Furthermore, a study is probably incorrect if it can't withstand sanity checking from simple population models based on data we do have from the time (e.g. Roman garrison sizes).
> Look around the Internet - there is a new revisionist history of the Western world that is being pushed..
The revisionism is actually that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse. To paraphrase the source of this controversy, Paul Joseph Watson: If Roman Britain was diverse then modern day Japan is ethnically diverse.
The "we are all immigrants" narrative is pushed to justify mass immigration and open borders. This might make academics like Beard feel cosmopolitan and P.C. views might draw the attention of the Guardian and boost her book sales, but tens of millions of people are suffering from the consequences of these policies and feel alienated by an elite that they feel is working against their will and best interests.
> These people are undoubtedly far less numerous than they appear; they use bots
Paul Joseph Watson has over 1m subscribers on YouTube and his videos have hundreds of thousands of views. This places his daily circulation higher than most newspapers. While only a small percentage of those people may agree with his views enough to push them online, that is still a lot of people.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading "Skin in the Game" and wonder whether this story will become another anecdote of Taleb's "Intellectual Yet Idiot" social class.
Modern day Japan, btw. is ethnically "Japanese". Which is to say the entire country are migrants from various parts of the Asian mainland over the last 4000 or so years, again, obvious when you know what to look for. (And don't mention Korea...)
Concern over the problems of the modern era, overpopulation and refugees, are real, valid and deserve respect. But they don't need to be mixed up with the convenient stupidities of racism.
You probably mean racially diverse -- most Roman soldiers / administrators were ethnically Roman, regardless of race.
> then what happened to the diversity?
Cities have historically been population sinks, not able to replenish themselves without constant population flows from the countryside. If there were non-white people in the cities it might not have left much trace in the population's genes.
I don't understand the argument this is making. Could you clarify?
OP is making a joke -- if you want to call Romain Britain ethnically diverse, you might as well call Japan ethnically diverse. The term becomes meaningless.
This is indeed the case, and the nativists v. cosmopolitans culture war is raging throughout the West. It's one of the reasons behind Brexit, for example.
I don't think it's either new or revisionist -- the vast majority of European have been white, going back millenia.
And very many Europeans, particularly educated ones, have considered themselves as European, both in geographical terms, and in civilisational terms -- e.g. they thought of them selves as Romans, or as part of Christendom, or as part of the West.
> it isn't really up for debate whether there were Roman soldiers and civilians in Britain who came from the far reaches of the Empire and beyond. Yes, including from Africa.
Indeed so.
> Whether we would have looked at these people and said they were "black" is, as Dr. Beard explains, pretty unanswerable
In terms of what they looked like, most Romans were of Mediterranean appearance.
Dr. Taleb and others show a massive ignorance of how the studies of history, archaeology, and biology work when they assert that we can just "look in the genes" for an unambiguous record of every damn person who has ever set foot on the British Isles. But a misguided desire to hold history to the same evidentiary standards as, say, physics or mathematics - including by physicists and mathematicians - is nothing new.
What's more worrisome is the determination of some to willfully ignore historical evidence that might challenge their worldview.
Look around the Internet - there is a new revisionist history of the Western world that is being pushed, one that holds a shared "white" or "European" identity as paramount. These are the people who came after Dr. Beard as they come after anyone who challenges their views.
These people are undoubtedly far less numerous than they appear; they use bots and multiple accounts to make themselves appear more legitimate. This itself is dangerous, as it may cause bystanders to view these people as more mainstream than they truly are (and it's no secret that people ascribe more credulity to an idea when it seems widely accepted).
This is not going to get better as neural networks improve at writing tweets that sound human.