Your historian friends agreed with the global claim which I believe was fairly well established. From what I’ve heard talking to the interlocutor hosting this meetup (I am not he), it was *how* you extrapolated to that global claim from a local one that is being taken issue with. Notice that the historian on your blog also believes it is difficult to say to what degree Europe declined during the Dark Ages, although there are many possible markers. Notice that the reddit historian backing you is apologizing for your background rather than providing corroborative concrete evidence related to the structure of your argument. The Dominican Friar thing is nice and it’s understandable why you wouldn’t quote a private email, but it’s of course possible that they would make a similar mistake and taken without detail, it definitely seems like a pithy authority appeal.
As far as this meetup goes, from my discussions with the interlocutor, I’d expect mainly methodological criticisms, and criticisms of the rhetorical moves used to waive the limitations of the methodology. These are not the same as criticisms of the goals of SSC, or even the goals of a particular post. The substitutes recommended will be deeper reading of primary and secondary sources instead of *only* using SSC as a source (being that it’s tertiary and pop-sci), at the very least.
Maybe these criticisms once brought to light won’t be enough to brand you as a “pseudo-intellectual”, but people who do not take these kinds of criticisms into account will read your disclaimers against your expertise, yet would still be left with the inability to understand how these affect the soundness of your claims, because supposedly, they too, are not domain experts. I think such refutations, if valid and pondered, could be educational and sanity-raising for everyone in the SSC blogosphere.
Your historian friends agreed with the global claim which I believe was fairly well established. From what I’ve heard talking to the interlocutor hosting this meetup (I am not he), it was *how* you extrapolated to that global claim from a local one that is being taken issue with. Notice that the historian on your blog also believes it is difficult to say to what degree Europe declined during the Dark Ages, although there are many possible markers. Notice that the reddit historian backing you is apologizing for your background rather than providing corroborative concrete evidence related to the structure of your argument. The Dominican Friar thing is nice and it’s understandable why you wouldn’t quote a private email, but it’s of course possible that they would make a similar mistake and taken without detail, it definitely seems like a pithy authority appeal.
As far as this meetup goes, from my discussions with the interlocutor, I’d expect mainly methodological criticisms, and criticisms of the rhetorical moves used to waive the limitations of the methodology. These are not the same as criticisms of the goals of SSC, or even the goals of a particular post. The substitutes recommended will be deeper reading of primary and secondary sources instead of *only* using SSC as a source (being that it’s tertiary and pop-sci), at the very least.
Maybe these criticisms once brought to light won’t be enough to brand you as a “pseudo-intellectual”, but people who do not take these kinds of criticisms into account will read your disclaimers against your expertise, yet would still be left with the inability to understand how these affect the soundness of your claims, because supposedly, they too, are not domain experts. I think such refutations, if valid and pondered, could be educational and sanity-raising for everyone in the SSC blogosphere.