I think this is a mistake, and a missed chance to practice the virtue of scholarship.
I honestly don’t see how or why.
I already have a rather huge list of things I want to do scholarship with, and I don’t see any use I could have for knowledge about the persons behind these things I want to study. Knowing a name for the purposes of searching for more articles written under this name is useful, knowing a name to know the rate of accuracy of predictions made by this name is useful, and often the “central early figures” in a field will coincide with at least one of these or some other criteria for scholarly interest.
I hear Galileo is also a central early figure for something related to stars or stellar motion or heliocentrism or something. Something about stellar bodies, probably. This seems entirely screened off (so as to make knowledge about Galileo useless to me) by other knowledge I have from other sources about other things, like newtonian physics and relativity and other cool things.
Studying history is interesting, studying the history of some things is also interesting, but the central early figures of some field are only nodes in a history, and relevant to me proportionally to their relevance to the parts of said history that carry information useful for me to remember after having already propagated the effects of this through my belief network.
Once I’ve done updates on my model based on what happened historically, I usually prefer forgetting the specifics of the history, as I tend to remember that I already learned about this history anyway (which means I won’t learn it again, count it again, and break my mind even more later on).
So… I don’t see where knowledge about the people comes in, or why it’s a good opportunity to learn more. Am I cheating by already having a list of things to study and a large collection of papers to read?
To rephrase, if the information gained by knowing the history of something can be screened off by a more compact or abstract model, I prefer the latter.
To rephrase, if the information gained by knowing the history of something can be screened off by
a more compact or abstract model, I prefer the latter.
That’s fine if you are trying to do economics with your time. But it sounded to me from the comment that you didn’t care as well. Actually the economics is nontrivial here, because different bits of the brain engage with the formal material vs the historic context.
I think an argument for learning a field (even a formal/mathematical field) as a living process evolving through time, rather than the current snapshot really deserves a separate top level post, not a thread reply.
My personal experience trying to learn math the historic way and the snapshot way is that I vastly prefer the former. Perhaps I don’t have a young, mathematically inclined brain. History provides context for notational and conceptual choices, good examples, standard motivating problems that propelled the field forward, lessons about dead ends and stubborn old men, and suggests a theory of concepts as organically evolving and dying, rather than static. Knowledge rooted in historic context is much less brittle.
For example, I wrote a paper with someone about what a “confounder” is. * People have been using that word probably for 70 years without a clear idea of what it means, and the concept behind it for maybe 250 more (http://jech.bmj.com/content/65/4/297.full.pdf+html). In the course of writing the paper we went through maybe half a dozen historic definitions people actually put forth (in textbooks and such), all but one of them “wrong.” Probably our paper is not the last word on this. Actually “confounder” as a concept is mostly dying, to be replaced by “confounding” (much clearer, oddly). Even if we agree that our paper happens to be the latest on the subject, how much would you gain by reading it, and ignoring the rest? What if you read one of the earlier “wrong” definitions and nothing else?
You can’t screen off, because history does not obey the Markov property.
This is “analytic philosophy,” I suppose, and in danger of running afoul of Luke’s wrath!
Am I cheating by already having a list of things to study and a large collection of papers to read?
Not really, but only because the example you gave was Astronomy. If we’re talking specifically about Existentialism (although I guess the conversation has progressed a bit passed that) I’m not entirely sure how one would come up with a list of readings and concepts without turning to the writings of the Central Figures (I’m not even sure it’s legitimate to call Camus an ‘early’ thinker, since the Golden Age of Existentialism was definitely when he and Sartre were publishing.)
I would very much agree with your assessment for many if not most scientific fields, but in this particular instance, I happen to disagree that disregarding the Central Figures won’t hurt your knowledge and understanding of the topic.
[Obligatory disclaimer: This is not a challenge.]
I honestly don’t see how or why.
I already have a rather huge list of things I want to do scholarship with, and I don’t see any use I could have for knowledge about the persons behind these things I want to study. Knowing a name for the purposes of searching for more articles written under this name is useful, knowing a name to know the rate of accuracy of predictions made by this name is useful, and often the “central early figures” in a field will coincide with at least one of these or some other criteria for scholarly interest.
I hear Galileo is also a central early figure for something related to stars or stellar motion or heliocentrism or something. Something about stellar bodies, probably. This seems entirely screened off (so as to make knowledge about Galileo useless to me) by other knowledge I have from other sources about other things, like newtonian physics and relativity and other cool things.
Studying history is interesting, studying the history of some things is also interesting, but the central early figures of some field are only nodes in a history, and relevant to me proportionally to their relevance to the parts of said history that carry information useful for me to remember after having already propagated the effects of this through my belief network.
Once I’ve done updates on my model based on what happened historically, I usually prefer forgetting the specifics of the history, as I tend to remember that I already learned about this history anyway (which means I won’t learn it again, count it again, and break my mind even more later on).
So… I don’t see where knowledge about the people comes in, or why it’s a good opportunity to learn more. Am I cheating by already having a list of things to study and a large collection of papers to read?
To rephrase, if the information gained by knowing the history of something can be screened off by a more compact or abstract model, I prefer the latter.
That’s fine if you are trying to do economics with your time. But it sounded to me from the comment that you didn’t care as well. Actually the economics is nontrivial here, because different bits of the brain engage with the formal material vs the historic context.
I think an argument for learning a field (even a formal/mathematical field) as a living process evolving through time, rather than the current snapshot really deserves a separate top level post, not a thread reply.
My personal experience trying to learn math the historic way and the snapshot way is that I vastly prefer the former. Perhaps I don’t have a young, mathematically inclined brain. History provides context for notational and conceptual choices, good examples, standard motivating problems that propelled the field forward, lessons about dead ends and stubborn old men, and suggests a theory of concepts as organically evolving and dying, rather than static. Knowledge rooted in historic context is much less brittle.
For example, I wrote a paper with someone about what a “confounder” is. * People have been using that word probably for 70 years without a clear idea of what it means, and the concept behind it for maybe 250 more (http://jech.bmj.com/content/65/4/297.full.pdf+html). In the course of writing the paper we went through maybe half a dozen historic definitions people actually put forth (in textbooks and such), all but one of them “wrong.” Probably our paper is not the last word on this. Actually “confounder” as a concept is mostly dying, to be replaced by “confounding” (much clearer, oddly). Even if we agree that our paper happens to be the latest on the subject, how much would you gain by reading it, and ignoring the rest? What if you read one of the earlier “wrong” definitions and nothing else?
You can’t screen off, because history does not obey the Markov property.
This is “analytic philosophy,” I suppose, and in danger of running afoul of Luke’s wrath!
Not really, but only because the example you gave was Astronomy. If we’re talking specifically about Existentialism (although I guess the conversation has progressed a bit passed that) I’m not entirely sure how one would come up with a list of readings and concepts without turning to the writings of the Central Figures (I’m not even sure it’s legitimate to call Camus an ‘early’ thinker, since the Golden Age of Existentialism was definitely when he and Sartre were publishing.)
I would very much agree with your assessment for many if not most scientific fields, but in this particular instance, I happen to disagree that disregarding the Central Figures won’t hurt your knowledge and understanding of the topic.