A fire 2,200 years ago preserved moment in Iron Age, down to a gold earring

> Even comments looked down as misguided by mainstream academics can be substantial

They still get voted down fairly uniformly regardless…acceptance of that which we cannot change…

The short answer is that I comment because I enjoy it, not because I feel any sort of moral obligation to correct people. I'm also not talking about the specific, reasoned viewpoints that come from people like Hossenfelder who are deeply familiar with consensus ideas and simply disagree with them. Those are often the best people to talk to!

I've found that correcting certain other kinds of people usually isn't worth anyone's time though. Writing up long corrections 1) often comes across as rude or presumptuous 2) takes a lot of effort 3) is highly repetitive (the same sorts of misunderstandings come up consistently) and 4) isn't very fun

You can argue these are because I'm bad at communication and some other way of reaching people would be more effective. That's probably true.

However, it's just plain hard to write academically informed information that's also individualized to a person who may not have any of the relevant background knowledge.

Let's explore that idea a bit more, because I want to emphasize some examples and (hopefully) illustrate that different things need different approaches and knowledge, not all of which I have relevant expertise in.

One set of common misunderstandings stem from a lack of familiarity with the past decades / centuries of archaeological research. This is entirely understandable (not everyone is an archaeologist/anthropologist), but it means that explaining a lot of the context that they're missing. Imagine someone who's only ever read about Babbage asking where all the gears and shafts in a modern computer are. Sure, I can give them a hand-wavy explanation "we don't need them anymore because we have better ways of doing things", but getting into the details of how and why gets very long, very quickly.

An example of this is Thor heyerdahl of kon-tiki fame, a popular person to discuss whose views ultimately stem directly from 19th century hyperdiffusionist thought. Most people bringing him up aren't intending to bring that up, but in doing so they tend to incorporate a lot of his assumptions in their understanding that make understanding modern narratives difficult. "Correcting" that involves dissecting that weird mixture of unconscious preconceptions and addressing the huge semantic gulf that's developed over the years.

Another example in the same vein is just the whole idea of Roman collapse encoded in Gibbon's Rise and Fall, which continues to define popular perceptions of the end of the empire. Entire bookshelves have been written by much better authors than me addressing his shortcomings.

Do I write yet another short dismissal or a longer (yet fatally flawed) breakdown of my own? Is responding to Gibbon's shortcomings appropriate if the person I'm responding to doesn't actually know or fully agree with Gibbon, they've just partially adopted some of his ideas through cultural osmosis? I don't have an answer.

Then you have the people who are starting from preconceived ideas and are obstinate about staying there. This is where I'd put Hancock and unfortunately, you can't reason someone out of a position they're holding for emotional reasons by simply providing better info.

There are entire journal issues dedicated to just correcting Hancock's books and analyzing why modern evidence and methodologies don't support his ideas. Hancock himself operates under an assumption that critiques and corrections are simply "the academy" keeping him down.

Personally, I don't really care about Hancock himself being wrong. What I do care about is the impact he has on his audience and the popularization of his ivory tower mafia conspiracy. One of the most important relationships archaeologists/anthropologists have with the public is trust. The field needs the public to trust that researchers are not professional looters looking to gain monetarily. They need the public to be willing to aid researchers with fieldwork (e.g. permits, interviews, land use). They need the public to trust the information they produce even as it changes, because otherwise what's the point of research?

I'm of the opinion that Hancock is poisonous to all of that based on my personal experiences. You can disagree.

Another thing I want to draw attention to is the idea of the "mainstream" though. Archaeology and anthropology are not like mathematics. It's rarely obvious when one idea is "more correct", whatever that means. "Academic circle-jerk" in the sense of there being one single, homogenous school of thought largely doesn't exist. Everyone from grad school onwards is heavily incentivized to critique others harshly outside their in-group. It's not that Hossenfelders don't exist, it's that nearly everyone is one. So yes, I fully agree that not everything is black and white.