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Comment by atwrk | Hacker News Reader

It usually is prudent to assume that professionals in foreign fields aren't idiots; that includes archeology and their knowledge of the existance of bonfires. Just skimming the paper for a few seconds makes the reasoning of the researchers pretty clear.

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As an outsider, you're best off waiting to hear the consensus of a field, rather than grabbing an arbitrary study and trying to evaluate its quality.

It's hard to spot the difference between a good paper and a charlatan who carefully paints a picture that supports his claim or even outright fabricates data, unless you've read dozens or hundreds of papers in the field and know the lay of the land on who tends to be reliable and who are the well known cranks who have been publishing academic fan fiction for decades.

ok, by what consensus was the "bonfire" conclusion reached?

if the original claim is assumed bogus, why is the HN dismissal assumed true?

I'm not assuming either claim is bogus or legit. I'm saying trying to divine the legitimacy of a study without much context beyond a handful of "Alice says X but Bob says Y" is a fool's errand. On any "X/not X" topic one side is probably going to be correct, but not necessarily for any good reason.

we have an overcomplicated, never seen before, explanation involving a short structure of two short logs joined together for an unknown purpose that nobody could explain. Too short to be a building, too big to be a tool (Is this a 1mx1m house, a prehistoric walmart? a doll house? the earliest proof of a christian cross in the planet?) The structure somehow managed to survive for an awful lot of time, and was dated by a strange indirect method. If the sand is old, the wood is old (and the people sunbathing in the beach is also old).

This is explanation 1.

I proposed a much more simple explanation, that explains the notches, and also the position of the pieces, and also why the logs didn't root; and also a reasonable purpose for this structure that does not depend on extraordinary claims. This particular structure can be also easily replicated today

This is explanation 2

One of this explanations can be published on Nature. One is more probable than the other. One, or none, of this explanations are correct

I keep seeing people claiming that explanation 1 is correct "because experts are right, because they are experts (and know better)". A circular reasoning known in logic as fallacy of appeal to authority. Check the definition if you think that is used here incorrectly.

Nope, this is not an acceptable proof of anything

"You can't be right because, who do you think that you are, jackass?" is also an equally ludicrous response. Sorry If I broke your little Indiana Jones heart. Who do you assume that I am is not relevant. (LOL, you don't even know me).

I see the experts proposing that as there is a notch, it must be an imaginary rope, glue or whatever to join the logs, to support their narrative. My explanation does not rely on hypothetical proofs like an imaginary rope (that lets admit it, nobody has found)

Chop marks on firewood are expected, but don't imply necessarily "Tell Nature that they were trying to build a boudoir".

The fallacy of appeal to authority (or argument from authority) is referring to cases where the authority status is unrelated to the field of the argument. It is not a fallacy to assign higher credence to a statement of an expert in the relevant field relative to outsider with no relevant expertise.

I once read an article relating to farming practices which evoked from me reaction similar to yours, those smartypants archeologists are surely imagining entire worlds on the basis of small piece of insignificant broken metal. I read the entire paper just to prove myself I was right, and reading the forensic methods used for corroborating the thesis was very effective humbling lesson

> The fallacy of appeal to authority is referring to cases where the authority status is unrelated to the field of the argument.

This is called "appeal to false authority" fallacy. A member of this family (but not the only member)

> It is not a fallacy to assign higher credence to a statement of an expert in the relevant field relative to outsider with no relevant expertise.

Wrong. It depends on context. Check the definition again, is wider than you think.

Yes, but I'm a programmer.

Indeed; the simple thinking you apply to sort some numbers, or to understand a brutally simple logic such as a programming language spec, gives you incredible insight into all fields of human endeavour, past and present.

Making a linked list is a lot like processing a lidar scan of a jungle canopy for signs of ruins, if you think about it.

Am I being serious? I have no idea.

On a somewhat related note - I highly recommend visiting the Mayan ruins at the Coba archaelogical site. It has the tallest Mayan pyramid on the Yucatan peninsula, with half of it (the inaccessible rear) still inundated by dense jungle. A few tips: if you don't want to opt for a guided tour, prepare to turn down several pointed offers at the entrance. Also, there are small rickshaws for transportation - they will inflate the distances involved to get you to hire one - if you can take a few hours total of walking including breaks you don't need their services. Quite a place! Less squeaky clean than Chichen Itza.

to be fair, programmers are experts in logs

The number of programmer problems I by reading logs make me skeptical of that

Especially endeavours like wrestling. Try it sometime.

The fact you think programming is about numbers shows you have no idea what programming is.

The fact is, programming at a high level means analyzing thousands of dimensions of information and flattening them out into something executable by a dumb machine.

We are literally expert at becoming experts.

For any given data set there are a number of possible interpretations. Is that notch natural? They say yes, but I'm sure others in the field disagree as well.

He didn't say programming is about numbers.

His claim was that programming is a simple kind of thinking. He gives two representative examples:

* The consideration of sorting algorithms (which in all fairness _is_ a staple in teaching algorithms), and

* The use of simple logic - such is representative of programming language specs.

I'd say that this is a fair summary - real life tends to be a lot more complicated that the problems faced by most programmers.

Even more brutally: he is aiming quite high, a lot of programming is the minor stitching together of APIs without making too big of a mess.

Few programmers ever seriously actually need to analyse thousands of dimensions of information - and I'd say that it is a safe bet that the ones who do are probably using numbers.

To "We are literally expert at becoming experts.", I'd reply with https://xkcd.com/1112/

Perhaps I should reword my original comment. Here's the same meaning, expressed differently:

"Software engineers often have an unjustified belief that they are intuitive experts in fields in which they have no training or experience."

Including, very frequently, understanding written text.

The arrogance of this statement is wild.

Surely you refer to this: https://xkcd.com/1831/

Programmer's hubris?

Prudent yes, but also, since it's science, challenging should always be an option. A lot research on e.g. female burials were done by male researchers who had male point-of-views, so they interpreted someone buried with a load of weaponry as male, while the actual science showed - later on - it was a woman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birka_grave_Bj_581)

> challenging should always be an option.

By someone else in the field, not by some jackass online.

Oh, the irony.

I may be a jackass, but I’m not making claims about things I don’t know about.

> It usually is prudent to assume that professionals in foreign fields aren't idiots

No ones presuming idiocy, more dishonesty.

What makes a better paper? Bonfire or "Earliest carpenters"

Cynicism's as bad a tool for judging research as arrogance.

Bonfires aren't renowned for leaving tooling marks, they're not just saying it was done kind of side claim and moving on, they're presenting the case for them appearing to be evidence of 'earliest carpenters'.

Off topic but I've been thinking about the difference in how logic works for programmers, engineers, and lawyers. A programmer can build a complicated logical thing and it'll work reliably. An engine can do that too but it takes a lot of effort to make it reliable. If a lawyer tries that it won't work. Because legal facts are to uncertain and the law conflicts with itself.

to be fair, having such a giant jump between this discovery and the previous earliest log structure discovered incite to be cautious. There was a similar case with superconductivity few weeks ago, where the cautious were right against the researchers.

There is a lot more money to be made if you claim to have the secret formula for superconductivity, than discovering some evidence of ancient wooden tools/structure.

But did the professionals consider that it might be aliens?

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