[geijoenr]

Seriously? It looks to me that guy is perfectly aware is talking bullshit. And disparaging archaeologists is part of the publicity game. He is just an entertainer trying to make money.

Why would any scientist have to descend into the mud to argue? Just let time run his course and wait for Graham to run our of ideas, people will forget about him.

[namaria]

Exactly. There is so much straw man going on. "They don't want you to know this, they say this is fantasy, but..."

There is no monolithic 'science'. Science is a big open debate fueled by verifiable evidence. Scientists hostility to speculation and hand waving is too often pointed to as evidence of arrogance.

[UncleMeat]

And it is also understandably human to become frustrated when people do this kind of thing to your field. You spend your entire career working rigorously in Field X, learning proper methodology, performing original research, and communicating with other people who do so. This is hard work and is largely unrecognized by broader society. Then somebody comes in and says a whole lot of bogus stuff while saying that your community is deliberately malicious and gets a lot of popular press and success and people believe what they are saying. Pretty easy to understand how people would get upset. And then getting upset is seen as ivory tower arrogance.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Maybe. But there is also much inertia. As explained by:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle

Also see how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener have been ridiculed at the time.

Or washing the hands as suggested by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

[UncleMeat]

Sure, there is inertia. There are famous examples of people with ideas backed up by data who were treated very badly (notably - they tend to be from before the last 100 years). Academics do get things wrong, even in groups.

But an outsider showing up and saying "academia is lying to you" and making a show aimed at a popular audience is... just not going to be the place where paradigm shifts come from.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I disagree. Because:

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/marchapril-2008/out...

https://www.medicaldaily.com/mad-scientist-6-scientists-who-...

https://bigthink.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-outsider-sc...

And much longer: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-revolutions/

Nowadays there are other means of doing 'citizen science', enabled by more, cheaper, and faster mobility, similar for access to information, and new technologies like LIDAR, drones, and much more.

In turn enabling the discovery of patterns which do not fit into the common wisdom.

What is so hard about understanding that?

Edit: Also 'institutional blindness', or if that's not a thing in english, the german 'Betriebsblind(heit)', meaning to be blind to things, because too far out to be recognizable, diverging too much from the established ways of doing things, and so on...

[UncleMeat]

I just mentioned how it bothers me that people use so many cases from more than a century ago to justify these things today and you've given me links to those old examples.

The only modern example from your second link is a case where a doctor performed a very interesting experiment to demonstrate their thesis, it successfully changed the expert consensus, and he was awarded the highest possible prize from the academic community two decades later. Not exactly a "ivory tower academics conspire to hold knowledge back" situation. The sole thing that makes this story so interesting is that he conducted the experiment on himself.

The first link is asking for amateurs to work with academics. Again, extremely different than "academia holding back progress." Academia is explicitly supporting outsider ideas in this case!

The third link is five paragraphs long and again does not discuss anything remotely modern. There's whole books about the history of science! Even specifically about scientific revolutions! And they tend to be written, gasp, by academics (that's who writes the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy)!

Absolutely none of this is meaningful evidence that the academic community is behaving in an unacceptable way to Hancock.

[namaria]

Collecting evidence and changing theory in the face of new facts is doing science. Defending entrenched positions based on vested interest and appeal to authority is not.

You don't get to point to people doing the latter and saying it taints the work of people doing the former. It makes no sense.

[luxuryballs]

unless perhaps academia is lying to you

[namaria]

Yes people lie. That's why it is so necessary and so hard for every generation to fight for evidence based reasoning. There is no group of people or institutions from where correct science emanates.

You should never believe anything or anyone who cannot back their claims with hard evidence, no matter which titles or traditions they hide behind.

[lowkey]

The problem with strictly following the sanctioned science community is that science follows the money (funding).

98% of archeologists agree with whoever is funding them. The remaining 2% are shunned on social media.

— somebody on the internet