Beware the Historical Analogy
Analogizing between current events and historical events is a common source of error among political thinkers.
There is a phenomenon of people too frequently comparing things to Hitler. There is even an adage, Godwin’s law, that conversations on the internet will eventually result in a comparison to Hitler provided enough time.
This was especially the case when Trump was president. Trying to make predictions on the basis of the idea of Trump being like Hitler is foolish. Analogies are good political story telling, but you would’ve made some outlandish predictions if you took the analogy seriously. Perhaps, this contributed to some of the widespread anxiety during Trump’s presidency—sometimes referred to as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The right makes similar comparisons to Maoist China or Stalinist USSR.
I was reminded of this error in thinking twice on twitter recently:
I think that this sort of reasoning is natural. People want to reach for a comparison when talking about current events and the best place to look is in history. What sort of history do they use? Well, things that more immediately come to mind. Unfortunately, more emotionally triggering things come to mind more easily. When are ability to recall some things more easily influences our reasoning, we suffer from recall bias.
Current events, as well as historical events, are multifaceted. The mere existence of some technology makes analogizing between the present day and WWII very difficult. People’s attitudes towards a great deal of behaviors and ideas are drastically different as well. It does make for a nice narrative that is engaging though.
This sort of analogous storytelling should probably be avoided. In his book Expert Political Judgement, Philip Tetlock examines what makes good predictors of the future and what makes bad ones. One cognitive error that people fell victim to was trying to fit a current event into an analogy.
Psychological skeptics argue that such results bode ill for our ability to distill predictive patterns from the hurly-burly of current events. Insofar as history repeats itself, it does not do so in a ploddingly mechanistic fashion. Much analogical reasoning from history is, however, plodding. Consider the impact of the Vietnam War on the political consciousness of late twentieth-century pundits who saw a variety of conflicts, almost surely too great a variety, as Vietnam-style quagmires. The list includes Nicaragua, Haiti, Bosnia, Colombia, Afghanistan, and Iraq (all new American Vietnams), Afghanistan (the Soviet Union’s Vietnam), Chechnya (Russia’s Vietnam), Kashmir (India’s Vietnam), Lebanon (Israel’s Vietnam), Angola (Cuba’s Vietnam), the Basque territory (Spain’s Vietnam), Eritrea (Ethiopia’s Vietnam), Northern Ireland (Britain’s Vietnam), and Kampuchea (Vietnam’s Vietnam). We know—from many case studies—that overfitting the most superficially applicable analogy to current problems is a common source of error. We rarely hear policy makers, in private or public, invoking mixtures of probabilistic analogies: “Saddam resembles Hitler in his risk taking, but he also has some of the shrewd street smarts of Stalin, the vaingloriousness of Mussolini, and the demagoguery of Nasser, and the usefulness of each analogy depends on the context.”
— Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgement. pp. 37-38 (emphasis mine)
So, does learning the history mean we are going to avoid making the same errors of the past? Are we going to be able to be better equipped to make predictions about the future?
It is crucial that we don’t get too fixated on any one analogy. To reason using historical knowledge, it is necessary to have a great deal of examples and to keep them in mind while thinking about current events.
For certain questions, you ideally want to use aggregated data of some kind. If you want to know if Trump will undermine the Democratic process and become a dictator, it would probably be better to look at how frequently this occurs in Western nations among the conservative party, rather than to say that he is Hitler like and will act like Hitler.
Attempts to quantify history, such as with cliometrics and cliodynamics, should be lauded. For the same reasons we should seek statistics and avoid anecdotes, we should try to data to understand current and historical events.