primeideal

Yet another "this is context for a book review but is freestanding enough to be its own post."

Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were astronomers in the 15-1600s, during the post-Copernicus era as different people were trying to figure out how the planets moved. Brahe lived earlier and took lots of excellently detailed observations. He is also infamous for a prosthetic nose and an unpleasant cause of death. He had cousins named, more or less, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who may have been Shakespeare's inspiration. Kepler was his assistant later in his career. After that, Kepler built on those notes to conceptualize some broader, theoretical laws of motion, like orbits are ellipses and planets sweep out equal areas in equal times.

I took history of science for my history class in college and read some more about the scientific revolution era. Kepler was a Lutheran preacher's kid [eta: this part was wrong] who had dreamy, fanciful ideas about how the music of the spheres is all sort of some mathematical harmony and also had some sharp words for people who take the Bible too literally, to the impediment of scientific understanding. I'm a Lutheran preacher's kid who loves math and has little time for superficial conflict [between science and religion] thesis stuff. Obviously, I loved reading about Kepler. This is a Kepler appreciation blog.

Even non-astronomers have opinions about the timing of "Brahe worked for years and years taking these painstaking records, and then after he died, Kepler came along and got all the glory of the theoretical synthesis." And there are two main reactions:

-Sarah Williams, who wrote a famous poem about astronomy and how people build on each others' research, featuring some widely-quoted lines in the fanfic world, which prompts other people to go "we should use 'Reach Me Down My Tycho Brahe' as a title, now that would be more original" (yes, been there, done that)
-my dad, who looks at the timing and says "oh how conveeeeeenient. A 'bladder issue.' Kepler definitely did it."

We had the opportunity to visit Prague a couple years ago and I mentioned that I wanted to see Kepler and/or Brahe sites/houses/tributes if possible, and that became our in-joke. Johannes Kepler: astronomer, open-minded Lutheran, murderer.

This is one of those "things that have been tumbling around in my mind for a long time but never bother to write up." However, I think it's going to be a factor when I review the book I'm currently reading, and it's sufficiently noteworthy IMO to stand alone.

When it comes to individuals, there are a couple pop psychology factoids that get tossed around to the effect of "it takes X positive comments to outweigh one negative comment," where X is some number greater than one. Some of these are "in practice, we found that well-performing teams/relationships feature more positive than negative feedback," and others are "in theory, this is how you should do it" (which doesn't always work). I'm not sure how rigorous this research is, but it seems intuitively plausible that, when presented with a mix of positive and negative feedback, some people tend to focus on the negative and ignore the positive, so their overall emotional reaction will tilt negative, even if the mix of inputs was about 50/50.

Okay, that's about individuals, and that's pretty well-known. To me, however, there seems to be a corollary that follows from this, but that I haven't heard other people discuss in these terms.

Pretty much any group has good and bad aspects to its history. Suppose you have group X of people, and you list some of the good things and bad things that the X have done over the years, and that ratio skews about 50/50. Suppose that some of the people you're talking to are also members of group X. They may not necessarily identify as X, or think about being X a lot, but if you're giving a talk specifically about the history of X, that identity is likely to become much more salient. The above finding suggests, to me, that the emotional takeaway from the X in the audience is going to be negative.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; whatever reasons you had for giving a talk about the history of X in the first place might be good ones, and the emotional state of your audience might not be very important. Or, depending on your goal, making them upset might be a feature, not a bug. But it's something you should expect!

Okay, but I've made an important hypothesis here; I assumed that the good things and bad things in the history of X are about 50/50. Is that fair? Surely, there are some groups somewhere in space and time whose contributions to human history have been much worse than 50/50. There have probably been some whose contributions have been better, as well. Let's grant for argument that there was a society Y, whose good deeds outweighed their bad deeds by a significant factor like 5-to-1. If I talk about the history of Y, will the Y in the audience come away feeling generally happy about their Y identity?

No, they won't, because there won't be any Y in the audience. Because the general pattern in history is that the people from society Y get slaughtered by the people from society X, who live to write the history books.