(IANAH but) I think there’s a throughline and it makes sense. Maybe a helpful translation would be “oversimplified” → “overconfident” (though “oversimplified” is also the point). There’s going to be a lot of uncertainty—both empirical, and also conceptual. In other words, there’s a lot of open questions—what happened, what caused what, how to think about these things. When an expert field is publishing stuff, if the field is healthy, they’re engaging in a long-term project. There are difficult questions, and they’re trying to build up info and understanding with a keen eye toward what can be said confidently, what can and cannot be fully or mostly encapsulated with a given concept or story, etc. When a pop historian thinks ze is “synthesizing” and “presenting”, often ze is doing the equivalent of going into a big complex half-done work-in-progress codebase, learning the current quasi-API, slapping on a flashy frontend, and then trying to sell it. It’s just… inappropriate, premature.
Of course, there’s lots of stuff going on, and a lot of the critiques will be out of envy or whatever, etc. But there’s a real critique here too.
(IANAH but) I think there’s a throughline and it makes sense. Maybe a helpful translation would be “oversimplified” → “overconfident” (though “oversimplified” is also the point). There’s going to be a lot of uncertainty—both empirical, and also conceptual. In other words, there’s a lot of open questions—what happened, what caused what, how to think about these things. When an expert field is publishing stuff, if the field is healthy, they’re engaging in a long-term project. There are difficult questions, and they’re trying to build up info and understanding with a keen eye toward what can be said confidently, what can and cannot be fully or mostly encapsulated with a given concept or story, etc. When a pop historian thinks ze is “synthesizing” and “presenting”, often ze is doing the equivalent of going into a big complex half-done work-in-progress codebase, learning the current quasi-API, slapping on a flashy frontend, and then trying to sell it. It’s just… inappropriate, premature.
Of course, there’s lots of stuff going on, and a lot of the critiques will be out of envy or whatever, etc. But there’s a real critique here too.