Noah Smith of Noah’s Opinions Takes on History and Loses…Badly

I’ll start right from the beginning with @Noahpinion on Twitter: he has blocked me. This has made it difficult for me to find the tweets I want to reference. I would invite the reader to visit his profile himself. Could I log into another account etc. and get the tweets? Yes! Am I that motivated? Yes? I am also respectful his no longer wanting to interact with me? Also Yes. Besides, this is more fun.

History Has Nothing to Offer

Noah Smith decided to take on the entire discipline of history in early September 2022 by boldly declaring that any discipline whose conclusions could not be conveniently put into a graph or otherwise quantitatively evaluated could offer no hope or guidance to people of today. This is a bold statement that certainly made Twitter a fun place for about 24 hours.

Let’s break that down: if it can’t go on a graph, it’s not useful. Rightly so, a history professor took Noah to task on this terrible take. This sparked days of discussion regarding the veracity of the humanities and how “soft” sciences like history simply couldn’t keep up with the solid numbers from the hard sciences.

In the course of the discussion on Twitter, I pointed out that the fall of the Roman Empire could not be graphed and someone replied with a graph of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean around the 4th century AD and remarked that it could be inferred from the graph (fewer ships wrecking after the fall). But that only tells one very narrow part of the story: ships. It tells you nothing of the politics or the mistakes that lead to the Visigoth sacking of Rome in 410.

Not Everything Can be on a Chart

Ultimately, history like its cousins anthropology, political science, and sociology are ultimate about the story of us. It is the shared wisdom passed down by our ancestors about what humans have been up to. Can history be colonialist? Yes? The victors get to write the history and it is from their perspective. Can history be inaccurate? Yes! Historians are always looking for new information and new discovers that can rewrite what we thought we knew. This does not however mean that the hard sciences are some how more pure. Hard sciences change their story all the time. Look no further than what we thought we knew about Covid-19 or the vaccines. The story does change. But to postulate that any sort of course of study that can’t offer numbers is simply daft.

I think Noah wants historians to take historical patterns, chart them in neat graphs and say definitively, “we should take a certain course of action.” That’s nice over in physics and engineering but it just doesn’t work for history because all the context and the “why” has been pulled out. Take the chart about ships sinking in the mediterranean. That tells us there were fewer ships sinking but it doesn’t tell us the story of how and why the western roman empire fell to the german tribes or that germans and romans had been interacting for 200 years and the last five roman emperors were german.

I appreciate numbers; I really do. They are apart of a story but they aren’t the only side to a story. I fear that this “anti-humanities” backlash that we’ve had over the past 10 years or so is the result of too few people taking humanities courses and the continued sucking of humanity out of our society. When everything is ran by “the machines of loving grace” then the human element, by its very nature, must be reduced. Someone recently posted a picture of Silicon Valley, a region of bland business parks painted beige with no adornment or architecture whatsoever, and remarked that for such wealth there was no sense of aesthetic. To which I replied that of course that was nothing like that. Servers and laptops don’t need beauty; that is a human need and computers aren’t human. Hence, the bland boxes.

Technological Dark Age

Ultimately, Noah Smith got served by several people and myself. That’s how I got blocked. That being said, I think the opinions of people like Noah Smith are really the dominant idea of our current age. That’s why I think we are headed straight for a technological dark age.

Knowledge will be limited, AI, like the catholic church, will control our lives in seemingly disparate ways that we don’t understand but must blindly follow. Indeed with the ChatGPT progress and the rise of AI generated art, this has already begun. People are boldly declaring that AI will replace humans or that humans who use AI will replace those who don’t quickly adopt the new technology. I wonder if history has any answers to what happens when technology takes over and leaves people behind?