Comment by d0mine
3 years ago
"false history" -- is there any other kind? It is like the difference between a cult and established religions: the main difference is scale and time.
3 years ago
"false history" -- is there any other kind? It is like the difference between a cult and established religions: the main difference is scale and time.
If you have trouble with the concept of 'truth', just go by what's useful.
That's eg why financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth: their readers want to be able to play the markets, so need something with a bit of a reality check, instead of just playing to their ideological preferences only.
Importantly, this only applies to the subsets of financial media that traders pay money for. Bloomberg's free news is garbage opinion pieces, but the stuff you pay (a lot) for is generally decent.
> financial newspapers often stick closer to the truth
Are you sure?
From my limited experience, there is a huge amount of fictitious narrative in financial news. I just had a look at https://www.barrons.com/ - hard to say how much is just opinions of the journalist, but not much looked fact based.
Older articles are easier to check for correctness.
2 replies →
Correct.
History in an ideal world tries to record what happened.
But realistically, history is a tool for politics.
But judging by the heavy downvotes of your comment, that fact doesn’t seem to be popular.
Even a biased account of history is a record of history, in some ways even more interesting when you have other biased accounts to compare with.
Goofy as his methods are, Herodotus is a very compelling read specifically because it's not one coherent narrative, but a collection of points-of-view (none of which may be entirely correct, but reflect what people claimed at least).
> that fact doesn’t seem to be popular.
No its because he question to concept of truth itself. Literally everybody knows history writing is manipulated for many reasons.
But in my observation, however in my view historiography is often far more complex then reflecting simply political desires.
I don't question "concept of truth." Ironically, the truth is corrupted already.
To answer the question "is there any other kind" would be enough to provide one [just one] example of a truthful history book (it is ok if it is imprecise in details as long as it is accurate overall--think physics theories within their application domain--we are far far away from history resembling hard sciences).
The example would demonstrate falsehoods you believe in.