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.
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.