Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
&gt; Finally I worked my way up to “first walled, territorial state”. Not thinking super hard, I googled “first walled city”, and got a date 3000 years before the one Scott cites. Not a big deal, he specified state, not walls. What I can google to find that out? “Earliest state”, obviously, and the first google hit does match Scott’s timing, but… what made something a state, and how can we assess those traits from archeological records? I checked, and nowhere in the preface, introduction, or first three chapters was “state” defined. No work can define every term it uses, but this is a pretty important one for a book whose full title is Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.<p>Isn&#x27;t this kind of spiral going to appear when you analyze almost any claim? It&#x27;s where skepticism comes from. When you get down to it it&#x27;s very hard to say a claim is truly &quot;epistemically legible&quot; outside math and the hard sciences (and even there there are dissenters).<p>And if someone does manage to write a history that&#x27;s relatively epistemically legible it&#x27;s going to be boring as hell. All histories contain narratives and all historical narratives are seriously flawed. What saves history (besides the entertainment value) is that some narratives are better than others. We can move closer to the truth through discovery and analysis of information. At the end, though, we&#x27;re still left with seriously flawed narratives, just less flawed than the previous ones if history as a discipline is functioning.