Quotes About History

I have an enormous faith in Time and History as eventual debunkers of fragility. Education is an institution that has been growing without external stressors; eventually the thing will collapse.

It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention. We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.

I recall how we were taught in school how far more civilized and wiser we were than those in the Balkan communities

We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened.

The story of the wheel itself is even more humbling than that of the suitcase:

While I accept the notion of epistemic base, what I question is the role it has really played in the history of technology.

It is hard to resist discussion of artificial history without a comment on the father of all pseudothinkers, Hegel. Hegel writes a jargon that is meaningless outside of a chic Left Bank Parisian café or the humanities department of some university extremely well insulated from the real world.

I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.

It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion.

history belongs to those who can write about it (whether winners or losers)

Had it not been for the discovery of antibiotics, only a few decades earlier, I would not be here today.

In the days of Suetonius, 60% of prominent educators (grammarians) we slaves. Today the ratio is 97.1%, and growing.

In other words, history teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. It can teach us a lot outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson. In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical

traditions provide an aggregation of filtered collective knowledge

Next let me show how the future is mostly in the past.

An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid cancers (eradication of white blood cells). But

La tesis central de Popper es que, para predecir los sucesos históricos, es necesario predecir la innovación tecnológica, algo en sí mismo fundamentalmente impredecible.

except to make fun of them or provide a historical reference.

It has been difficult for people to understand that, historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God, and that all the great skeptics have been largely either religious or, at least, pro-religion (that is, in favour of others being religious).

The future is in the past.

he who does not have a past has no future.6

Look at the implication for the Black Swan. Extremistan can produce Black Swans, and does, since a few occurrences have had huge influences on history. This is the main idea of this book.

Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future. We just don't know how much information there is in the past.

Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.