I follow him on Twitter. It's quite remarkable how he structures his frequent polls, and subsequently uses them to confirm his priors, when the limited choice of questions funnel responses into Hanson's favoured response vs a series of straw man positions, with no catch all "other" to gather disagreement even from the choir that follow him.
The best thing about him is that his dubious evidence does sometimes support an interesting perspective; it gives him ammo to stick to a possibly unpopular position, which might even be true, or have sufficient truth value to merit thinking about.
0: "Worship me without salt or die!" is a reason to engage in premeditated deicide, not worship.
I mean it is a fantastical idea, and if we ever find a laptop from 10000bc I would be stunned, or if we find marsian burial chambers, but the probability just isn’t very high on what we observed sofar.
That isn’t to say a lot is lost to history, which skews our interpretation, especially prehistorical, but that would warrant a different kind of article.
Surprisingly, one existed thousands of years before what was long considered the oldest, the Egyptian pyramid builders.
The surprise of gobekli-tepe is mostly in demonstrating once and for all that monumental construction isn't limited to fully sedentary peoples and doing so in a way the diffusionists can't argue with.
He treats the former as his domain and clearly sees himself as a master thereof. And the latter you solve with bounties.
> "That all our knowledge begins with bounties there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of payouts which validate our judgements, and partly of themselves produce rationales, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience?"
Edit: wow, what is SFW Rule 34 called? this is a thing. http://kenfeinstein.blogspot.com/2011/01/kant-on-betting-and...
A similar thread on HN in the past [1].
[0] https://youtu.be/aDejwCGdUV8 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23761252
His point is that if we consider where life originated without any a priori assumptions, Mars could be viewed (based on some existing theories) as a more likely place of origin than Earth.
He's simply peeling back some of the existing (and often immovable) theoretical layers that filter our perception of the underlying reality and asking whether any of those layers might be reasonably discarded.
In a way this is the same point made by Kuhn about the calcification and cultural embeddedness of scientific authority.
He then notes that we humans seem to have a bias in which we eagerly rule out explanations that turn out to be true, and wonders how we might overcome this.
He proposes a prediction market mechanism that would allow for probability-weighted odds-making while also allowing for profits to be extracted by those whose knowledge is not widely shared; in effect an incentive for structured investigative behavior toward answering a series of deep and related questions.
It's not that Hanson believes archaeologists lack humility, just that the questions that are considered most interesting and the analytical approaches that are the most culturally rewarded may result in a landscape that prevents us from understanding an (obvious?) deeper truth.
I think that to appreciate Hanson's method of argument you must adopt a view of science as a collection of imperfect models and humans as irrational monkeys playing with the models and often overlooking valuable inferences and insights.
Put another way, under what circumstances would one of Hanson's proposed prediction markets fail to achieve equilibrium (liquidity)? Your analysis would suggest that you would bet $0.99p or $0.01p on any of the contracts and happily await reality to prove Hanson foolish. That's the point of such markets, however. Hanson would love to be shown that one of the markets he suggests had that quality, as the price would be valuable information about the robustness of the underlying constructs.
This is very true, and the rationality community has plenty of its own sacred cows (prediction markets are a great example) which this type of “evidenceyness” is used to confirm all the time.
Every community is bound to have blind spots and biases. Perhaps there is nothing more important than critical thinking to avoid building a community around.
What percentage of confident predictions about old things were eventually disproved (by uncovering old things)? Poor article with little data.
Hanson here appears to be backing up his claim with three hyperlinks. One thing that troubles me about rationalist-affiliated writing is that it tends to rest on what looks, at first glance, like a decent evidence base, but this evidence often breaks down under a little scrutiny. For example:
• Hanson's first link is to a recent National Geographic article that summarizes an archaeology finding from Bronze Age China. The summary is, IMO, misleading in one key respect. It calls the find "astonishing" because "parts" of the site "date back 4,300 years, nearly 2,000 years before the oldest section of the Great Wall—and 500 years before Chinese civilization took root on the Central Plains." The Great Wall reference is a non sequitur: it's a bit like saying that a find from the Old Kingdom of Egypt is astonishing because it dates back to two thousand years before the building of a Roman aqueduct. There's no real connection, and it's not at all news that agricultural civilizations existed in China circa 2300 BCE. Whether we want to call these societies "Chinese civilization" or not is debatable. But this finding, while really interesting and cool, is very different from what Hanson seems to be reading it as -- which is to say, as evidence for the belief that future discoveries might yield signs of "advanced civilizations" which far predate the Bronze Age as it's currently imagined. After all, in 2300 BCE, written records and urbanized societies already existed in a fairly large swathe of Eurasia.
• His second link is simply to the Wikipedia page for Göbekli Tepe. Which is a totally fascinating site, I agree. It certainly does have unique features, such as the megalithic carvings. But again, it is not evidence of an entirely unknown "advanced" civilization; instead, the people who built Göbekli Tepe clearly fit into the existing archaeological record relating to the Neolithic Near East. We've known for some time that early agricultural societies were emerging in the fertile crescent around the same time as this site. What's fascinating about this site is that it appears to predate agriculture in the region. However, it is thought to fit into a transitional stage ("Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in sequence to wild wheat found on Karaca Dağ 30 km [20 mi] away from the site, suggesting that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated"). So again, IMO this has nothing to do with his claim about "lost" civilizations which don't fit into our existing chronology.
• The final link is to a Nature write-up from two years ago relating to a contested claim about when humans arrived in the Americas. Again, this has nothing to do with evidence for an "advanced civilization" that has previously not been discovered.
All three of these links reference really interesting and important work which I very much hope continues to be funded and elaborated on. I'm convinced that there are incredible mysteries in store in the future, especially in the field of underwater archaeology. Yet to my reading, none of these reports relate to phenomena that scholars "confidently predicted would never be found." Any archaeologist or historian with a sense of humility will gladly admit that there are a huge number of unknowns in the historical record. None of this can be leveraged as a basis for the existence of "lost advanced civilizations" (by which he appears to mean agricultural or otherwise technologically-advanced civilization that far predate the Agricultural Revolution as its currently understood, and which were forgotten after some kind of hypothetical period of decline).
For that, you need what Hanson waves away: actual archaeological or historical evidence.