The genre of random internet commentary by people who’ve played a video game and thought about a subject for 5 minutes after skimming an article vs actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
> actual professional who has read deeply in the original sources is fascinating.
I don't see it as a bad thing really. Can't say about all professions but in mine (software engineering) I've seen many professionals who has decades of experience and still do things poorly, take bad decisions and make outright incorrect statements.
There's nothing wrong with politely asking questions and consistently challenging the logic shared by professionals. Maybe you'll learn something from them, maybe you'll learn that they are incompetent. Either way, some useful information.
Software engineering is a young and still rapidly changing field, it is extremely likely that the state of play will have significantly changed over the course of somebody's career. There is fertile ground for a new outside the box idea to come out and take things by storm.
History is more similar to, say, databases or cryptography then software engineering in general in that there is base knowledge that is needed in order to have a productive conversation.
Take databases, a little bit of knowledge about some of the different guarantees that different systems have is required in order to have a productive conversation. When that's not there you get "mongodb is web scale" type discussions.
History is the same, actual historians (which don't have to be professional ones) have learned the basic pitfalls, they've learned what the biases of the sources. For this discussion, they know the things that were usually written down and so if there isn't evidence of it, it probably didn't happen (i.e. anything cool that rich people did in war) vs the things that weren't written down so who the heck knows about it (things poor people did).
Wrapping back around, in history, the out of the box ideas that outsides have, the historians have usually already heard them. Sometimes you do get interesting outside work from related fields, like experimental archeology and whatnot, but it's not coming from random people on the internet who obvious are thinking about this for the first time.
it happens on practically every topic. this was technologically not possible 100 years ago and it’ll be fascinating to watch play out. stfu and listen is a legit skill in 2025
In discussing why in LOTR Saruman's battle campaign is terrible:
"Saruman is an builder, engineer, plotter and tinkerer. Given his personality, he strikes me as exactly the sort of very intelligent person whose assumes that their mastery of one field (effectively science-and-engineering, along with magic-and-persuasion, in this case) makes them equally able to perform in other, completely unrelated fields (a mistake common to very many very smart people, but – it seems to me, though this may be only because I work in the humanities – peculiarly common to those moving from the STEM fields to more humanistic ones, as Saruman is here). I immediately feel I understand Saruman sense of “I am very smart and these idiots in Rohan can command armies, so how hard can it be?” And so I love that this overconfidence leads him to man-handle his army into a series of quite frankly rookie mistakes. After all, the core of his character arc is that Saruman was never so wise or clever as he thought himself to be."
