Yeah, it made it impossible for me to take the OP seriously when they weren’t even around in the timeframe they’re referencing. Nor did they do the research to get it right. Real crusader putting in the work.
If it doesn't matter to the overall point whether various historical claims are true or false, then why include them? All it does is make the piece feel amateurish and contribute to a common problem of taking historical research flippantly and ignoring the community of experts.
Agreed. I was going to point that out as well but a few other comments addressed the dating of the sources so I instead just wanted to address the people who read the title and were ready to jump into the comments to beat a dead horse.
I'm quite puzzled by this comment. A quick glance through the article and there seem to be several references to what appear to be serious academic work.
So is the issue with the work of the academics? Or the way Wikipedia has put together the article? I'm not a historian by any definition of the word and in quite curious about this.
This sort of content is intensely frustrating. OP is a software engineer and entrepreneur. There are actual people who actually study this stuff for a living. They are called historians and they work extremely hard for minimal pay in a field with few jobs and crushing hours.
Then some random startup person comes in and writes a blog post with a sentence like
> But there’s also another option if we don’t take it for granted that people in the past were really that different from us.
Like... this is the sort of sentence that makes people tear their hair out and scream into the void. It is like somebody coming to you and saying "wait... maybe we can... just hear me out... write a program in text and edit it over time to build software."
My wife is a professor of history and has done work on some of the questions raised in this blog post. Usually I show her these things because I know it'll be fun to rage at them together. But this one I chose not to show her because I do not believe that I have ever seen online writing that is more dismissive of her profession than this. Like, and I cannot express this clear enough, OP is just making shit up about a field of study that is centuries old and involves professionals who work 60+ hour weeks for shit pay because they are so invested in these topics.
Yes. So much narcissism, Dunning-Kruger and so little authoritative expertise/oral history. I had a guitarist Wikipedia editor tell me that a niche science industry page update adding historical details of people and places "wasn't relevant" when it was an account of an important era for that industry. Smh. History lost forever.
Yes, it was inaccurate for me to question the origin. I should've said its surprising to me that otherwise educated people still fall for these narratives.
You’re right on the details, my bad for not looking up the dates and books, but the argument would be the same, except to say 1600 years or so prior to the cited work in the article, meaning the article is incorrect in its facts. If I was writing an article I guess I would have checked my facts ;)
The chutzpah. To project that OP is giving revisionist history, and then to dead-ass present an out-of-context[1], highly-edited quote mash-up as evidence. What a dick move.
The author's sense of time and history is spectacularly bad.
Given that he made the mistake at multiple places across the article, he really seems to unquestioningly believe that the industrial revolution was underway less than 100 years ago in London.
I'll start of by saying the author has provided some nice research. However, this particular example is the kind of thing where it doesn't even really matter wether its legitimate or not. The fact that it doesn't attribute it to any particular source makes it almost meaningless. It's basically just saying that some person 100 years ago said "X".
Does it really matter if I have a source for that? This content is clearly not meant to convince, only entertain.
I got to the part where it says "feudal lords" and I don't need to read any further. I can't fathom how they actually tried to defend this based on the abuse and exploitation of the dark ages. Seriously.
While the motivation is correct, I would have to take this with a huge boulder of salt due to the inability to accurately obtain and analyze all the information around the historic event.
Excuse me, but there's an enormous difference between working with erroneous source material, and making factual errors when the correct data are already and widely available.
And, I reject your repeated assertions that because you have historian friends, you are somehow more qualified to speak on the topic than one who does not. That type of clubby gatekeeping is frankly toxic to society and you should abandon that sort of thinking immediately.
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