Writing for a public audience is a double-edged sword. It’s all very well to want to put your work out there and reach as wide an audience as possible – and even if it’s not something you really yearn for, it’s still heavily encouraged and incentivised throughout academia. But it comes with significant risks, and those only grow and multiply as you reach a wider and wider audience.
Interesting piece. Personally I'm quite surprised about the coverage this one bit of contentious history is getting - both in terms of promoting its claims and attacking them.
On the topic of corrections a piece (1) that you co-authored for the Entrepeneurs Network earlier this year refers to "[the UK] continues to be among the best places in the world to innovate, recently giving us the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine, Babylon Health, and DeepMind".
Babylon Health went into administration/was sold through bankruptcy in August (2). This was after several years of allegations that neither its technology or its business model worked as claimed (3). Allegations that are now being more extensively reported (4).
So, it was quite surprising to see Babylon being referenced as a exemplar of innovation earlier this year - the issues with the tech and business model were pretty well known - and even more surprising to see the reference persist after Babylon went bust.
Very annoying that the newspapers who pushed the original won’t publish the follow ups/rebuttals but the stuff with the journal seems much more damaging to me
I mean how do you take that place seriously anymore?
Oh and by request - You’re an idiot (I’ve got no specific reason why but I’m a polite guest and you requested we say that so you’re welcome)
Ah the politics of history! I first witnessed it when one of my UG lecturers used to write polemical columns for the Sun tabloid that invalidated his authority. More seriously, I've seen politicians try to change the school history curriculum towards their favoured narrative. I won't call you an idiot though.
"I do not wish to get carried away here and claim that this is proof that the entirety of history is in crisis and we need some kind of radical overhaul"
Oh Anton. Sweet child of summer Anton. I admire your work and integrity but you're displaying remarkable naivete. What you're experiencing here is the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization of Prog ideology (really, de facto religion) and utter domination of virtually all academia/NGO/media/clerisy is what you're up against here.
This is nothing, nothing. 18th century obscure metallurgy? Try fathoming briefly what population genetics and psychometrics is up against, and shudder.
"'what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism'.
When I read this, *I* knew that *they* knew that the case didn't stack up. Would they have written this if the empirical evidence supported Bulstrode? No. When the empirical evidence doesn't support you, denounce empiricism itself.
Keep up the good fight. This is the only way history self-corrects.
Regarding corrections, criticisms and insightful comments I like the model that another stack uses where he posts a follow up titled Highlights From The Comments On [Previous Title]
This type of engagement should be used carefully as it could signal boost trolls but it could be an useful tool occasionally that will allow you more freedom to make more speculative claims.
It might be slightly naive (if not idiotic !! ) not to consider whether history is being killed by people like Jenny Bulstrode who seem to have above any scholastic endeavour an overriding and prior political agenda.
'The Treason of the Intellectuals' - the title in English of a book by Julien Benda warned in 1927 about where the "desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action” would lead......
'The Killing of History: how literary critics and social theorists are murdering our past' by Keith Windschuttle published back in 1997 shows how the disposition of 'historians' like Bulstrode - at least as manifested in her article about Cort - destroys the discipline of history. It is worth reading - he exposes the distortions and fabrications - what I would consider scholastic corruption - through key case studies.
The issue is whether there is honest intent and willingness to address any mistakes made. Such intent does not exist when the discipline is corrupted by political agendas (Lysenkoism .....)
In a sense, everything we write is always wrong. There is simply no possible means of boiling down the complexity of reality into a few thousand words. The goal should not be perfection, but to be less and less wrong over time.
That means hearing criticisms, engaging in reasoned debate, and rewriting. Kudos to you for recognizing human fallibility, embracing it for the betterment of all, rather that ignoring it for self-preservation.
I still like the idea of creating public archives of source material when possible so readers can check not only the accuracy of data points but the interpretation. And I agree with your implication that a journal that says "authoritative" histories should not be challenged means their authority to confer that status may not be questioned. Which suggests it must be.
Superb article. While you're (sensibly) careful not to take a side on the culture war point, I'm under no such restrictions and I'm just going to say it: the "woke gone mad" side were claiming that Bulstrode's article was deliberately being weaponised against the present-day West (including by its author) and had been exempted from proper academic scrutiny as a result, and so far events strongly suggest that *that is what actually happened*.
Perhaps "woke gone mad" got lucky; one example doesn't prove anything much. Let's see.
Great piece. I worry that the defence of the original piece by the journal editors, a well established historical society, professors, etc., reveal a profession that is increasingly unsure of itself, and unable to stand up for its values.
Foucault was famously unconcerned by the accuracy of the historical facts he weaved his theories around. Can you be an admirer of his approach as well as a historian? Lots of historians seem to think so. I'm not so sure.
Dr Anton, this is the least idiotic piece I've read in a while. It's pure method and it works. Well done.
I used to read a magazine published by Cornell university called The Sciences. If i recall, they had a page titled Errata. This was pre internet, but might that sort of thing work for you, or is it what you are already considering?
Nov 28, 2023·edited Nov 28, 2023Liked by Anton Howes
Hi Anton. You're an idiot.
OK. Now we've got that out the way... 😁There's so much here I'd love to comment on, but I'm overdue with my latest newsletter, so I'll try to keep this under 10,000 overexcitable words.
Thank you so much for the mention here! Funnily enough, my "dear reader, call me an idiot" request to encourage readers to break the ice is applicable in my case here: this is the first time I've commented on your Substack, despite being a fan of your work for a long while, so - I'm glad it worked on me as well.
Speaking as someone looking on in semi-clueless horror from the sidelines at the controversy around the Jenny Bulstrode piece - of everyone (including Noah Smith), you've untangled it best for me, so thank you. And it is indeed so horrifying - I can't quite understand how it all became so wayward of the calm, respectful, fact-based and well-publicised discussion that is sorely needed at the heart of this thing. What a mess.
(A rose-tinted personal; memory: as an archaeologist, I was accustomed to blazingly passionate semi-rows happening in the back of pubs where, despite the volume and the colour of people's faces, it was more or less understood that everyone's opinions were flawed and up for correction in service of a keener glimpse of reality, or at least a richer grab-bag of ideas with which to speculate upon it. Especially true of us undergrads, of course, but it applied to everyone, professors included. I really enjoyed that, along with the intolerance of people who held such totally inflexible conviction that they couldn't take part in that kind of good-natured verbal melee. I can't imagine what the best of those folk would make of this situation where fact-based counterarguments are treated with such hostility. Where's the scientific method here? I don't see it.)
Also, congratulations on a hilariously perfect summing-up:
>>"what we have here is not just the lack of a smoking gun. There isn’t a body, and there isn’t even any blood. There hasn’t been report of a loud bang, or really anything at all. There’s just a quiet, empty street to which someone has turned up before suddenly rushing to the other side of town and arresting a random person – Henry Cort."
True Art, that.
Regarding getting things wrong:
I also live in fear of it - but I have it much easier than some, because I'm actively cheating. I'm not doing original research like you are - I'm presenting myself as an amateur enthusiast in what I write about (which I am, 90% of the time) and this gives me leeway to mea culpa myself out of any holes I've dug myself into. That has proved immensely useful AND it's helped my engagement hugely, because it's a chance to immediately issue a follow-up where I correct the facts and point to the egg on my face, and *that* is when I get emails saying they enjoy my work. It doesn't make me cringe any less when I realise I'm dead wrong, but it does humanise me and give me a chance to show I'm genuinely correctable...
But to your wider ethical point, it's very much how I want to present myself online, based on my time as an archaeologist. My first few terms as a student in York (200-2004) were a dizzying tour in how the principles of Archaeology had been overturned or undermined again and again throughout the 19th and 20th Century - from the data-driven law-seeking rationalism of so-called Processual methods to the new wave of ideas coming from the sciences, from the Annales school, from sociology and gender studies, now messily lumped together under the term "Post-Processual". In short, we were taught how to consider everything at least a bit wrong and *still* move forward, how to put our full weight on that uncertainty and how to think like the idealised scientist, where everything is a working hypothesis, where the difference between necessary speculation and vital fact is clearly understood and we're always trying to tell one from the other, and (the classic final line of every undergraduate thesis) More Work Needs To Be Done. So I guess I've brought that forward in a way I'm only partly conscious of, and it helps me be less afraid of getting things wrong in public. But it's also cheating, because I'm making it very clear that I'm a student, as befits a privileged enthusiast's newsletter about the science of curiosity itself. That's the wall I get to hide behind. So far, barring a few hundred people calling me an idiot, nothing nasty has kicked off yet. Time will tell.
(I did defuse one argument about one of my newsletters on Twitter where someone yelled "WOKE RUBBISH You don't know what you're talking about you ****ing libtard" and I replied "I completely agree!" and included a short summary of things I'd learned were incorrect in my piece. I didn't get a reply from him - I guess because he had no actual interest in what I'd got wrong? Anyway, that worked. Make me feel nice. Might use again.)
Your final suggestions about how to improve public debate...it makes me wonder, is there something more we can do to teach a more academic approach to critical thinking? I know it's often said that "young people don't know how to think critically" and so on, which is a loaded statement if ever there was one, and I'd encourage anyone of my generation (50s) to have someone under the age of 30 do, say, some technical troubleshooting for them on their phone before chucking such a sentiment around. But it does make me wish that the groundings I got in my first terms as an archaeology student - the acceptance of ever-present personal bias, the recognition of the nature of primary, secondary & tertiary sources, a willingness to play with ideas without calcifying any of them into dogma, and an eagerness to discuss or even argue in good faith - I wish there was something in an easily-digestible popular format that was flooding TikTok and Facebook and everywhere else, baking these principles deep, and presented in a way that was just as emotionally engaging as the bad-faith misinformative nonsense turning heads of every generation...
(For example, it was heartening to see the organisational psychologist Adam Grant championing the scientific method as a way of improving our ability to rethink, in his recent bestselling book "Think Again". Where's the history-based version of this? Is there one? Maybe you could write it, Anton? OK, OK, I'm leaving now, I've done enough damage to your comment thread.)
It's quite a challenge, to call you an idiot. I'm game to try, because you ask so sincerely and politely, and must have labored long and hard over this essay, but the fascinating content and reasoning, the artful explanation, the downright decent tone of the piece make it seemingly impossible. That's it: You idiot! You are just *too* enlightening, too reasonable! That's the best I can do. Or perhaps in real life you sound like Eccles from the Goon Show. In which case, in the voice of Grytpype-Thynne, "You silly twisted boy!" (Just to add, I consider myself a cautious and, I trust, courteous driver, but I also like to remind myself frequently when I'm behind the wheel that I'm some else's "Idiot!".) All power to your elbow!
Interesting piece. Personally I'm quite surprised about the coverage this one bit of contentious history is getting - both in terms of promoting its claims and attacking them.
On the topic of corrections a piece (1) that you co-authored for the Entrepeneurs Network earlier this year refers to "[the UK] continues to be among the best places in the world to innovate, recently giving us the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine, Babylon Health, and DeepMind".
Babylon Health went into administration/was sold through bankruptcy in August (2). This was after several years of allegations that neither its technology or its business model worked as claimed (3). Allegations that are now being more extensively reported (4).
So, it was quite surprising to see Babylon being referenced as a exemplar of innovation earlier this year - the issues with the tech and business model were pretty well known - and even more surprising to see the reference persist after Babylon went bust.
Perhaps something to correct?
(1) https://www.tenentrepreneurs.org/operation-innovation-1
(2) https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/digital-health/babylon-closes-us-business-lays-employees-after-mindmaze-take-private-deal-collapses
(3) https://www.wired.co.uk/article/babylon-health-nhs
(4) https://sifted.eu/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-babylon
Very annoying that the newspapers who pushed the original won’t publish the follow ups/rebuttals but the stuff with the journal seems much more damaging to me
I mean how do you take that place seriously anymore?
Oh and by request - You’re an idiot (I’ve got no specific reason why but I’m a polite guest and you requested we say that so you’re welcome)
Ah the politics of history! I first witnessed it when one of my UG lecturers used to write polemical columns for the Sun tabloid that invalidated his authority. More seriously, I've seen politicians try to change the school history curriculum towards their favoured narrative. I won't call you an idiot though.
"I do not wish to get carried away here and claim that this is proof that the entirety of history is in crisis and we need some kind of radical overhaul"
Oh Anton. Sweet child of summer Anton. I admire your work and integrity but you're displaying remarkable naivete. What you're experiencing here is the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization of Prog ideology (really, de facto religion) and utter domination of virtually all academia/NGO/media/clerisy is what you're up against here.
This is nothing, nothing. 18th century obscure metallurgy? Try fathoming briefly what population genetics and psychometrics is up against, and shudder.
"Science" (or "History") is in deep deep trouble.
"'what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism'.
When I read this, *I* knew that *they* knew that the case didn't stack up. Would they have written this if the empirical evidence supported Bulstrode? No. When the empirical evidence doesn't support you, denounce empiricism itself.
Keep up the good fight. This is the only way history self-corrects.
Regarding corrections, criticisms and insightful comments I like the model that another stack uses where he posts a follow up titled Highlights From The Comments On [Previous Title]
This type of engagement should be used carefully as it could signal boost trolls but it could be an useful tool occasionally that will allow you more freedom to make more speculative claims.
It might be slightly naive (if not idiotic !! ) not to consider whether history is being killed by people like Jenny Bulstrode who seem to have above any scholastic endeavour an overriding and prior political agenda.
'The Treason of the Intellectuals' - the title in English of a book by Julien Benda warned in 1927 about where the "desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action” would lead......
'The Killing of History: how literary critics and social theorists are murdering our past' by Keith Windschuttle published back in 1997 shows how the disposition of 'historians' like Bulstrode - at least as manifested in her article about Cort - destroys the discipline of history. It is worth reading - he exposes the distortions and fabrications - what I would consider scholastic corruption - through key case studies.
The issue is whether there is honest intent and willingness to address any mistakes made. Such intent does not exist when the discipline is corrupted by political agendas (Lysenkoism .....)
In a sense, everything we write is always wrong. There is simply no possible means of boiling down the complexity of reality into a few thousand words. The goal should not be perfection, but to be less and less wrong over time.
That means hearing criticisms, engaging in reasoned debate, and rewriting. Kudos to you for recognizing human fallibility, embracing it for the betterment of all, rather that ignoring it for self-preservation.
I still like the idea of creating public archives of source material when possible so readers can check not only the accuracy of data points but the interpretation. And I agree with your implication that a journal that says "authoritative" histories should not be challenged means their authority to confer that status may not be questioned. Which suggests it must be.
Please follow this up with a 10,000 word article telling us how many public historians can dance on the head of a pin. :)
Superb article. While you're (sensibly) careful not to take a side on the culture war point, I'm under no such restrictions and I'm just going to say it: the "woke gone mad" side were claiming that Bulstrode's article was deliberately being weaponised against the present-day West (including by its author) and had been exempted from proper academic scrutiny as a result, and so far events strongly suggest that *that is what actually happened*.
Perhaps "woke gone mad" got lucky; one example doesn't prove anything much. Let's see.
Great piece. I worry that the defence of the original piece by the journal editors, a well established historical society, professors, etc., reveal a profession that is increasingly unsure of itself, and unable to stand up for its values.
Foucault was famously unconcerned by the accuracy of the historical facts he weaved his theories around. Can you be an admirer of his approach as well as a historian? Lots of historians seem to think so. I'm not so sure.
Dr Anton, this is the least idiotic piece I've read in a while. It's pure method and it works. Well done.
I used to read a magazine published by Cornell university called The Sciences. If i recall, they had a page titled Errata. This was pre internet, but might that sort of thing work for you, or is it what you are already considering?
Best wishes.
Hi Anton. You're an idiot.
OK. Now we've got that out the way... 😁There's so much here I'd love to comment on, but I'm overdue with my latest newsletter, so I'll try to keep this under 10,000 overexcitable words.
Thank you so much for the mention here! Funnily enough, my "dear reader, call me an idiot" request to encourage readers to break the ice is applicable in my case here: this is the first time I've commented on your Substack, despite being a fan of your work for a long while, so - I'm glad it worked on me as well.
Speaking as someone looking on in semi-clueless horror from the sidelines at the controversy around the Jenny Bulstrode piece - of everyone (including Noah Smith), you've untangled it best for me, so thank you. And it is indeed so horrifying - I can't quite understand how it all became so wayward of the calm, respectful, fact-based and well-publicised discussion that is sorely needed at the heart of this thing. What a mess.
(A rose-tinted personal; memory: as an archaeologist, I was accustomed to blazingly passionate semi-rows happening in the back of pubs where, despite the volume and the colour of people's faces, it was more or less understood that everyone's opinions were flawed and up for correction in service of a keener glimpse of reality, or at least a richer grab-bag of ideas with which to speculate upon it. Especially true of us undergrads, of course, but it applied to everyone, professors included. I really enjoyed that, along with the intolerance of people who held such totally inflexible conviction that they couldn't take part in that kind of good-natured verbal melee. I can't imagine what the best of those folk would make of this situation where fact-based counterarguments are treated with such hostility. Where's the scientific method here? I don't see it.)
Also, congratulations on a hilariously perfect summing-up:
>>"what we have here is not just the lack of a smoking gun. There isn’t a body, and there isn’t even any blood. There hasn’t been report of a loud bang, or really anything at all. There’s just a quiet, empty street to which someone has turned up before suddenly rushing to the other side of town and arresting a random person – Henry Cort."
True Art, that.
Regarding getting things wrong:
I also live in fear of it - but I have it much easier than some, because I'm actively cheating. I'm not doing original research like you are - I'm presenting myself as an amateur enthusiast in what I write about (which I am, 90% of the time) and this gives me leeway to mea culpa myself out of any holes I've dug myself into. That has proved immensely useful AND it's helped my engagement hugely, because it's a chance to immediately issue a follow-up where I correct the facts and point to the egg on my face, and *that* is when I get emails saying they enjoy my work. It doesn't make me cringe any less when I realise I'm dead wrong, but it does humanise me and give me a chance to show I'm genuinely correctable...
But to your wider ethical point, it's very much how I want to present myself online, based on my time as an archaeologist. My first few terms as a student in York (200-2004) were a dizzying tour in how the principles of Archaeology had been overturned or undermined again and again throughout the 19th and 20th Century - from the data-driven law-seeking rationalism of so-called Processual methods to the new wave of ideas coming from the sciences, from the Annales school, from sociology and gender studies, now messily lumped together under the term "Post-Processual". In short, we were taught how to consider everything at least a bit wrong and *still* move forward, how to put our full weight on that uncertainty and how to think like the idealised scientist, where everything is a working hypothesis, where the difference between necessary speculation and vital fact is clearly understood and we're always trying to tell one from the other, and (the classic final line of every undergraduate thesis) More Work Needs To Be Done. So I guess I've brought that forward in a way I'm only partly conscious of, and it helps me be less afraid of getting things wrong in public. But it's also cheating, because I'm making it very clear that I'm a student, as befits a privileged enthusiast's newsletter about the science of curiosity itself. That's the wall I get to hide behind. So far, barring a few hundred people calling me an idiot, nothing nasty has kicked off yet. Time will tell.
(I did defuse one argument about one of my newsletters on Twitter where someone yelled "WOKE RUBBISH You don't know what you're talking about you ****ing libtard" and I replied "I completely agree!" and included a short summary of things I'd learned were incorrect in my piece. I didn't get a reply from him - I guess because he had no actual interest in what I'd got wrong? Anyway, that worked. Make me feel nice. Might use again.)
Your final suggestions about how to improve public debate...it makes me wonder, is there something more we can do to teach a more academic approach to critical thinking? I know it's often said that "young people don't know how to think critically" and so on, which is a loaded statement if ever there was one, and I'd encourage anyone of my generation (50s) to have someone under the age of 30 do, say, some technical troubleshooting for them on their phone before chucking such a sentiment around. But it does make me wish that the groundings I got in my first terms as an archaeology student - the acceptance of ever-present personal bias, the recognition of the nature of primary, secondary & tertiary sources, a willingness to play with ideas without calcifying any of them into dogma, and an eagerness to discuss or even argue in good faith - I wish there was something in an easily-digestible popular format that was flooding TikTok and Facebook and everywhere else, baking these principles deep, and presented in a way that was just as emotionally engaging as the bad-faith misinformative nonsense turning heads of every generation...
(For example, it was heartening to see the organisational psychologist Adam Grant championing the scientific method as a way of improving our ability to rethink, in his recent bestselling book "Think Again". Where's the history-based version of this? Is there one? Maybe you could write it, Anton? OK, OK, I'm leaving now, I've done enough damage to your comment thread.)
Well done. Thank you.
It's quite a challenge, to call you an idiot. I'm game to try, because you ask so sincerely and politely, and must have labored long and hard over this essay, but the fascinating content and reasoning, the artful explanation, the downright decent tone of the piece make it seemingly impossible. That's it: You idiot! You are just *too* enlightening, too reasonable! That's the best I can do. Or perhaps in real life you sound like Eccles from the Goon Show. In which case, in the voice of Grytpype-Thynne, "You silly twisted boy!" (Just to add, I consider myself a cautious and, I trust, courteous driver, but I also like to remind myself frequently when I'm behind the wheel that I'm some else's "Idiot!".) All power to your elbow!