Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I'm always so skeptical that historians and archaeologists and such have any idea what they're talking about or if it's all just a self-reinforcing web of made up stuff founded through the human talent to find patterns where they aren't actually present.

If I wanted to challenge the claims made on that wiki page with a lot of "how did you come to that conclusion?" and drill all the way down, is it possible? Is it all founded on solid ground in referenced materials? Does it ever get challenged deeply by those whose academic careers don't depend on buying in to it all?

Maybe I'm being way too paranoid.

View on HN

Wikipedia isn't the forum for any of that. Journals, books, and other literature are the place for discussions about ontology and methodology.

My experience with archaeology is that it's more self critical than you probably expect.

Or maybe you aren’t paranoid enough. Can you hold yourself and you industry up to the same impossible standard?

All high level animals respond to reinforcement learning. They learn by correlation, not causation. It’s ridiculously difficult to confirm causation, period. It’s not limited to academics, WikiPedia, etc.

Based on my strictly amateur readings of research in archaeology and historical anthropology, they’re more contentious than I expected. People who jump to unsupported conclusions draw public criticism. There are many papers along the lines of “paper x is wrong for reasons a, b, and c”.

It’s not math, so it’s not a clean procession of verifiable work, but their scientific method seems to be alive and well.

The public image maybe suffers from earlier (~1900) work, which really does read like “here are some evidence-light ideas that strike me, a philosopher gentleman, as quite plausible”.

The site summarises accounts of individual researchers, most of which are based on interviews with individuals that are by now dead (as is the researcher). You can doubt as much as you want but I don't see the benefit in this - especially as the article doesn't present 'truthc but rather the different viewpoints/interpretations.

I’d call that a reverse cargo cult, if so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com