What Will ChatGpt Do for History?

 Discussing with my cousin the pros and cons of a decision on what to write caused me to reflect on ChatGpt, and how it might change historiography.

Some thoughts:

1. these days everyone is writing something, whether it's on social media or memoirs published through Amazon's KDP or whatever. Some of the material represent a minute-by-minute record of events, both significant and insignificant 
2. the cost of storage keeps dropping.
3. gradually or rapidly everything written in the past which has survived is being digitized and stored on media
4. 1-3 mean that historians have much more material to work with and from, but the task of finding relevant source records and assimilating their content is becoming impossible.
5. the advent of ChatGpt will provide historians with an invaluable, if dangeroous, aid to find relevant records and the ability to get summaries of the results--a tireless research assistant.

1. To the extent that materials 
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Responsibility for Deficits

 Kevin Drum had a post the other day showing the percentage of the nation's GDP devoted to the federal government.  It's roughly 21 percent from 1980 to now. Kevin argues that shows the various tax cuts delivered by Republican presidents (Reagan, GWB, TFG) are responsible for our deficits: because spending has remained level(ish) the deficit must be on the tax side.

I don't find that argument conclusive. I think a more realistic picture is that spending and taxing both wiggle over the years: sometimes up and sometimes down, but consistently the public and its political leaders are comfortable with a regular deficit. 

Trigger Warnings--A Compromise?

 Saw a tweet by FIRE arguing against a call at my alma mater for mandatory trigger warnings.  Here's a piece in the college newspaper arguing against it.

I can sympathize with someone whose emotions are so easily triggered as the result of some trauma in the past, but as an old fart, my knee-jerk reaction is: tough it out, snow flake.

I seems to me there's a reasonable compromise: FIRE agrees a professor is perfectly free to give trigger warnings.  I'd suggest requiring every professor to have a policy on trigger warnings that's announced in the first class of the semester. That way students have fair warning of what the rules are.  If the professor is my age, and with my views, they can drop out of the class (though after it becomes a requirement, it will be easy enough to include the professor's policy in the write-up of the course). If the professor is a "woke" member of a younger generation and wants to commit to giving trigger warnings, fine.

The Lesser Importance of Libraries?

 Much concern these days over which books are in school libraries and which are not. It's warranted: the presence of a book in a school library signals something. 

But these days hasn't it a diminished importance?  When I went to school the library was my source for magazines to read and books to take out. I didn't have other sources, unless my family could subscribe to a magazine or buy the book.  My appetite for reading material far exceeded the available money my family could spend. 

Today's youth have access to cellphones and printed material on the internet. I realize the material differs from the books whose presence in school libraries is currently questioned, but still.

Back in the day the two sources of perversive material were the library and the mass of rumor and fact passed down from older kids to younger kids. Today it's just a click  away.  

The bottomline seems to me that those trying to ban books are wasting their energy on the lesser threat, not the major one, while those fighting bans often exagerate the significance of the ban. 

Government Budgeting

 Was alerted to this substack post going back in history to efforts in federal budgeting and spending.

As I commented, I didn't follow some of the argument, but it triggered memories.  Back in the old days ASCS could use CCC funds as a piggy bank and its status to bypass some restrictions.  For example, if we had a rush print job for program signup involving the notices of bases and yields and the signup form, the print branch could justify bypassing the Government Printing Office's rules by claiming the material was to implement CCC programs, enabling them to go directly to a printer. 

Details of interest only to oddball types like moi.

The Port Royal Experiment and Phonics

 Stumbled across an odd fact today.  I've been reading Roger Lowenstein's "Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War."  It's interesting.  A main character for most of the book is Sec. of Treasury Chase, who ends up designing the "National Bank System" and also had charge mostly for the Sea Island plantations after the Union Army took the islands.  This led to what is called the Port Royal Experiment, giving the government the problem of how to handle the freed slaves and the occupied plantations.  It was a forerunner of Reconsttuction's issues.

One problem was teaching adult blacks to read. A teacher was John Zachos, a Greek whose father was killed in the Greek rebellion in 1824, and was brought to the US by an American who supported the rebellion.  He wrote a book, the first book the blacks had, entitled: " The Phonic Primer and Reader, A National Method of teaching Reading by the Sounds of the Letters without altering the Orthography. Designed Chiefly for the Use of Night-Schools Where Adults are Taught, and for the Myriads of Freed Men and Women, Whose First Rush from the Prison-House of Slavery is to the Gates of the Temple of Knowledge?"

The Great 20th Century

 It seems we often look at some statistics the wrong way.  For example, it's common among the optimists among us to brag about the improvement in living standards by citing the reduction in the percentage of people in poverty.  But I think it would be more impressive to look at it the other way.

So I  asked ChatGpt to compare the number of humans above the poverty line in 1900 with the number in 2020. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the numbers but what it gave me (using World Book numbers of "extreme poverty") was 150 million in 1900 and 7.1 billion in 2020.

That's a whole lot of people who might be happy.

ChatGpt's Errors

 My cousin and I were discussing the early textile mills in New England.  I thought I remembered Europeans visiting the mills, particularly Lowell, and writing about them.  So I asked ChatGpt.  I can't copy the response, which is curious since I've done it before, but it listed Harriet Martineau, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur as a French writer, Isaac Weld, and William Strickland.

The Strickland reference is definitely wrong; he didn't write the book listed.  Both Weld and Strickland are cited as visiting New England in the 1790s, which seems too early for the mills.  Martineau seems dubious based on the description in Wikipedia, as does Crevecoeur. 

It looks to me that ChatGpt confused opinions on slavery which all four people expressed with visits to mills,

Why Working for FSA Is Worse These Days

 Sec. Vilsack testifying, link was posted to the Facebook FSA group. At the start he observes that it's no longer true that the county executive director of the FSA office is among the best paid in the county and that serving the public by working for the government has lost some cachet.

Iraq in Retrospective

 This is a comment I posted on Kevin Drum's post looking back at Iraq, which you should read:

"Wish I was blogging then so I'd have a good record of what I was thinking. As best I can remember I was dubious of Afghanistan, given the Soviets failure there, our failure in Vietnam, etc. But it went surprisingly well, and the aftermath seemed to be working well with Karzai getting support.

So with Iraq I was torn. The Post had a reporter who was filing good stories challenging the official line. I still had some skepticism about war. But on the other hand Bush did have Blair on board, and Blair seemed capable and had worked well with Clinton. So I think my attitude when the bombs began to fall was to the effect: I don't think I'd do this if I had the power, but I don't so I hope you're right and can do as well in Iraq as you seem to have done in Afghanistan.?