I kinda hate it when historians are like "the point of history is surely not to compile a dry record of events, but to extract...
I kinda hate it when historians are like “the point of history is surely not to compile a dry record of events, but to extract some deeper lessons or patterns from those events”. Like, no! The dry record of events part is the only epistemically reasonable part of this whole deal! Your field is so good at dry records of events and so bad at extracting larger patterns! Leave searching for patterns to people who study things in which meaningful patterns exist in the first place, and recognize that there’s nothing wrong with the fact that history is largely random unrelated shit happening in a row.
Type of guy that has a plan to separate the record-keeping and pattern-seeking branches of history into different departments.