Imagine that you could take all the words of any kind that were written down in this year, in any medium – newspapers, blogs, emails, kids’ diaries, graffiti, books, everything. It would be a large volume of words, even in a single day! Okay, now imagine that a machine randomly selects 5% of those words and presents them to you.
Of that selection, what percentage would be factual, truthful information? It seems like only a small percentage would be! Most of the words wouldn’t be true accounts – by volume, most words written in a year are pure fiction, speculation, gossip, etc.
Especially if you took that small selection of words out of context – or didn’t have the context – you really wouldn’t know anything by just reading those words.
Now imagine trying to assemble an accurate picture of what 2024 was like if you were reading that contextless, random 5% sampling of our words from the year 3000. If you read that random sampling and then claimed “Here is what was happening in 2024,” you would be absurdly, laughably inaccurate.
I think about that a lot when I think about the study of ancient history.
The Opportunity Machine 