"I was wrong... And so was everyone"

December 28, 2022 9:49 PM

Tom Scott apologises: So it turns out the whole history about fire brigades not coming to put out fires if you're not insured with them wasn't true at all. (SLYT; 7 mins with link to the longer report, which is here)
posted by cendawanita (31 comments total)

Modern example previously.
posted by Mitheral at 10:09 PM on December 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

I mean isn't that how Crassus made a bunch of his fortune?
posted by Carillon at 10:33 PM on December 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

From the linked report, "The question is set in the context of property fire insurance in London, from 1680", some time after Crassus.
posted by Lorc at 12:07 AM on December 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

The general lesson from the Tom Scott confessional is that, for this story, everyone was wrong. But, because counter-intuitive, the story was re-churned widely. That chimes with my experience as Sir Blogalot: I'll try to track down specific information but drown in a tsunami of adjacent material, limited in extent, missing the data I seek, and often lifted verbatim from somewhere else without attribution [plagiarism alert etc.]. It makes me think that a lot of other 'interesting stuff' on the web would fall apart with a small amount of critical evaluation, or plain research, which we are collectively too busy to carry out.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” Mark Twain
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:09 AM on December 29, 2022 [16 favorites]

I went to school in the pre-internet era. I don't think I can be alone when recalling this was a time when "common knowledge", as discussed and taught, was built on a pretty tenuous basis: textbook or encyclopaedia entry if we were lucky, but maybe just a recollection from a book or from a recalled discussion. Actually checking anything with a primary research source would have been very rare - and checking with a primary research source whose credentials contribution had been validated and peer reviewed - still less so. Mostly all that worked OK; sometimes what I was taught turned out to be bullshit, and I don't feel at all surprised by that.

Today, in a very much changed environment, it can be tempting to equate the notion of "having researched a subject", with having Googled it: Wikipedia, whatever random other pages come near the top of a search and maybe even a glance at the primary cited references. I admire Tom Scott here for making an apology video in the first place - but even more showing what can be achieved, by contrast, by hiring an actual researcher: somebody who goes and visits archives and who trusts nothing without verification, and who persists at the task for al long as it takes. The difference that can make is important to note - most especially if, like Scott (and many of us) we are lured by the appeal of a good story.
posted by rongorongo at 3:40 AM on December 29, 2022 [17 favorites]

Another thing I find interesting about this is that it seems to follow a pattern of excusing or falsely contextualizing bad modern behavior based on incorrect ideas about the past. Medieval peasants bathed regularly. It's never been normal to marry 13 year olds. And it's always been a good idea to put out fires.
posted by Nothing at 3:50 AM on December 29, 2022 [20 favorites]

pattern of excusing or falsely contextualizing bad modern behavior based on incorrect ideas about the past

Agreed, I'm adding a corollary to my statement here.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 4:29 AM on December 29, 2022

isn't that how Crassus made a bunch of his fortune?

Sort of. According to Plutarch, he had his crew rush to burning buildings and point out to both the owner and the neighbors that their real estate was in danger of rapid depreciation and would they like to sell now cash on the barrel while the offer was still on offer? If enough of them did, he put out the fire and, if necessary, rebuilt.

After the Great Fire of 64, Nero instituted building codes that made fires somewhat less common. Wider boulevards, no shared walls between buildings, that sort of thing.
posted by BWA at 4:47 AM on December 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

It makes me think that a lot of other 'interesting stuff' on the web would fall apart with a small amount of critical evaluation, or plain research, which we are collectively too busy to carry out.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” Mark Twain

I am going to assume that you posted this widely-shared interesting quotation because when it is investigated there is no evidence that Twain actually said it? Delightful if intentional, delightful if not--a win-win either way.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 5:55 AM on December 29, 2022 [19 favorites]

‘Not our mission’: private fire crews protect the insured, not the public - a 2019 article on private firefighting in the US and specifically California. [The Guardian]

It's largely done by or through the insurance industry; moving from "it would be a shame if your house burned down and you lost everything" to "it would be a shame if your house burned down and you lost everything but you still had to pay it off."
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:57 AM on December 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Dang! and, like, touché Pater Aletheias: Delightful if intentional.
I'm not that clever, was my first response. But I was wrong . . . the blobarchive suggests that, at one time, I did know the quote was ". . . attributed to a wild array of different people." Excuse me while I disappear up my recursive.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:23 AM on December 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

I am going to assume that you posted this widely-shared interesting quotation because

It’s widely-known that 80% of fake Twain quotes and 60% of fake Jefferson quotes are actually fake Dorothy Parker quotes.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:28 AM on December 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

It makes me think that a lot of other 'interesting stuff' on the web would fall apart with a small amount of critical evaluation, or plain research, which we are collectively too busy to carry out.

If it's counterintuitive and neat, you should start from the presumption that some goofus made it up.
posted by praemunire at 6:48 AM on December 29, 2022 [6 favorites]

It makes me think that a lot of other 'interesting stuff' on the web would fall apart with a small amount of critical evaluation, or plain research, which we are collectively too busy to carry out.

On the plus side, it gives Sarah Marshall of the You're Wrong About podcast plenty of grist for the mill.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:14 AM on December 29, 2022

If it's counterintuitive and neat, you should start from the presumption that some goofus made it up.

Or as HL Mencken actually did say: “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
posted by jedicus at 7:16 AM on December 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Sarah's former YWA co-host Michael Hobbes has an excellent new podcast called If Books Could Kill about dangerous bullshit spread by pop-sci bestsellers. The first two episodes cover the kings of "this non-intuitive truth will blow your mind!" crap, Freakonomics andMaclolm Gladwell's Outliers.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:18 AM on December 29, 2022 [12 favorites]

Dang. It's interesting how much of an inverse ratio that develops over time, where we know way more about the past the further we get from the actual events.

Our understanding of dinosaurs is so different than when I was a kid.
posted by ishmael at 7:45 AM on December 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Looking forward to the bombshell thats gonna drop when pop history comes to grips with the idea that ninjas never actually existed.
posted by ishmael at 7:46 AM on December 29, 2022

That's not quite accurate. There were historical shinobi covert agents/mercenaries, the reality is just very different than the later fantastical depictions.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:17 AM on December 29, 2022

That's not quite accurate. There were historical shinobi covert agents/mercenaries, the reality is just very different than the later fantastical depictions.

Is that true? I'm going off of the general opinion of a forum I used to frequent, Samurai-Archives, where phd candidates would put forward their work in debunking ideas that samurais didn't actually have cavalry squads as we think of them, or that the ashigaru conscription system made rotating volley fire impossible to train and probably didn't happen at Nagashino.

Anyway, from what I gathered the general consensus on that site (which sadly doesn't exist anymore), was that a lot of the effort to further the idea of the "historical ninja" was pushed by this guy Anthony Cummins, and that his primary sources, while being hundreds of years old, were essentially folk tales and not actually documentation in a historiographical sense.

I think there was an agreement that there were spies and spycraft, just not organized in any particular way.

Sorry for the derail all, I'll just drink my honeybush tea in the corner now.
posted by ishmael at 8:37 AM on December 29, 2022

Sarah's former YWA co-host Michael Hobbes has an excellent new podcast called If Books Could Kill about dangerous bullshit spread by pop-sci bestsellers.

I cannot recommend this podcast enough, which he cohosts with Peter Shamshiri. He just released the episode where he fisks Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb.

What's striking to me about all of Hobbes's podcast work is the degree to which his debunkings consist of stripping the rhetorical sheen from the sources and just asking in a straightforward way "what's being said and what are the consequences of that wrt to what we already know or don't know" (albeit with a hefty bit of snark).
posted by fatbird at 8:50 AM on December 29, 2022

Is that true?

You can just read the Wikipedia article if you'd like. There were covert agents called shinobi in the medieval Sengoku period who performed espionage, reconnaissance, infiltration and other irregular warfare activities for the various warring daimyo of the period as well as acting as mercenaries. They obviously did not have magic powers, they didn't wear the black outfit we think of today, or other various later fabrications or exaggerations, but they did actually exist.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:57 AM on December 29, 2022

You can just read the Wikipedia article if you'd like.

Yep yep. And that wikipedia article is sourcing Stephen Turnbull a lot, and while his Imjin War book was pretty good, he does not have a great reputation in the historical community. He is exactly one of those pop-historians, who did a lot of Osprey books that raised a lot of awareness about those time periods, but had problems with attribution and accuracy.
posted by ishmael at 9:02 AM on December 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think that the distinction WRT ninjas is that between the historically verifiable facts regarding Japanese irregular troops (some of which came from hill clans) and other covert operatives--which pretty much any and every major power had historically--and what you might call Ninja Inc., which seems to be based mostly in America and claims that Japan had developed what were basically described as the ultimate martial artists, who either had superpowers or fantastically perfected skills that were functionally the same as superpowers, and that the black pajamas and hoods were totes legit traditional uniforms rather than an inside joke about the outfits worn by stagehands in kabuki theater. The historical reality doesn't sell books, movies, paraphernalia, or memberships in schools, even though it doesn't really make sense that anyone with money in hand could sign up for something like that as if it were a pottery making class at Learning Annex.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:08 AM on December 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

If I recall correctly, there was even disputation of the word "shinobi/ninja", which would imply much greater formalization and organization.

Like Hattori Hanzo was an actual hatamoto (trusted retainer) of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and might have spied for him, but never would have been referred to as "shinobi no mono".

Gah, I can't help myself- sumimasen- I'll shut up now.
posted by ishmael at 9:15 AM on December 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is interesting; I first heard of fire marks on a tour of Charleston, SC in the early-mid 1970s. I don't specifically recall if the tour guide said that fire brigades would only put out fires in buildings their companies insured, but I certainly made that assumption at some point in the intervening decades. But it looks like that myth has been debunked by historians there as well, and for similar reasons, namely, that allowing an urban structure to burn uncontrolled was a threat to the entire neighborhood, if not the city. But the FPP article does have a couple of sentences that make me wonder if there might be a small grain of truth to the assertion:

"Referring back to earlier times, when 'each Insurance Company had its own engines and firemen, ... it too often happened that the latter would decline to exert themselves at the suppression of a fire, unless the building which was a prey to it, was insured with the office to which they belonged'."

"As insurance fire brigades began to fight fires more generally, they no longer needed to rely so much on fire marks as identifiers of insured properties."

The first sentence indicates that this idea dates at least back to 1840, but doesn't really investigate how that periodical came to that conclusion. The second implies that there was a time when insurance fire brigades didn't fight fires more generally and did rely on fire marks to identify insured properties. But the evidence and common sense definitely support the author's premise. It is interesting that the biggest problem in later years was too many firefighters/fire brigades responding to fires. I wonder how many pedestrians were injured by fire brigades rushing to be first at fires.
posted by TedW at 9:36 AM on December 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

a pottery making class at Learning Annex.

You have to learn to make the smoke-bombs before you can flip out and kill people with Real Ultimate Power.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:37 AM on December 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wow, all these sources got it wrong but... GANGS OF NEW YORK interpreted this pretty much spot on?! Makes me wonder what sources they used for the firefighting scene.
posted by alex_skazat at 9:56 AM on December 29, 2022

Wow, all these sources got it wrong but... GANGS OF NEW YORK interpreted this pretty much spot on?! Makes me wonder what sources they used for the firefighting scene.

Herbert Asbury is awesome and relied on primary sources in writing the book that Gangs of New York was based on. If you've never read The Barbary Coast, it's highly recommended. (And I hope broadly accurate, because some of the details he provides about the first fifty years of San Francisco are legitimately bonkers.)
posted by Gadarene at 4:39 AM on December 30, 2022 [3 favorites]

Just realized that I mashed two things together there in a confusing way.

Herbert Asbury wrote the book on which The Gangs of New York was based; that book was called The Gangs of New York.

He also wrote a similar book around the criminal underworld and various excesses and weirdnesses of San Francisco from its founding up through the 1906 earthquake; that book is called The Barbary Coast. It is exceptionally good.
posted by Gadarene at 6:48 PM on December 30, 2022

The Barbary Coast [Archive.org, borrowable] (Extra Copies: 1, 2)
also Gangs of New York (Copies: 1, 2).

He has others, including Chicago (Gem of the Prairie) and New Orleans (The French Quarter).
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:50 AM on December 31, 2022 [1 favorite]