Archaeologists Ask Netflix to Reclassify Graham Hancock’s Docuseries as Fiction

Re:Archaeologists Ask Netflix to Reclassify Graham Hancock’s... by mc32 on Sunday December 04, 2022 @08:45PM (#33860358)

Vast swaths of paleontology and archeology can be summed up by the word "oviraptor". Instead of saying "We don't know" they feel compelled to make up a _plausible_ story which sometimes the field puts forth a likely sequence of events and the public then take it to mean fact. It's likely most people in the field(s) themselves understand it to be conjecture with some interpretable signposts --but introductory courses generally introduce lots of the field as fact based presupposing students understand that it's composed of lots of conjecture.

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Re:Archaeologists Ask Netflix to Reclassify Graham Hancock’s... by humanistbot on Sunday December 04, 2022 @09:15PM (#33860592)

> Instead of saying "We don't know" they feel compelled to make up a _plausible_ story which sometimes the field puts forth a likely sequence of events and the public then take it to mean fact.

Happens all the time in science. Science is about making our best current generalized explanation that fits the observed data. That's what gets us luminiferous ether, phlogiston, the plum pudding model of the atom, or the miasma theory of disease. Future generations will certainly look at us in horror for what our best current generalized explanations are, just as we look at previous generations.

That doesn't mean science is wrong or not worth pursuing. It just means we have to have healthy skepticism, which should be a virtue of science.

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Re:Archaeologists Ask Netflix to Reclassify Graham Hancock’s... by mc32 on Sunday December 04, 2022 @09:42PM (#33860794)

To me there is a difference when you have fresh data vs very old data which may or may not be a result of the thing that you're proposing was a plausible cause of something. With hundreds and thousands of years, things move, they weather, other things interact, floods, fire, get exposed buried, re-exposed buried...

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Re:Archaeologists Ask Netflix to Reclassify Graham Hancock’s... by AlotOfReading on Monday December 05, 2022 @02:22AM (#33862553)

There is an vast amount of literature on exactly these sorts of things, which we call 'formation processes'. I don't recommend you read any of it because most is stupifyingly boring, but please consider that academics have spent at least a few hours over the past couple centuries thinking about archaeological epistemology.

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Re:Archaeologists Ask Netflix to Reclassify Graham Hancock’s... by hdjjhhvvhga on Monday December 05, 2022 @02:36AM (#33862643)

There is an enormous difference between a fact - that has been observed and confirmed by various observers - and a plausible theory. There are many theories in physics, for example, some with many elements confirmed in numerous experiments, but still called theories.

When I read history books, authors often mix these two. As a reader, I don't know whether a given statement is a fact (an artifact was found, several contemporary authors described an event in a uniform way), or just an interpretation that seemed plausible in a given situation

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