Once I belonged to the History Book Club. Eventually I bought every single book they had on history prior to gunpowder so the club held no more value for me. One of those books was ‘History of the Goths’ by Herwig Wolfram. Translated into English and quite technical, not really intended for the general public, I read it cover to cover anyway. How fascinating to find out where the Goths came from. Except the book really didn’t answer that. The concrete origin kind of dissipated into that time where there was any record of such a group. And this from what appears to be to be a scholar at the top of his profession.
This brought home to me the truism the deeper we dig the messier it gets. It is not black and white like the movies.
Now the further in history we go back the less we will know (this should be obvious) so given the track record with history closer to us I think this warrants caution to suggest closure and should encourage humbleness before reality. Once again – except that is apparently not what happens is it?
Institutionally and personally we defend our beliefs closing our minds to the fact we have just shut off any chance of progress. One of the aspects of good hypothesis creation is that it be simple, do not embellish with anything beyond the minimum to explain the anomaly. OK – but coupled with that is do not get attached to that hypothesis and turn into a belief. Science by nature is forever revisionary – every ‘fact’ it uncovers is contingent. This is not satisfying to us though – for well understood psychological reasons we need to believe what is true for our survival depends on it. Thus the uncritical public will accept the latest in Scientific America as ‘true’.
Now if we want to grow and if we want to understand more and more about reality how do we fight this? Does scientific methodology need to change? No. This dynamic approach to knowledge is built in to ‘the method’. This requires a personal attitude change. Rather than consider how much or all of what we belief to be right I think we need to flip that 180 degrees and consider that absolutely everything we believe is wrong to some extent – so is every single fact and theory science tells us. This attitude shift will get us back to letting reality tell us about itself rather than us trying to make reality fit our beliefs. Another ‘aid’ to get to this point is consider truth pragmatic and not certain.
Honestly to be right one has to be omniscient so I think we all need to get off our high horse a bit. Science will not get us to knowledge or epestime, science at its best only gets us to very well considered opinion and most of our opinions are not even that.
Combining these two ideas – the actually complexity of something once we do a deep dive and recognizing explicitly we don‘t have it all right yet, will open up a lot of possibilities. Really – it is OK to not commit to a belief on something – your personal world will not end. Trust me on this – I went through this.
What does the ‘we got it all figured out’ approach do? Stops inquiry anywhere that may seriously threaten the narrative. An obvious one from GH’s books is lack of interest in marine archeology. Why? Because we know don’t we that nothing is there to find because _it has been established_ when civilization began already. Looking on the continental shelf must assume something much older. Another example was claiming no civilization worthy of the name could arise in the Amazon. Sometimes this gets turned around within ivory tower – I believe ‘the Clovis First’ idea in North America had taken some big hits. So too with the Dryas ELE. But, for the most part, where does the momentum start to get to that point? Well it starts with us idiot amateurs who don’t know anything, the ‘alts’ (or worse the ‘fringe’). I might point out there is this demeaning assumption that those of us on the dark side turn our backs on science and that is simply not true for me and I bet other ‘alts’ here agree. Rather, as GH suggested, we would like to hand off a new direction to the ‘experts’ since only they have the know-how to do a legitimate investigation.
A major new direction GH is proposing is the possibility of an end-of-ice-age civilization. This is not simply looking for ‘Atlantis’. To categorize this as such is a straw man again. One problem with that is this new approach posits something world wide. Atlantis won’t be in one spot and it may be a conglomeration of different cultures just like we have now. We cannot project our own idea of what ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’ should look like back either to clue as what to find. It is fallacy to think they should bel like us in every aspect. Pre-history inevitably will get more complex and veer away rom the simple linear models we have as knowledge increases – to resist this is futile
I am not too worried about beating war drums over this – the momentum will build. GH stood on preceding skeptics and alts, some very wild posting aliens and alternate dimensions, to get us close to something more tangible science can help us look for. He deserves much credit for ‘upping’ the visibility of the credibility of this view. But we have the younger Dryas ELE, we have models of sea level rise, we have cultural myths of flooding all over the place. The details of who built what exactly, like who built or refurbished various parts of Egyptian monuments is really kind of a second stage to all this and may get us bogged down in unnecessary trivia. Just a word of caution on that – I think this micro focus lends itself to maintaining a narrative at times.
Some may not appreciate my ‘big picture’ perspective but I have to point out any edifice is only as good as its foundation. We need the right attitude towards the investigation before we even start.
This brought home to me the truism the deeper we dig the messier it gets. It is not black and white like the movies.
Now the further in history we go back the less we will know (this should be obvious) so given the track record with history closer to us I think this warrants caution to suggest closure and should encourage humbleness before reality. Once again – except that is apparently not what happens is it?
Institutionally and personally we defend our beliefs closing our minds to the fact we have just shut off any chance of progress. One of the aspects of good hypothesis creation is that it be simple, do not embellish with anything beyond the minimum to explain the anomaly. OK – but coupled with that is do not get attached to that hypothesis and turn into a belief. Science by nature is forever revisionary – every ‘fact’ it uncovers is contingent. This is not satisfying to us though – for well understood psychological reasons we need to believe what is true for our survival depends on it. Thus the uncritical public will accept the latest in Scientific America as ‘true’.
Now if we want to grow and if we want to understand more and more about reality how do we fight this? Does scientific methodology need to change? No. This dynamic approach to knowledge is built in to ‘the method’. This requires a personal attitude change. Rather than consider how much or all of what we belief to be right I think we need to flip that 180 degrees and consider that absolutely everything we believe is wrong to some extent – so is every single fact and theory science tells us. This attitude shift will get us back to letting reality tell us about itself rather than us trying to make reality fit our beliefs. Another ‘aid’ to get to this point is consider truth pragmatic and not certain.
Honestly to be right one has to be omniscient so I think we all need to get off our high horse a bit. Science will not get us to knowledge or epestime, science at its best only gets us to very well considered opinion and most of our opinions are not even that.
Combining these two ideas – the actually complexity of something once we do a deep dive and recognizing explicitly we don‘t have it all right yet, will open up a lot of possibilities. Really – it is OK to not commit to a belief on something – your personal world will not end. Trust me on this – I went through this.
What does the ‘we got it all figured out’ approach do? Stops inquiry anywhere that may seriously threaten the narrative. An obvious one from GH’s books is lack of interest in marine archeology. Why? Because we know don’t we that nothing is there to find because _it has been established_ when civilization began already. Looking on the continental shelf must assume something much older. Another example was claiming no civilization worthy of the name could arise in the Amazon. Sometimes this gets turned around within ivory tower – I believe ‘the Clovis First’ idea in North America had taken some big hits. So too with the Dryas ELE. But, for the most part, where does the momentum start to get to that point? Well it starts with us idiot amateurs who don’t know anything, the ‘alts’ (or worse the ‘fringe’). I might point out there is this demeaning assumption that those of us on the dark side turn our backs on science and that is simply not true for me and I bet other ‘alts’ here agree. Rather, as GH suggested, we would like to hand off a new direction to the ‘experts’ since only they have the know-how to do a legitimate investigation.
A major new direction GH is proposing is the possibility of an end-of-ice-age civilization. This is not simply looking for ‘Atlantis’. To categorize this as such is a straw man again. One problem with that is this new approach posits something world wide. Atlantis won’t be in one spot and it may be a conglomeration of different cultures just like we have now. We cannot project our own idea of what ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’ should look like back either to clue as what to find. It is fallacy to think they should bel like us in every aspect. Pre-history inevitably will get more complex and veer away rom the simple linear models we have as knowledge increases – to resist this is futile
I am not too worried about beating war drums over this – the momentum will build. GH stood on preceding skeptics and alts, some very wild posting aliens and alternate dimensions, to get us close to something more tangible science can help us look for. He deserves much credit for ‘upping’ the visibility of the credibility of this view. But we have the younger Dryas ELE, we have models of sea level rise, we have cultural myths of flooding all over the place. The details of who built what exactly, like who built or refurbished various parts of Egyptian monuments is really kind of a second stage to all this and may get us bogged down in unnecessary trivia. Just a word of caution on that – I think this micro focus lends itself to maintaining a narrative at times.
Some may not appreciate my ‘big picture’ perspective but I have to point out any edifice is only as good as its foundation. We need the right attitude towards the investigation before we even start.