"History is more or less bunk" Topic

'when we realised the place was worth sod-all and went home' ?'

One of History's lessons then?

Adrian Goldsworthy wrote in his introduction to The Fall of the West that he and other academics had been flown to Washington to provide a seminar on historical lessons for hugh level USA decision makers. He thought it inconceivable that this would happen in the UK. I found that a very interesting observation.

Certainly having been exposed to many of the recent and current crop of UK politicians and their wonks the lack of any intelectual hinterland is remarkable. Conversely they are very susceptable to fads and focus groups which leads to a trail of abandoned or poorly executed policies. I would add I'm not making a party political point.

A knowledge of history might improve them.

Pat,

And did any of them succeed in pacifying the place?

Ah – so 'You cannot PACIFY Afghanistan' is your new Maxim? Most historical warriors couldn't give a how pacified a place was, as long as it paid taxes and bowed when they went past.

Your new maxim would also apply to Doncaster BTW.

pAT

Afghan hats – Macedonian hats, makes you think don't it. Maybe they liked the Macedonians.

From

you cannot win

to

you cannot pacify
= Lakatosian degenaration of hypotheses due to ad hoc reformulation :)

…"you cannot conquer". There's a difference between pacification, "win the war" and conquest. Winning is the easiest to claim: just set your definition of "win" and attain it IN Afghanistan and you've (voila!) won a war in Afghanistan.

So any list of successful wars IN Afghanistan must include "Charlie Wilson's War", one of the most successful (and wasted/missed opportunities to make that win mean something….)

Yes its easy to invade and "conquer" Afghanistan but to actually assert control over the whole nation and be able to march around unharrased is almost unkown--I think only Alexander the Great actually acheived that (alledgedly)….

Even when there is no foreign invader the Afghan fight amongst each other as amatter of course!!!

More sage advice: YouTube link

It was the hats, they liked the hats. Also Alexander married in iirc.

Classic blunder, yes of course (love Wallace Shawn)….

Ah – so 'You cannot PACIFY Afghanistan' is your new Maxim? Most historical warriors couldn't give a Bleeped text how pacified a place was, as long as it paid taxes and bowed when they went past.

Your new maxim would also apply to Doncaster BTW.

You seem to be now squirming at the discovery that war consists of a little more than fighting battles. As for 'historical warriors', what do you know? Been one have you? If you cannot pacify a place you sure as hell aren't going to be able to tax it. As for Doncaster, I could pacify it in 20 minutes. We pacified a whole lot worse than that during the 80s and didn't even have guns.

Remember, it's you that tried to imply that winning wars was nothing more than combat victories, which is abject nonsense.

Pity that no one here seems to be able to tell who that piece was written by. The Author is well known at Berkeley, to some a hero, and to most a kook.

David Lance Goines was the author of that screed:

link

He is a little bit off and is just an artist. He included the quote by Ford, probably to create some sort of chaos in those who read what he wrote. He likes to troll, in other words, long before the word "Troll" had the meaning that it now does.

He is both right and wrong in his views on History. History is a very difficult subject to deal with, and it is not a hard science whereby one may make predictions based upon past events with certainty.

However, this does not mean that History should just be thrown in the trashcan. There are many things that can be learned from history, and the Sci-Fi concept of Psycho-History (Psycho-Social History) is not too far fetched in that some work has been done on the prediction of the behavior of large groups of people. The Poly-Sci school at Stanford, for instance, has a huge number of predictions they have made in Election history that have proved correct. Their ability to model the mood of a population has improved substantially due to data mining techniques that use the web as a method of determining the attitudes of a group (these methods will only improve as more people move online with their social lives as well).

For instance, Computer Designer Johnathan Harris has designed an App that allows one to get a general mood of the web at any given moment, by simply entering keywords of emotions.

wefeelfine.org

I have seen work that is similar to this that is used at Berkeley and Stanford where other forms of social navigation are available that are much more powerful than Johnathan's toy program (Toy in the sense that it is something that he plays with to get a feeling for more advanced modeling tools. Those in the < Physics, Mathematics, Comp Sci and Cog Comp fields should understand this meaning of "toy").

So, in this sense, history is very important in building these sorts of models, yet it is not hard and fast like a formula for calculating when a wave function will collapse. Both are just the calculation of probabilities, yet one is far more robust than the other.

Nope Old Bear, quite the opposite – I suggested the 9 or 10 previous conquests of Afghanistan might make your maxim nonsensical. You responded by moving the goalposts. No, I have no idea how pacified Afghanistan was during these periods – I also have no idea how pacified Gaul was after Julius Left, but I have no doubt who won that war.

But anyone who raises the 'were you there' line to try and disprove a Historical argument immediately falls off my contacts-list. Lend me your time-machine, or let it be.

Pat

… war consists of a little more than fighting battles.

Battles are truthfully the only part of history that really interests me.

"Oman rules"….

Old Bear, nobody can pacify Doncaster's mighty burberry army!

Hi Cog Camp

Waht are you doing?????? bringing facts into a TMP discussion – bad precedent

Seriously thanks for the update it is very interesting and led me to a lot of interesting reading.

Sorry about that… I am studying AI (Cognitive Computation and Computational Engineering) and facts just tend to be part of the program there… I realize that they do seem to be far less important here, and that the minutia seems to be where most will throw in their lot

"Minutia" aka "Miniature". Is this any surprise?…

Psycho history to a point is already here with Expected Utility models (like those done by Bueno De Mesquita), and advanced Game Theory, or Agent Based Modeling models.Poli Sci 20 years from now will really be awesome (unfortunetly it will also mean I will be irrelevant :))

If ol' Henry really believed that history was bunk he would never have bothered to learn from it and thereby create his assembly lines…..;)

""Minutia" aka "Miniature". Is this any surprise?…"

In what world is minutia in any way the same as miniature? Get a dictionary, dude!

Tra la la

Minutia is occupation with the MINIATURE details. Don't be so pedantic….

Henry Ford said history is bunk, well I say Ford is Bunk!

I have "bunked" in my Ford often – a 15 passenger Club Wagon. What a machine….

Old Bear – Like so many maxims yours is wrong.

Afghanistan has been conquered by

-The Achaemenids
-Alexander the Great
-The Bactrians
-The Parthians
-The Kiddarite Huns
-The Seljuks
-The Ilkhanids
-The Ghaznavids
-Timur Leng
-Genghis Khan "Hey, Genghis are you crazy? You can't win a war in Afghanistaaaaaaaargh"

And I bet I have missed a few.

Do you think your maxim should read 'the last three wars in Afghanistan, while admittedly under-resourced, dogged by poor political decisions and lack of will to succeed have suggested that such a war will be difficult to win, despite the last so-called British defeat being followed by 40 years of effective hegemony that only really ended 1919 when we realised the place was worth sod-all and went home' ?

Not quite so Pithy, but has the advantage of being less obviously wrong..

And no, I am not being smug. What you choose to call the "Glaringly Obvious" is only glaringly obvious if you choose to ignore the bits of history that don't support your maxim – which is rather the point of this thread.

Pat

Umm!!!! I know I have only done post graduate studies in Classical history but I always felt that Conquered and Subdued were two entirely different things. Alexander for one did not conquer, merely subdued the peoples in that region. And he even colonised the area with Greeks. I wonder if the west will advertise colonsiation in Afghanistan. Best hope of success – but I think not.

Lets face it, the place is ridden with corruption, where nothing is done without gifts (bribes for those who do not know what it means)and repression is so ingrained in their psyche and culture that they would not know a better way of doing something if it struck them square between the eyes. As tradgic as it sounds the world turns but sadly, some places on the earth stay the same and usually for the worse. Afghanistan is one such place.

Just like Plato's cave, one actually has to know or believe that there is such a thing as sunlight in order to move towards the front of the dark cave. And even then one has believe sunlight is actually better than darkenss to move away from the back of the cave and into the light. So it is with Afghanistan, all the people have to believe that change is important and that the way they do things is not as good as alternative ways of living and alternatives in culture etc.

"History is a cruel joke played upon the dead by the living."
-Mexican proverb

For the record, I was just being snarky and my comment about Afghanistan was meant as a joke. I've heard so many people say it's impossible to win a war in Afghanistan over the last decade that at some point my brain just started ruminating on the inherent absurdities of the statement.

Obviously the statement is meant to be taken as something more complex than what the actual words say, but when you hear the actual words enough times, you start to notice that thy go together to make a pretty silly claim.

Because again, the Afghanis have won every war someone else lost in Afghanistan. It's just how war works. (Fair warning: I'm smacking the first hippie who suggests that no one ever wins in war. You can win a war, I have the victory points to prove it!)

Of course you can win a war. The more you depopulate and devastate the other side, the less costly your loses will seem, the more people will think they won a great victory:)

Actually, I wonder if it is the other way round, and 'history is a cruel joke played upon the living by the dead'?

I mean, I bet the inventor of the bricole must be sniggering in his grave at the turmoil he has caused.

KTravlos, I am friends with some guys who have done some amazing (and still mostly secret) work on Utility Models.

One of them is Steve Omohundro. He helped build the Connection Machine by Thinking Machines with Danny Hillis, and wrote the programming procedures to make use of the massively parallel systems of the machine (He also did the original 3D Graphics in Mathematica)… You can google his public work. He is huge into Agent based Modeling and Bayesian Updating of Utility Functions (Hell, everyone I know is a Bayesian out here, and I am rapidly succumbing to Bayesian models)…

Now, why is this thread so popular?

Also, I am next in line behind Gailbraithe to smack the first hippy who says that no one wins a war.

"Now, why is this thread so popular?"

Mayhaps a bayesian model could help. Almost everybody doing quantitative polisci is Bayesian this day.

I am next in line behind Gailbraithe to smack the first hippy who says that no one wins a war.

Are you calling Frank Sinatra a hippy? :) YouTube link

Coherent argument is not made by joining up incoherent sentences with the names of a few well known people.

At best that constitutes "Bad journalism".

Ford was an interestinmg mix. enlightened enough to see all sorts of racial/national groups as potential Americans, but narrow-minded enough to force any trace of their previous culture out to do it…