Fifth Law: All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
Fifth Law: All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
History, which contains literally everything that has happened to human civilization, is the data of the social sciences.
As The Scholar's Stage puts it: The problem with history is that it is too big. It is impossible to get a fine grained picture of every people and era on the planet. There is just too much of it.
TWO DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY:
The fir... See more
As The Scholar's Stage puts it: The problem with history is that it is too big. It is impossible to get a fine grained picture of every people and era on the planet. There is just too much of it.
TWO DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY:
The fir... See more
Étienne Fortier-Dubois • History in the Space-Time Continuum
So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. For example, studyi
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
That’s a theoretical argument. An observational argument is that we know that the technological innovation of the Renaissance began by rediscovering history. And we know that the Founding Fathers cared deeply about history. In both cases, they stepped forward by drawing from the past. So if you’re a technologist looking to blaze a trail with a new
... See moreBalaji Srinivasan • The Network State: How To Start a New Country
Thucydides wouldn’t have put it in that way, but I suspect this is what he meant when he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a
... See more