Through an old-fashioned pattern of web surfing of blogrolls (from here to here to here), I came across this post by Bret Devereaux on non-historians’ perceptions of academic history. Devereaux is responding to some particular remarks from economics journalist Noah Smith, but he also points to some more general issues, so these points seem worth discussing.
Also, I’d not previously encountered Smith’s writing on the study of history, but he recently interviewed me on the subjects of statistics and social science and science reform and causal inference so that made me curious to see what was up.
Here’s how Devereaux puts it:
Rather than focusing on converting the historical research of another field into data, historians deal directly with primary sources . . . rather than engaging in very expansive (mile wide, inch deep) studies aimed at teasing out general laws of society, historians focus very narrowly in both chronological and topical scope. It is not rare to see entire careers dedicated to the study of a single social institution in a single country for a relatively short time because that is frequently the level of granularity demanded when you are working with the actual source evidence ‘in the raw.’
Nevertheless as a discipline historians have always11 held that understanding the past is useful for understanding the present. . . . The epistemic foundation of these kinds of arguments is actually fairly simple: it rests on the notion that because humans remain relatively constant situations in the past that are similar to situations today may thus produce similar outcomes. . . . At the same time it comes with a caveat: historians avoid claiming strict predictability because our small-scale, granular studies direct so much of our attention to how contingent historical events are. Humans remain constant, but conditions, technology, culture, and a thousand other things do not. . . .
He continues:
I think it would be fair to say that historians – and this is a serious contrast with many social scientists – generally consider strong predictions of that sort impossible when applied to human affairs. Which is why, to the frustration of some, we tend to refuse to engage counter-factuals or grand narrative predictions.
And he then quotes a journalist, Matthew Yglesias, who wrote, “it’s remarkable — and honestly confusing to visitors from other fields — the extent to which historians resist explicit reasoning about causation and counterfactual analysis even while constantly saying things that clearly implicate these ideas.” Devereaux responds:
We tend to refuse to engage in counterfactual analysis because we look at the evidence and conclude that it cannot support the level of confidence we’d need to have. . . . historians are taught when making present-tense arguments to adopt a very limited kind of argument: Phenomenon A1 occurred before and it resulted in Result B, therefore as Phenomenon A2 occurs now, result B may happen. . . . The result is not a prediction but rather an acknowledgement of possibility; the historian does not offer a precise estimate of probability (in the Bayesian way) because they don’t think accurately calculating even that is possible – the ‘unknown unknowns’ (that is to say, contingent factors) overwhelm any system of assessing probability statistically.
This all makes sense to me. I just want to do one thing, which is to separate two ideas that I think are being conflated here:
1. Statistical analysis: generalizing from observed data to a larger population, a step that can arise in various settings including sampling, causal inference, prediction, and modeling of measurements.
2. Causal inference: making counterfactual statements about what would have happened, or could have happened, had some past decision been made differently, or making predictions about potential outcomes under different choices in some future decision.
Statistical analysis and causal inference are related but are not the same thing.
For example, if historians gather data on public records from some earlier period and then make inference about the distributions of people working at that time in different professions, that’s a statistical analysis but that does not involve causal inference.
From the other direction, historians can think about causal inference and use causal reasoning without formal statistical analysis or probabilistic modeling of data. Back before he became a joke and a cautionary tale of the paradox of influence, historian Niall Ferguson edited a fascinating book, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, a book of essays by historians on possible alternative courses of history, about which I wrote:
There have been and continue to be other books of this sort . . . but what makes the Ferguson book different is that he (and most of the other authors in his book) are fairly rigorous in only considering possible actions that the relevant historical personalities were actually considering. In the words of Ferguson’s introduction: “We shall consider as plausible or probable only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered.”
I like this idea because it is a potentially rigorous extension of the now-standard “Rubin model” of causal inference.
As Ferguson puts it,
Firstly, it is a logical necessity when asking questions about causality to pose ‘but for’ questions, and to try to imagine what would have happened if our supposed cause had been absent.
And the extension to historical reasoning is not trivial, because it requires examination of actual historical records in order to assess which alternatives are historically reasonable. . . . to the best of their abilities, Ferguson et al. are not just telling stories; they are going through the documents and considering the possible other courses of action that had been considered during the historical events being considered. In addition to being cool, this is a rediscovery and extension of statistical ideas of causal inference to a new field of inquiry.
See also here. The point is that it was possible for Ferguson et al. to do formal causal reasoning, or at least consider the possibility of doing it, without performing statistical analysis (thus avoiding the concern that Devereaux raises about weak evidence in comparative historical studies).
Now let’s get back to Devereaux, who writes:
This historian’s approach [to avoid probabilistic reasoning about causality] holds significant advantages. By treating individual examples in something closer to the full complexity (in as much as the format will allow) rather than flattening them into data, they can offer context both to the past event and the current one. What elements of the past event – including elements that are difficult or even impossible to quantify – are like the current one? Which are unlike? How did it make people then feel and so how might it make me feel now? These are valid and useful questions which the historian’s approach can speak to, if not answer, and serve as good examples of how the quantitative or ’empirical’ approaches that Smith insists on are not, in fact, the sum of knowledge or required to make a useful and intellectually rigorous contribution to public debate.
That’s a good point. I still think that statistical analysis can be valuable, even with very speculative sampling and data models, but I agree that purely qualitative analysis is also an important part of how we learn from data. Again, this is orthogonal to the question of when we choose to engage in causal reasoning. There’s no reason for bad data to stop us from thinking causally; rather, the limitations in our data merely restrict the strengths of any causal conclusions we might draw.
The small-N problem
One other thing. Devereaux refers to the challenges of statistical inference: “we look at the evidence and conclude that it cannot support the level of confidence we’d need to have. . . .” That’s not just a problem with the field of history! It also arises in political science and economics, where we don’t have a lot of national elections or civil wars or depressions, so generalizations necessarily rely on strong assumptions. Even if you can produce a large dataset with thousands of elections or hundreds of wars or dozens of business cycles, any modeling will implicitly rely on some assumption of stability of a process over time, and assumption that won’t necessarily make sense given changes in political and economic systems.
So it’s not really history versus social sciences. Rather, I think of history as one of the social sciences (as in my book with Jeronimo from a few years back), and they all have this problem.
The controversy
After writing all the above, I clicked through the link and read the post by Smith that Devereaux was arguing.
And here’s the funny thing. I found Devereaux’s post to be very reasonable. Then I read Smith’s post, and I found that to be very reasonable too.
The two guys are arguing against each other furiously, but I agree with both of them!
What gives?
As discussed above, I think Devereaux in his post provides an excellent discussion of the limits of historical inquiry. On the other side, I take the main message of Smith’s post to be that, to the extent that historians want to use their expertise to make claims about the possible effects of recent or new policies, they should think seriously about statistical inference issues. Smith doesn’t just criticizes historians here; he leads off by criticizing academic economists:
After having endured several years of education in that field, I [Smith] was exasperated with the way unrealistic theories became conventional wisdom and even won Nobel prizes while refusing to submit themselves to rigorous empirical testing. . . . Though I never studied history, when I saw the way that some professional historians applied their academic knowledge to public commentary, I started to recognize some of the same problems I had encountered in macroeconomics. . . . This is not a blanket criticism of the history profession . . . All I am saying is that we ought to think about historians’ theories with the same empirically grounded skepticism with which we ought to regard the mathematized models of macroeconomics.
By saying that I found both Devereaux and Smith to be reasonable, I’m not claiming they have no disagreements. I think their main differences come because they’re focusing on two different things. Smith’s post is ultimately about public communication and the things that academic say in the public discourse (things like newspaper op-eds and twitter posts) with relevance to current political disputes. And, for that, we need to consider the steps, implicit or explicit, that commentators take to go from their expertise to the policy claims they make. Devereaux is mostly writing about academic historians in their professional roles. With rare exceptions, academic history is about getting the details right, and even popular books of history typically focus on what happened, and our uncertainty about what happened, not on larger theories.
I guess I do disagree with this statement from Smith:
The theories [from academic history] are given even more credence than macroeconomics even though they’re even less empirically testable. I spent years getting mad at macroeconomics for spinning theories that were politically influential and basically un-testable, then I discovered that theories about history are even more politically influential and even less testable.
Regarding the “less testable” part, I guess it depends on the theories—but, sure, many theories about what have happened in the past can be essentially impossible to test, if conditions have changed enough. That’s unavoidable. As Devereaux replies, this is not a problem with the study of history; it’s just the way things are.
But I can’t see how Smith could claim with a straight face that theories from academic history are “given more credence” and are “more politically influential” than macroeconomics. The president has a council of economic advisers, there are economists at all levels of the government, or if you want to talk about the news media there are economists such as Krugman, Summers, Stiglitz, etc. . . . sure, they don’t always get what they want when it comes to policy, but they’re quoted endlessly and given lots of credence. This is also the case in narrower areas, for example James Heckman on education policy or Angus Deaton on deaths of despair: these economists get tons of credence in the news media. There are no academic historians with that sort of influence. This has come up before: I’d say that economics now is comparable to Freudian psychology in the 1950s in its influence on our culture:
My best analogy to economics exceptionalism is Freudianism in the 1950s: Back then, Freudian psychiatrists were on the top of the world. Not only were they well paid, well respected, and secure in their theoretical foundations, they were also at the center of many important conversations. Even those people who disagreed with them felt the need to explain why the Freudians were wrong. Freudian ideas were essential, leaders in that field were national authorities, and students of Freudian theory and methods could feel that they were initiates in a grand tradition, a priesthood if you will. Freudians felt that, unlike just about everybody else, they treated human beings scientifically and dispassionately. What’s more, Freudians prided themselves on their boldness, their willingness to go beyond taboos to get to the essential truths of human nature. Sound familiar?
When it comes to influence in policy or culture or media, academic history doesn’t even come close to Freudianism in the 1950s or economics in recent decades.
This is not to say we should let historians off the hook when they make causal claims or policy recommendations. We shouldn’t let anyone off the hook. In that spirit, I appreciate Smith’s reminder of the limits of historical theories, along with Devereaux’s clarification of what historians really do when they’re doing academic history (as opposed to when they’re slinging around on twitter).
Why write about this at all?
As a statistician and political scientist, I’m interested in issues of generalization from academic research to policy recommendations. Even in the absence of any connection with academic research, people will spin general theories—and one problem with academic research is that it can give researchers, journalists, and policymakers undue confidence in bad theories. Consider, for example, the examples of junk science promoted over the years by the Freakonomics franchise. So I think these sorts of discussions are important.
I really like this piece. I think that descriptive work is very important and dismissing it is poor form. That said, I agree that more discussion of the strength of evidence would be a useful adjunct to many analyses. In my work, observational drug studies, there is a real conflict between trying to emphasize that we cannot fully account for bias (confounding, loss to follow-up, confounding by indication, healthy worker bias, etc . . .) so we are presenting associations and the fact that patients and clinicians will use these associations as information when deciding on medication use.
So puzzling how to have useful conversations about strength of evidence and different epistemologies is a useful piece of forward progress in causal inference.
And that hard-headed “what is that claim based on? what other conclusions could be drawn from the same evidence? what assumptions are you using to interpret it?” is the single most valuable thing historians can offer the quantitative social sciences. From our perspective, a lot of work in those fields is childishly credulous of tables of numbers. For example, there is no solid basis for estimating world population before the 19th century (arguably the 20th century), but a lot of big claims which take population charts over time as their input.
Sean:
Good point. In my post I did not emphasize that important part of Devereaux’s post. I think I’ll devote another post to it, actually!
This blog post by Michael E. Smith is relevant https://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2018/12/when-big-data-are-bad-data.html (its often archaeologists who are interested in quantitative, large-scale comparative work on the ancient and medieval world, maybe because its easier to compare house sizes than stylistic conventions in letters reminding debtors to pay their bills)
FWIW, the MA in East Asian Studies program at Yale back in the 1980s made us take a couple of terms of real (Japanese) history with real historians, and it was exactly as Devereaux puts it, namely digging down into the data (goverment documents from the period) and figuring out what was actually going on, and hopefully finding something that hadn’t been noticed before (or, even more fun, had been misanalyzed before). (An example: The concept of “land ownership” in early Japan (11th century or so) was pretty hairy: there wasn’t really ownerships, just a bunch of rights (e.g. the right to tax agricultural production on the land (aka squeeze the peasants; it was a feudal society, after all)), and these rights could be sold or traded independently of each other. And we’ve got documents that prove this.)
As a raving lefty, I often think of this phenomenon as showing how naive “libertarian” ideas of property ownership are, but I doubt any real historian would bother with that sort of argument.
That sounds a bit like some of the work of Douglass North, who I think is well-regarded by libertarians.
Unclear to me how you square Devereaux’s comments with the work of Peter Turchin and other historians who work in a similar vein ( I would even include the work of my old roommate Philip Hoffman in that group), no matter what your opinion is of these works. There is a class of historians who work as Devereaux describes, but clearly the field has expanded. I remember that when Hoffman was working on his thesis, the approach he was using was relatively new at the time.
I think that Turchin’s background is in ecology. Richard Hanania went to grad school for political science (and law) and currently likes to hold up Turchin as his exemplar of scientism in the “social sciences”. Andrew pointed out earlier that Hanania didn’t seem to notice that he was using an anthropologist-turned-failed-politician as an example for why anthropology might be more useful than polisci in that very domain.
Turchin actually wrote a post yesterday responding to Devereaux (https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/on-testing-theories-in-history/). I was a bit surprised it wasn’t mentioned in this post, but maybe it hadn’t been written when Turchin wrote his own post.
Peter Turchin’s Ph.D is in zoology, so he’s about as much a historian as a giraffe.
Wow to some of these comments. I did not comment in any way on how good or bad Turchin’s work is, just that there are people studying history in a manner that differs from that described by Devereaux. Hoffman is trained as a historian, not that this matters, as there have been many people who have done good work in areas in which they don’t have degrees, and many people with degrees in a field who do not do very good work (just go through many posts in this blog if you want examples). If I remember correctly (this was many years ago), Philip described what he was doing as “empirical history”, and was a different way of studying history than what was done traditionally.
Speaking of not doing things the traditional way, I can remember when doing Bayesian statistics, or at least statistics that included regularization and shrinkage, was similarly mocked (in fact I have a whole 5 minute routine of such quotes). I do not have to like either Bayesian or frequentist statistics to make the quite accurate statement that both approaches are used in practice. Same with history – there are people who study history as Devereaux describes and people who are using other methods. And while I am not a historian, I guess given my background and the work I actually do I am also a giraffe, though that may be sticking my neck out.
“there have been many people who have done good work in areas in which they don’t have degrees,”
Let me know for your next surgery. I’ll be happy to do the bypass for much less than a medical doctor. I’ve done good work in that area.
Tl;dr: wow, you’re a dipsh**.
There is no reason to use such language. What is wrong with you?
Em:
Agreed. Also, indeed there have been many people who have done good work in areas in which they don’t have degrees.
Agreed, I don’t understand all the hate for Turchin. I think it must be jealousy.
In any event, he’s not really working outside his field. He literally wrote the book on Complex Population Dynamics. He’s applying that framework to humans populations. And, if it matters, the basic theory of elite overproduction is from a historian, Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern world; Turchin’s work on secular cycles is largely a formalization and extension of Goldstone’s work.
Great piece Andrew! I like it.
However, I would say that historical inferences can be and are tested over and over again because similar situations arise repeatedly in history. The US response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been calibrated by the lessons learned in several historical events, ranging from WWII to the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan. So far, although many details are unknown, the US appears to have calibrated its response extremely well.
Regarding predictions: shouldn’t we regard works like “Animal Farm” as predictions? They play out at every scale almost every day in our daily lives. I loved the “This American Life” story from many years ago about power struggle to control the “Fraternal Order of Real Bearded Santas”. Orwell would have loved it.
I think Devereaux’s defense doesn’t really hold up from a pragmatic point of view. I imagine most people would agree with Devereaux here:
“The epistemic foundation of these kinds of arguments is actually fairly simple: it rests on the notion that because humans remain relatively constant situations in the past that are similar to situations today may thus produce similar outcomes.”
But this is a comment about what past data might contain, not about what we can learn from past data. So how should one understand the work of historians while keeping the previous statement in mind? Then there’s this quote:
“We tend to refuse to engage in counterfactual analysis because we look at the evidence and conclude that it cannot support the level of confidence we’d need to have. . . . historians are taught when making present-tense arguments to adopt a very limited kind of argument.”
Which is also fine, but it seems to me like Devereaux is trying to have his cake and eat it too. If the evidence cannot support the level of confidence needed, then does it really matter that the past contains information that may help us understand the present? Isn’t the correct response to ignore whatever work historians produce because we simply don’t know whether the past information is helpful in the current context? If the previous response isn’t the correct one, then we’re doing some form of Bayesian reasoning, whether we write down any probabilities or not. The distinction reminds me a bit of the distinction between existentialism and absurdism. Where one philosophy states that there is no inherent meaning in the universe, while the other states that there may or may not be but we have no way of understanding if there is. They’re different claims, but the conclusions you draw from them are more or less the same from a pragmatic point of view
You haven’t really understood Devereaux’s point at all. Historians are producing the raw material for other people to make a predictive call. The value of that is that they can engage more closely with the actual evidence from the past, and they’re not wedded to trying to answer a particular predictive question.
Isn’t the correct response to ignore whatever work historians produce because we simply don’t know whether the past information is helpful in the current context?
Well, that’s a stupid remark. Yes, and doctors should ignore any symptoms patients have because we don’t know which of them is useful in diagnosing their ailment.
I think you misunderstood my post. Sure there is value in understanding past events better, but that value exists whether past events help predict future ones or not. I’m specifically asking about whether we should consult the work of historians to help us understand the present and help predict the future.
I’m not sure I really understand your doctor analogy. The doctor pays attention to symptoms precisely because they (the doctor) has the ability to predict the patients current/future health based on their symptoms. Modern medical scientists seem to have no hesitation quantifying their predictions
“I think you misunderstood my post”
I didn’t, so I’ll refer you to my original response.
I’ve struggled with this question for a while and suggested the metaphor of history as weather.
The reason we value meteorology over history as a causal discipline is that “it’s accurate predictions are not very useful and its useful predictions are not very accurate. ”
https://metaphorhacker.net/2021/06/history-as-weather-a-fractal-theory-of-history-for-ian-morris-jared-diamond-and-cgp-grey
I’m going to disagree with you on the relative cultural power of economics relative to all other disciplines. I think we all forget just how much a humanities-based outlook dominates media. Yes there are some big name economists with fancy Op-Ed jobs, but they aren’t even close to the majority of Op-Ed columnists. If we broaden to scope to all journalists, people with economics or quantitative backgrounds of any sort make up a tiny portion. Instead, the media is dominated by people with humanities background–literature, history, gender studies, ethnic studies, etc. And it shows in the way that the news is reported. The search for proof in journalism is a lot like looking for proof in a text: keep interviewing people until you have enough quotes to sustain your angle. The attempt to bring any sort of statistical rigor into the media is both recent and peripheral. For most journalists, causality is just correlation plus anecdotes. And I do think this is a big deal, because journalists are the bridge between academic research and the general public. They construct reality for most people. I think this holds for government as well, which is dominated by lawyers. I remember talking with a political scientist who worked in the Obama administration, and then fled back to academia, and he said you could see the lawyer-bias in the way problems were solved: they just wrote up the pros and the cons and then chose the side with the most entries.
Butros:
You seem to be mixing a few things. You write, “the media is dominated by people with humanities background—literature, history, gender studies, ethnic studies, etc.”
First, I doubt that there are many people with backgrounds in gender studies or ethnic studies who dominate the media. Just for example, from some quick googling: the chairman of the New York Times has a degree in political science, the editor in chief of the Washington Post has an MBA, the owner of the Washington Post has a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, the CEO of Fox News does not seem to have a college degree, and the CEO of CNN has a degree in broadcast journalism and political science. Just stepping back a bit, very few people get degrees in gender studies or ethnic studies, period.
Second, more people study literature and history. But I don’t know any evidence that they dominate the media.
Third, what I’m talking about is not people who happen to have degrees in English or economics or statistics or whatever and then get jobs in the news media. I’m particularly speaking of people in the media who are offering up the their academic backgrounds as qualification: people such as Noah Smith or Paul Krugman or Bret Devereaux or, for that matter, me. For most journalists—those who are not offering academic credentials themselves—I’m not so concerned with whether their college degree, if any, is in English or history or economics or engineering or business or psychology or whatever; what’s important is what they do with this.
Fourth, you point out that much of government is dominated by lawyers. True. That’s a major concern; I just don’t think particularly relevant to the post and discussion here.
It seems almost humanly impossible to make a description of what happened in the past without (at least implicitly) committing yourself to some counterfactual claims of some kind.
It would be interesting to see history written in a radical Hume/al-Ghazali style, carefully describing a succession of events without ever asserting or implying that there is any connection between any events. But this would be very unnatural obviously.
The point at the end here — that Noah Smith is really talking about historians doing public interventions into politics — makes his argument seem more reasonable to me than I previously thought it was.
CS:
It depends. I’m a strong believer in the division of labor. Much of the work in academic and popular history focuses on what happened—getting the facts down—without getting to counterfactuals or Why questions or whatever. I agree that such causal questions are underlying much of our interest in history, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be the focus of any particular work of history, whether scholarly or popular.
Even worse than historians ‘a mile wide and inch deep’ are historians an inch wide and a mile deep.
Even if we imagine we could model human societies and their interaction, the model would have to be very complex with a lot of states and random effects. Data for most of these is not readily available (= we don’t have a good idea what happened, other than major events), and takes a lot of effort to uncover.
I think that most historians focus on this kind of data collection, which is not unlike imputation of missing or noisy data, but much more difficult.
As an economist I find history fascinating, especially historical accounts about everyday life in periods where nothing “major” happened (wars etc).
That is another point. Some academic work interests the public because it answers “big questions” with “big ideas”, and other academic work satisfies smaller curiosity like “how did the Vikings build and navigate their ships?” or “why is there so much naughty art at Pompeii?” The first kind is big on corporate social media and talky blogs, but the second kind is big offline. I’d argue that most historians’ careful, skeptical methods and focus on the particular makes them better at the second kind than the first (although yes, Yuval Harari and Ian Morris are historians). Many people are interested in historical data, whereas few people are interested in Nebraska’s wheat exports 1945-1962. But right now the money and status and imaginary Internet points are for the “big questions” and “big ideas.”
I agree with Andrew that in reality, economists have massive amounts of influence and impact on critical policy, certainly much more than historians. On the other hand, I think your point about the media explains why Noah would make this claim: he himself is immersed in the world of journalism and media. It’s plausible that he senses the cachet and influence the historical point of view has in that setting.
In print journalism, in particular, it seems like there is an increasing trend to run long form pieces that use a historical perspective to explain present day circumstances. However, these pieces are often not written by academic historians themselves, and they sometimes draw the ire of academics e.g. the recent NYT piece on Haiti’s debt (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/23/new-york-times-historian-haiti-authoritative-source-00034511)
A good example of the limits of historians’ influence is Victor Davis Hanson, who as he was retiring as a classicist and revving up his career as a pundit was Dick Cheney’s pet historian. Did he get invited to fancy places and have conversations with powerful people? Absolutely. Did he change policy? Probably not substantively, he got that comfortable place because he said what Cheney and his boss wanted to hear. And in any case Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis, and Pakistanis had a say in how the wars Hanson wrote about progressed.
The idea that economists are neglected by US policymakers while historians are respected is laughable.
Interesting example. In terms of conservative classicists, there is of course Donald Kagan. I guess his influence is hard to assess (particularly because you can’t disentangle it from that of his sons).
His Wikipedia page has this quote:
> You know, Thucydides has this great insight. I wish I could get people to pay attention – he has one of his speakers at the beginning of the war say, ‘Why do people go to war? Out of fear, honor, and interest.’ Well, everybody knows interest, and fear is very credible. Nobody takes honor seriously.”[7] Kagan believes honor – better understood as “prestige” – was crucial in beginning World War I, for example.
The partial transcript of that interview has plenty of similar remarks that I think would drive Smith mad: https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/donald-kagan/
Yes, there are a handful of pundit-classicists in the USA of old-school conservative to radical reactionary leanings (D. Kagan, Hanson, Luttwak) and a dozen or so with websites but no mass audience or policymaking audience (often younger and leaning woke), but when you compare the impact which (some kinds of) economists have on US economic policy, on TV, in newspapers its night and day.
David Hugh-Jones responds to the kerfuffle here:
https://wyclif.substack.com/p/history-as-mind-furniture