The field of history runs on a trust it has not earned: almost nobody ever checks a citation, so an error can propagate unchallenged indefinitely.

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Our reading — they may agree, disagree or merely touch the same thing. Closest first: a shared subject counts for most, then how near the wording is.

• History has a reproducibility problem worse than science’s replication crisis, because hardly anyone ever goes back to the sources to check what a historian claimed they say. AHAnton Howes29 Aug 2023similar wording
• When two expert users argue over whether documentation is clear, that debate is unproductive — the way to actually find unclear documentation is to test it on real readers, not to have experts argue about wording. JEJulia Evans8 Jan 2026similar wording
• The hardest thing for a future historian to recover will be how little the world outside understood, because whatever happened looks inevitable in retrospect. DADario Amodei13 Feb 2026similar wording
• “Trust science” is a confused instruction: what deserves trust is the process, not any particular thing it has concluded so far. JCJason Crawford16 Aug 2023similar wording
• History has no predetermined path: its course turns on unpredictable contingencies rather than on deep currents that would have produced the same outcome anyway. BDBret Devereaux26 Aug 2022similar wording

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