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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

Not picking on you, more on this kind if comment.

I think it is easy to be snide about fields like archaeology when you come from a field of absolutisms and proofs, but what else are they supposed to do with gaps in knowledge? We don't have to approach CS work wondering if the 1s and 0s we found were naturally occurring, or put there by some level of intelligent being. Our field in entirely of human construction.

The extension of this attitude leads to situations where Talib is berating a Classics professor for there being 'no data to back up her claim'! As if we can't study anything without data, or we should ignore history until there is something for a mathematician to work with on it.

Perhaps we should poke fun at the physicists who talk about 'dark matter' in the same way.

What a boring world it would be without shifting knowledge of the known and unknown.

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Honestly, I feel like "ritual use" makes for a good placeholder. Cliché is better than creativity, in this instance.

Everyone knows "ritual objects" means stuff without known/obvious use. We know that people's stuff is often hard to explain, with context. This captures it.

Also, a lot of what people do is ritual. We may not see our culture this way, but it's often a good description.

What's a credit card signature? What's a baseball trophy, fidget spinner or star ears figurine?

> Everyone knows "ritual objects" means stuff without known/obvious use

How to distinguish between "for ritual use (for real)" vs. "for ritual use (nudge, nudge, wink wink)"?

Why not say "we don't know yet", instead? Like a normal person.

Because we don’t know if anything from archeology is “for ritual use (for real).” Sometimes people just do odd stuff because it’s cool. Mount Rushmore should make you wonder about giant ancient statues.

In 10,000 years people might be looking a remnants of Christ the Redeemer statue and think it’s clearly for ritual use. But we know it isn’t for ‘ritual use (for real)’ so someone making such an obvious leap would be wrong, thus making other such seemingly obvious leaps could just as easily be wrong.

I would think that Christ the Redeemer would be a good example of something that is largely for ritual use

What specific rituals would you you say it was built for?

Christian deity worship

I understand your point, but that’s not a specific ritual.

Sacramental wine is created for a specific ritual, houses of warship are made for many rituals but it’s easy to pick one of them as an example. But you can’t point to a specific example here because that’s not what it was built for.

To be clear people have weddings for example at all kinds of interesting buildings, but only some of them where built for that reason. This might seem trivial but it is a meaningful distinction otherwise essentially anything interesting becomes a ritual object.

I do see your point too; it could very much be argued that it’s not for ritual use per se, but it’s debatable, and not a good example of something that’s certainly not for ritual use, which is how the commenter was using it

> we don’t know if anything from archeology is “for ritual use (for real).”

I apologize for being unable resist thinking of a counterexample any time someone makes a generalization. Would household utensils found in a sealed burial chamber be a clear case of ritual use for real, or did dead people in ancient times put them to some practical use we haven't identified?

I do think people getting buried in clothing qualifies as ritualistic when the body was presented for an open casket funeral.

However, people still regularly get buried with their wedding rings or similar such items. Do you consider that behavior ritualistic, or just sentimental?

> Do you consider that behavior ritualistic, or just sentimental?

If you squint a little is a bit of overlap in the definitions of those words. I think that’s where the practice lies.

Sentimental: A: marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism

B: resulting from feeling rather than reason or thought

Ritual: 1: the established form for a ceremony specifically : the order of words prescribed for a religious ceremony

2A: ritual observance specifically : a system of rites

B: a ceremonial act or action

C: an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary

That’s fair.

I can’t help but point out that “if you squint a little” is grounds for a great deal of debate. It’s exactly the kind of thinking that makes some sort of “ritual object (for real)” hard to distinguish even when actually living in the culture in question.

Touché!

Mount Rushmore is a good example.

Ancestral leaders, mythical heroes, apocryphal stories. When we describe the cult of a dead Pharaoh of living roman emperor, we're quite comfortable using terms like "cult," "rite," and such. When describing contemporary culture, we call it a political monument, a cultural heritage symbol or a national monument. To future archeology, it's all the same. Washington can be described in the same terms Nefertiti and the reverse. Visitors to the statue are pilgrims. Events taking place there are "performed rites."

It's not wrong describe constitutional judges as a priests endowed with mysterious abilities to commune with spirits of the past to gain knowledge of constitutional mystery. These rites are not that different from the oracle of Delphi.

Why/how isn't Christ the Redeemer a "ritual object." It's a statue of a god worshipped extensively by the people who live in Rio. It has artistic, religious & cultural meaning. Every day, millions of people cross themselves, say prayers, take mass or perform other christian rites. Why is Christ the Redeemer different to the Sphinx or Jupiter?

You can replace "ritual object" with "cultural object."

If we want to use cultural object then sure but saying ritual object implies something.

Suggesting the Kaaba in Mecca is the same category of thing as a giant ball of yarn roadside attraction misses a great deal of context.

Similarly the Supreme Court isn’t really different than any other aspect of government. They have their rituals, but the court had no problem adapting to COVID restrictions and having everyone work remotely.

I once read a great article on HN which I now can't find, which linked Skinner's superstitious pigeons with the development of human technology.

As told by this article, the Burke and Wills expedition in Australia encountered friendly aboriginals who shared with them a grain called nardoo which they ritually prepared. The preparation was convoluted, with many steps which seemed superfluous. After relations broke down, the party attempted to prepare and consume the nardoo as they had observed but quickly succumbed to illness and death.

It turns out that nardoo is extremely toxic without being processed in a very specific way. To Burke and Wills this process looked like a religious ritual. Perhaps many of the steps in the preparation were pointless, but the superstition of the aboriginals in doing it exactly this way was vital because a small change in the process could lead to illness.

We definitely still see this sort of superstition in Western cooking today, Adam Ragusea does a lot of fun mythbusting in this area.

Similar to theories on why Judaism forbids eating shellfish and pork, potentially pointing to a history of death from spoiled shellfish and pork, thus leading to a religious doctrine to avoid them.

On the other hand "I don't know" is a valid, and (should be) an acceptable answer.

'ritual use' is code for, I don't have a clue what practical use this thing could have.

This isn't about known v unknown, it's about being intellectually honest and admitting the unknown.

I can’t know is what’s lacking from the zeitgeist. Too many people say I don’t know which implies they can. No, often it is can’t know.

Really?

What is the meaning of life? Where did the universe come from?

Some of the most interesting questions are unanswerable / don't have a correct answer.

In the field of archaeology there generally isn't the absolute 'can't know' though. Until the Rosetta stone came along we didn't know what various hieroglyphs meant. But the hypothetical existence, however remote of another Rosetta stone means we can know the answer to these various questions.

"I can't know" is good shorthand for "this cannot be known with precision, given available information."

Good scientists discuss and, when possible, quantify uncertainty.

Is it good shorthand? Seems as flawed as hypothecating ritual use.

Again if you don't know something, just say you don't know. If something can't be known, hypothecate, fine, but be honest about your ability to know.

Good scientists should surely be precise and intellectually honest at minimum.

Yes, it's good shorthand.

> But the hypothetical existence, however remote of another Rosetta stone means we can know the answer to these various questions.

Partially flawed logic here aside, a Rosetta stone needs to be qualified in this case. We most likely (almost definitely) cannot know whether these tools at these sites were made and used by hominins or monkeys without time travel, as the sites themselves have been processed and additional discoveries likely eliminated as a result of the destruction of the sites. A Rosetta stone in this setting would be a recorded observation by hominins that lived in the time of themselves making and using these tools at every site that is at question, made in a format we could interpret, because anything else leaves open the possibility that at least one of them, and thus many other sites, were made by monkeys.

Recovering this Rosetta stone, or its equivalent, is so unlikely that can’t is the better answer.

I disagree that it's flawed logic.

It is possible to know, we just don't. You for example are presupposing that no technology will come along that will eg allow us to detect fingerprints, or tooth marks in bones or nuts found nearby. You're also presupposing that no new sites will come to light.

If anyone postulated the existence of the Rosetta stone before it's discovery, do you think anyone would have said it's existence was in any way likely?

It’s flawed logic because you are collapsing the idea that you can imagine it with the idea that it can happen. Whether or not it can happen is unknowable, i.e. can’t be known, which is the point you were refuting.

I gave 2 concrete examples. Are both of those impossible?

> Whether or not it can happen is unknowable, i.e. can’t be known, which is the point you were refuting.

If I play the lottery, it is unknowable whether I will ever win, it can't be known. That doesn't mean I will never win the lottery. The possibility of me winning the lottery is independent of possibility of me knowing whether I'm going to win. Which is kind of the point.

But eventually I might win the lottery, and the unknowable question of whether I will win the lottery will have a concrete answer. So by definition, it was never unknowable to start with!

But you can't know something you've never personally experienced. You're collapsing that which you can experience with that which you can't and assuming that because there are things unknown that are possible to experience they are the same as things that are unknown that you can't experience. That's a very different type of knowing.

It is certainly more accurate to say that one may believe in something to be true, but one can't know.

I was personally amused by the GP’s joke about the absurdity of there being any bright lines between different hominid species.

And I was also amused by your quip about the laziness of the dark matter explanation for gravity we don’t understand.

IMHO there is a place for humor here as long as it’s on topic.

Just my 2c.

I liked the joke, but I had to pick on one of the several similar comments... and picked this one

People, including knowledgeable physicists and astronomers talk about about dark matter all the time, and with good reason. Let's make theories but be upfront about their shortcomings, especially if they're funny.

> We don't have to approach CS work wondering if the 1s and 0s we found were naturally occurring, or put there by some level of intelligent being. Our field in entirely of human construction.

Well, in hardware engineering and on the lower levels of software you may well have to keep it in mind:

https://community.hiveeyes.org/t/soft-errors-caused-by-singl...

> what else are they supposed to do with gaps in knowledge?

Not saying anything about it, or saying "I don't know what that's about" sound like OK choices to me.

Having been in a position where I would maintain archaic software, I can tell you there certainly are gaps in knowledge in CS as well.

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