However he does make sure that the more out there crazy does get referenced and carefully avoids saying anything, or referencing any counter-evidence that would discredit them. So he avoids being categorised with the more extreme crazies, while assiduously making it clear he is their friend. After all, he needs to sell his books.

Having said that, his stuff as with Von Daniken really is a lot of fun. I occasionally check it out just to keep current on state of the art crazy. Just bear in mind there's a lot of flim-flam in there and he will avoid referencing any evidence that debunks his claims, no matter how much of it there is. You will not get the whole story from him. For example he will write a book on a topic from the point of view of say 20 years before the book's development and publication, and ignore any inconvenient research later than that, and probably also ignore some relevant research and counter-arguments from before that as well.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvmEISc6e4tLwn8TyS14ncw (possibly UK only)

Just as I'm sure you are with your Hancock's BS theory.

Is it really true that he's only been peddling unsubstantiated stuff tho?

Didn't he propose that the younger dryas ice age was caused by an impact, a claim later supported by more evidence, including nanodiamonds? I know the cause remains unsettled, but even if you read Wikipedia, which starts out saying the evidence for that is misinterpreted, it goes on to detail a bunch of solid sounding evidence. That's there's contention and ambiguity is not unusual for science, particularly such a speculative science as archaeology. But his proposal, at least, sounds neither crazy, nor appears to be unsubstantiated, as you claim.

He doesn't make money from suggesting there might have been an asteroid impact that affected the climate at a given point in history. He gets paid for writing books about "Meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind".

Unless you're comfortable with Newton being a crank for his alchemy, Oppenheimer being a crank for his mysticism, Turing being a crank for his desires, Galileo for his solar centrism, Harvard's Avi Loeb for his derelict alien ship, Chinese being cranks for TCM, and so many others.

It's funny how rational skepticism and "crank calling" (shaming?) rubs shoulders so closely with bigotry they're almost indistinguishable. But i suppose our beloved skeptics are apt to ignore that inconvenient interpretation. I just think that the propensity to think outside the box, and courageously push against the boundaries of (sometimes merely culturally normative, as in the case of TCM) orthodoxy, while also keeping connected to truth, is possibly one of the foundations of scientific genius, and seems to be something to be encouraged. At the very least, it's benign. I'm not quite sure why people seem to be so terrified of scientists who dare stand outside the herd, and propose new ideas.

Don't we have enough groupthink everywhere else (politics, think tanks, political science, education, religion), can't we have one place to celebrate dangerous ideas? Why wouldn't science be the perfect place for that?

I think it's possible your Hancockyness is a little overblown. Perhaps he's not quite the crank you think, tho he may be the crank you need.

W/r/t Turing, a person's sexual preferences aren't even in the same universe as someone's unsubstantiated personal beliefs about how the world works. Perhaps you would want to retract that piece? While I don't agree with you overall, I think your argument would be stronger if you excluded his example.

I think you're looking at the "crank / non-crank" evaluation as an attribute of a person. I'm suggesting it's more relevant to use a person/field-of-study grain to apply the label. (It probably also makes sense to break it down further, but at some point, the complexity outweighs the benefit.)

So no, won't rewrite nor retract. Is important to keep it in to reinforce how relative alot of this is.

I think you probably got upset by assuming I was associating gay sex with some sort of absolute measurable moral position. Hopefully what I said has reassed you that's not the case and let you feel better about it.

Btw good point about crank aspects not tainting the whole. Maybe sometimes what we think of as crank is simply undiscovered science. Maybe Newton would have had a better theory if he knew something more about nuclear transmutation.

I think there's a spectrum of these crank things though some stuff like flat Earth come on that has to be false.

But i think we should be giving more due, and less crank, to people like Hancock.. i know it's a personal thing tho, how your feel about a particular person. I just don't like to see a groupthink pile on, from any group.

I'm still not clear what the broader point is. That sometimes norms change, and have non-linear impact?

Most of the time, a crank is just a crank. That's why we know about the outliers.

Sorry, (very) freudian slip there (i guess), i meant ressaured not re-assed haha

is that really true though that a crank is just a crank most of the time? I don't think that's true. I think the skill is looking for the sincerity and the truth in what they're saying aside from any noise that might be there as well. Just like you're trying to make the point of reducing distractions. And just like I think it's important in data analysis you know you want to increase the signal reduce the noise and that's something you as a reader can do. So I don't think it's true that a crank is just a crank it's too much of an easy dismissal. it's important to have these alternative hypothesis generators and to listen and not get distracted by the other stuff. If everyone was obsessed that Newton or Turing or Galileo had culturally normative crank ideas they would have missed the good stuff. And maybe there is good stuff in some of those culturally normative crank ideas. And maybe we did as a society miss out on some of the good stuff because we wanted to say oh cranks are just cranks. so I don't think we should do that and I think you should probably stop doing that if you want to support this idea of you know scientific inquiry and the expansion of knowledge. Just a pointer ;) :p

So, I see you making your points there and I've already made my points so I don't see anything more to add. I'm comfortable that we have different views on it.

I see this all the time in medicine. One of the best neurosurgeons in my country and someone I consider a friend still tells me that I need to keep the microwave door shut for 3 seconds after it’s done or else the waves will escape and give me cancer. That defies the laws of electromagnetism on several levels.

We absolutely need alternative hypothesis generators, but the widespread acceptance of every crank idea that comes along even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is not only infuriating but actually serves to damage the scientific method, when the lady down at the mothers group claims that the vaccine gave her son autism and there is a global conspiracy led by bill gates to implant microchips in everyone.

At the end of the day, in my belief, it boils down to a sad lack of trust in experts - some of it warranted from the abuses and oversteps of the past, and some of it actively facilitated by people who have ideological reasons to oppose what the scientific truths are presenting (ie climate science denial).

I think science theories wrt to public belief have both high false positive and negative rates. A lot of people believe stuff to be true that isn't (that climate changes are only due to us, are terrible, and that there's something we can do about it that will help), and don't believe true stuff that is (flat earthers... I'm pretty open minded but also quite sure we live on a fucking ball).

The obvious caveat is nobody fucking knows anything we're all just fumbling around in the dark but consensus and a sense of certainty certainly does help. It's surprising how shit a lot of the data that we have (even in this scientific age) is. And how easily manipulated the narratives can be.

So i think we should be giving more due, and less crank, to people like Hancock.. i know it's a personal thing tho, how your feel about a particular person. I just don't like to see a groupthink pile on, from any group.

There are many layers, some full of cranks and some not. Maybe this is a field where generalization just isn't useful? I dunno, but wanted to think out loud and thank you for making me think a bit more than planned today :).

There are various videos of him online engaging in straightforward, evidence-based debates with others, and where some of the things he's said has been subsequently proven by more recent discoveries.

Your opinion of him seems entirely prejudiced. You have no substance in your description of him at all.

> Hancock's ideas have helped fuel the surge of interest in Gobekli Tepe as an ancient observatory. But he has an even more fantastical claim about the vulture and other carvings on Pillar 43. He believes, again without evidence, that it's an ancient constellation diagram that shows the winter solstice against a backdrop of today’s modern sky.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322150872_Decoding_...

What about his work that led to the acceptance of the Younger Dryas period being a result of the asteroid impact, that was refuted in academia for so long that is now been proven with time?

That revelation alone is worth more PhDs than most entire departments create in a decade!

Take a look at the revision history of the page, where you see him routinely reversing revisions that would improve the page -- particularly, reversing deletions of irrelevant but prejudicial content.

There is no reason to mention Graham Hancock on the page at all, or any century-old stories. They are there just to muddy the water, and to give the ex-professor a soapbox for name-calling.

The evidence is presented in a deliberately confused order, and very selectively. New evidence is not permitted. Wikipedia is ruled by people like that, now. We have to wait for them to die before we can have pages not somebody's hobby-horse.

I didn't say he was the only one to do so, but he put in the work to get observational data and brought to the mainstream archeaologists and historians who wrote countless works and based their dissertations on their 'irrefutable fact' of how the Ice Age ended which never included an asteroid impact and he staunchly challenged academia as a JOURNALIST and did the legwork with his colleagues who were actually trained archeologists and documented his observations.

And just so it's clear: I'm not parroting academia's indoctrination it forced me to bend to, but Wikipedia is not a valid source for citation for a reason, and if I had submitted a paper referencing it was dismissed entirely.

But here is an essay from the Man himself if you are so inclined to read it [0].

I think his work is notable and his contributions worthy and have merit, which is honestly much more than what many people based their PhDs on when they make arguments about things like the extinction of wooly mammoths and other mega fauna as result of Human over hunting. When NOTHING could explain these massive dead zones, but were none the less awarded degrees for their findings.

0: https://grahamhancock.com/hancockg17/

I'm just wondering, can you give examples of the research papers for these PhDs or degrees where you evaluated them and found them insufficiently rigorous. It sounds like this has happened a lot, so are there any resources on this I can read?

Hancock's pop sci summary of other people's work you linked to is entertaining, but are we really surprised that geologists 100 years ago had a limited understanding of the history of the earth? That controversy was 40 years before we even came up with plate tectonics. It's hardly cutting edge stuff.

As another poster said, his theories are interesting (I spent several days as a teenager running through all sorts of measurements trying to work out the megalithic yard and see if door measurements/side measurements in other monuments could be related, and found it fascinating when in the sign and the seal/hiriam’s key the original of the megalithic yard was discovered), but the benal/fascinating realities of the unit of measurement are a long way from the phantasmagorical claims made in heaven’s mirror and fingerprints of the gods

That's not a very good dismissal of the man's work, like I said that revelation alone is as solid as an entire University's department of post doc and grad students combined. It's overturned so many people's dissertations and the narrative of how the Ice Age ended, specifically to the migration of People into the Americas from Eurasia that has so many implications in other departments like biology.

Also, his observations of water erosion on Egyptian pyramids is very compelling, and places it way before the modern Egyptian narrative if its true as nothing provided by modern Egyptologists really explains how deep it is. Wind/sand erosion cannot carve that deeply, especially since so much of the pyramids was under sand until maybe only modern times when it became a large part of the Egyptian economy via tourism, thus preserving it from further erosion.

So really it seems that he hasn’t contributed a huge amount to this field at all apart from being another voice amongst many, when the claim has still not been fully substantiated by the geological record. An area worthy of more study, but it’s hardly ‘his’ contribution

To say that this guy has thrown 10,000 darts and come up with hardly anything is absolutely an accurate way to characterise Hancock’s work.

I also think it’s quite disingenuous to claim that modern Egyptologists are unable to claim ‘how’ ‘water’ erosion exists there (or even if it is water erosion) - there’s not only a decent chunk of carbon dating from ie. The camps next to the pyramids used by the builders but on an Occam’s razor perspective the consensus is the one most substantiated by existing evidence.

And don’t go into an argument about how groupthink dictates too much of consensus, as a doctor and scientist I understand the need for alternative hyptheses and I’ve found Hancock’s theories to be very interesting, but he makes a literal living out of pareidolia - he sees faces in every group of shadows, and vociferously denies they were just shadows when the lights are turned on.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...