Sima Qian chose suffering and mutilation over death to complete his life's work.

The written word can persist throughout space and time. What will happen to our digital archives?

Even paper needs shelter. It must be kept from moths, because they eat holes in it. It must be kept from humidity, because it causes the fibres to expand and the ink to run.

It stands to reason that Sima Qian, if he cared about posterity, would have submitted his works to people who make it a point on preserving records.

Similarly a person is writing a digital work, they will need to go through a digital analogue of the same process, if they want to preserve their work.

The process of bit entropy acts like digital moths.

In 100 years with minimal, passive effort, a piece of paper will be fragile, but usable.

In 100 years, a hard drive will degrade without multiple transfers to new media - an active process.

The barrier to digital archival is much higher than paper archival for the average person, and the internet does forget. There's not really an equivalent authority who preserves records for digital works, is there? The Internet Archive works toward this goal, but their mission is not enshrined anywhere permanent and could be gutted.

Yes. The amount of digital data will be like, I don't know, 10 order of magnitude more than paper content. So I think archiving even 0.00001% for long term maybe tall order.

In 100 years most paper will be gone, thrown out, without any attempt to archive it. In 100 years most digital will be gone for the same reason. The exceptions in both cases is where something is “fortuitously forgotten”, a box left in an attic after a move, or a web page that remains in a fossilized state.

Preserving both paper and digital records requires the active effort of convincing people (some of whom haven't been born yet) that the records should be saved. That's the hard part.

Disaster recovery for millions of paper records is hard. So hard that even the US Government, which has been archiving paper records since its inception, sometimes fails. The majority of the 1890 census records were lost to a fire as well as a chunk of military service records (to a different fire). Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.

> Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.

Who is this "someone", though?

There's no long term, passive, digital storage solution available for the average person. Records that used to survive on a regular basis no longer do so in digital form.

Also don’t forget Anna Komnene.

She was the oldest daughter of Alexios I (who unwittingly kicked off the Crusades).

After unsuccessfully trying to overthrow her younger brother, she was exiled to a monastery where she ended up writing the Alexiad which provides much of our information about the early crusades including first hand descriptions of some of the key players as well as as weapons and tactics.

Covered in episode 313 of Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy (without any gaps) podcast:

<https://historyofphilosophy.net/anna-komnene>

(Episode and further references at the link.)

Tanner is one of those people I might disagree politically with from time to time but who nevertheless convinces me of the alternative point of view regularly. I see he disses my man Herodotus right off, so now I need to read this to see why.

There is, of course, a margin of "losing" from which no history can return. Anyone know about Khazar history? What happened to those guys? The Mongols happened.

His series on the Soviet "cybernetics" movement was also fascinating.

Why is cybernetics quoted?

Had a different shade of meaning in the Soviet context from the way we use the word today - more like "Computer Science" or "Automatic Theory", rather than robotic or human-robotic or "cyberpunky".

I'm pretty sure the Soviet context is actually the correct one. The robotics tie in isn't far off though, as some of the earliest autonomous mobile robots spawned from cybernetics research.

> I'm pretty sure the Soviet context is actually the correct one.

Just to clarify, do you mean that the Soviet context is the same as the modern context or that the modern context misuses the term in some way (or something else that I missed)?

Is the modern definition any different than the older one? It just means systems with feedback loops. A motion sensitive video camera is “cybernetic”. So is the Facebook feed algorithm and self-checkout at the grocery store.

Not in the technical meaning, no. But the general public thinks anything "cyber-" has to do with the Internet

If you read old cybernetics writing it’s hard not to see a striking analogy with the excitement around machine learning. They had all kinds of medical experiments showing the usage of feedback mechanisms on the body and brain and how they were just on the edge of unlocking artificial humans.

I read that as "the more stringent academic definition" (~= "the Soviet context") vs "the fashionable pop-culture cyberpunk-influenced understanding" of the term.

Take your pick which of those you mean by "the modern context".

I think that was the original idea of the term in the West as well, we just got it distorted via sci-fi over time

It had the same different meaning outside the Soviet context too. Check out, for example, Norbert Wiener, as American as they come and considered the inventor of "cybernetics" in that "old-school" sense.

> Anyone know about Khazar history? What happened to those guys? The Mongols happened.

No. The Russians happened. Mongols came later.

And rest assured Khazars did not disappear. According to some theories they infiltrate governments of the world and they are ruling the world. You just need to read the true sources, not some fake history. :)

Would you mind providing links to those “true sources”, please? I’m curious to do some research for myself.

He is probably alluding to the Khazar hypothesis, according to which at least part of the Eastern European, and thus Ashkenazi in general, Jews, have Khazar ascendancy.

The scale is very much subject to discussion, but genetic evidences[0] support the core idea.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/5/1/75/730630

they are probably referencing an antisemitic conspiracy theory. I can't tell whether as a joke, or seriously. In any case, it should probably be downvoted, or dang should remove it. it's psuedohistory, invented to spead hate.

I think it’s obviously it’s a joke. However, there’s even a smiley at the end of the comment, as a clue for the people with broken humour detector. I hope you saw it.

You can’t just jokingly say “this is a robbery” in a bank though.

If you have any familiarity with the kind of people seriously spreading these kinds of conspiracy theories, you'll know that framing "truth bombs" as jokes is par for the course because it creates plausible deniability.

If it really is a joke, what is the punchline? How does it work? What's being made fun of? That it would be outrageous for someone to say that seriously? As "red pillers" like to say: keep making jokes until the joke really lands (i.e. accustom people to hearing it by framing it as a crass joke so they'll no longer flinch when it is said in earnest).

Ah yes, the "humor" of repeating an obscure antisemitic conspiracy theory. It's "funny" because it's obscure enough that the majority of the audience will assume it to be innocent, and liable to jump to the the speaker's defense against the apparent "crazies" who take offense. Like a silent fart, the "joke" is on the audience, and a smile merely indicates that the author is amused.

Fine but this one seems weirdly specific so we'd like to know which conspiracy it is.

How is it antisemitic ? Are Khazars secretly running the world from Atlantis ?

They are probably alluding to antisemitic conspiracy therories.

Sorry people, in this post I was mocking the conspiracy theorists, and you take it as a conspiracy theory itself and accuse me of being an antisemite? WTF? If that's the consensus, dang should delete the post.

Besides, you know that Khazars are not alone? They are supported by the Nazis from the dark side of the moon. "They" just don't want you to see this truth. But they are all just servants of the lizards from the Earth, who only leave their habitat when they show up masked as a royal family in Buckingham Palace.

Should I put a :) or a /s or some other sign to make it clear it's a joke or sarcasm?

> A man dies only once

Interesting words from a man who has died but of whom we still speak. And fitting that they come from a person who some say invented history; there wouldn't have been counterexamples.

Well, they say you die twice: you die again, when you're forgotten. So in a way he ensured his immortality (with a good helping of luck through the ages).

History is written by the corrupt and corrupted and those who still have to survive.

Related:

History Is Written by the Losers (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21228034 - Oct 2019 (20 comments)

History is Written by the Losers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037214 - Nov 2016 (17 comments)

Thucydides Roundtable, Book IV: History Is Written by the Losers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011872 - Nov 2016 (47 comments)

The assessment of Indian history is quite accurate, though it is important to note the distinction between the Greek/Chinese written history and the Indian tradition of oral history. Foundational works like the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita were transmitted orally, from teacher to student, over the course of many centuries. Various memorization techniques (e.g. the eleven pathas of Vedic chanting [1]) were employed to promote perfect transmission of information.

This presumably means that during the many centuries of internal strife in the Indian subcontinent, warfare and disease could erase the history of the vanquished by simply eliminating the learned few who had memorized it.

It's also worth pointing out that contemporary Indian history is extremely biased. In the museum adjoining the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the historical account of the 1984 Sikh separatist movement universally refer to the event that led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi as the "Blue Star massacre". The Partition Museum, located less than a mile away, uses the generally-accepted name of "Operation Blue Star", but is riddled with factual inaccuracies and anti-colonial editorialization in many of its displays. The underlying motives of many Indian historians is to rewrite it to suit their present purposes, which is why P. N. Oak [2] has such a huge following in the highest levels of Indian government.

My nieces and nephews in India are taught "Indian exceptionalism" in school. Many Indians will erroneously claim that Western ideas like germ theory are either appropriated from, or inferior to, the ancient practice of Ayurveda. And even when it comes to what little historical information one might find in the Mahabharata, the words are treated as mystical sounds rather than something to be analyzed and understood.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._N._Oak

With optical media, history is written by the lasers.

The author doesn't consider, or comment on, or maybe doesn't know about, Voeglin's thesis that the Hebrews exemplify a bringing-about of order out of disorder with a reflective understanding about the importance for the future of mankind, and making a record in that regard, i.e., History

Machiavelli and Dante are other examples of losers effectively writing (thinly veiled, and very subjective) history. Both were political losers, exiled from their lands in their latter years, grinding their axes by wielding their pens.

Does that detract from the quality of their observations, though?

(You're reminding me of Robert Greene's superb "The 48 Laws of Power")