What went wrong Veeky Forums?

-The 20th lower percentile is the majority of tv viewers.
-Programs with the most audience get imitated to raise global audience since the goal is to make money.
-Programs that the lowest 20th percentile prefer is retarded garbage.
-->History ( and others ) channel.

Shadilay.

Pawn Stars and Pickers are a really good way to learn about certain historical things you really couldn't learn about in any other context though. They present interesting little pieces of cultural errata that really can't fall into any concise category that could be presented as a 1 hour doc and also teach about how preservation and antiques markets work.

if you have any statistics for the composition of tv viewership by iq quintile, I'd really be curious

I have little doubt that the bottom 20th watches more tan others but a significant amount, but I'd imagine that tv producers produce their content for between the 20th-40th level. that's just a hunch though.

errata=/=history

but your comment is enlightening. people below the 99th percentile are not actually capable of history, or anything remotely rigorous

they compile errata in the order they've stumbled upon it, and cohere it into a folk pathway

Americans regressed intellectually after 9/11 due to the media becoming more propagandist.

That's the advertising world's word, not mine.
the 80/20 rule, 80% of advertisement investment is catered to the lowest 20% consumers.

And since tv is really just a platform to advertise, the advertisement world's rules apply to it naturally, if not on purpose, organically anyway due to what i described in

yeah but content numerically is not necessarily the same as content by total revenue or cultural impact

especially these days, people like to feel smart. you produce a different advertisement to make a 40th percentler feel smart compared to a bottom 20th percentiler. one will feel patronizing to another, and one will not grab the other.

I'm sure it varies by network and the type of content produced. because that's just the thing, as viewership of tv increases, tey can't ALL enter into the bottom 20th percentile.

it just means that people who are in the 60th percentile become acclimated to dumber content, and make up increasingly a greater proportion of total viewership relative to what the 20th used to represent.

I think in large part this represents viewership for "smart" shows like mad men or game of thrones.

tv becomes stupider, but the content is being produced for increasingly higher people in terms of percentile, because the people themselves are stupider.

>people like to feel smart

>wooow the pyramids were made by aliens, it's so obvious why can't the sheeple realise that like me ?
Case in point.

>the 80/20 rule, 80% of advertisement investment is catered to the lowest 20% consumers.

Isn't that just the Pareto principle?

>errata=/=history

Please explain what you mean here as it relates to a show like Pawn Stars. Sure, the history of the Burger King Star Wars commemorative glasses is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but still there is a cultural and commercial significance there.

>people below the 99th percentile are not actually capable of history, or anything remotely rigorous

I really have to disagree with this. Not only have I known several amateur historians who produce good work independently of academia, but a lot of them talk about things no one would care about otherwise. Almost all local history happens like this. My Eagle Scout project helped preserve one of the oldest cemeteries in the American northeast and almost all of the experts I got help from were amateurs and just local people who had accrued a lot of relevant local and cultural history knowledge.

Maybe the common folk think differently about history, but they can't be incapable of it.

>they compile errata in the order they've stumbled upon it, and cohere it into a folk pathway

Once again, I don't think this can make sense. Cultures and histories don't just happen, I think if the common person has any sense of their own lineage a sense of meaningful cultural and local history begins to develop.

when I say below the 99% I don't mean in terms of academic accreditation. I mean in pure terms of iq and time preference.

people who acquire errata are not capable of constructing theoretical scheme, creating inductive/deductive lines of thought, weighing heirarchies, or leveraging other thoughts, such as genetics, anthro, engineering, when relevant.

people who collect errata are just capable of repeating things they've already come across, which isn't history

>people have a sense of meaning
yeah, they have a sense of meaning derived from things that they read into because they lack the intelligence/patience to seek deeper patterns.

folk historians are the worst in this respect. they attach tribalistic pride to a smattering of things they happen to know and try to construct meaning from their feelings.

WE WUZ

>when I say below the 99% I don't mean in terms of academic accreditation. I mean in pure terms of iq and time preference.

How does not being i the 99th IQ percentile disqualify you then? Like I said, most of the amateur/non academic historians I worked with were just "common people" who wanted to keep the story of the community alive, and most probably weren't in the uppermost range of IQ.

>people who acquire errata are not capable of constructing theoretical scheme, creating inductive/deductive lines of thought, weighing heirarchies, or leveraging other thoughts, such as genetics, anthro, engineering, when relevant.

people who collect errata are just capable of repeating things they've already come across, which isn't history

But doesn't all history have to start from piles of errata? And isn't a lot of that stuff you mentioned, genetics, anthro, considering engineering, etc. either just used as tools to help in the main historical quest of assembling a coherent and close to the facts chain of events? You can do that without any of those things, and most history that has ever been done was done without them. They help answer the questions as to why certain things tend to happen the way they do, identify laws of human behavior, etc, and that can be useful to historians, but isn't that going beyond just doing history itself? And if I am putting together a local history on the level of a town or state, how useful would most of those things be to me?

>yeah, they have a sense of meaning derived from things that they read into because they lack the intelligence/patience to seek deeper patterns.

Now that's just mean. And how does a pattern rob something of a relevant cultural or historical meaning? If we understand the economic causes of the great depression that still doesn't inform us of every aspect of that event and how it affected people.

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>folk historians are the worst in this respect. they attach tribalistic pride to a smattering of things they happen to know and try to construct meaning from their feelings.

Once again this is just kind of mean. Like I said almost all of the people I worked with in my project could be considered "folk historians" and that didn't in any way preclude them from doing good work or being in any way historically rigorous. Sure, things like WE WUZ are patently ridiculous but then again they're not really even based on something historical in the first place, they feel more like hollow myths without a deeper meaning.

What do you think of people like Shelby Foote?

local history doesn't really require a conceptual framework, the reconstruction of events, pouring over tons of data

it's a completely different endeavor, and more of a hobby. it's like butterly taxonomy.

>errata
before modern autosomal dna evidence a historian was often cross trained in archeology or linguistics. we'd had, for example, theories of modern europeans emerging from the caucasus mountains before we had bones or genetic evidence indicating such. in fact, the theory emerged from linguists 200 years ago.

now, autosomal dna evidence is indicating the linguists were correct. archeologists are beginning to piece together the factors that drove the westward expansion. no book you read could have told you either thing. historians who just read books are useless. they're like theologians trying to talk about evolution using the bible as their evidence.

data is embedded deep within other things. someone who reads a compilation of books isn't capable fo getting to it.

>how it affected people
okay, I get it, you want to write human interest stories, like how today, a fireman rescued 9 year old tammy's cat from a tree

no one cares. it's not history.

>local history doesn't really require a conceptual framework, the reconstruction of events, pouring over tons of data

How so? Understanding how your local region fits in to greater events is a fairly conceptual endeavor. And yes it most certainly involves the recreation of past events. I had to figure out how/why a cemetery was laid out by family plot, size constraints, etc. Same thing for data. Why can't it involve this? You seem to have a bias towards the grandiose that excludes that which may actually be still impacting the lives of people below a continental or national level.

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>before modern autosomal dna evidence a historian was often cross trained in archeology or linguistics. we'd had, for example, theories of modern europeans emerging from the caucasus mountains before we had bones or genetic evidence indicating such. in fact, the theory emerged from linguists 200 years ago.

now, autosomal dna evidence is indicating the linguists were correct. archeologists are beginning to piece together the factors that drove the westward expansion. no book you read could have told you either thing. historians who just read books are useless. they're like theologians trying to talk about evolution using the bible as their evidence.

data is embedded deep within other things. someone who reads a compilation of books isn't capable fo getting to it.

Yes, I wholly acknowledge the valuable nature of genetic, linguistics, etc. but they are just tools in a historian's toolbox. They jsut help us produce more pieces of errata that have to be put together into a cohesive narrative, and that is what I see as the history of it. You say historians who just read books are useless, but what use is an archaeologist producing work if there isn't someone in a university somewhere who has time to read there material and the material of countless other drawing from linguistics, genetics, etc. to put the pieces together? Of course just reading books generates no new data, but the only way to effectively make sense of the data is to have someone somewhere whose job it is to read the books all that data goes in to

>okay, I get it, you want to write human interest stories, like how today, a fireman rescued 9 year old tammy's cat from a tree

no one cares. it's not history.

What precludes something from being both a human interest story and history? How does understanding the effects people felt from an event not help us understand the event better?

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not sure if you're still an undergrad or what

I'm not saying all graduates have a better conception of the field itself, as there are internal divisions at every level

but fundamentally, one of the critical flaws of the field is the "intelectualization" of feels from any given level of society.

anthro does this via ethnographies that tries to intellectualize, say, the internal virtues of child cannibalization.

it's bullshit.

the job should be to remove the researcher from emotion as much as possible and involve the researcher in pure fact, and equip them with the tools that allow them to derive fact from evidence.

immersing yourself in emotions is not a good way to get at fact

my specialization is european history and people like carlyle discuss the problem thusly: if you empower stupid people to say what they like, and think what they like, you pollute the frame. people's attention spans are inherently limited, and for an expert to exert influence, there needs to be a certain amount of "unprimed" behavior in common people. the more you allow them to pollute their minds with false ideas (say, anti-evolutionary nonsense) you are, for every moment afterards, fighting an uphill battle to correct BASIC fucking mistakes.

people become arrogant because their emotions set their frame of judgement. you cannot allow this emotion to empower them, and you cannot allow institutions to accept emotions as a frame of reference.

discussion can only revolve around a limited frame of reference. if there is no frame of reference, you have two competing emotional frames.

the solution is to kill emotional content so that frames of discussions can revolve around facts.

filtering mechanisms for this include things such as tellng anyone who doesn't understand migratory patterns to shut the fuck up.

A combination of the rise of the internet and the rise of trashy "reality" TV shows.

Television is in its death throes.

The intelligent content can now be found online.

in case my post was tldr for you, basically, what I'm saying is acknowledged at all times, but all parties

if you're having a pleasant discussion with someone, and someone comes into the conversation shouting FUCK NIGGA MAKE MONEY FUCK BITCHES FUCK FUCK then it makes discourse impossible.

this is no less true in professional fields. filters are necessary. but selectively, your emotions might fear that you're excluded from the conversation, which means you want to remove filters for your own selfish benefit

but filters are necessary, always

>not sure if you're still an undergrad or what

I'm a STEM undergrad who has always liked history and almost went in to the field.

>but fundamentally, one of the critical flaws of the field is the "intelectualization" of feels from any given level of society.

Yes, and I agree with this.

>the job should be to remove the researcher from emotion as much as possible and involve the researcher in pure fact, and equip them with the tools that allow them to derive fact from evidence.

Yes, and I agree, but is a human testimony not a form of evidence? History is still a social science, the human element is still front and center in regards to where all accounts of events come from.

>my specialization is european history and people like carlyle discuss the problem thusly: if you empower stupid people to say what they like, and think what they like, you pollute the frame. people's attention spans are inherently limited, and for an expert to exert influence, there needs to be a certain amount of "unprimed" behavior in common people. the more you allow them to pollute their minds with false ideas (say, anti-evolutionary nonsense) you are, for every moment afterards, fighting an uphill battle to correct BASIC fucking mistakes.

Yes, and I understand what you're getting at, a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has it's pants on, and bad ideas should have to hold their own i the marketplace of ideas. But still we're dealing with history, which means we're ultimately dealing with people both past and present. Yes, genetics, archaeology, etc are hard sciences that generate testable hypotheses, but the history they inform isn't. When you talk about "polluting the mind with false ideas" in regards to things like history that could mean anything from elites controlling the narrative the plebs receive for propaganda purposes to quabbling over the dates of birth of important people. The example you give even is from a hard science, not history.

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people become arrogant because their emotions set their frame of judgement. you cannot allow this emotion to empower them, and you cannot allow institutions to accept emotions as a frame of reference.

discussion can only revolve around a limited frame of reference. if there is no frame of reference, you have two competing emotional frames.

the solution is to kill emotional content so that frames of discussions can revolve around facts.

Yes, of course facts are front and center but once again this is still history we're talking about. Emotion, ideology, etc. will always be involved as we are only human and these things affect how we interpret the objective data, even when we do our best to overcome them. And that doesn't even begin to answer questions of morality and politics, which historians oft have to consider. I'm sorry but the way you're putting this it seems like you're trying to say a goal of modern history should be best controlling the proles.

>filtering mechanisms for this include things such as tellng anyone who doesn't understand migratory patterns to shut the fuck up.

Yes, but once again that is a matter of the objective science of archaeology, genetics, etc.

human testimony is useless if you can't untangle bias, or economic/cultural phenomona

if you want a concrete example, I can think of two really clear ones

1. east asian history
literal phds in east asian history continue to make basic mistakes about east asia derived from a number of flaws.
a. they classify asians as shame culture according to a 10 year old schema
b. they classify asians as collectivist, or attempting to psychologize asians using freudian dynamics, which is fucking retarded
c. they are incapable of accurately reconstructing even basic facts of, say, order of events in an event, say, the aftermath of hiroshima, because they inherently struggle with the written language
d. they lack understanding of individual motivations. you'd think this would be simple, but they literally just cannot

again, you can say "well, they really DO understand." but they don't. they're completely incompetent.

2. the crusades
the crusades were a series of a couple dozen battles in response to the roughly 1k battles launched against papal holding over a 500 year time period. scholars fundamentally lack an understanding of the political structure of islam, which rewards violent conquest. they literally can't wrap their head around the fact this dynamic exists.

again, why are we supposed to believe that an open process is supposed to correct these mistakes? these people are idiots. they lack understandings of the political, psychological, economic, etc. factors that underlie history, but still presume to comment on politics, or go to say that economics doesn't matter.

they're idiots. even the ver smart ones. so would we benefit from even stupider people getting in on the conversation? no.

>human testimony is useless if you can't untangle bias, or economic/cultural phenomona

Yes, and I agree.

>1. east asian history
literal phds in east asian history continue to make basic mistakes about east asia derived from a number of flaws.
a. they classify asians as shame culture according to a 10 year old schema
b. they classify asians as collectivist, or attempting to psychologize asians using freudian dynamics, which is fucking retarded
c. they are incapable of accurately reconstructing even basic facts of, say, order of events in an event, say, the aftermath of hiroshima, because they inherently struggle with the written language
d. they lack understanding of individual motivations. you'd think this would be simple, but they literally just cannot

Alright, and I'm not an expert in this field or any of these issues, but it seems the issue is just a lack of knowledge of language and culture which should work itself out over time by individual scholars getting challenged on their work.

>again, you can say "well, they really DO understand." but they don't. they're completely incompetent.

Alright, and like I said they need to get called on their BS. Why hasn't that happened yet?

>2. the crusades
the crusades were a series of a couple dozen battles in response to the roughly 1k battles launched against papal holding over a 500 year time period. scholars fundamentally lack an understanding of the political structure of islam, which rewards violent conquest. they literally can't wrap their head around the fact this dynamic exists.

Once again, shouldn't this work itself out? Or why isn't the scholarly process working?

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>again, why are we supposed to believe that an open process is supposed to correct these mistakes? these people are idiots. they lack understandings of the political, psychological, economic, etc. factors that underlie history, but still presume to comment on politics, or go to say that economics doesn't matter.

>they're idiots. even the ver smart ones. so would we benefit from even stupider people getting in on the conversation? no.

Why isn't the open process working? It seems like you just gave me a whole spiel about how we can't trust the folk historians etc. because of bias, emotion etc. but that the professionals do it too anyway? So if we're all equally susceptible to all these flaws, we should just stick with trusting those with PhDs because they may be slightly less susceptible on a good day? Isn't that just elitism? You're entire point seems like it can be reduced to "academics are stupid, but commoners are stupider". So why should we even trust the academics then?

>not nazi megastructures

if we empower stupid commoners to have an opinion, they vault up stupid academics as their intellectual kings, was the point I didn't make incredibly well

the king of east asian academics are selected and promoted because they promote a version of history that makes stupid people feel warm and fuzzy about multiculturalism, same for the crusades.

debate of intelligent points happens at a level that is incomprehensible to idiots. selection needs to occur at that high level.

imagine if we chose physics docs according to what an average high school grad thought about tenser transformations?

because that's what we do with history phds. that's why the process isn't working.

we need to disempower idiots to have any involvement or pretense of involvement in history.

check out the mao thread for a good example of what I'm talking about. they're posting "historical" accuonts by the people who carried about mao's purges about how great the mao period was.

there was an indonesia thread yesterday where some anons were saying that the "historical" documents documenting that there "totally wasn't a chinese genocide" are totally accurate.

reading tons of primary documents isn't enough. it just gets you further down the rabbit hole. this board is full of idiots.

I dare you to try and discuss statistics with some of these people. they're innumerate. the people in my graduate department aren't capable of fucking arithmetic.

>if we empower stupid commoners to have an opinion, they vault up stupid academics as their intellectual kings, was the point I didn't make incredibly well
>the king of east asian academics are selected and promoted because they promote a version of history that makes stupid people feel warm and fuzzy about multiculturalism, same for the crusades.

But doesn't that mean the entire system is so broken it should just be thrown out? Are the people winning the popularity contests not being discredited by more thorough research? Would excluding the commoners really solve this problem or just limit it to the biases of academics affecting outcomes and not the biases of common people?

>debate of intelligent points happens at a level that is incomprehensible to idiots. selection needs to occur at that high level.

>imagine if we chose physics docs according to what an average high school grad thought about tenser transformations?

>because that's what we do with history phds. that's why the process isn't working.

>we need to disempower idiots to have any involvement or pretense of involvement in history.

Can you explain your physics analogy? Who are these idiots and who gets to decide who they are?

This all just seems like a defense of academic elitism to me. Besides, like I said I'm not exposed to any of this or the field of history so for all I know these could just be your unsupported opinions user.

>check out the mao thread for a good example of what I'm talking about. they're posting "historical" accuonts by the people who carried about mao's purges about how great the mao period was.

Yes but how many Marxist/Maoist history professors would go out and say the same thing with all the trimmings of proper academic presentation and the statistics to go with it?

>reading tons of primary documents isn't enough. it just gets you further down the rabbit hole. this board is full of idiots.

Sure, and I get that you can't rely entirely on primary docs, especially when dealing with shady governments etc. But then without primary documents isn't the physical evidence without context, and the secondary sources and human testimony are considered lesser than both of those.

>I dare you to try and discuss statistics with some of these people. they're innumerate. the people in my graduate department aren't capable of fucking arithmetic.

Yes, and economic has the opposite problem where people get so caught up in math they completely forget the guidance of basic principles and how to logic through things a priori as a way to begin looking for answers. I understand your frustration i expecting them to know how to use it, but once again stats is supposed to just one of many tools for a historian to use right? Are you sure you're not completely missing out on stuff some of your fellow postgrads are in on?

It seems like you're generalizing issues in specific fields of study to history as a whole and the entire human race.

This is what "& humanities" does to historical discussion.

>should the whole system be thrown out?
maybe

>who gets to decide who is an idiot
people with an iq below 120 give or take probably shouldn't even be allowed to go to university.

>academic elitism
people who are correct ARE elite. being correct should be a baseline requirement for promotion

the schools of thought that have given accurate results in the past and recent findings should be promoted and their theoretical frameworks promoted as far as they deliver results. speculative, subjective approaches should be oppressed ruthlessly.

>who selects talent in the current system
public opinion and book sales

>physics analogy
nothing really. you don't let the child who can't do math choose whether we use a newtonian or einsteinian physics model. neither should normal people decide what istorical framework we use.

people who say things that come to be true should be selectively promoted. it's that simple.

>how many marxist history professors would promote communist china
most of them. the field is filled with people who think communism works. they're divorced from reality.

>secondary documents
I'm not even saying we shuld rely on secondary documents. I'm saying that we know very well what is true and what isn't

any dickhead can present "documented interpretations" of some event. failure needs to be punished. idiots need to be punished. when they are no longer polluting common knowledge, discourse can take place. otherwise, you spend all of your time fighting against ignorance

>are you missing out
I'm not saying individuals don't come into good knowledge even with flawed approaches.

but the entire field of history, existing as it is, without even a basic understanding of math, is not something that can be forgiven. it's fucking stupid.

for example, historians who denounce genetic moels of intelligence. they need to shut up, or die. they're harming society by aggresively promoting ignorance.

Wow, finally a good post among an ocean of shit.

This is probably the last thing I should ever say on Veeky Forums...

...But it was literally a failure of capitalism.

>people with an iq below 120 give or take probably shouldn't even be allowed to go to university.

This is unabashed elitism. Why? Why 120?

>people who are correct ARE elite

What prevents those two from swapping places at any time? If the current standards can't be maintained as they are how could you hope to maintain such a high standard?

>the schools of thought that have given accurate results in the past and recent findings should be promoted and their theoretical frameworks promoted as far as they deliver results. speculative, subjective approaches should be oppressed ruthlessly.

Won't this just create a new orthodoxy? One that, seeing as history isn't a hard science, won't be objectively correct?

>public opinion and book sales

>nothing really. you don't let the child who can't do math choose whether we use a newtonian or einsteinian physics model. neither should normal people decide what istorical framework we use.

>people who say things that come to be true should be selectively promoted. it's that simple.

But doesn't this just mean the things in your field that are broken should be fixed without throwing out the whole system? And the whole book sales thing can't be that bad. Jared Diamond is pretty much been discredited even though his book was a bestseller. And promoted people based on what they say being true? What if they are right for the wrong reasons?

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>most of them. the field is filled with people who think communism works. they're divorced from reality.

Yes, and I agree wholeheartedly, but you can't just boot them from the field. Besides, aren't they all into the whole materialist-science-in-history game? I get that it's just a smokescreen for their ideology most times, but could you even beat them at their own game?

>I'm not even saying we should rely on secondary documents. I'm saying that we know very well what is true and what isn't

And I'm not saying that either, but it seems like you're saying all human created sources should be either discredited or treated as highly suspect until proven otherwise.

>any dickhead can present "documented interpretations" of some event

Yes but why and what makes that dickhead wrong is important, not the fact that anyone can do it. Once again, this is just elitism.

>I'm not saying individuals don't come into good knowledge even with flawed approaches.

Yes but it seems you are saying its your way or the highway.

Is modern marvel and engineering an empire still broadcast? I haven't had cable since 2010.

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>but the entire field of history, existing as it is, without even a basic understanding of math, is not something that can be forgiven. it's fucking stupid.

Alright, but do most historians even need this knowledge, especially when it might already be done by economists or some other field? How are modern historians even lacking in this area? Math/stats as used to analyze history has been a pretty normal thing since the early 20th century at least.

>for example, historians who denounce genetic moels of intelligence. they need to shut up, or die. they're harming society by aggresively promoting ignorance.

Sure, but if this is the case call them on it, don't just tell them to shut up.

You seem to be going about this like history is a hard science that has one set methodology and nothing else can work consistently or at all. I don't mean this as an insult but are you angry? have you let your anger with your field cloud your judgement? You seem to put your faith in a perceived set of historian ubermensch and I find that very unsettling.

>implying Veeky Forums isn't history channel-tier

Change of market. No money in digging through archives to get new black and white footage.

History Channel as a whole is a victim of its own ambition. It's simply impossible to give the full story in a 1 hour documentary. Of course it dealt in mostly memes, but at least it encouraged youth to explore history further.

>why 120
around there is when people start beginning to conduct deduction and understand inductive ineferences. any lower and they simply parrot simple pieces of information and their logic takes the shortest conclusion to what they want to believe

>your way or the highway
I'm not even saying that. I'm saying that there needs to be SOME standard, rather than this tripe that passes as free speech, but just drowns everyone in irrelevant information.

there are various schools of s cholarship from different ages and continents who managed tocome to very similar conclusions. carlyle reads a lot like xunzi. they didn't come to similar conclusions because they had the same methods. they came to similar conclusions because in a relatively noise-free environment, logic generally works.

in high noise enviroments, NO logic can work. this isn't my opinion, this is just a fact.

ending the struggle for the competition over control of the field is the first step.

that's my argument.

>wouldn't a new flawed paradigm emerge
it might, it might not. as I said before, logic can only function in a noise free environment. I believe more generally that punishing those who spread false information goes a LONG way to rectifying this.

you'll note that history departments in japan and korea manage to do actual history without involving historians in promoting an anti-science agenda

we don'tneed to accept idiots running the show as a fact of life

According to that picture it would seem to have been caused by 9/11 and social media.

The pawn shop and dirty jobs channel.

fuck you're retarded.

It's the result of the general masses getting what they want, which any free market system, such as capitalism, leads to.
.

>Reality shows are really cheap to make, and people still watch them.
>Like, you're talking 10% of the cost of a scripted program with real actors.

Do you realize that documentaries are usually even cheaper to make than social porn reality shit for brainless? While reality trash usually requires multiple camera crews and shit. Documentaries can be usually done with much smaller crews.

>tfw probably the only one old enough here to remember pre 9/11 history channel where most of it was just historians talking into a camera interspersed with pictures of old paintings giving it an almost old timey PBS feel

posting updated version

>that guy
>intelligent

No, you aren't only one, but american documentaries still rate bellow BBC when it comes to history or wonders of nature. Too many superlatives.