Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of history. By history, I don't just mean those learned-but-dull books in the history section (with Renaissance paintings on their cover to attract buyers). History,
I will repeat, is any succession of events seen with the effect of posteriority.
... You are in a classroom listening to someone self-important, dignified, and ponderous (but dull), wearing a tweed jacket (white shirt, polka-dot tie), pontificating for two hours on the theories of history... Then you realize that a large part of what he is saying reposes on a simple optical illusion! But this will not make a difference: he is so invested in it that if you questioned his method he would react by throwing even more names at you.
... It is a problem with the way we construct samples and gather evidence in every domain. We shall call this distortion a bias, i.e., the difference between what you see and what is there.
I will repeat, is any succession of events seen with the effect of posteriority.
... You are in a classroom listening to someone self-important, dignified, and ponderous (but dull), wearing a tweed jacket (white shirt, polka-dot tie), pontificating for two hours on the theories of history... Then you realize that a large part of what he is saying reposes on a simple optical illusion! But this will not make a difference: he is so invested in it that if you questioned his method he would react by throwing even more names at you.
... It is a problem with the way we construct samples and gather evidence in every domain. We shall call this distortion a bias, i.e., the difference between what you see and what is there.
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