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Arnold Kling's avatar

"This lack of effective institutions or incentives was really brought home to me recently by the publication of a paper in the prestigious journal History & Technology by Jenny Bulstrode of UCL, in which she claimed that the inventor Henry Cort had stolen his famous 1783 iron-rolling process from Reeder’s iron mill in Jamaica, where it had been developed by 76 black metallurgists by passing iron through grooved sugar rollers. It was a widely-publicised paper, receiving 22,756 views — eleven times as many views as the journal’s next most most read paper, and frankly unheard of for most academic papers — along with a huge amount of press coverage."

There are papers with random mistakes, but this is not one of them. We are in an environment filled with what Bryan Caplan calls "social desirability bias." Get a result that appeals to progressive politics, and your paper will be easily published and the popular press will amplify it. Go in the other direction, and your paper will get denounced and retraction demanded, if it gets published at all.

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Charles C. Mann's avatar

I quite enjoyed this piece. I think it's worth noting that you're talking about two types of error. One is the irresistible anecdote--"Good Queen Bess actually expelled all the Africans in Britain!"--that turns out not to be true. The other is the systematic creation of a narrative for ideological reasons. Both have been around forever. Oddly, the second is easier to correct for than the first, because there are always people of different political flavors who will attack the biased narrative. Instead of being retracted, as in scientific papers, these tend to be relegated to the sidelines and forgotten. The system is not perfect, but things have worked this way many, many times in the past. In colonial US history, for example, Jenning's super-polemical "Invasion of America" was useful as a corrective in 1975, but it is so over-the-top biased that Pekka Hamalainen doesn't even cite it in "Indigenous Continent," his 2022 book covering the same ground.

The first kind, IMO, is much harder to deal with. Let me give an example from my own work. Almost 20 years ago I wrote a book called "1491," about American societies before Columbus. In it I discussed the Maya invention of zero, a major intellectual landmark. The archaeological evidence for this is tricky to understand, as are the various aspects of what zero means mathematically. For obvious reasons, I included a short section about when zero was invented and popularized elsewhere in the world. I came across a fascinating fact, one that had been repeated often in specialized texts--that the Catholic Church had banned the use of zero in medieval Europe, claiming that it was somehow un-Christian not to use Roman numerals. This was long ago, so I may have the details wrong, but I believe the ultimate source was a German history of mathematics by the distinguished scientific historian Otto E. Neugebauer (1899-1990). But the book had never been translated and I don't read German. I contacted a couple historians of science who confirmed Neugebauer's stellar reputation and said that they had heard the story. So I went with it--only to be contacted by a Catholic blogger who was furious at me for perpetuating this myth.

It turned out that Neugebauer was indeed a great historian, but also one with an anti-Catholic bias that he indulged by noting when Catholics (in his opinion) did dumb things. And it was true that Catholic rulers had banned zero, but that was because they were afraid that it would be used to swindle people--which Neugebauer apparently thought was idiotic, but doesn't seem that way to me. Anyway, some early readers had misunderstood Neugebauer's emphasis on the rulers' Catholicism as referring to their banning it for religion reasons, and this led naturally to some others thinking that the orders had to have come on high. So... the blogger was right, my book was wrong, and I corrected the paperback edition.

But because it's a small point, and exactly the kind of fun detail that perks up a text, I am quite confident that this mistake will go on endlessly--while the wild portrait of European colonizers as being a mostly monolithic force of inhuman beasts in Jenning's book has largely disappeared, except for certain sections of the Internet. (Newer accounts like Hamalainen's aren't exactly flattering, but they see colonization as a much more complex, many-sided, and incomplete process.)

Whew! Sorry this is so long, but your essay was interesting!

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