I like the post but I'm not entirely convinced. Even if these are optional classes to pad your degree out, you'd have to think taking history classes adds more value than all other potential options. I don't entirely believe that's the case even if I agree with many of your points in the post.

I'm skeptical of your claim that primary sources are better than secondary books. In particular, it seems that the insight-to-effort ratio is very small, as given a secondary book which comes recommended by people knowledgeable in the field, it seems you can get approximately the same insights as a primary source, but with far far less effort.

Can you expand on why you think either the fidelity of the insight transfer from the primary to secondary source is small, or why I'm overestimating the difficulty of reading primary sources (or some other reason you think I should care more about primary sources which I haven't thought of)?

I think this post makes a better case that we should be interested in history than that we should attend history classes. 

I agree that we could do well to learn from and meditate on the highs and lows of history and that I my opinions are parochial and shortsighted.

Thanks for writing.

I just want to second this recommendation. In my experience a lot of people are ignorant of various important facts about the world, including my past self, and don't realize it because they don't know what they are missing. Presumably my present self is also ignorant of important things that more history learning could fix.

Personally, I have tended to enjoy the history classes I took, but I also felt that actual history “classes” are not the most efficient way to learn broader lessons/concepts. For example, I took a Russian revolutionary (~1860–1921) history class, which I personally found interesting (especially since I was also studying Russian language). I feel like I learned quite a few interesting stories, and even learned some broader concepts about failure modes for democratic governance (e.g., division among more-moderate parties vs. cohesion among some of the more-militant parties), political power structures, foreign manipulation of domestic politics, etc. However, the class also required learning/memorizing a serious amount of dates, names, places, etc. for tests, despite not actually being pivotal to learning the broader concepts.

I certainly haven’t thought all that long about it, but I do feel like history could be taught much more efficiently for people like me who want to learn important lessons from history to update their models and/or get a sense of what might happen moving forward. For example, integrating short-ish (e.g., 3 week) history modules that don’t focus so much on the specific details into political science classes on specific themes like “political revolutions” or “social conceptions of morality”? Of course, if you like learning all the details and/or telling the stories in conversations, then the traditional format seems like a good route.

I see your point but my response is that I don't need historians to study history. Again, you keep saying that history is useful, I'm not contesting that(though it seems like you may think it is more important than me). I'm contesting that the way you are taught history in the classroom as being specifically useful.  I've personally found reading macro history type blogs and doing very general overviews on wiki to be more useful than taking specific courses on a topic in school, in terms of understanding my place in the world/trajectory of the world.   You say historians are not supposed to be predictive. That is literally my point. If historians are just a source of data, what makes a historian/history different than Wikipedia in any real sense, outside of the motivation to actually do the material because grades. Why would I take a history class that has no value added from reading sources when I could have a professional writer coach me on writing skills. 

Again, how do you use historical data when attempting to predict things? 

Take for example guessing about what politician wins some election. You might use historical data of how the previous elections went to make a prediction (hopefully your model isn't fully just based on historical data with no account for how things have changed). However,  it just doesn't seem like taking academic history provides you with anything here. Maybe they are the people who combed the primary sources so that the data is on the internet in the first place, but absent them having a monopoly on that data, I'd trust a cs/rationalist type more to use that data in a useful way. Historians will probably claim some story about why something happened, IMO that is antithethic to what we are trying to do here, unless that story is more predictive.   

Again like if some history professor at your school teaches in a really quantitative way or teaches a class that is like about large scale historical trends that seems like it could be useful but that has not been my experience taking history classes. 

To be clear, I think history is important. I don't believe that college history classes are the best forum for learning history\the important aspects of history for prediction was my point. Also, to reiterate: If history as taught by academics is so important for prediction,  shouldn't we then expect academic historians to be the best forecasters(to be fair maybe they are, I'm not an expert on who the best forecasters are but kind of assume its gonna be cs people\rationalists)?  comment currently sitting at -7 but no one has even contested that point or said why it doesn't make sense. Also I condone taking macro classes. 

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I would like to  address on the point "the ends don't often pan out".  It appears that the issues you have discussed are involved with failures of instrumental reasons and epistemic failures as opposed to problems with consequentialism as a moral system.  I believe learning from these failures don't necessarily  involve in history but can be also achieved from alternative sources. For example, a mechanical engineer would learn about Challenger disaster. Similarly, a nuclear engineer would learn from Fukushima disaster. 

I see no reason to pay attention to academic history until historians start flexing their predictive abilities. If historians have nothing other than knowing more history to show for their studies, then history profs for the most part are just individual dewey decimals systems for their hyper niche topic. Anything I can learn from class I can learn from youtube/wiki, unless the prof structures it in a way where there is some thinking style that in tandem with the info helps you see the world more clearly (something I didn't find to be true from the history classes I have taken, but obviously anecdotal). 

To expand a little more(all personal opinions), the world is extremely complicated. History as an academic field provides basically no tools for understanding this complicated world, compared to other fields. Furthermore, we have even more incomplete information of the past, which is often extremely biased. Finally, the world changes incredibly fast incredibly quick these days. A priori, there doesn't seem to be much reason to expect the overall patterns of society to continue. In order to use history in any meaningful sense, we need to find smaller patterns within larger systems that can be clearly defined and then carefully studied across many time periods.  We would only study specific patterns that we know to be highly influential under certain conditions, there's no reason to study noise. I guess this is possible. I don't think this is easy. If this was easy, we should probably expect to see some ungodly levels of wealth among top macro economists and historians. Obviously many don't care about money, but some do, so if they had huge predictive advantages you would expect huge gainzzz, or at the very least, we would all look towards historians to predict elections(this is sort of a straw man but one I think turns out to be correct). 

When people say understanding history helps us understand ourselves, you should pause. Would you say that learning about math history/math? Why or why not?

That being said I agree with taking easier classes for most people who don't have academic-related goals. However, I think communication/journalism/writing classes may be more useful.