Because what happens instead is that you repeat your interlocutor's claims, you validate the existence of a discourse at all -- and discourses necessarily have two sides.
Consider the following imagined conversation:
--
Alice: The Earth is hollow.
Bob: The Earth isn't hollow; here are some facts about the Earth that speak against this claim.
Carol: [to David, attempting neutrality] Disagreements about the hollowness of the planet continue
David [to Bob]: Experts disagree on whether or not the Earth is hollow; why are you not taking Alice's concerns seriously?
--
Generalizing, it's impossible to debunk an obviously false claim without subtly reinforcing the feeling that there must be some valid point being made. After all, would anyone be talking if there weren't facts on both sides?
Because engaging with a batshit idea effectively helps promote it, the best thing to do with such an idea is to hustle the 'bat' out of the conversation as quickly as possible, before you find that the conversation is now entertaining angels, square circles, and multiple Atlantii.
Yes, the need to downregulate dangerously absurd voices is in tension with free speech. Yes, it is still a necessary practice.
Yet, ultimately, one must also make peace with entropy. Over the long term, no conversation can withstand batshit. Sooner or later, the convo will turn. Sooner or later, Alice will be celebrated.
> Yes, the need to downregulate dangerously absurd voices is in tension with free speech. Yes, it is still a necessary practice.
What is dangerous about his theories? Every culture I've heard of has their own origin myths, what is so dangerous about this man creating one of his own? I don't see astronomers raging against flat-earthers. People having different beliefs might be cumbersome or annoying, but it's rarely dangerous.
What is dangerous is not that a harmless old man is tenuously attached to reality, but rather that a corporation with global reach has discovered how lucrative falsehood can be when slickly produced & released at scale.
That is dangerous, because not only is it harmful in the immediate term, but because it strongly implies that they will do so again. Whatever checks-and-balances used to exist at Netflix on what they disingenously call "creative freedom" are simply no match for a contracting market.
> because not only is it harmful in the immediate term
How is it harmful? I'd never heard of most of the megalithic sites he visited. He just goes around to these sites and points out things he finds amazing, and presents some of his theories on their origins. Whether a viewer chooses to believe his theories or not, really all he's doing is stimulating the viewer's imagination. Nothing he discusses will have any immediate physical effect on anyone's lives.
> discovered how lucrative falsehood
They are in the entertainment business, not the education business. They sell stories and fantasies. You're holding TV to a standard that might make sense for government sources.
It's harmful because it means that it presents things which are known with near-certainty to be falsehoods as truths or potential truths.
This is being done by Netflix for profit, which ought to be bad enough to end the conversation right there.
But the deeper context is even worse: it's being done in an era where reality is routinely contested by quasi-LARP-like political actions that depend on keeping their userbase afraid, absurd, and feeling unheard.
Giving them yet another reason to feel epistemically isolated in order to boost ratings is like taking the water out of a nuclear reactor to heat your home -- it makes a great deal of sense to today's bottom line, but none at all for tomorrow's.
Our civ is not sustainable without a steady, heartfelt, and broadly-distributed grasp on truth.
> it presents things which are known with near-certainty to be falsehoods as truths or potential truths
I didn't get that from the show at all. There aren't many fundamental 'truth's in this realm, afaict, and I don't recall him debating things like carbon dating. Instead, there are theories with varying amounts of archaeological evidence to support them. Does he display every bit of evidence people have discovered? Obviously not, but over time, everyone's theories on ancient civilization will change.
There shouldn't be anything negative/isolating for people if they choose to entertain different theories about the past, and it's sad that people would ostracize someone for that. The world is a richer place because of it imho- this is largely a realm of fantasy, imagining life in the past, trying to infer the ancient's motivations/capabilities from scraps of long-lost cultures.
I'll counter with a bit of dangerous drama of my own: Its very easy to believe that the 14th century papal state said the same thing to Galileo. "Our civilization is not sustainable without a steady, broadly-distributed grasp on truth; and that truth is Christianity, with the earth in the center of the universe."
Of course, our scientific truths today are far, far more steady than those of the past. We know a lot more; we don't know everything. We only evolved beyond that state by questioning the accepted truth and testing it.
In the line of that questioning; we're going to land on ten times more wrong answers than right ones. Graham's work is, probably, a wrong answer; that doesn't make it any less important that its asked.
We shouldn't aim for a world with one steady, heartfelt, and broadly-distributed grasp on truth. We should encourage skepticism. The Accepted Truth should exist; people should be taught it, and taught to be skeptical of it. They should seek out alternate viewpoints, and be skeptical of those too. They should do their own research, whether that's new fundamental research or seeking the research of others; integrate what they find into their worldview; and draw new conclusions from it.
I in no way claim that we all need the same grasp on truth.
I do however claim that there are ideas which can be described as 'absurd.' A large number of these ideas later turn out to have been misclassified, for example, Galileo's ideas.
Yet there are still some other ideas in the 'absurd' category which are there *because they are absurd*, and because *absurd ideas deserve to be ignored.*
The possibility of making a mistake does not obviate the need to try.
I guess I'm not sure what you're demonstrating with this link. I watched Behind the Curve, and it generally treated flat-earth proponents as nice, well-meaning people who've just gotten themselves stuck in a rut where no evidence will convince them. That seems like the right attitude towards this kind of theory to me. Perhaps some of the scientists in the movie were exasperated by how obviously false flat earth is, but I can't imagine any of them writing a letter like the one in the source article, saying that flat earth theory is harmful and you're racist if you believe in it.
Yes, the flat-earthers are indeed shown as relatable, flawed, silly human beings, but the show is still driven by scientists.
Imagine how _Behind the Curve_ would have played if it had instead shown those astronomers as being part of a secretive conspiracy to conceal the real geometry of the world. That's what Netflix is playing now.
I expect it would have played a lot like What the Health, a similarly buzzy documentary from 2017 making ridiculous false claims about the health benefits of a vegan diet. It got a lot of attention, and people talked passionately in major outlets about how wrong it was, but as far as I can recall (and as far as I can tell from a Google search) the idea that Netflix had some responsibility to downrank it or attach a "fiction" tag was never part of the conversation.
I've never heard of this documentary, but if it makes false claims, then, yes, it should be labelled fiction, and possibly downranked.
This seems so morally obvious to me, and the converse so plainly wicked, that I'm going to assume I've hit one of those issues where there is some deep-seated worldview-differences that say as much about me as they do about my interlocutor.
If I'd hazard a guess, it would be that I believe that there is some sort of fact of the matter, and that people -- even large groups of people -- can be actually very wrong, in fact, and this wrongness counts again listening to them in the future, or valuing their opinions the same as those which are not wrong. This is a belief I hold and I know it is unpopular ;)
The alternative, often expressed on the right as a 'marketplace of ideas' and on the left as 'values-alignment', is that there are multiple competing ways of assessing the worth of an idea, and an idea's wrongness might (say) be counterbalanced by its congeniality, its convenience, or its usefulness, and therefore that it's mean or base of me or anyone else to complain about someone pumping falsehood into the ears and eyes of the planet.
But at the risk of being melodramatic, I say: this is a hill I'm ready to die on. Or not; but definitely not both at once.
I really don’t understand what’s so batshit about the claim that anatomically modern human with similar brains as modern humans could have built up civilizations and structures a few thousand years before the currently accepted dates.
Because it essentially requires everything known about the recent past to be wrong. Human societies and civilizations are incredibly complex and don't just pop out of nowhere and then disappear without a trace. We have an overwhelming amount of evidence on the human development from genetics to radio-carbon dating, to deciphered languages to the spread of technological innovations.
It is as nonsensical as claiming that the latest Ryzen is really from the 1990s.
Of course, this guys 'theory' is not based on actual evidence; so there is no reason to even take it seriously.
> Human societies and civilizations are incredibly complex and don't just pop out of nowhere and then disappear without a trace.
But they absolutely do. "Traces" of ancient societies are incredibly sparse, very little other than stone can survive for thousands of years. And what we call "civilization" rests on resource availability; when people only have enough resources for bare subsistence, social collapse is inevitable.
The disappear without a trace part is entirely possible if you assume they were largely centered around areas that are now underwater or covered under earth.
> “Why is there no evidence for this Ice Age civilization when we have plentiful evidence for hunter-gatherers all over the world at this time?” Dibble asked. “The truth is in the trash.” Every living being leaves something behind, but no refuse at all has turned up from Atlantis. “You’re going to clean up all your trash and vaporize it?”
OK, well, attacking the fringiest speculations doesn't do the establishment any favors. The nut of the whole thing seems to be that humans were doing sophisticated things about 8000 years earlier than academia were telling us even 10 years ago.
Speculating on what was happening doesn't seem like something beyond the pale of reasonable discourse.
And here, I think, we landed on a core piece of the matter. That there are some "ineffable truths" reserved and locked away in the High Tower of Academia. Oh, you're not An Academic? Ha, moron. We know the truth, how dare you question it?
Guess What? Graham also isn't in academia. Yet, he's been talking about this for 30 years, gained a following, and now has a Netflix special.
The ball is in your court. If you want to talk about failures, let's not focus on Graham. Let's focus on this High Tower of Academia. Why the hell doesn't the accepted side of the theory have a Netflix Special? What happened to PBS? Our public schools are a disaster. Published research seems to be more of a contest to see who can use the most complex, flowery, unintelligible language in the Race for Academic Recognition.
THIS is why Academia lost this one. We're on HackerNews, so here it is: You're an engineer with a brilliant idea; but you can't market it. What's the point of the idea? Ideas are nothing without marketing. Its the same fucking thing. If there's Truth out there, scientific truth, it doesn't mean shit unless its communicated intelligibly and repeatably. Academia has institutionally FAILED at this. But, hey, tenure must be nice.
My favorite part about Ancient Apocalypse isn't really anything about the Ancient Apocalypse. Its the fact that Graham spends minutes in every episode saying "mainstream academia hates this, they hate me" and if you have no context you might hear that and think "wow he's being dramatic"; but he's not! Every single reaction I've seen to this show has been one of absolute vitriolic derision. There's startlingly little attempt to educate, present accepted facts, criticize his presentation. Its just "he's racist, this is a crackpot show, fuck netflix for showing this." Its like we just assume, despite a failing educational system, that people should just know he's wrong; and you're dumb for thinking he's right. His theories are out there; YouTube is free; shoot him the fuck down. I want to see it.
I haven't said that. But how is a legitimate significant inquiry. How dare you (what's that even mean?)
How do you expect people change their mind after they said obv bs, tl;dr the first time they saw the original? I haven't.
> Its like we just assume, despite a failing educational system, that people should just know he's wrong;
Yeah, no they don't expect that, when they complain the first time, but they are hoping to give a hint. Hancock hasn't asked the right question (which can be worth more than a correct answer, according to saying).
Considering that it wasn't until the last 15 years or so when those in "Academia" finally started letting go of the long-since discredited "Clovis First" theory, people have have reason to be skeptical. As some other posts have pointed out, the fact is that much of our understanding of the distant past is speculation. We have fragments of history that archeologists are left to make their best guesses about. There are many different guesses and narratives about human pre-history that can be spun from the same set of these fragments that are all equally plausible. That isn't to say that Hancock doesn't make guesses and assertions that are unsupported (he does), but it is to say that the guesses and assertions made by academics are no more credibly or valid than guesses and assertions made by anyone who else who has a firm grasp of the available evidence and good reasoning skills.
Do academics feel like it's important to bring the normies up to speed on what they know or don't know?
It seems like a good opportunity for an enterprising establishment figure to step up and explain why the Hancock idea is wrong. Preferably with an argument that's better than "he's not an archaeologist plus he's probably racist because that's what I'm afraid of being called so that's what I'll call him."
Actually, yes they do, in large part. The problem is that the people who produce the documentaries don't want to make "let's talk about modern archaeology" documentaries--they think lay audiences won't lap it up, and so instead want to shift everything to "crusader against orthodox archaeology" (which usually means something akin to Hancock or Ancient Aliens) instead.
They have on many, many occasions. Here's an example: the Nov 2019 special edition of the SAA magazine [1] is dedicated almost entirely to debunking some of Hancock's claims in a recent book and explaining why they're so problematic in context.
The reason you're probably not aware of things like this is that public awareness of the discussion is very one-sided. People like Hancock are fantastic at getting their narrative into the public consciousness. Good academics (almost inherently) are not.
Except that much of what we theorize about hunter-gatherers comes from relatively modern foragers, who lived in very resource-poor environments and were thus unable to transition to more complex societal arrangements. Ancient "hunter-gatherers" may have been very different, and Gobekli Tepe is suggestive of that.
"Relatively modern foragers" did have and still have complex social arrangements and rich trading partnerships.
Göbekli Tepe is deeply interesting for being an apparent transition between fully nomadic living and the first permanent cities in Europe, however Graham Hancock is not some sole lone outsider commenting on this, there are many more qualified people providing a bedrock of thought on what may have occurred there with Hancock repackaging their work and adding a twist of magical thinking.
The fact that long-range trading arrangements among ancient foragers have only been posited very recently, and on the sheer weight of evidence, is quite significant and means Hancock has a point. Even then though, there's complex and then there's complex. Having more resources around means that people can devote time and effort to something other than bare survival--and that turns out to be one of the main factors behind complex societies. Any widespread disaster leading to lower resource availability would in turn have social collapse as its unavoidable consequence. Even mainstream historians and archaeologists readily accept that this happened, e.g. on Easter Island; Hancock is just generalizing that same kind of scenario.
The best of Hancock is unsourced and uncredited from the actual progenitors, the bulk of Hancock, that which remains, appears to be pop rubbish and discredited conjecture.
I couldn't be arsed banning the chap, but he's offered nothing original of value that I'm aware off.
>> I mean, the evidence has only been moving toward Hancock’s theories over the last 30 years, not away from it.
I'm sorry. What? More raw research has been conducted in the last 30 years than in the entire history of archeology up to that point. Absolutely none of it provides even the slimmest speck of confirmation for this guy's nonsense.
He predicted that monumental construction dating to the end of the younger Dryas would be found. It was.
He predicted that a comet strike at the onset of the Younger Dryas would be demonstrated. It was. 30+ genera suddenly vanished from North America, along with any hint of Clovis toolmaking.
He does better than anybody with his qualifications has any right to. His wacky speculations trace back to unaccounted evidence.
That's just load of anti-science nonsense. The whole premise of scientific progress is our ability to convince people, backing our arguments with facts.
Your attitude is of religious fundamentalist, where discussing truths about god can be done only by a carefully selected and prepared priest elite, and non-priest people are unworthy and can't be trusted with it, and would be best thrown into a lake for heresy if they have any opinions on their own.
I mean, kind of? Any speculation on what's up with a city thousands of years older than expected should be rooted in, you know, someone going and investigating the city in depth.
Who, how and why built Göbekli Tepe so early? Let the facts speak for themselves.