(Edit: I wrote this and then realized you are a historian. Leaving it because maybe other people want to know one way of relating history to other fields).
Some thoughts about distinguishing historical research from other research and why it might be valuable.
First, history is exceptionally method agnostic, compared to other fields. Non-specialists (journalists, bankers, English professors) have made major historical contributions. This isn't because the methods used are always basic or non-scientific, but because such a wide variety have proved useful for historians. Historians usually can't go back and gather more information from their subjects, so their methods have to be flexible and change based on the time and place, and trying to define the 'historical method' is a pretty nebulous task. It's something sort of like, 'what evidence exists about this subject&period&place, and what can I trust it to describe accurately?', and then you choose whatever tools from other disciplines make sense to answer the question. This is a pretty Bayesian-friendly mindset compared to other fields.
Second, other disciplines usually begin with an 'object' that they can then apply interpretive methods to, or an object which they can conduct tests on in order to test a theory. Historians, instead, mostly construct historical objects. Most historical questions start as "what was going on with X?" or "why do these other historians disagree about what happened during X?" "How do we periodize this series of events?" and the answers will be "England was developing a working class" or "military records and civilian correspondence tell very different stories about the Civil War" or "there seem to be six distinct stages of US party politics." Sometimes two historical objects are so closely entangled that it's hard to study just one (how can you understand the Haitian Revolution without knowing what was going on in France?), and it's probably good that historians can tell other researchers that.
So here are some things historians might do, according to me:
And some things which are probably not history in the strictest sense, even if they rely on a lot of historical work, according to me:
I would be kind of shocked if historical research, in this fairly strict sense, was directly action-guiding. Yet for EA, a lot of historical research might still be valuable, mostly by creating & consolidating the body of evidence available for other EA-focused research. For example, describing more clearly the impact of technological developments on women's labor, or cataloguing the salient details of past near-civilizational collapses, or providing overviews of social movements.
I really appreciate this post, especially the idea of time-limiting crews (with the option of extending if appreciated)! I’ve been workshopping similar ideas in anarchist spaces using their framework of pods & affinity groups.
I am not on Twitter but I’m curious how you developed the case format. Especially step 2:
Each "coach" reflecting back what they heard and how it made them feel without giving advice or over-intellectualising
This sounds almost-but-not-quite like a nonviolent communication method as I understand it. What do responses sound like in this step? And more generally, do you know what motivates the case clinic format (the presencing institute link doesn’t clarify)?
I’m curious why you believe this