course you can't be. Historians should say what their values are, what they care about, what their background is, and let you know what is important to them so that young people and everybody who reads history are warned in advance that they should never count on any one source, but should go to many sources. So it's not possible to be objective, and it's not desirable if it were possible."
--Howard Zinn
posted by mutRupuLLi @ Monday, April 12, 2010
12 Comments:
Balanced is a much better word than objective. That term is muddled and has been taken to the point of no return along with secularism, rights, etc by clueless usage. Objective may also be the result of science envy in other fields - trying to arrive at cut and dried idioms - this mostly is a bad idea and doesn't work when dealing with flesh and blood human beings. There's talk in informed circles of how physics-envy is the cause of much damage that has been inflicted in the field of programming by conflating engineering ideas with what is essentially a craft.
BNB,
I have heard of penis-envy...intha physics-envy konjam puthusa irrukku :)
The kind of salary physicists used to get(before the last pay commission super-duper hike), we should be the ones envying the programmers and not the other way round : )
But i get your point. I guess Zinn said it ages back. And again usage of many words in India often takes different connotations. Sometimes opposite ones too. My favourite example is the invariable equating of atheist to a communist. By that logic, Ayn Rand was a communist.
But maybe there is another reason why the word objective is used. There is an increasing shift towards making the humanities subjects more mathematically oriented. People talk of chaos theory in historical discussion these days (as against say, the more deterministic marxist notion of history). Physicists are now busy trying to become econo-physicists.
Maybe that way there is indeed an attempt to make stuff more "objective".
There is an increasing shift towards making the humanities subjects more mathematically oriented.
There have quite a few insightful write-ups in the last one or two years, that have explained how this is a not a good thing. Even the wall street meltdown is now attributed by some people (with some explanations that cannot be dismissed out of hand)to the excessive mathization of wall street. It seems previously Wall street was dominated by mostly arts-commerce types, but post Reagan there has been a huge inflow of engineering graduates who have invented all sorts of complex instruments. Nasim Taleb who wrote the best seller 'Black Swan' has been warning about this for a long time. There are even people like Benoit Mandelbrot (Telugu spelling maybe wrong) of fractals fame who have been warning about the consequences of these complex derivatives etc. Incidentally Praful Bidwai once wrote in the Frontline criticising the engineering graduate domination of the CAT exam. He mentioned a quota on science /engineering intake in IIMs - not sure if it still exists today.
Nerds are generally not bothered about social repercussions of their activities. Math to them is some kind of religion - maybe it is in a world in which there are no human beings.
BNB,
Have to take a look at Black Swan...
There is this guy Paul ormerod, (author of butterfly economics and Why most things fail...). This guy's argument is many economic models and theory don't hold up to the test of agreeing with data.They are not empirically tested. Now i dont fully understand his arguments...But that sort of is the gist.Now I should say I am learning more on these...so ularalgalai mannikkavum...
One possible reason for the current collapse has been suggested to be due to the increasing complexity of the global business network. Increasing complexity leads to unstable networks is a standard result of network or graph theory. So if we were to dehumanize economics and look at it as just a huge set of networks, some things can be explained...But again I am a mathematical scientist, hence incurably(?) biased... :)
//physics envy// LOL !
//There is an increasing shift towards making the humanities subjects more mathematically oriented//
Ken Boulding அன்றே சொன்னார் "Mathematics brought rigor to economics but it also brought the mortis."
BNB, regarding models, the first thing you learn about them is that they are 'abstractions'. My microeconomics prof. used to repeatedly warn research students from confusing their work with reality.
The assumptions based on which the models are built seldom have a reasonable bearing on reality. But the assumption makes your (say) production function differentiable ! So it is sexy.
To be fair though, rather than ridicule those assumptions, an insightful student will see them as limiting conditions.
For example
Assumption: Perfect information
Result: Free markets are better than socialism
If the assumption is demonstrated to be a "necessary condition" then it actually says that only if such a demanding condition is met 'free markets' will work. So the result is actually saying the exact opposite of what it is popularly understood to be saying.
But this seems to be something most people find so difficult to understand !
And in all this I am talking simply about theoretical research. Empirical results being their own argument- paththi oru pushthagamE ezhudhalaam. For starters more than 50% of published empirical results in any field could not be replicated :-)
For starters more than 50% of published empirical results in any field could not be replicated :-)
Lol, dagalti - that's serious stuff. Any linksu ? Once I read that 80% of the articles in serious physics journals like Physical Review Letters do not advance the state of that sub-field of study by much. The careerists have built their own virtual world, often using public money.
The problem with abstractions/models is that while the really smart ones realise their limitations, the careerists generally push them to their absurd limits, and aam janta has no understanding of science and tech issues, and the journos are even worse, they manage to get away.
BNB, here is a link to an old post in the popular econ blog Marginal Revolution. It links to an important paper in a medical journal that explains using simple statistics why most of the published results are false !
I am not sure where I got the 50% couldn't be replicated stat. I remember hearing it from an econometrician though.
Regarding careerist, well it is universal, isn't it. It is easy to diss academics but surely they are not alone.நாம புடுங்குறது பூராமே தேவயில்லாத ஆணி தான். Largely,we are all doing work to keep each other busy, that's all. More new jobs is something technology should take part credit for. The more important reason is there are more people to be kept engaged.
Mistrust of human leisure is perhaps the defining characteristic of our age.
So I am not severely perturbed by my tax-rupees going to academics who 'underdeliver'. The only thing I feel perhaps is a gnawing envy
"I read that 80% of the articles in serious physics journals like Physical Review Letters do not advance the state of that sub-field of study by much. The careerists have built their own virtual world, often using public money."
if my boss were to chance on this comment section, he might have quiet a few things to say...to me...
One hand i am re-writing the draft for the (n-1)th time just for PRL kadatcham.
and on the other kai, tolerating blasphemous comments such as above in the blog :)
I will claim these to be the crosses one has to bear for being a liberal :)
ஆஹா ! bnb, எங்க வந்து என்ன பேச்சு பேசிப்புட்டோம். :-)
அது வந்து... default-A, blog வச்சிருக்கிறவங்க எல்லாரும் நம்ம சாதிக்காரவுகன்னு நினைச்சு சிலசமயத்துல பேசிடரோம்.
dagalti,
idukkuthan idam porul eval seval ellam pakkanam : )
mutrupulli, dagalti:
Yedho oru Ph.d program drop-out oda frustration control panna mudiyama vella vandiruchchu. I yaam sorry ...
your post including the entire conversation between the three of you is extremely interesting.
especially to a humanities student who attended a discussion-meeting in chennai, not too long ago, where there were economists, physicists, mathematicians and one (if not two) historian: all trying to come to some kind of understanding.
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