Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each claim: a habit of thought the course teaches, or a trap it warns against?
Groups: Habit to keep · Trap to avoid
- Explain a collapse by naming the invaders who caused it
- Let a technology explain a social outcome by itself
- Ask who made this source and why
- Check whether the sequence really runs the intuitive way
Hints
- The traps all make the past simpler and the present inevitable.
- The habits all cost more effort and yield less certainty.
Show the answer
Habit to keep: Ask who made this source and why, Check whether the sequence really runs the intuitive way
Trap to avoid: Explain a collapse by naming the invaders who caused it, Let a technology explain a social outcome by itself
Why
Every trap in the right column is a shortcut that makes the past simpler and the present inevitable. Every habit in the left column costs more effort and buys you a past that could have gone otherwise.
Practise Synthesis: The Human Journey
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Synthesis: The Human Journey
- Prehistory accounts for roughly 95% of the human story.
- Order the whole human journey, oldest first.
- Farming spread despite making individual lives measurably worse, shorter, sicker, harder. Why does that…
- Why does the long view make the present look contingent?
- Complete the course’s closing argument.
- Which habits of thought has this course been building?
- In what sense is the prehistory/history line "drawn behind" people rather than crossed by them?
- Prehistory covers 99.9% of the human past and is studied almost entirely without texts. What does that…