![]() What matters is that your assessment is useful to you or to me right now, and that is the only thing we can successfully argue about, otherwise everything else is just our opinion of our own belief in the interpretation of the past. This applies to history as well, we have fragments of the past, we will never know the truth of what happened and why, you can insist that your assessment is the true one, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. I'm saying that seeking truth is misguided, searching and defending any truth is always a falsehood, because there are only models of the world and their practical applications. "Means to an end" generally assumes that the means is justified by the end goal, which isn't what I'm talking about. I'm not sure you understood my "haha" moment. Now your model of history can be objectively measured in how good it is at doing that. Start thinking that way, and history becomes a means to protect yourself from future mistakes using past data. If it doesn't allow you to do this, and actually does the opposite, and that's not your goal, than it's a bad model of history. It might be that one framing of history helps you keep together a free society and keep authoritarian agents at bay, if so, it's a pretty good model of history. What matters is the conceptual model you use to look at the artifacts you've got, and what that allows you to do today in your life. ![]() It doesn't really matter what actually happened and why. But if you focus on your practicalities, then it's a question of finding the most effective conceptual model you can, and then applying it to your life. And that's fine, unless you wrongly obsess over "truth", which you will never find. Like you said, quantum physics and general relativity are simply two conceptual models, in practice they each work well for certain things, but we've found they are incompatible right now, and what one is good at the other not so much. This means we really only care about the practicalities. I realized that in actuality, we are simply framing facts and observations into conceptual models that allows us to predict or infer further conclusions. I think one thing that was a big "haha" moment for me was actually reconsidering what I'm even trying to accomplish when discussing "truth". > but there are higher-order concentric rings of abstractions above those that aren't strictly true but serve as an accurate enough first-order approximation of the truth Not necessarily, I think it's very likely that the foundation of truth is ever changing in itself, nothing has to be fixed in time and space. > There is one objective truth, of course He's fun in a way that the more academic approach to history necessarily can't be (unless there is a Feynman-esque character writing history books that I'm not aware of?) Gladwell, on the other hand, I can read in the bathtub with a cold beer. Nuanced and rigorous history requires careful and objective study to truly understand. ![]() There are serious criticisms of him in this article that may cause me to rethink this, but as long as they aren't full-on manipulations of reality, I view them as a useful entry point into a subject. Another example would be "everything revolves around the earth" -> "everything revolves around the sun" -> "Newtonian gravity" -> "Einsteinian general relativity".Īs a first-order approximation of the truth, Gladwell is fine. ![]() The clichéd example of this would be the Bohr model of atoms being the first "ring" of truth, and quantum mechanics being a second or third "ring". There is one objective truth, of course, but there are higher-order concentric rings of abstractions above those that aren't strictly true but serve as an accurate enough first-order approximation of the truth.
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