
Confabulation in the humanities - diodorus
http://matthewlincoln.net/2015/03/21/confabulation-in-the-humanities.html
======
cubano
F.A. Hayek[0] wrote in great depth about this "confabulation" (which he termed
Scientism), and, ironically enough, lectured about it directly in his Nobel
Prize speech of 1974[1].

"It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts
which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the
real world. This view, which is often quite naively accepted as required by
scientific procedure, has some rather paradoxical consequences. We know: of
course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many
facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very
imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in
any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are
simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific
evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which
they can measure are the only ones that are relevant."

[0]
[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hayek.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hayek.html)

[1] [http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-
sciences/lau...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-
sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html)

[edits]

~~~
pron
Since "confabulation" is our only option, Hayek warns against _disguising it
as science_ \-- this is what happens in economics, he says. Most historians,
on the other hand, understand the limits of their knowledge, don't try to make
predictions (certainly not with the same definitiveness common to many
economists), and don't disguise their narratives as physical science. The
author of the article under discussion, though, seems to wish history was more
like physics, which it just can't be.

~~~
benbreen
Interesting discussion here. I don't think you're representing the author's
point correctly, though, given the larger context of the work he's doing and
current debates in the historical field. Here's what he says:

"I suppose the point of this post is to articulate my growing concern that we
are so damn good at coming up with post-facto historical explanations to
contextualize any given observation, that we are particularly susceptible to
confabulating these post-facto rationalizations with the idea that we somehow
knew the results of this quantitative work already."

The implication here, I think, is simply that historians should be open to
multiple ways of testing explanations (i.e., combining qualitative and
quantitative approaches, if those are available). And in the larger context of
debates about digital humanities, he's swatting down the argument that DH
simply tells us what we already knew, because if done right it can be used to
add a new perspective on existing arguments. The point isn't that history
should be science but that "scientific"/quantitative approaches can be used to
test the validity of historical claims based on more traditional historical
work, like finding manuscripts in archives, doing a close reading of a key
text, tracing correspondence networks, tracing the material history of a
painting or object, etc. I agree with him.

Edited to add: also need to be careful about confusing prediction with
explanation. Historians don't predict much, but we certainly try to explain
things a lot! I read this post as being exclusively about the latter.

~~~
pron
I agree with everything you say (although I read this article differently),
but historians should be careful to steer away from Hayek's "scientism".
History's underlying mathematical assumption -- an assumption that is almost
surely correct -- is that society is a complex system, and therefore cannot be
subject to predictions (or very few, qualitative predictions) in the long run.
If historians feel quantitative analysis gives their explanations any sort of
definitiveness (and "proving" the inevitability of past events is exactly the
same as prediction), they will fall into the same trap as economists.

A different perspective -- absolutely; a quantitative _theory_ \-- no. In
fact, quantitative theory, at least in a sense similar to physics, is nearly
impossible even in subjects that are much closer to physics than history. The
simplest non-linear differential equations defy quantitative study, and
history (and even economics and biology) are nowhere near simple.

However, it is possible that even in a complex system, there should arise some
temporary structures that can be described as linear processes, and therefore
subject to some quantitative theory, but it will be short lived. Complex
systems undergo phase-changes that tend to break and reform any structure. On
the other hand, it can be argued that those phase changes are rare, and that
human society is self-stabilizing on some global scale, so that the system --
at least for the moment -- is stable, and some quantitative analysis may
apply. But I'm pretty sure no one would classify any _specific_ society (i.e.
a small subset of humankind) as stable.

~~~
scottbot
This is true, but not _entirely_ relevant. Life-based complex systems often
share a propensity for punctuated stability specifically due to their own
nature, because of the same circularity inherent in evolution (those that can
survive to replicate, do). In this case, systems whose parameters tend towards
stabilization persist specifically because they tend towards stabilization.
The least self-undermining regularities persist (attractors).

Societies formed and persisted because they were good at it, because they were
a stable attractor in a larger system. We might not necessarily be able to
formally describe the entire system, but our propensity towards stabilization
(at the biological level, the human level, the societal level) means we can do
clever things at the stability points, like develop medicines that work,
design groceries which are more likely to sell certain products, and predict
the outcomes of presidential elections.

Now, whether or not the explanation given for the systemic outcomes are
"accurate" descriptions of the underlying mechanisms is in question here, and
it's an important one, but it's not a lost cause. When Copernicus set the
world in orbit, there was a big argument of whether he was providing an actual
explanation of the way the world works, or just a convenient mathematical
shorthand for making accurate predictions. It turned out that the most
parsimonious shorthand was also (ahem) less wrong than earlier mechanistic
theories. So too can historians find explanations that, if not accurate
representations of underlying mechanisms, can still be explanations which fit
better to systemic tendencies than earlier explanations.

Edit: Which is just saying that the blog author's point is still a useful one,
whether or not we can ever achieve complete mechanical account of human
activity.

~~~
scottbot
Pron, as a historian who has come up with quantitative models and resisted the
urge to call them predictive, yes, I think that sort of restraint is within
humanit(y|ie)'s capable grasp. =]

~~~
pron
I would love to see them. And I have great faith in historians' own abilities
to resist that urge -- they are well trained at that; I am not so sure how
others would fare.

Becoming a "quantitative historian" used to be a dream of mine (before I
abandoned an academic career in either math or history). But then I realized
that I enjoyed reading a transcript of a German witch trial no less than a
Marc Bloch epic narrative, and found it to no less educational. :)

------
haddr
A very similar example gives Kahneman in his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (a
great read for those interested in cognitive biases). He calles it "The
illusion of understanding". Using an example of Google and a number of books
depicting Page and Brinn as role models and geniuses, who leaded the company
into its great success by taking always the right decisions. It is of course
easy to say so knowing already that Google is a successful company. It would
be very hard to tell it 15 years ago. Also when you study the history of
Google you learn that there was a lot of luck involved, and you won't learn
how to build the next google from those books.

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gwern
Darn. I thought one of the 2 versions sounded more plausible, and I checked...
I was wrong. It was the other.

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tonyarkles
Not sure if the author is around here, but the style sheet on this seems to be
broken on an iPad 2 in landscape mode. It seems to be right on the edge of a
CSS breakpoint, and flips back and forth between two different layouts every
time I scroll. Makes it very very hard to read...

~~~
mdlincoln
blerg, sorry about that! Will fix when I'm done with the dissertation.

~~~
tonyarkles
Good luck on the dissertation!

------
mdlincoln
Author here, in case anyone had questions!

~~~
peterfirefly
Have you read Michael S. Gazzaniga's work on confabulation in split-brain
patients?

Or this paper on Equality Bias?

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZcGJTVDZwRzNzeGM...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZcGJTVDZwRzNzeGM/view)

------
narrator
Evolutionary psychology fits this paradigm.

~~~
RodericDay
"You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their
genes' perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s
obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's.
In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."

~~~
JoeAltmaier
What's wrong with that, if it works and is correct? What's the point made
there?

~~~
luddypants
The point was probably that this is not scientific. Whatever model you come up
with won't really have any predictive power. See arguments against pseudo-
science, e.g. Freud and Marxist theories.

~~~
afarrell
In other words, if your theory can't help you recognize a wrong answer, it
can't tell you when you've got the right one.

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pron
This is interesting and entertaining, but rather than a warning sign, it is
just a good demonstration of the limits of our knowledge.

We should not be alarmed that we can only come up with post-facto explanations
for the behavior of complex, chaotic systems such as human society, because
that is a direct consequence of what they are: complex systems. In fact, we
should be alarmed if the opposite were true, and by analyzing current trends,
current data, we were able to predict future events. If that were true, then
society would be no more than a _simple system_ , completely predictable,
whose complete dynamics could possibly be described some closed-form formula.

~~~
tjradcliffe
The only thing we should be alarmed about is people taking those after-the-
fact explanations as being anything more than confabulations, because then
people might think they actually understand the world, which is a dangerous
conceit at the best of times.

After-the-fact explanations have almost zero epistemic value. They create no
understanding, only a feeling of understanding. Look at the financial press
for endless examples of this.

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ElectricFeel
I hate to say 'I told you so,' but, Geez, this is literally everything I hate
about liberal arts majors.. A grad school dissertation on Medieval Printing
Techniques of the 1400's?? My senior project was software work for a Fortune
500 STEM company that I interned for as a sophomore & this guy is selling
Printing Techniques of the Middle Ages.. what is this world coming to??

