>Historians should be doing everything they can to help us be more connected with the past
No, Historians have the job of creating an accurate account of the past, their job isn't to connect you to anything, they're not Facebook for the past or the history channel.
Yes but that super accurate account is worthless if the accounts never actually get told to someone who isn't a historian. It's somebody's job to take those accounts and present them to non-historians/muggles and they care very much that you feel connected to the past.
No, that's a cultural issue about the confusion between education and entertainment. If people aren't interested enough in actual history the solution is not to turn science into entertainment, it's to foster a genuine interest in actual science in the population.
Trying to turn everything into entertainment is a race to the bottom, because people will more and more demand that their scientific education is 'engaging'. That's actually how the history channel went from well, actual history to ancient aliens
This kind of purist attitude is so self-defeating in my opinion. The choices are "make history interesting/easily digestible/accessible" or "not have people care", unfortunately "make people care more about history" doesn't just happen. I'm sorry but I'm not motivated at all to pick through old/inaccessible texts trying to pull out some historical significance but I'll gladly watch a documentary/YT series/TV docuseries that does a good job of explaining events, painting a full picture, and puts events in context.
The type of approach you suggest feels like the arguments about how people should just learn the CLI or low-level computer operations. The "We shouldn't bother with GUI's", "it's not important that we expose functionality with pretty UI", or "if people cared they would learn the CLI and be happy about it".
Making history/art/computers/etc more accessible is not a bad thing.
We don't have to forbid AI-upscaling videos, we just have to maintain the proper awareness of what those actually are (entertainment) and are not (accurate history). That's what academic historians are speaking up about.
"Alter things to make them more popular" is fine in some contexts, but if everyone starts confusing that with the original study of factual knowledge... that's a huge problem.
Good point about ancient aliens. I feel like that is the Walmart of science shows. But the same trend towards "edutainment" is also what brought us Neil deGrasse Tyson, someone who can be entertaining and didactic at the same time.
It's also how we got Titanic, Hamilton, Saving Private Ryan, and the entire genre of Westerns. Ancient Aliens is very dumb, granted, is it so bad that it's worth discarding the entire idea of historical entertainment?
They can do whatever they want. It's a free country. But on day zero, they're on the same ground as the recolourizers. On day 365, they'll find that I'm willing to pay the recolourizer more. Because the utility of a historian to me is making me understand the past.
They may not care that I redirect more funding towards more understanding of what happened. Or they may. Either way they are not in control. I am.
Interpreting the past is literally a subjective process. Previously we used a human neural net - famous for assuming relationships between individuals that do not exist and for denying ones that do.
In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a place and time and its best possible interpretation of the evidence.
After all, knowledge that does not adjust my actions is worthless. So if there is truth somewhere that I cannot access and some less accurate information that is well accessible and which will move me closer to the truth then the latter is superior every time. I'll just multiply it appropriately with my prior probability on how accurate an ANN reconstruction can be.
"They may not care that I redirect more funding towards more understanding of what happened."
You may have more understanding of something, but you have to be very careful to remember that it's not "what happened". Adding another layer of inaccuracies does not make something more accurate.
"In time I will use an artificial neural net and I won't need a gating human. It will paint me a picture of a place and time and its best possible interpretation of the evidence."
I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, if you do get an "artificial neural net" to do that, you might want to start worrying about what impressions it wants you to take away.
It’s just a machine. People have ulterior motives. Machines just do what you tell them to. People need to worry about their jobs, their ethnicities, their status. Machines don’t even care about replication. There is no silicon gene that drives them.
And as for what’s happened, it doesn’t matter that it’s less precise. Every piece of information only moves my belief tensor in some direction. It only has to move me in the direction of what’s happened and it’s already superior to an exact description of what’s happened that doesn’t move me in that direction at all.
You overvalue inaccessible truth. And you overestimate historians’ propensity to tell the truth. They have every incentive to lie. And they do. And it works because I suspect you value precision over accuracy. The net result is you have lies told to you by people with a vested interest in you believing a thing.
And I, I have a machine that I can make that makes mistakes. But you know what, you take your approach. I’ll take mine, we’ll see who wins in the marketplace of ideas.
If anything, I an overvaluing the error bars on what is knowable. And I know I will lose because the "market place of ideas" strongly prefers the certainty of a comfortable lie.
No, the Historian's job is to preserve and transmit. Then, it becomes the job of the writers and artists to connect us to that knowledge in a cultural and emotional way. Two very different jobs. Some individuals have the talents to do both, but they are discrete disciplines/jobs/roles.
> It's somebody's job to take those accounts and present them to non-historians/muggles and they care very much that you feel connected to the past.
Yep. That's the job of writers of popular history books and school history textbooks, which historians themselves sometimes write, and creators of historical entertainment such as novels, plays, movies, and TV shows.
Every field of study contributes to building a bridge: math and science the engineering, language the coordination of labor. History alone tells you why to build the bridge.
No, Historians have the job of creating an accurate account of the past, their job isn't to connect you to anything, they're not Facebook for the past or the history channel.