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Noah Smith of Noah’s Opinions Takes on History and Loses…Badly

I’ll start right from the beginning with @Noahpinion on Twitter: he has blocked me. This has made it difficult for me to find the tweets I want to reference. I would invite the reader to visit his profile himself. Could I log into another account etc. and get the tweets? Yes! Am I that motivated? Yes? I am also respectful his no longer wanting to interact with me? Also Yes. Besides, this is more fun.

History Has Nothing to Offer

Noah Smith decided to take on the entire discipline of history in early September 2022 by boldly declaring that any discipline whose conclusions could not be conveniently put into a graph or otherwise quantitatively evaluated could offer no hope or guidance to people of today. This is a bold statement that certainly made Twitter a fun place for about 24 hours.

Let’s break that down: if it can’t go on a graph, it’s not useful. Rightly so, a history professor took Noah to task on this terrible take. This sparked days of discussion regarding the veracity of the humanities and how “soft” sciences like history simply couldn’t keep up with the solid numbers from the hard sciences.

In the course of the discussion on Twitter, I pointed out that the fall of the Roman Empire could not be graphed and someone replied with a graph…