Dumbing down the history of science.

[Lionel Mandrake]

The man who brought history of science to America, George Sarton, spent many years studying science before turning to its history. The best historians of science have always been people with deep knowledge of the science whose history they write about, such as Thomas Kuhn and Owen Gingerich.

Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth once gave a lecture titled "Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science". What he meant by that was that computer scientists should follow the example set by mathematicians, who have taken charge of the history of their own subject, rather than leaving it in the hands of historians who not only lack significant knowledge of mathematics, but have no interest in acquiring such knowledge. The sort of histories of science written the scientifically illiterate are so bad that they have brought tears to Knuth's eyes.

Unfortunately, the history of science in general is now dominated by scientific know-nothings. Typically employed in history departments, not departments of history of science, they cater to and are judged by other academic historians with little knowledge of and little interest in the technical content of science. And what's worse, they celebrate their "externalist" views of science. Like Bart Simpson, these underachievers are "proud of it, man".

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. What these fools have done is nothing short of a travesty.

And our students, along with our future, suffer for it.

Shame on them.

K&R

[dhol82]

2. Can you give a link

to show concrete examples? I am interested but do not know the inaccuracies.

I can do a web search if necessary.

Never knew there was such a problem with this particular area of history.

[Lionel Mandrake]

3. IIRC Donald Knuth gives some examples.

http://kailathlecture.stanford.edu/2014KailathLecture.html

[bananas]

6. Should I read the paper he talks about before watching his talk?

Should I bother reading that paper at all?

[Lionel Mandrake]

7. I can't offer advice,

since I didn't read the paper. But I've read other "externalist" papers. In fact, most of the papers in Isis are very much a view of science from the outside. Some would claim that this "broad" treatment (purr) is an improvement over "narrow" (snarl) internalist papers, but those of us with a background in science tend to describe the two approaches as "superficial" (snarl) and "deep" (purr), respectively.

(We all use purr-words and snarl-words, as Sam Hayakawa used to say.)

[Lionel Mandrake]

4. Here are a couple more links.

Both of these articles discuss externalism vs. internalism in much greater detail and with less bias than I did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext

[dhol82]

5. Thank you

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. From the ACM article:

"This is not one of his passionate interests outside computer science, such as his project reading verses 3:16 of different books of the Bible."

[Lionel Mandrake]

9. Donald Knuth is certainly sui generis.