<story><title>We Should Teach Music History Backwards</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-we-should-teach-music-history-backwards-180955053/?no-ist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>c3534l</author><text>There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question &amp;quot;why?&amp;quot; It start with &amp;quot;Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?&amp;quot; Then regressed back to questions like &amp;quot;why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn&amp;#x27;t?&amp;quot; down to &amp;quot;Why did agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than corn spread to the Americas?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it&amp;#x27;s resolved. By asking a series of &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; you broadly expand a person&amp;#x27;s view and they understand why you&amp;#x27;re talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the &amp;quot;why are we talking about this&amp;quot; up front, and teacher&amp;#x27;s answers were always just &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s in the syllabus.&amp;quot; I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.</text></item><item><author>bambax</author><text>Not just music history, but history in general.&lt;p&gt;History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures.&lt;p&gt;History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past.&lt;p&gt;However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it&amp;#x27;s not, we like &amp;quot;stories&amp;quot;, we don&amp;#x27;t understand, don&amp;#x27;t believe in, and outright reject chance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcranmer</author><text>The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from evidence.&lt;p&gt;For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn&amp;#x27;t factor into it. But... the Americas won the agricultural jackpot (there&amp;#x27;s a reason why potatoes became a staple crop in much of the world). And the European conquest of the Americas was anything but preordained: the Spanish only conquered Tenochtitlan (which was a larger city, it should be noted, than likely any of the Spanish had ever seen before) with the help of their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies.&lt;p&gt;[1] The astute will notice that there&amp;#x27;s a related question that Diamond 100% completely ignores... why didn&amp;#x27;t China dominate?</text></comment>
<story><title>We Should Teach Music History Backwards</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-we-should-teach-music-history-backwards-180955053/?no-ist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>c3534l</author><text>There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question &amp;quot;why?&amp;quot; It start with &amp;quot;Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?&amp;quot; Then regressed back to questions like &amp;quot;why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn&amp;#x27;t?&amp;quot; down to &amp;quot;Why did agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than corn spread to the Americas?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it&amp;#x27;s resolved. By asking a series of &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; you broadly expand a person&amp;#x27;s view and they understand why you&amp;#x27;re talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the &amp;quot;why are we talking about this&amp;quot; up front, and teacher&amp;#x27;s answers were always just &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s in the syllabus.&amp;quot; I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.</text></item><item><author>bambax</author><text>Not just music history, but history in general.&lt;p&gt;History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures.&lt;p&gt;History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past.&lt;p&gt;However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it&amp;#x27;s not, we like &amp;quot;stories&amp;quot;, we don&amp;#x27;t understand, don&amp;#x27;t believe in, and outright reject chance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vanderZwan</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a wonderful rhetorical device.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>