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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

unless perhaps academia is lying to you

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.

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

I'm not sure much of the stuff really needs to be "debunked" at all. Let's look, for instance, at Gobekli Tepe.

Is it really the position of mainstream archaeology that something like Gobekli Tepe was built by nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes who hadn't even invented the wheel? Some of the pillars weigh 22,000 lbs. There are intricate statues carved by people who supposedly didn't have metalworking or any metal tools. The entire thing is part of an even larger complex that has yet to be excavated and it was all planned out and coordinated by people who hadn't even invented writing or math. How plausible is this?

10 years ago, when these discoveries were much newer, mainstream archaeologists were still largely hung up on the idea that these ridiculous massive stone temples must somehow have been built by primitive hunter-gatherers. These days, it seems as though those attitudes have shifted, and that things like Gobekli Tepe call into question if we really have the right picture regarding the timeline of human development at all. It seems increasingly possible - even in mainstream archaeology - that humans 13000 years ago may simply have been further ahead than we thought.

One side effect of this paradigm shift is that people like Graham Hancock get to claim they were right all along. OK! Of course it this doesn't mean everything else he has ever claimed is right, but as far as I care, he can milk the "him vs the establishment" angle all he wants. He has a valid complaint - but more importantly, what institution is supposed to be able "debunk" him at a time when legitimate new discoveries are currently upending everything we thought we knew? You need to figure out what is actually going on first before you can hope to be Real Scientists "debunking" anything. Until you do, the notion that perhaps Gobekli Tepe was really built by people with a comparatively advanced level of civilizational development, rather than primitive hunter-gatherer cavemen, seems as decent a hypothesis to entertain as anything else. And if I were a betting man, I'd bet this really is the right hypothesis, in my view!

Wheels aren’t useful for primitive societies moving 10 ton stone pillars. Assuming you define them as large round objects with an axle between them. Placing various objects beneath them to reduce friction is, but it’s not actually needed either if you have enough manpower.

Metal tools would have been helpful but aren’t needed. We have many examples of actual stone tools used to shape similar objects. Ex: https://www.archaeology.org/news/6891-180813-easter-island-t...

Suggesting that hunter gathers can get together and do large works together is perfectly reasonable. Some Native Americans on the east coast did massive scale forestry without setting down in one place. This effort was rewarded because they would cycle through areas repeatedly. It wasn’t agriculture but something of an in between activity and was viable as other nearby cultures did practice farming.

Hunter gathering is migratory because they use up local resources faster than they replenish. But the rate this happens depends on natural abundance. It’s similar to why Texas cattle farmers need a lot more land to support a herd than east coast farmers assuming neither are supplementing their diets with feed.

> I'd love to watch a Netflix (or Youtube!) series that point-by-point disproves or provides more reasonable explanations for the phenomena Graham proposes, filmed in a similar awesome style? Where is it?

This is part of the problem. It's no-one's job to entertain you. As Mr DeGrasse Tyson has said, and I paraphrase the good thing about science is, it doesn't care about your opinions. Collecting and reasoning about evidence is hard enough. Don't ask serious professionals to prove the validity of their work by making flashy videos about it. It's ignorant and insulting.

An accessible messenger providing entertaining but accurate snippets and overviews is very useful to the sciences or other misunderstood disciplines. It inspires interest in future experts and the young. It raises a more general maybe shallower interest, but also general appreciation and funding. In some cases it’s also quite lucrative to the charismatic expert doing the outreach, I think “A Brief History” paid for decades of Stephen Hawking’s medical care.

The cool work only happens if industry pays when there’s a profit to be had, or when society as a whole pays because it inspires and seems culturally valuable. Someone has to present that case for sponsorship.

Yes good scientific content in the form of accessible documentaries is awesome. What I find debasing is someone pointing to a preposterous bundle of claims from a bad movie saying "this is entertaining! debunk this in a fun way and I will listen!". That's just entitled. The burden of having correct information about reality is on you.