Hendrik Strauss’s Reviews > Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 > Status Update

No need to worry! I always comfort myself with the usual cliches about human nature not changing, all knowledge being of equal value even if through a very roundabout way, and etc, whenever I find myself wondering how knowledge of the ambush of a specific detachment sent by Hannibal to Italian town X in 214 BC could be of any possible use to me. Recommend that you do the same because thinking about the immediate utility of what you read is a sort of unpleasant vortex :(

Thank you so much <3
And even if military tactics are my go to as well for "hard-to-register as something else than fascinating and gruesome", they actually had one application in my life so far. A few friends and fellow students of mine were playing a game of capture the flag( a version where your “life” is a cloth tucked into your waistband), and there I had this moment where all those years of strategy games suddenly converged: I feigned a retreat and drew three friends away from their support so they couldn't sound an alarm, and into an ambush(literally ppl hiding in the bushes) xD

You're completely right though: immediate utility is a dangerous lens for this kind of learning. If anything where it leads is not straightforward and immediate. On the one hand, I would love to use this knowledge in just such a straightforward practical way, it's just sometimes uneasy that I just haven't seen the application yet. On the other hand, weirdly it feels not just like pure escapism. There are paths where it feels it makes sense to study more, for some reasons I could explicate to a certain degree if prodded enough, and others where I am being pulled in by some invisible band telling me that's the stuff I ought to know more of even if it is the nuts and bolts of Hannibals campaign. Who knows why this context might not help make sense of something else worth understanding down the pipe.

It’s not like chess. I've been starting to like chess recently. And it's a game, and I like for the that. History is somehow different. It's about life as the cliches say correctly.

And when all else fails, it's still my favorite kind of escapism.

> And when all else fails, it's still my favorite kind of escapism.
I just love this line!

You should consider yourself extremely fortunate that strategy games have had such great utility for you. For me at most it has provided a sort of "fun" framework to view life with, as in "let's 'improve relations' with X".

And at risk of stating the obvious, for me the utility with the sort of knowledge we are talking about is always a very real thing, namely cross-domain application of ideas, which I intuit/know to have been responsible from a huge amount of innovation. Furthermore, as much as I try not to judge, from the people I've known, those without historical knowledge seem to be terrible at understanding human affairs. As they say, you can't understand the present without knowing the past (and this includes imo historical minutiae as well).

And if I permit myself to rave a little more, isn't it the case that we are able to view the present more analytically and draw more enlightening conclusions about it when we are actually reading about the past? For me at least, when I read the news or think of present affairs, it either angers me or I gloat and so on, basically everything is so emotionally charged that my analytical side is seriously impaired. This doesn't happen for the most case when reading about things in the past.

I agree all across the board. Particularly your last point rings especially true. It is easier to judge the past from multiple angles. We have more information in some sense of how it played out, and often times why, and people interpreting it more dispassionately - it is good stuff. I personally don't care that much whether romans or goths were the assholes back then. And then this allows thinking about general questions and applying standards and thinking "hmm, is this possible to generalize?". I always think about history as the data mine of social sciences but generally human sciences and human centric philosophy. We can ask about the generalizability of our stances and thoughts across cases. The most basic kind of check if smthng works out just using data from memory. As for being politically educated, and having perspective about where things could be going, and what is relevant to how people behave, I think history is the most important thing. And the fact that it is super accessible (to an extent - great educators always know how to tell the stories engagingly) and a perfect mirror of our current situation is the shit. I think all the liberal arts or whatever are like that. They are super useful and it is a matter of temperament how much anyone is pursuing them as there are other relevant things too, but maybe in our age of partially naive opinions and oligarchicasation of democratic institutions, better history education is literally one of the most urgent and fixable things.

Also honestly EU IV gave me the basics for a realist (in the po sci sense) framework of geopolitics haha Aggressive expansion and overextension, revolt risk, prosperity, economic specialization of regions,trade influence. May be a stupid 10h of sleep in the last 62 hours kind of thought but I sometimes felt a little like this games is one of the bigger achievements of humankind xD

I get where you are coming from. This might also be stupid but I legitimately think I have successfully applied EU4's balance of power concepts in real life (god this sounds even more cringe than I thought). Think how interesting it would be to kidnap Putin, Trump, Stalin, and maybe Caesar and have them play an EU4 campaign. About your other points, I always take it for granted that everyone was/is a dick and the difference is simply a question of opportunity. Of course a simple glance at the world reveals this to be a gross generalization but it is very useful for viewing things objectively. Of course, in the end I think there are very disturbing epistemological vortexes that it is best to simply ignore if all the points we are making are to be allowed to take their rightful places, but that's a different matter altogether.

Also have to say, really admire your replying 2 weeks after the fact. The internet is an extremely annoying place. I have for some time instituted a rule with my close friends that if they really need me to reply within a few hours, the message must be prefixed with "[Urgent]". Offends a lot of people but I really hate online conversations. This comment might seem weird and awkward but I am just mentioning this so there's no "pressure".