Challenges to the credibility of two recent Netflix documentaries
wsj.com
wsj.com
Some of them are probably exactly what they convey themselves as (relatively unbiased, informative, etc.), but if you are not already an expert in the topic, you can't tell the difference between those ones and the ones that are basically propaganda.
Made us want to visit the Scablands in Eastern Washington, which we didn't even know existed.
It's worth a watch if nothing else. Ultimately, nothing in the documentary is going to change your life but it is very interesting all the same.
The response from Graham Hancock is an interesting read.
I don't know about you, but I don't really trust Netflix to consistently find the line between documentaries that are honest purveyors of truth vs. ideological cheerleaders.
Yes, it's impossible to correctly classify all video productions, and you won't ever get a guarantee that everything said in a "documentary" is correct, but labelling clear examples of pseudo-science as just that will slightly improve the situation, it won't make it worse.
I will just say that the problem lies in what you think is "clear" vs. what the person/group doing the labeling thinks is "clear". That determination is usually anything but "clear".
Scientific community has a pretty strong consensus that this is not science. It's pretty clear cut.
We're not even talking about cancelling it, just about showing the contextual information that the information presented is in a stark conflict with the scientific consensus.
Indeed, it's Netflix who is doing it. And has been always doing it. It's in a way a strawman to discuss whether they should be doing it or not, because they've been always evaluating what they're distributing. They do have to make calls on what is Nazi propaganda and what isn't. It's possible that they got it wrong a couple of times, but it doesn't seem to be a systemic problem in the case of Nazis.
The push here is whether they should make a better job at labelling or not.
> Sometimes it's obvious that there is no consensus (yet).
So, do you think there's no scientific consensus on Ancient Apocalypse being pseudo science?
In what ways would labelling it as pseudo-science on Netflix make the world a worse place?
You seem to forget that Netflix already makes a wrong call by labelling "Ancient Apocalypse" as a "documentary".
No one is mistaking that as a documentary but he is still able to insert a lot of his biases into it.
A decent filter is the conspiracy test. The stronger the claim of a cover-up, the more scepticism is warranted.
>The series was produced by ITN Productions and released by Netflix on 10 November 2022.[8][9] Hancock's son Sean Hancock is "senior manager of unscripted originals" at Netflix.[8]
(from Wikipedia, but I have had it from other sources before)
These are two different cases; Cave of Bones is a case of scientists that are arguing, there seem to be a lot of questions about the science but we will see. Hancock is a fantasist who has fabricated a fictional narrative.
That’s not how truth works. The documentaries may be accurate or inaccurate, but the documentary’s claims being unpopular has no bearing on either.
I could see all of this being a person of science and seeing all of the ugly aspects of academia. I'm not sure the average viewer will pick up on these things. It's irresponsible to publish without better context.
I do give the creators credit for having the scientists speak and have a lot of camera time. It allows for these judgments to be made. If they hid behind narration and drone shots it would be much more difficult to pick up on these things.
It's edutainment, but the edu is silent.
There is no “consensus” in the scientific method. I’m going to assume all of the above is propaganda!
If you don’t follow basic research and knowledge that largely undermines your hypothesis, you are likely to create an experiment that fails to account for the understood confounding factor that your hypothesis ignores.
That's not consensus though, that's existing prior results, eg things that actually happened.
But there is consensus on how to use the scientific method, and sometimes the evidence accumulated with that method mostly agree with a specific part of the hypothesis space, in which case the consensus is to call that part the consensus
1. Ask a question
2. Do research
3. Construct a hypothesis
4. Test the hypothesis with experimentation
5. Analyze data and draw conclusions
6. Communicate the results
That is how science should be done.
Here is how science is often done:
1. Assess what questions will attract grant money
2. Do research about those topics
3. Construct a hypothesis that supports the approved narrative
4. Test the hypothesis
5. Analyze data selectively and draw conclusions that support the narrative
6. Communicate the results
7. Apply for more grant money
On the consumer side, people want entertainment and interesting. Much of reality and its corners are interesting but there’s often a high barrier of entry in terms of prior knowledge and absorptive capacity overall to find the interesting bits and probe them. As such, information has to be conveyed to a general audience’s ability to understand things and often the nuanced interesting bits are lost. Many things just aren’t spectacularly interesting on a daily basis to any life changing degree.
Even outside the general audience, even science struggles with incentive for truth. Much research published these days is targeted around publishing papers and maintaining certain metrics to be considered relevant and drive future work (their livelihood). Science is a long twisted road with many failures and we don’t make it practical to travel. So people come up with incremental often very weak publications just to put food on the table. Occasionally a few go beyond publishing semi-useful to nearly useless results and go out and forge data or manipulate methodology in ways to achieve certain conclusions. It happens all the time. Combine that with the ever growing reproducibility crisis and while I give certain publication platforms more credit than a documentary, I certainly don’t put most as useful or in many cases even that credible. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just the way things are in our institutions.
And with the internet we have a platform for anyone to spew anything they want as truth. We have people who have a lot of incentives to put misinformation out there to their benefit. Businesses and their marketing/propaganda arms are at the forefront. Governments around the world do it. And now we have automated and widely available technology to produce all sorts of somewhat believable information.
These issues have always existed in our society of free speech but competition and economic incentives are becoming clearer for many in the value of lying over truth telling or at least attempts at truth telling. There’s just so much value to be had in manipulating information out there.
Now there’s still value in understanding or trying to understand truth. If you understand things you have a competitive advantage, but you also tend to have more advantage if you exclusively understand truth, so teaching others how to distinguish nonsense or presenting them with truths you discover is often putting oneself at a competitive disadvantage. So the more we pressure people and normalize and accept these pressures everywhere, we shouldn’t be surprised to see complete and utter trash information everywhere we look. And it’s only going to get worse.