how to deal with revisionism?
cousin_it: Evaluating a big controversial issue is hard for reasons analogous to the "curse of dimensionality" when numerically computing multidimensional integrals: a grid with step 1/k in N-dimensional space has ~k^N points, way too many to sample them all. People solve this problem in practice by the Monte Carlo method: sampling points at random and averaging their values converges to the true integral much faster. So if some major topic has two opposite factions, pick a random tiny factual detail where they disagree, and honestly work out for yourself which side is right about it. Repeat several times to get a big picture with pretty good statistical assurance.Some examples:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_made_from_human_corpseshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_seigneurhttp://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/carrots.asp