The historical record overstates the prevalence of disorder, because what is written down is what was exceptional enough to record.
Tuchman proposed in A Distant Mirror that the persistence of an event in the record makes it appear more common than it was, and suggested discounting accordingly. The mechanism is a selection effect on the archive rather than an error by any chronicler: ordinary years generate no documents, so a period reconstructed from documents is a period reconstructed from its emergencies.
In practice
- A safety review reading only the incident reports is reading the years when something happened.
- A century known chiefly for its wars had decades nobody wrote down.
- Standing
- Formulated by a historian about historical sources, and the same selection operates on news, incident logs and any archive built from what was worth reporting.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- How knowledge grows, and how inquiry fools itself