I absolutely agree that history is filled with politically motivated bias. But there are actual historical facts (someone won the Siege of Vienna of 1529, and it wasn't the Ottoman Empire). There are historical theories that actually fit most of the facts and pseudo-historical theories that fit carefully selected sets of facts. Being able to tell the difference is a valuable skill that members of this community should try to develop.
To put it differently, the falsity of the theory of moral progress has implications for assessing the difficulty of building a Friendly AI, doesn't it?
There are historical theories that actually fit most of the facts and pseudo-historical theories that fit carefully selected sets of facts. Being able to tell the difference is a valuable skill that members of this community should try to develop.
And how does one do that? The problem is that most historical facts are publicly available, so how does one distinguish a theory producing by data mining and overfitting from one that wasn't? The only historian I can think of who has anything close to an answer to that is Turchin via the usual statistics method...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.