Erich von Däniken has died | Hacker News Reader

Erich von Däniken has died

daniken.com

135 pointsKaibeezy254 comments

https://x.com/vonDaeniken/status/2010314306894828023

He was the first person who introduced me to the idea that if you look at a thing with different mindsets, from different points of view, you can arrive at quite different opinions about the “true” nature of that thing.

At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.

He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.

A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.

Incapable: that happens when the acceptance of an idea implies that their perception of their identity is flawed and has, logically to change in order to adapt for the new reality where the idea has its place. Denial is a protection mechanism, and it is very effective when the reality is too difficult to support as it is. Identity is so essential in our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that most of us won't accept anything that requires it to change. Unless we accept that failure is part of our identity and that this means that our identity sometimes has to evolve. But that has to be done willingly, explicitly (in our minds).

I share your confusion about how ideology clouds judgement but I have a little anecdote.

I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.

If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.

My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.

The N=100 is a 'lazy' (or abstract if you prefer) way to look at it, it doesn't really explain anything.

It's hard to show how to explain the problem just writing about it, but by making them choose one of 3, and then making assumptions about which door will reveal the car, and if it is better to switch. You can easily demonstrate that in two out of three situations it is actually better to switch.

For the 3 case, since 2/3 is relatively close to 1/2, it's hard to build intuition from just a few examples.

The N=100 build intuition very quickly. I disagree that it doesn't explain anything. After playing, people quickly understand that the likelihood that they chose the correct door initially is very small and when all 98 other doors are revealed, the remaining door provides a red flag that their intuition is off.

Note that often I would explain the logic behind switching and still have them not believe me. Their intuition wouldn't be shaken by arguments or even small demonstration. Only when actually playing an the N=100 case would they start to understand.

Why doesn’t it explain anything when it clearly demonstrates the point?

Because that's just repeating a point without explaining why the underlying maths works.

We used to ask job candidates a variation of the door in an infinite wall question [1]. The initial answer of many interviewees is to choose a direction and walk in that way forever, which is understandable, as infinity makes the question weird.

What is more interesting is, even after I pointed out that this answer has a 50% chance of finding the door and I'm looking for a 100% solution, some candidates refused to give it a second thought, didn't change their answer, and insisted that this is the best course of action.

[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3915578/door-in-an-...

Leave it to people in the tech industry to ask interview questions that confused Paul Erdös for days and expect their interviewees to reason through things during an interview.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140413131827/http://www.decisi...

I'd get the Monty Hall problem question right off the bat, but only because I've encountered it before, not because I can naturally reason through it better than Erdös.

The only reason people get confused about the Monty Hall problem is that the problem description rarely if ever makes it clear that the host knows where the car is and deliberately chooses a different door.

It's inconceivable (for example) that Paul Erdos, a world class mathematician, would fail to solve this problem if it were actually communicated clearly.

It is incredibly annoying that in the case where the host doesn't know where the car is but opens a goat door anyway, the probability goes back to 50-50

But if he doesn't know where the car is, how can he be sure that the door he opens is going to have a goat?

The scenario is the host doesn't know which door has the car, opens some random door, and that door happens to have a goat behind it.

If you were in this scenario, your odds of getting the car doesn't change whether you switch or not

That would indeed be annoying, but I doubt it is the case. If you only consider this scenario, it cannot be distinguished by conditional probability from the case that the host knows, and so the math should stay the same.

As usual, the problem is not an incredibly difficult problem, but just a failure to state the problem clearly and correctly.

Try to write a computer program that approximates the probability, and you'll see what I mean.

https://github.com/yen223/monty_fall/blob/master/Monty%20Hal...

The math is contingent on whether you know the host knows or doesn't know where the door with the car is. This is the counterintuitive bit.

Your program shows exactly what I mean: "Impossible" cannot be non-zero, your modified question is not well-defined.

Yes, of course it depends on the host knowing where the goat is, because if he doesn't, the scenario is not well-defined anymore. This is not annoying, this is to be expected (pun intended).

The scenario is well-defined. There's nothing logically impossible about the host not knowing which door has the car, and still opening the goat door.

"Impossible" in the program just refers to cases where the host picks the car door, i.e. the path that we are not on, by the nature of the statement. Feel free to replace the word "impossible" with "ignored" or "conditioned out". The math remains the same.

No, sorry, it is not well-defined. But I should have been clearer. What is not well-defined? Well, the game you are playing. And, without a game, what mathematical question are you even asking?

You cannot just "ignore" or "condition out" the case that there is a car behind the opened door, the game doesn't make any sense anymore then, and what you are measuring then makes no sense anymore with respect to the game. In order to make it well-defined, you need to answer the question what happens in the game when the door with the car is opened.

You can for example play the following game: The contestant picks a door, the host opens one of the other doors, and now the contestant can pick again one of the three doors. If there is a car behind the door the contestant picks, the contestant wins. Note that in this game, the contestant may very well pick the open door. The strategy is now to obviously pick the open door if there is a car behind it, and switch doors if it is not. I am pretty sure, when you simulate this game, you will see that it doesn't matter if the host knows where the car is (and uses this knowledge in an adversarial manner), or not.

The game you seem to want to play instead goes as follows: If the door with the car is opened, the game stops, and nobody wins or loses. Let's call this outcome a draw, and forget about how many times we had a draw in our stats. But you can see now that this is an entirely different game, and it is not strange that the resulting stats are different than for the original game.

Nobody said he can be sure.

Eh, when you think about it, it makes sense.

Original rules (host knows where car is and always opens a door with a goat):

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, and you should stick

- 2/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, and you should switch

Alternative rules (host doesn't know where car is, and may open either the door with the car or a door with a goat)

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should stick

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should switch

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens the door with the car, and you're going to lose whether you stick or switch

So even under the new rules, you still only win 1/3 of the time by consistently sticking. You're just no longer guaranteed that you can win in any given game.

We are conditioning out the case where the host picks the door with a car, so there's only two scenarios of equal probability left. Hence 50-50.

Well yes, if you throw out half of the instances where your original choice was wrong, then the chance your original choice was correct will inevitably go up.

> I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.

Yeah this is the way I found it the easier to understand intuitively

> They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it.

This is me, the logic of Monty Hall Doors does not make sense to me, so luckily I found this one: https://www.rossmanchance.com/applets/2021/montyhall/Monty.h...

After running the process 500 times, the ratio seems insane (using the stay tactic, 67% loss & 33% wins) - it makes me able to accept "that is just how it is then", but absolutely does not explain WHY, because in my mind, once you open the door, the situation resets to 50/50 - so there should be no difference if I stay or switch. The fundamental misunderstanding of statistics is probably what is the problem.

It's funny to observe own mind in this process, and how much of a "struggle" there is to convince one-self that what seems logical and sensible is in-fact a wrong interpretation and can only exists due to lack of understanding.

> My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.

That is so true - before the own idea/concept gets put to test, it's easy to be delusional about how correct your own "idea" is. As long as it is in the vacuum of your own brain, you can keep it protected and shielded from all that nasty truth that tries to bully and beat it.

There is a reason why a lot of coders do not want others to see their code and do a code review on it...

I think in your mind you associate "unknown" strongly with "random" and even "random with equal chances". Just because something is unknown doesn't mean it is random. And if it is random it doesn't mean it is 50/50.

> the logic of Monty Hall Doors does not make sense to me

For me, the core is that you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting it right on your first guess, and nothing can change that. So if you always stick with your original guess, you will win one third of the time.

No no. The thing is, the Monty Hall guy is responding to YOUR choice. So if he has to open a door where you fail, it's a response to what he knows of your choice, so HE knows what YOU chose and is not only revealing the remaining losing choice but also the winning choice. Call it a coin flip except for he always has to call tails.

Therefore your choice can either be cadillac or goat, he cannot choose cadillac and has to show a goat, so the remaining option you DIDN'T highlight is that much more likely to be cadillac because it could've been either, but he doesn't get to pick randomly, he had to show which one was NOT the winning one.

Hence the result. And since it started out as one pick of three, he responds to you and then you respond to the added information by switching and that's where the 66% odds come from: two moves each responding to each other.

How does that contradict what I said? The way the game is set up, one of your choices -- stick or switch -- is guaranteed to win.

Your original door will be correct 1/3 of the time and wrong 2/3 of the time.

Therefore switching will be the winning move 2/3 of the time.

Your explanation isn't wrong, but it's never quite resonated with me because it feels almost like a magic trick than something that follows intuition. Like seeing a magician perform a trick, it doesn't quite convey to me the "why" as much as the "what", and even though I know there's no actual magic, I still feel like I'm left having to figure out what happened on my own.

The idea that finally made it click for me is that Monty has to choose one of the doors to open, and because he knows which door has which thing behind it, he'll never pick the door with the winning prize. That means the fact that he didn't pick the other door is potentially meaningful; unless I picked the right door on my first try, it's guaranteed to be the one he didn't open, because he never opens the right door on his own. His choice communicates meaningful information to me because it's not random, and that part while seemingly obvious gets left implicit in almost every attempt to explain this that I've seen.

Another intuitive way to explain it would be to imagine that the step of opening one door is removed, and instead you're given the option of either sticking with your original door or swapping to all of the other doors and winning if it's any of them. It's much more obvious that it would be a better strategy to swap, and then if you add back the step where he happens to open all of the other doors that aren't what you picked or the right one, it shouldn't change the odds if you're picking all of the other doors. This clarifies why the 100 door case makes it an even better strategy to switch than the 3 door case; you're picking 99 doors and betting that it's behind one. The way people usually describe that formulation still often doesn't seem to explicitly talk about why the sleight of hand that opening 98 of the doors is a red herring though; people always seem to state it as if it's self-evident, and I feel like that misses the whole point of why this is unintuitive in the first place in favor of explaining in a way that clarifies little and only makes sense if you already understand in the first place.

> once you open the door, the situation resets

That's the root cause error of your thinking.

The prizes aren't reshuffled and the host's choice of doors depends on both the player's choice and on information that is hidden to the player. No way you can treat that as a reset.

I remember when I first came across it (someone mentioned it on a business trip) leaving dinner to nip up and write a little random number simulator in Basic on the Z88 that I used for taking notes. Then coming down 15 minutes later" "OMG, you're right"

But what if the car was placed behind one of the doors by aliens? This would be proof that aliens had been visiting and maybe even influencing the production offices of daytime game shows, and possibly even those in prime time. The aliens would have been treated as gods by the producers, forcing them to give away valuable prizes to the contestants to prove their loyalty and worthiness.

Consider the possibilities.

Of course, there may be other explanations.

> I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.

> If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.

That is all way too much work. I draw a decision tree and let them fill in the fractions for each edge leaving a node (2/3 edges result in this outcome 3 nodes later while 1/3 edges result in that outcome 2 nodes later).

If that doesn't work, I'll just give up.

Yeah, but Monty Hall problem is so unintuitive even very smart and logical people has hard time accepting it. Even changing it to thousand doors variant doesn't help.

The monty hall problem is often stated in such a way multiple interpretations are possible. I don’t know how exactly you state the problem, but have you considered you might have stated it wrongly or ambiguously?

Yes.

I have stated, explicitly, at the beginning, that the person opening the doors knows where the prize is, will only open doors without a prize and that the prize doesn't change positions.

This is demonstrated by the fact that when we actually play the game, I write the door number down on a piece of paper before the game starts.

This supposed ambiguity is touted as the key to why the puzzle is so difficult but, in my experience, it makes absolutely no difference.

> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view

Do you really want the answer?

People don't always say what they think and aren't consistent because they may hold multiple conflicting beliefs. This isn't lying or a lack of curiosity. It's the opposite, and perfectly rational.

Actually, if you don't think you have any conflicting beliefs you should think about it harder or seriously question how open-minded you really are.

You can give someone all the evidence that convinced you about something, but it will only convince them if they share enough of your foundational assumptions. At the core of all beliefs lie some assumptions, not facts.

This quickly becomes philosophy, but I encourage you to seek more if you really want this answer. You are pulling on a thread that I promise will bring enlightenment. I wish more people asked this more often and really meant it. It would resolve a lot of pointless conflict.

What I see instead, especially on places like HN or Reddit, is people trying to reassure themselves because they want to settle a question "once and for all" instead of seeking better answers. They want praise for what they "know" and to take a break, but there is no perfect truth, just better answers, and this process never ends.

> the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.

This stops being as relevant when you're put under pressure to make real decisions based on what you believe is true. You are forced to weigh the consequences of the decision, not just what you think might be true. This is a compromise, but I struggle to call this dishonesty.

> At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.

Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?

Was it inability or simply calculation? He made a livelihood out of making up stories about ancient aliens. He was financially motivated to keep telling his stories.

Might be calculation for him. But inability for many of his believers, who had no financial gain.

I think a large part of it is wishful thinking. As a scifi fan, I think it'd be great to find out that we were aliens seeeded on Earth by some advanced civilisation. To weigh up the facts and realise that there's all the evolutionary evidence to show that we did just evolve from fish is a bit more boring.

Interestingly enough, but as a teenager, I classified his stories as sci-fi. And I was absolutely into sci-fi(that was the genre I kept reading right after Fairy tales... yes, Ive read Bible in my early teens as well - nobody asked me to do so) - it made me learn English, as I have read all the ~100 sci-fi books in my language and there was nothing else to read for me.

> To weigh up the facts and realise that there's all the evolutionary evidence to show that we did just evolve from fish is a bit more boring.

Your definition of boring is different than mine. I find the reality of what evidence points at to be awe-inducing!

I watch Cosmos (original or 2.0) and I get goosebumps.

There's no need to make shit up, the universe is wondrous.

Okay, maybe "boring" is the wrong word. But just think how cool it'd be if there were bits of alien technology lying around waiting to be found rather than just a non-rusting lamppost, lines in a desert and a few pyramids?

I've often wondered if he was sincere in his beliefs or just a grifter.

Maybe he was both, at different points in his life.

“Evidence” is often in time overruled by new knowledge and evidence.

Yes, but the main question is into which direction the arrow of causalality points for the main part:

Does an individual trust their image of the world, because it summarizes the evidence well? Or do they grade all evidence based on the image of the world they want to be true?

In reality it has to be of course always a mixture of the two, even for the most reflected person. We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.

IMO the whole thing keeps boiling down to two questions:

1. Do you want to believe or do you want your world image to accurately represent the world as it is, even if there might be no such thing as objective truth in some cases?

2. Are you aware of the breadth of evidence you have (or the lack thereof)? E.g. when I develope software, I encountered grown, adult people who would talk about computers with superstition, as if it was some angry deity that had to be calmed. Now in their world there absolutely is evidence their rituals worked. But their evidence was based on an entirely wrong world model, where they treated a computer as a person, instead of treating it as a totally predictable automaton. Turns out praying doesn't help resolving a network issue, especially not if you click away the message explaining why it doesn't work without reading it.

The von Däniken question fundamentally boils down to: If you have 1 billion pieces of evidence pointing one way and one piece pointing in the way of a fantastic fantasy novel, do you go with the "boring" 1 billion pieces or do you hyper-fixate on the one piece, build a theory that explains it in the most exciting way and then ignore all points where that theory collides with the 1 billion pieces of evidence?

Thank you. This was well-written and made a point I think I needed to see set out in this form.

> We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.

On reading this, it struck me how much of the world we engage with on these terms. And how much of the information soup we live in seems designed to persuade us of things being just so.

It being designed is what also should give away that it could also be designed differently.

People who create, be it artists, designers and engineers can sometimes develope that insight from their daily practise. We create, thus we have a deeper than avarage awareness that the world is created and which factors play into it being this way and not a slightly different (better?) variation on the same theme.

Right. For people who don't know the wealth of evidence we are talking about here, the Egyptians left very detailed records including wages of the people working on the pyramids[1], paintings showing the numbers of people needed to move heavy objects and how they lubricated the sand beneath the skids[2] etc

[1] They weren't slaves, they were salaried workers, and there are records of how much they got paid and how many of them there were.

[2] and the numbers check out when you do the standard "block on an inclined rough plane" thing you learn in 1st year mechanics. Check out https://sites.uwm.edu/nosonovs/2017/11/05/about-djehutihotep... where you can clearly see the pains they have gone to in order to ensure the numbers of workers are accurately portrayed

That’s not an argument against * any * current evidence, only sloppy thinking trying ignore evidence.

What replaces evidence is better evidence, not fairy tales that ignores reality.

And statistically, if you take all knowledge, and look at all the claims that have failed to displace it, you’ll find the vast majority of alternative claims are simply wrong.

I'm saying treat current evidence with care, not as a never changing Truth.

Aliens didn't build the fucking pyramids.

Ok maybe not the fucking pyramids.

Not anything.

Why wouldn't they built anything.

> Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?

Roughly 80% of the planet has an inability to change their mind regarding their religious beliefs.

In reality, there is more evidence of ancient aliens that there is of almost every other religion, and yet the people who follow religion aren't being vilified the way the ancient alien believers are.

I mean, look at your own question - do you routinely ask people (IRL and online) why they can't change their religion based on evidence?

I think you are quite correct to put Däniken in the corner of belief and religion, and not expect followers of his ideas to be open to rational argument by default.

Exactly - that was my point! Why do those followers get so much vitriol but we give actual religions a free pass when they have even less evidence to support their beliefs?

> Roughly 80% of the planet has an inability to change their mind regarding their religious beliefs.

What makes you think so? Most people don't really have strong religious beliefs that they are testing against evidence, I suspect. It's mostly just a way to connect with their communities for most people.

> Most people don't really have strong religious beliefs that they are testing against evidence, I suspect.

Okay, lets go with that: that is still a lower bar than EvD theories, because he at least has some evidence while everyone else has none.

Doesn't matter if the evidence is insufficient, or if the theory has been tested and found to be wanting, what matters is that it's still operating at a higher bar than many of the people on the planet who are not drawing such ire.

> Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?

He wasn't that unwavering. About the iron pillar of Delhi he said in his first book that it doesn't rust and thought this being a proof for alien interference. Later he turned around and said "By now this damn thing is rusting!".

But he never changed his opinion on his basic premise. I guess it's easy to not change your theory if it can't actually be disproved. There are so many unknowns and gaps in history that you have enough space to fit a few ancient aliens in there.

For context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_pillar_of_Delhi

> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view

I've thought about this and the conclusion was:

What you believe you know makes you what you currently are. You can't just believe in a contradictory position. You could believe that you have been proven wrong, which would then change your belief.

Changing your point of view, looking at things from the vantage of someone else with different life experiences and the resulting belief systems would be dishonest at best, and claiming that you are capable of changing your beliefs on a whim is like being able to rip your arm off.

You can, at best, adapt your own belief to encompass theirs with caveats or simply not care about your truths.

> I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.

I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.

My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it, BUT it also means he 100% believes in whatever his current goal is and he's achieved a lot more than I ever will because he's unwavering in his beliefs and goals, whereas I'm always doubting and second guessing.

You should try and and do what the OP is suggesting, i.e. to try and put yourself in your dad's shows and try to see the world the way he sees and understands it. I.e. this type of conversation goes both ways.

Becoming conspiracy theorist yourself is not a way to prevent dangers of conspiracy theorist. It will make the issue worst - instead of one conspiracy theorist, we now have too.

Not being like them is a good life goal.

Often we think someone is 100% sure but they only appear that way to us. Trying to change someone's thoughts by arguing with them never works.

Nasty quarrels might indicate an amount of uncertainty, or an amount of inability to articulate a thought. We often have ideas we don't really know why we have them, so we can help others to try to explain things to us in a way that helps them understand why too.

A "nasty quarrel" requires more than one side, and this other side is also responsible for the quarrel. I think its wise when trying to talk about difficult things to first identify and agree upon the small things you can both agree upon. If a conversation becomes heated it's no longer a conversation and you should get out before it gets worse. If you feel it's leading into fire and can still be salvaged you can then go back to these shared things and start again.

However a real conversation about ideas will also challenge and change your own view of the world. You might find your own ideas changing. People generally find this a psychologically painful process and will subconsciously resist such a movement. Generally we prefer to label the other as different, alien, us vs them. Having a quarrel is therefore even more likely as it means that your own psyche is protected from encounter with the dangerous other. Understanding that this also applies to the person you are talking with can also help reduce tensions and increase empathy. Again, starting from common shared baseline will help.

> I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.

> My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it,

I am not even able to fathom how this is possible; unless someone is trying to convince you to join them in their belief, how on earth does a quarrel arise from differing beliefs?

I'm a lifelong atheist surrounded by religious family (and friends, too, TBH), and the only problem is when they refuse to take subtle hints that I am not interested in reading their book and I have to be blunt with them. And even then, that is not sufficient to start a quarrel!

You're fortunate. Very fortunate.

I've had friends - they really felt like friends at one point - tell me that they don't want to know me anymore when they learned I'm an atheist. One told me that "without God there's no morality", so they can't trust in anything I say. Just like that. One told me that atheists should be branded or marked somehow, so that they can't pose as "good people". To my face. When I mentioned that history knows such policies, and that they almost always lead to massacres, pogroms, and things like the Holocaust, the person didn't see any problem with that. At all.

Beliefs, especially strongly held ones, warp a person and their perception of reality. This influences their actions, and those actions can hit you hard. If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise. Most people agree to "live and let live" in principle, but when it comes to details, it's almost always "but we don't want X or Y in this neighborhood".

You're really fortunate to have only met people who hold beliefs that are not in direct opposition to your continued existence in this world or in their presence. However, you need to be aware that there are beliefs that are more incompatible with yours, and that there are people who hold them - and that you will quarrel (or worse - much worse) when you happen to meet.

Idea + idea2 = quarrel

Is missing out a variable. It's an action. An action e.g. it has been brought up.

Idea + idea2 + action

Merely encountering someone with an idea different to one we hold shouldn't lead to a breakdown in communication. It needs an action to e.g. discuss the idea, and this action is controllable. Most of the time we do not quarrel with people even though they are different than us.

Often we are not the ones who can control this, but we can control our reactions and stop participating in the quarrel should one start. (That's easier said then done as its all emotions by this point!)

There is a growing school of thought in academia and in some radical groups that says that we shouldn't stop participating in quarrels and that we should let our anger out and voice heard. This idea says that any call to understand the other (empathy) is therefore toxic and harmful and that it's a choice which suppresses our important story. (Usually we just say they are impossible to understand and so "other" them, which leads to de-humanisation as only humans can be understood). Often our pain needs recognition but to reject the idea of understanding another seems to lead to a worse world in any reality.

Now whilst to deny understanding is utterly fundamentally wrong in any and all rational belief systems, there is actually some truth to the idea! It will cause pain and effort to understand another. It does weaken one's own ideas and certainty about things. If I try to understand someone who opposes me on some important idea that I have, it will change me somehow. Maybe I will have less attachment to the idea, maybe I will find other ideas, maybe I will reject the idea, maybe I will not. These side effects of understanding can be dangerous.

It's Von Daniken's books that lead me here:

Why do people think funny things. What are the processes to believe things? What are the processes and ideas which keep people from changing their beliefs. What do people really desire? How are people manipulated and how do they manipulate others? How can people in a cult come out of a cult? How do cults work? How do people change the ideas inside them? How do I tell what I believe in? What does "ideology" mean? How can I tell where what I believe in comes from? How can I talk about different ideas with others?

> There is a growing school of thought in academia and in some radical groups that says that we shouldn't stop participating in quarrels and that we should let our anger out and voice heard.

I think the problem is in wanting to convince the other party to change their mind, except that humans untrained in presenting arguments just switch to campaigning instead.

Academia has always been where new ideas are seeded, germinate and flourish; this means that a lot of campaigns for change come from academia. It always has, probably always will.

The problem we have had recently (Moreso in the last 10 years or so) is that academia itself has tried shutting itself off from ideas; it's why there's safe spaces, and why people have been prevented from presenting talks at campuses, etc.

This new approach is resulting in a lot of "Nope, we won't even discuss it, nor will we allow you to discuss it to third parties".

Leading us to be in a thread about von Daniken, making fun of people who have a belief that meets a higher bar for evidence than the clear majority of the world.

The people making fun of the theories aren't even self-aware enough to realise that they interact daily with the rest of humanity who have even wilder beliefs.

> How can I tell where what I believe in comes from?

I believe (hehe) that this is where Cogito Ergo Sum came from.

> I've had friends - they really felt like friends at one point - tell me that they don't want to know me anymore when they learned I'm an atheist. One told me that "without God there's no morality", so they can't trust in anything I say. Just like that. One told me that atheists should be branded or marked somehow, so that they can't pose as "good people".

That doesn't actually lead to a quarrel any more than having a friend saying they want to stop being friends for any other reason.

IOW, if a friend wants to stop being your friend, does the reason matter? I don't argue with people who don't want to be friends anymore (regardless of the reason)

> If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise.

I can certainly see a quarrel arising from that because ... well ... what are you going to do? Stop showing up at family events because your boyfriend is not accepted? Cut off all ties with your family because your boyfriend is not accepted?

This "quarrel", though, is not like a normal quarrel about differing beliefs; this actually has an impact on the ability to remain part of the family.[1]

-----------------------

[1] TBH, though, if it's only the father in this case who objects, simply not showing up at any event he is part of will usually be sufficient to get the rest of the family to pressure him into at least keeping quiet if you do show up, boyfriend in tow.

If the father is willing to keep from having outbursts, that more than sufficient to not quarrel. You don't need to man to believe that it isn't immoral. You don't need him to accept it. You just need him to shut up about it.

> You're really fortunate to have only met people who hold beliefs that are not in direct opposition to your continued existence in this world or in their presence.

What makes you think that?

I'm non-white, grew up in apartheid South Africa; in 2026, even transgenders in first world countries are treated better than my race was in 1986.

If you think systemic discrimination is bad, try living under legislated discrimination.

> However, you need to be aware that there are beliefs that are more incompatible with yours, and that there are people who hold them - and that you will quarrel (or worse - much worse) when you happen to meet.

No, I will not. If they are morally against my existence, let them go vote for laws to that end. I'm not gonna stand there arguing with them about it.

I'm sorry. I assumed too much about you, and I'm a bit ashamed for sounding so patronizing in my previous post. You seem wiser than me, and you're definitely wiser than I was back when it happened: I tried to defend myself. That's how the quarrel happened: I believed that I cared about morality, so I didn't want to just accept the accusation that I'm inherently immoral. That led to a few more shouts than it should; but as your sibling commenter says, at such points emotions tend to run high. I could have just walked away, and that would have been wiser. Somehow, I didn't manage to.

> What makes you think that?

Because you said you're "not even able to fathom how this is possible" - honestly, I still don't quite understand that sentence, especially after what you wrote above. It looks like you're advocating stoicism and disengagement, and I agree that it's a good strategy. But I can't believe you never felt the anger of being perceived through a lens of a belief that makes you into someone you're not - and that you "can't fathom" how that anger can get the better of you, to make you "stand there arguing with them about it". I get that you're able to rein in those emotions and simply walk away from situations like that; but I can't bring myself to believe you never felt that anger at all.

> You don't need him to accept it. You just need him to shut up about it.

Yes, that's rational. It's a way to live on without turning all family meetings into war. But maybe that particular war is worth fighting? Maybe, through countless battles over the Christmas tables, society changes course? Maybe by fighting against the belief that you're something lesser than human, by turning your life into a miserable one, you're paving a way for younger family members or the next generation to live their lives a little better than you could?

I don't know, to be honest. I'm not some activist. But I think I can understand people who decide to "stand there and argue". It's probably less rational and often leads to quarrels, but I'm almost sure that beliefs that are never challenged won't ever be changed. That's why I found your "I can't fathom" line a bit strange; sorry for overreacting :)

> Because you said you're "not even able to fathom how this is possible" - honestly, I still don't quite understand that sentence, especially after what you wrote above.

Look, in context, what I said had a qualifier:

>>> I am not even able to fathom how this is possible; unless someone is trying to convince you to join them in their belief, how on earth does a quarrel arise from differing beliefs?

I am not able to fathom how this is even possible unless one party is trying to change the beliefs of the other party.

I think that's a little less ambiguous, no?

> But maybe that particular war is worth fighting? Maybe, through countless battles over the Christmas tables, society changes course?

Maybe it does, and you just need to keep fighting.

Or (my approach), wait for the older generation to die off; the younger generation has no need to change the minds of the older generation, they just have to wait.

You still end up with the following result:

> next generation to live their lives a little better than you could?

I like my way better[1], but, you know, whatever works for you, works for you.

------------------------------------------

[1] For example, in my entire adult life I have had only two serious (i.e. shouting) arguments with my father, and neither of them had to do with differing beliefs, and now that he is dead I regret even having those two arguments.

He did not approve of my beliefs, but both he and I take a live and let live approach to life. I mean, I'm atheist and I'm happily married to someone who isn't; we have yet (over decades) to have a single argument over religion!

I would say that you are very unlucky. I know people of multiple different religions, and atheists, and agnostics, and people of no particular belief and I have never known anyone to make a comment like that about anyone else.

I know many families whose members follow multiple different religions or none in multiple combinations.

> If a father "100% believes" homosexuals are worse than dirt, and a son firmly believes he loves his boyfriend, that's how a "quarrel" will arise.

Yes, but that is atypical. It most commonly happens either with American evangelicals, or in the context of very conservative societies in certain places (e.g. in multiple African and Asian countries).

American evangelicals seem to have a peculiar obsession with homosexuality as some sort of uniquely bad sin - perhaps to deflect attention from what the Bible and Christian tradition have to say about materialism and wealth. Traditional Christianity is quite non-judgemental and optimistic - e.g. the belief, or at least the hope, at all or almost all of humanity will be redeemed.

> To my face. When I mentioned that history knows such policies, and that they almost always lead to massacres, pogroms, and things like the Holocaust

The Holocaust was carried out by people who had to invent their own religions (their variant of neo-paganism and "positive Christianity") to have religions that could be reconciled with their ideology. Their ideas were more rooted in "racial science" than anything else.

> The Holocaust was carried out by people who had to invent their own religions (their variant of neo-paganism and "positive Christianity") to have religions that could be reconciled with their ideology. Their ideas were more rooted in "racial science" than anything else.

Some of them thought they had to invent or resurrect such religions to sell their movement to the masses, yes. That movement's actual religion was that ideology and racial "science"; it kind of was its own religion. (Not that this is exclusive to nazism / fascism; the same goes for communism.)

> I would say that you are very unlucky.

> or in the context of very conservative societies in certain places (e.g. in multiple African and Asian countries).

Also in a few European ones, I can personally assure you :) It's fortunately (much) less common today than it was 25-30 years ago, but the truth is, everybody everywhere has their own hellhole, and living there could indeed be seen as unlucky. Atheism in a country where 96% of the people adhere to folk Catholicism (outside cities, that would probably be 110%...) is a hard sell.

I think you are very close to explanation. Ideas in human minds can be presented as facts. If you decide that you are happy by some setting - that becomes a fact to you, while in reality that is a belief. The same about depression and sadness - you can get impacted by information you did not knew and would not be impacted if you were in blissful ignorance and some people choose exactly that choice. Some people get psychosis and their mind is hallucinating that they are on fire - that is real to them as what are your experiences, though those also are not based on facts, but serve as an information delivery to your brain.

The whole issue with human minds is that it is not built to deal with scientific facts, but with socium of other people. You can't use facts when operating with society - you have to use symbols, that they will associate with. And I think that the issue is with you(as it is my experience as well) - I can guarantee, that there are people, that will explain to your family members EXACTLY the same ideas, that you are trying to explain to them... and they will agree to that person - and not to you, because you are clearly doing it wrong.

> To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.

From what I know, and please correct me if I am wrong; it relates to fear and cognitive dissonance. First, by creating FUD the perpetrator can cause physical narrow-mindedness within the brain, the amygdala — centre of emotions if you will — takes control which reduces reasoning capabilities. Second, by introducing multiple conflicting viewpoints in that state, you induce what we call cognitive dissonance. The brain is unable to reconcile the two opposing (or even just differing) views. This is a conflict at the circuit level of the brain, and the brain needs to reach a conclusion, and conveniently the conclusion is produced by the perpetrators of fud, those who seek to control/exploit others.

I think, that the people that are criticizing Erich von Däniken are doing so from modern viewpoint. People in his time had very limited POV, mostly because there was not much data, compared to how it is now, but modern people also forget that science is not a religion and it can't be based on beliefs only - it requires evidence and without any such evidence all the ideas has to be thrown out. Also, if there are better explanations - old ones are thrown out as well, because that is how it is in science. Unfortunately, no matter how good and exiting his ideas were as a read, but as a science theory they simply did not pass test of time, however IMO he has earned his place as someone as an example to have wider horizons to look around.

"People in his time"?!? He only died the other day. Until last week was "his time"! And new weird religions / cults / sects like the "Ancient Aliens" one he founded are being born all the time. The world hasn't changed fundamentally since last week, so it's still "his time".

The only place he has earned is as a successful nutjob / scam artist (about on a par with L. Ron Hubbard or Eric Dubay?), as opposed to all the less successful ones.

- most people don't like admitting to having been wrong -- they might not be right in their new viewpoints either

- some people like to preen and moralize, so changing their view is an admission that they had (and therefore have) no moral authority (this overlaps the previous point)

- most people don't like the idea that something everyone knows to be true isn't -- that's conspiracy theory territory, and they know not to go there no matter what

- even where it's not any of the above, significant shifts in opinion are simply uncomfortable

- in specialized cases (e.g., science) people may have a sunk cost fallacy going on. For example, suppose you have a new theory to replace Lambda-CDM: but you'll be wrecking a bunch of researchers' life work if you're right! This is why "science advances one funeral at a time", per Max Planck. We've seen many cases of this.

The main thing I credit EVD with is teaching me disappointment from certain fun tantalizing things not turning out to be true. This prepared me to better cope with the X-Files and Lost TV shows, as well as nuclear fusion research and faster than light space travel :grumpycat:

I remember reading a von Däniken book when I was quite young, 9 or so, I think and being absolutely fascinated. Then after a while I realised it was pretty much all made up and what has stayed with me ever since was my blazing righteous anger that someone could make up a pile of stuff and put it in a book and claim it was true. That feeling has stayed with me far long than anything from the book itself.

Perhaps most of us can assess something like this and decide for ourselves on the available evidence as to its truth and relevance. What the author claims seems, to me at least, a minor issue. I get it that you do not agree. More generally aside from outright lies and pure stories, there are always analogical levels of interpretation. Presumably, if an unbeliever, you're irate at many of the world religions.

Well, I was 9 at the time and it was probably the first "science" book that I had read and got excited about.

And no - never been impressed by any of the major religions - although (possibly influenced by Philip Pullman) I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other...

"...nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..." - Douglas Adams

this is a fashionable sentiment, but as Nietzsche (a man who cannot be accused of having much sympathy for Christianity) pointed out: The notion that a slave, humiliated and crucified, was as worthy of mercy and equal was nothing short of a complete overturning of the moral order of the world. Far from obvious it was radical and subversive. The kind of modern atheist who doesn't see this does so because he has Christian values so deeply in his bones he doesn't even realize it.

Given the prevalence of slavery within the first 1800 years of Christianity's existence, I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved. More credit goes to the Enlightenment.

But the slaves were told that there was an afterlife, and that they had a better chance of going there than rich people. That must have been nice to hear for them.

Yup. Which was why some (probably Nietzsche, but AFAICR several people before him too) called Christianity "a religion for slaves": It's very very useful for elites throughout the ages, from Roman patricians to current techbroligarks, to fob the plebs off with "Your reward will come in the afterlife!"... So they don't make a ruckus about getting any reward for their toil in the present. Or, as Marx (no, not Groucho) put it: "Religion is an opium for the masses"; means the same thing.

> I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved.

We can because there is a difference between introducing a new moral grammar into the world and what people do with it. The claim is not that Christians as people were any more moral or less power hungry than people tend to be, it's that from that point on in world history, they had to be hypocrites, precisely because something had metaphysically changed.

The Enlightenment doesn't stand in contradiction to this, it's the culmination of it, which was most visible in particular among the American abolitionists. Who more than anyone else staked their claims on Christian (and Enlightenment) grounds.

And as a practical point when it comes to today's issues. Pay attention to what the post-Christian secular America looks like. Because unlike the British humanists who thought equality was just common sense, you're going to be in for a wild ride, which Nietzsche did tell us.

>I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other...

As far as I know, what we know as established historical fact is that:

- there indeed was a bloke

- he splintered from being a follower of another more famous bloke at the time who was executed by the romans for becoming too popular with the masses

- he preached the world was about to end (as in, in their listener's lifetime)

- he also pissed off the romans enough to be executed.

Everything else is left to guess!

>>>I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other

There wasn't any such bloke. I mean there was such bloke, but his qualities were completely opposite(Jesus was a violent man) to what he actually was and by various redactions and fusion of stories of initially opposing factions that were fighting over the actual seat of Jesus.

Jesus was a leader of militants(his power was spread not with peaceful words, but with sword and quite violent words - just like modern terrorists do - one of such passage has been slipped through redaction and left in the Bible) of a very violent sect(which itself was lead by John the Baptist), that were terrorizing everyone else(not in open, but when blended among other people, exactly like cult of assassins in Assassin's Creed games) and his capture was a shock and possibly betrayal and apparently those militants for some reasons(Roman military might - obviously) were unable to mount a rescue mission and because of that all the magic stories and Fairy tales, that we know as Bible were invented. You can see development of same myths to failures of modern religious fanatics - the same "magical" explanations why they have failed over and over again.

PS I do not hate Christianity, but I like cold hard Truth more than sweetest and softest Lies.

It's not Philip Pullman, it's living in a Christian society. The Enlightenment growing out of the Reformation meant that all the foundational atheist thinkers had deeply sentimental views of Christianity, which is how you get the Jefferson Bible (yes, a deist), and that Pullman quote and many more like it. "Well if you strip away all the things I don't like, this philosophy is very compelling" is only a conclusion you could come to when you already are predisposed to like the philosophy.

The most obvious problem with this article is that it assumes Von Däniken came up with this idea. Years before "Chariots of the Gods", Peter Kolosimo already had best-selling works discussing ancient aliens.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts

"However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964.

"Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."

Good point. I was introduced to the idea that aliens came to earth long ago and invented humans and built lots of weird monuments through The Mountains of Maddness by H P Lovecraft, written in 1930.

I loved the book (usually, Lovecraft’s work drives me nuts, because adjectives), but I assumed that The Great Old Ones were Cretaceous-era native lifeforms that had basically gone extinct.

He wrote his books at a time, when significant parts of the Earth were still a mystery. I sort of feel envy for that.

Yeah, there was something great about being a child who hasn't bing-read wikipedia for years. Lots of mystery out there. Then you read about the world and you know all this interesting stuff about it but the mystery is gone.

Feels to me that the current popularity of "What if...?"-scenarios of Alternative History may be a substitute. Though those are at least explicitly acknowledged as speculation, not some "Hidden Truth". (In contrast to "Flat Earth", "QAnon", and other recent conspiracy theories.)

Your precedence note is fair but it seems likely the whole "ancient aliens" subject was in the air around that time; pseudohistory has existed as long as history and this particular strand just emerges with the sci-fi boom and particularly the post-war fascination with UFOs.

Von Daniken was obviously just particularly good at pushing his brand of the nonsense; all of those authors though are interesting examples of the sort of anti-academic and conspiracy theorists that have reached their apogee in recent years via social media.

I read von Daniken as a very young kid and loved it. But I read it, and enjoyed it very much, as a science fiction genre. I never bought it, but I admired the effort. And so I thank him for stimulating a child's imagination. Well done Mr. V!

His books are entertaining, I'll give him that. Some of his archaeological interpretations are laughable but now and then he has a head scratcher.

The world is full of "head scratchers". But that makes it more important not just to yell "aliens!", but to exercise scientific curiosity. This is what makes me most angry about his works, he discourages people from trying to work out solutions for mysterious phenomena.

This was the first book that I picked out to buy for myself as a child (I remember pestering my parents for it at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park back in the 70s). I read it over and over and thanks to that, when I later came to stories like the Hebrews wandering the desert in Exodus, it was hard to put the von Däniken nonsense out of my mind.

Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.

Hey, Julian Jaynes! Haven't heard that name in a while. I remember that book fondly, compelling story telling. IMO Richard Dawkins said it best, it's either fucking nuts or fucking genius, no in between.

Exactly - a fun storyteller!

And I watched The Flintstones as a very young kid and loved it. And it deeply influenced how I thought cavemen lived. Well done, Hanna-Barbera!

The problem is that Erich von Däniken's "science fiction" was pseudo-scientific claptrap, which he sold as the truth, that perpetuated harmful cultural stereotypes, was patronizingly racist, also plagiarized French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians", and he never admitted he was wrong despite mountains of indisputable evidence.

At least Hanna-Barbera framed The Flintstones as fiction. Yabba Dabba Doo!

And at least Scooby Doo's whole schtick was that supernaturalism is just creeps wearing rubber masks. Scooby Doobie Doo!

The lesson we should have learnt from Scooby Doo is that most of the world's problems are created by rich old guys trying to protect their money/investment.

> Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians"

Charroux didn't write that one, he was likely influenced by it.

> an earlier French work, The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960), which is likely to have been a direct inspiration for both Charroux and Von Däniken

I think there is often a racist subtext to claims that 'the Egyptians couldn't have built the pyramids'. Why? Because they were Africans?

Geez. “It must be racism!” is almost as bad as “It must be aliens!”

Just peruse the list of great works that Ancient Aliens proponents claim could not have been built by the people who built them. Do they make that claim about the Parthenon? No. Other than Stonehenge, it's all stuff built outside of Western Civilization.

It could be a series of coincidences, or it could be old strains of racist anthropology, briefly suppressed by Boasian Cultural Anthropology, finding a new conspiratorial outlet.

There’s an Ancient Aliens episodes about the Antithykera Mechanism and pyramids in Italy.

https://youtu.be/wY7LXJI8Ago

https://diggingupancientaliens.com/episode-65-europes-only-p...

Careful clicking that YouTube link, my recommend feed is ruined now

I was very naive when I discovered his books as a child in my fathers bookshelf. Luckily my father told me that I should be careful not to take anything as "the truth" from any of Däniken's books. It helped me a lot with keeping the necessary scepticism while still enjoying the books and I was really grateful for this advice.

Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances

1. Can obviously be made

2. Can be made very fast

There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.

If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.

The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.

The reason better toolboxes have felt inside the drawers is you put a drop of oil on the felt, and it will keep the tools rust-free.

It's the other way around. Think about it, how would the oil travel to the rest of the tool that's not touching the felt?

Felt is bad, it wicks away oil from the tool's surface and often absorbs moisture from the air. Tools placed on clean felt will often rust where they touch the felt.

You need to mitigate its wicking and hygroscopic properties by applying lots of oil to it. Use rubber mats instead.

I've never had any tools rust in my toolbox.

The oil migrates around as the tools are taken out and put back in.

Skimming through this item, a couple points I don't see being made:

- If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on.

- Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?

I think a lot of it is based on how little of time most people knew existed in a tangible way. Until the last few centuries you were born into a world where most technologies you use had already been around so long they just might as well have existed forever. And the stories of how any talked about technologies were generally myth, folklore, or completely false. The idea the earth was around for billions of years wasn't really a thing for most cultures. Maybe you believed it was around forever, or that a mythological creation even happened in the 'more recent' past and the earth popped up like it was. The idea their was a beginning a long time ago, but it only started out with the most basic shit (ionized hydrogen mostly) and everything after that is because of an ever increasing entropy gradient is just not an idea that seems to pop into our heads.

I don't see why it would require a "turtles all the way" down logic trap. There would be a few ET civilisations which would develop the long and hard way, but then they could accelerate or seed civilisation elsewhere. A sort of reverse Prime Directive.

Yes it is: If those civilisations could "develop the long and hard way", why couldn't we?

One take on this - those rare few who did the "long and hard way" were not as lazy / stupid / warlike / etc. as us mere humans. And maybe they took 750k years, or some other really long https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HardWorkMontage stuff.

But a related take - if you just move the "seems inexplicable" stuff further away in space and time, then most people magically see it as being less inexplicable.

> Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?

The supernatural beings are a way of explaining a world that is not completely understood. Even today we don't completely understand it but we have dismissed the idea that something intelligent is behind the inner workings of the world around us.

Now if you have supernatural beings it is not quite a big leap from going from supernatural to just technical advanced. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For us modern readers this removes the supernatural part while it keeps them for our ancestors.

I wouldn't call it a random meme. But it was an excellent fit at a time where we started to explore space and could even imagine becoming ancient aliens to other civilizations in the future.

I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.

I’ve known a few people like that, and it had a darker undercurrent: they didn’t disbelieve that, say, the Greek or Roman monuments were built by those civilizations because they viewed those as predecessors of their own, but they considered the pacific or Central/South American cultures inferior and didn’t want to believe they were capable of great engineering.

Beyond the strong whiff of racism, I think there was also this idea that civilization went on a single path (grain, the wheel and domesticated horses/oxen/mules, bronze, iron, guns, steam, etc.) and so anyone which didn’t follow that path was basically developmentally challenged. This definitely did not consider the possibility that not every region had the prerequisites to follow the same path.

My own favorite example of this is how the pyramids (and all the advanced trigonometry required) were built by the Egyptians prior to their discovery of the wheel

> advanced trigonometry

There's a ratio involving pi between the base lengths of the pyramid and its height. This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi.

But, consider a measuring wheel, where you can mark off distances very accurately by counting revolutions of the wheel, say, 1 cubit in diameter (I know, I know, what's a cubit?). Then, if the height is laid out in cubits, the ratio of pi is there while being completely ignorant of it.

But that doesn't explain things if it's true that they hadn't discovered the wheel!

It is as far as I understand only wheeled transportation that was late in Ancient Egypt. They used wheels for pottery before they had wagons.

Most civilizations discovered. No one care about a wheel. The wheel itself is useless. Not everyone discovered the axle though, and even less created roads.

I have responded to a sibling comment with more information or examples. I hate this because I don't care about pyramids or Egypt, but I feel myself compelled to respond, I'm so sorry it's not against you, It's a recent pet peeve.

The pi ratio is strong evidence that a wheel is used somewhere in their surveying tools.

When I was a boy, I asked my mom how the Egyptians made their pyramid foundations straight. Without looking up from her book, she replied "pull a string tight". Then I thought I'd trip her up with how they made the foundation level. Without hesitation she said "dig a trench and fill it with water."

She shoulda been an engineer!

> This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi.

Well if you want to calculate the circumference of earth and know the distance between Alexandria and Syene, where the sun casts no shadow at noon during the summer solstice, you also need to know pi.

No need for pi.

If you know the angle and the distance between the two cities, you can just multiply the distance by [full circle divided by the angle], and that's the circumference.

Even if that were true, it wouldn't disprove the link to racism: Eratosthenes was Hellene, not native Egyptian. He "counts as white"; ancient Egyptians may or may not.

> what's a cubit?

What's an ark?

Discovery of the axles and roads.

The 'wheel' itself was discovered everywhere. Round things are easier to move, but you need an axle to make it useful. And roads or flat terrain to make use of that. Incas had pulley systems, which indicates they could probably have built an axle quite easily too, but had no use for it, because, well, no flat roads.

And even then Northern Manchurians knew about the wheel for sure, and knew about roads, but still used sleds until at least the Russian conquest.

Sorry, I'm quite boring about this, but it bothers me when people talk about 'inventing the wheel' like it was something special. The wheel itself is meh. The axles are what makes it usable, and the roads make it useful.

Roads were also innvented everywhere. There were cultures with flat roads and no wagons. I would say the axle and then the spoked wheel were likely the big deals.

I've heard this claim many times, and yet I remember VD books (and similar ones like Kolosimo's) discussing Prehistoric Europe including cave art and megaliths. The Ancient Aliens TV series does have episodes on Ireland, the Norse and Graeco-Roman mythology.

Even today, these types bring up Baalbek's massive triliths on a regular basis, and state they could not have been built by such classical civilisations.

There you go trying use logic on racism. Of course it's not going to work.

The question isn't whether the ancient aliens framework logically supports racism, since it's false anyway and racists don't care about logic (otherwise etc etc). The question for racists is which frameworks most conveniently provide tidbits for them to distort for their own purposes. No logic, pure association and confirmation bias.

It’s a group of idiosyncratic people so there are not hard guidelines but there’s definitely a hierarchy of who they are more likely to describe as advance civilizations and who they question were capable of major engineering projects. This can bring out really weird stereotypes: I’ve heard people make arguments where they positively describe American Indians as living in harmony with nature, etc. but question the estimated populations, trade networks, etc. for e.g. the Mississippi tribes from what appears to be a mix of “noble savage” mythology and sort of mentally having slotted them into a larger model which made it easier to doubt one detail than reconsider their larger intellectual framework. The “aliens did it” people are far out on that spectrum but less extreme versions aren’t uncommon.

An interesting observation, that racism link. Fills a glaring gap in a sad part of my own family history.

> The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that <my beliefs> did not really matter and would not convince them of anything

> It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize...

And for you, too.

Science the method is pretty damn great. Science the institution is closer to any other agenda-driven information source. If you’re doing first-hand, first-principles science, great. But if you’re doing the “here’s a study...” game, you’re relying on external authority you aren’t equipped to interpret, which, in practice, isn’t so much different from the people who think CNN or Fox News or Ancient Aliens is gospel.

Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe. I guarantee you, it makes sense, once you know enough information (it always does, even if they’re actually insane, that helps it make sense). But to say, ”this person won’t even accept science” and hand wave it off as a “them” problem, emotional religion etc, are the words of a politician, not a scientist.

Asking for evidence isnt a "belief system" its a coming to know things system. Equating a request for scientific rigor, to contrarian ancient aliens is nonsensical.

If someone wants to hold something up as true, its correct to disbelieve it until evidence is provided.

These people don't provide evidence, what they do is show you something cool and then beg the question. "Look at this cool rock in this place it might be hard to get a rock to, really makes you wonder who put it there huh". Literally any dumb science "content producer" is going to be able to get you closer to truth than listening to that bunk.

Not to mention that:

>It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize

>Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe.

Seems like you quoted them having investigated it.

But having done so you call them a politician.

I think the problems with alternate theories such as Ancient Aliens is that they seize upon some examples of evidence (which are typically not great evidence anyway) and build a whole story on top of that. However, they then don't consider the ramifications of that - if ancient aliens did exist, then we should expect to find other sorts of evidence and thus make predictions about them. Of course, without predictions, theories are non-falsifiable and thus worse than useless.

> Asking for evidence isnt a "belief system"

> If someone wants to hold something up as true, its correct to disbelieve it until evidence is provided.

So, a belief system.

> Seems like you quoted them having investigated it.

Asking for evidence isn’t investigating. It’s zero cost to ask for evidence.

Evidence alone doesn’t produce wisdom. It produces cleverness. Feelings and emotion are faster and vaster in terms of information processing, but provides a very low bandwidth output, basically a gut feeling of “good” or “bad”. Emotion isn’t irrational, it’s pre-verbal compression that contains real insight once it’s unpacked. Most people never unpack it, so an outside observer makes the (incorrect) leap from emotional -> irrational.

If you can marry evidence with that unpacked pre-verbal compression, that will be gold. But that requires a bunch of work and soft skills to have a good faith dialectic over time with someone you disagree with.

>So, a belief system.

Nope

>Evidence alone doesn’t produce wisdom. It produces cleverness. Feelings and emotion are faster and vaster in terms of information processing, but provides a very low bandwidth output, basically a gut feeling of “good” or “bad”. Emotion isn’t irrational, it’s pre-verbal compression that contains real insight once it’s unpacked. Most people never unpack it, so an outside observer makes the (incorrect) leap from emotional -> irrational.

Thats a lot of unsubstantiated feels.

The ancient aliens line of thinking is:

Is it possible that Adam and Eve were aliens?

If so, then that means [blah blah blah as if this is now an accepted fact]

No wonder your fam has no critical thinking

EvD is a good illustration of how we were more resilient against crackpots back then.

His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it.

We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine.

But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff.

Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things.

Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories.

Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.

Maybe. On the other hand, it was also harder to find refutations of crackpot theories that the mainstream happened to believe in.

Nowadays the popular mainstream cults openly go against hard data - and nobody bothers...

Witch hunting was popular in Europe for more than 300 years. Last conviction in court in Europe was 1944... The mainstream is much more insane than people are aware of. Modern cargo cults have a lot more evidence going against them than witch hunting ever had (doing statistics about the number of lightning strikes reduced by burning witches wasn't that popular at all).

I think it was a manufactured bestseller. Selling books is a for-profit exercise. I don't think crazy theories are anything new, "new age" beliefs are really a continuous thing since the second great awakening at least. But in the 70s, bookstore chains realized that a certain demographic bought a lot of books, and you no longer could leave all that profit to ill-run independent crystal-selling bookstores just because of some high-minded concern for truth. Give the voracious book buyers the books they want, let the marketplace sort out what's true or not. That was the ethos of the time.

This demographic was called "new age" by the marketers, but almost no one who bought such books called themselves new age.

But people who wrote such books became very aware of the demographic profile too. And while there had certainly been grifter cult leaders before who didn't sincerely believe what they preached, now they realized that they could go straight to profit, just by writing a book. No need for the messy high-intensity "make a cult" step. The bookstores were on their side now.

von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy. He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.

What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent.

Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.

Yes. I stopped reading von Däniken, after there were multiple contradictions on the very first page of the first book I tried.

I like fantasy, but it should be at least a little bit consistent.

Sitchin's biggest defence is that very few people can read cuneiform. Even less than hieroglyphics seemingly. Certainly less than Hebrew, Sanskrit or Greek. That means there aren't a lot of people able to dismiss his translations properly.

This also happens with Mayan script. When the group led by Linda Schele made major leaps in the 70s, to the point where 90% of the glyphs have now been deciphered, scholars mostly considered their meaning settled. That obviously hasn't kept cranks from asserting all kinds of wild ideas, but there are still scholars who dispute the accuracy and meaning of the interpretations.

I heard Däniken speak about 30 years ago, and exchanged a few words with him afterwards. He was a brilliant orator and came across as highly sophisticated. His arguments were contrived and I recognized that even as a child, but he was nothing like the natives of the YouTube era who do it for the likes and memes. He was completely sincere in his own belief of what he said.

He is a great showman in his way. He was far from being the first to write on this subject, but I think he was pretty much the first to popularise it on television.

VD wasn't the original, not even close. Peter Kolosimo had best sellers on the same subject years earlier, as did others.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts

TIL. I remember my parents had von Däniken books. I, on the other hand, was deeply into Isaac Asimov, both his fiction and non-fiction. He was a pretty good debunker.

I read both. I have to admit I was never much of a fan of Asimov's non-fiction or work outside of SF... I could take it or leave it. I do find most of EVD's examples to be ridiculous... The Nazca lines, for example, were clearly never landing strips, for a variety of reasons, although they may have been meant to be seen from above.

What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.

Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.

There's an important difference between facts and truth.

There was a time when I read a stream of articles and blog posts titled something like "I'm a liberal, but I agree with ... <obviously far right thing>" After reading enough of them, I realized the common structure was to state a number of relevant facts, then make a leap across an unstated and unsupported premise, hoping the reader won't notice. The final section would assert the conclusion based on this premise.

von Daniken's work inspired me to travel to Nazca PE and charter an airplane to see the alien landing strips for myself. Certainly a worthwhile trip. I may even have convinced the local guide I was a True Believer, of which I am sure he has encountered his share.

I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations".

It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.

I have always enjoyed bringing in the "you know, the bible could be read very differently if you consider God to be an alien" to certain philosophical conversations I've had with people over the years, ever since reading von Daniken's work.

As you allude to, there are always other explanations.

Nobel-winning author Doris Lessing wrote a novel called Shikasta in 1979 that (to my recollection) is a rewriting of the Old Testament and Earth history from the point of view of an alien community who played the role assigned to the divinities and angels in human myths.

I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.

Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF.

Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.

It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.

It doesn't need aliens. The people would have to encounter such things as the ruins of Jericho (destroyed at the beginning of the new kingdom period), or later cities burned down during the late bronze age collapse. Either could easily represent an extent of destruction incomprehensible to unsophisticated herdsmen. Later it was Greece or even Rome itself, before the area became a part of the empire. It's pretty clear that angelos was something like a courier or mailman, for example, and only later it acquired the mystical meaning.

There are documented cases where aliens weren't needed for that, either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomio_Kivung

>It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.

A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.

It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.

Poe's Law applies.

Are you talking about religion?

Yes. Ancient Aliens, Flerf nonsense, Tartarian nonsense. All religions.

Not particularly.

Flat earth, anti-vax, alt-right -- a significant influencer in these things and others were early trolls ... being trolls.

The fun of keeping a straight face while you say ridiculous things isn't so fun when you see everyone in the presidential administration doing it. People who didn't get the original joke took the bait and ran with it.

I agree. Von Däniken instilled a lot of bad ideas in people's minds. People like to complain about religion, but at least that brings some ethos. Von Däniken's ideas did nothing except create a rift with science.

>People like to complain about religion, but at least that brings some ethos.

It does? In America at least, the dominant religion seems to be teaching a really terrible and harmful ethos. I don't see how Von Däniken's ideas could possibly be worse.

Yesterday, my daughter asked me if it was “a round earth day or a flat earth day” thanks to my habit of providing outlandish explanations for things, often contradicting myself in the course of a single conversation in the process (they’ve come to enjoy trying to poke holes in some absurd explanation I’ve come up with).

That seems like a good game to play with your children. If it teaches them to regard any dubious statement skeptically and use critical thinking to figure out how likely it is to be true, that's a valuable life skill.

I've created table-top RPG campaigns by cobbling together these kinds of wack theories and building a world where they are true.

Obligatory Calvin & Hobbs mention: https://preview.redd.it/quintessential-dad-explanation-v0-p5...

His fairytales were wild, but they train you to see existing things in a new perspective. Debunking the new perspective is what makes you more knowledgeable.

But sometimes you see current reality with a different eye, not necessarily in E.v.D. way and surely not in the establishment's way.

In many ways, I think we've underestimated our ancestors. They may have been more capable than we often give them credit for.

RIP.

If I may share a memory: I still remember visiting Jungfrau Park with my parents on a vacation to Switzerland back in 2005; as a scifi-leaning kid even back then (4th/5th grade), I had a ton of fun in all the different exhibits. IIRC, different wings of the park were dedicated to different mysteries/monuments, so you'd have the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids, Peruvian (Nazca, and my favorite one) desert drawings, ancient Indian flying chariots, etc. A great time, and I'm honestly quite surprised (in retrospect) that my dad chose to go there, given our time-limited schedule. It was also my first time trying Weisswurst in the JP cafetaria (being a Hindu kid growing up in the UAE, I seized every opportunity to try beef and pork when I could lol) -- I'm sure it was fairly mid, but I thought it was fantastic!

If nothing else, it helped me establish some pop cultural 'throughlines' in that I was able to digest (so to speak) other "aliens were here first and they taught us a bunch of things" trope that cropped up later in my life (like Aliens vs. Predators, Prometheus). I can't say for sure, but it might have been my earliest encounter with the Big Question: "Why are we here? Is there a plan?" -- even though I discounted the alien theory pretty young, it was still an exciting way to get started on the subject (and is still fun to me to this day). I suppose a portion of credit for ongoing interest in science fiction is directly attributable to my time at Jungfrau Park :)

Weirdly enough, I was just in Switzerland a couple of months back and we happened to drive by Jungfrau on our way to Lauterbrunnen -- JP is still there, which stirred up the ^ memory, but I learned on the trip that it had been shut down sadly.

Thanks for being a part of such a surreal memory Mr. Daniken.

Graham Hancock's Mentor.

Not really. Von Daniken talks about ancient aliens. Hancock talks about ancient human civilisations.

> Hancock talks about

... a load of made-up absolutely drivel.

Just in case anyone out there was in any doubt whatsoever.

I've read a little of his stuff, but more to the point seen him speak live, and that was enough to quickly tell me he is nothing more than a fantasist and complete fraud.

As a youngster I (the country?) was so excited, entranced for a bit, I read Chariots and Outer Space, stopped at maybe Gold of the Gods? I matured and grew, though I wanted it all to be real, there was little to no progression of the claims and evidence. Like Batboy or all the National Enquirer articles, it was clear it EVD was a crank.

In the 80's he was considered a crackpot and a menace. In 2026 he'd make a fine member of the US government if he was a bit younger. Not much younger as it's a geriatric ward through and through but just a wee bit.

I remember him from 90s TV shows among other similar people. It seemed more like an obscurity but it was interesting to watch. Obviously he highlighted things which just hadn't been fully understood yet. To me it seems that was a time when society still had a healthy relationship to conspiracies, para sciences etc. (Maybe it's true but very much probably not...)

I read Chariot of the Gods when I was young and thought it was great - exciting ideas about how the world isn't quite how it's boringly portrayed. And aliens!

However, I tried re-reading it when I was a bit older and it was just laughably bad. Seemed to be a whole bunch of leading questions and then throwing random assumptions into the mix.

When I was older, I started reading a bunch of Robert Anton Wilson books and was introduced to The Sirius Mystery by Robert K G Temple - now that's a much more serious investigation into Ancient Aliens visiting the Dogon people.

Of course, we should really be tracing back the Ancient Alien theory to Lovecraft's fiction.

Also the guy that was the inspiration for Daniel Jackson in the original Stargate movie.

Rest in ascension.

Most likely his ancient astronaut theory was the inspiration for the entire Stargate franchise. Of course to make the movie believable they had to give Jackson a more academic background than von Däniken had.

He said, he wanted to "ask questions and entertain". I guess he does, but he does not use the scientific method. Also, he does not claim to use the scientific method.

I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now.

Godspeed Erich.

Bio on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken

Notable for "Chariots of the Gods" (1968).

When I was young, I liked his stories & perspectives and it carried some "myth into the world"

When I got older and understood how media industry works, I liked his "product execution & market fit" even more :-)

When I was young and having access to internet (but pre social media) I loved looking into these theories, prompted by Discovery Channel's "Quest for the lost civilization" and stumbling upon these books from the 1970s. It felt like doing research and archaeology on the nascent internet.

I was surprised to see these ideas becoming so mainstream with Ancient Aliens, and then somehow finding overlap with the alt-right, antivax and Covid-doubters. This made me really turn off of taking this seriously.

This dude got famous by polluting the public discourse on archaeology to sell books.

I cannot respect him as an author or thinker, only as a human.

Still easily a seven on the grifting scale from used carpet spruiker to current POTUS.

They look all the same to me.

Fair enough, no shame there, not everyone can tell a hawk from a heronsaw.

Carpet spruikers draw the crowd in to get a punter to buy a ratty old carpet with a backstory. It's a grift but the mark leaves with a carpet, just not a good deal.

Erich is selling the idea of aliens. There are no aliens in truth in his tales, but he is at a least (largely) a true believer (to the best of my knowledge).

Others know from the outset they're lying, misleading, and profiting from vaporware. The promise of better healthcare that doesn't come about, the myth of a better country again, etc.

Luckily there is a category for people like him, and one that is underused. "He was wrong about everything, but he sure was a great writer." Just because somebody paints a pretty picture does not mean that anything they say should be taken seriously.

> It is with great sadness and shock that we must announce that Erich von Däniken passed away on January 10, 2026.

Not sure what is 'shocking' about someone in their 90s passing away. Surely at that point you start expecting it?

Yeah, honestly, if anything, congratulations are in order: if you die in your 90s, you did quite well in the longevity contest. Most people die before their 90th birthday, many long before. Not too many people make it to their 100th birthday.

It’s a general societal expectation to be saddened and shocked by death.

Given how much he knew about the alien tech, youd thik he would use it to be immortal, or at least very long lived.

We haven't had a person witnessing technological decline in their lifetime for probably 400 years or so. It is not surprising that it is a conceptual blind spot, especially for quacks.

:-(

I stumbled upon his work when I was very young and could barely read, but damn, it was the first book that opened my eyes to our crazy world and taught me that our textbooks are just convenient truths.

[flagged]

The Chariots of the gods was impressive piece of work to read when I was a child and it definitely started something that lasts to this day. Although I must admit, Daniken was more of a sensationalist than a serious author. Thanks to him though, I have discovered Sitchin and all his body of work and thanks to him, few other authors - mainly the O'briens. So I guess Daniken did his job after all and got me interested in these topics.

Bummer, who are the aliens to contact now if they want to phone Earth?

Rest in peace, your ideas were good entertainment.

[flagged]

Please don't comment like this on HN, no matter who or what it's about. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A crook less in the world. Good riddance

Eric didn’t die - he just went home.

In regards to the space ship that people see, I've seen photos of some Egyptian pyramid hieroglyphs myself, I hear this often "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.

Read his books as a schoolboy, stopped taking him seriously when in one of his books he reproduced an ancient picture of a skeleton and said “this was /centuries/ before x-rays were discovered. How would they know bone structure without [alien advanced tech]” I kinda laughed and threw away his books. Still, he grifted a good living so props.

They come from above!

I loved his books in junior high. I was into cryptids and aliens UFOs and secret military base conspiracies and stuff like that for a long time. It's like making up sci-fi explanations for the real world.

He's up there riding that chariot now.

It's easy to dismiss the most obvious cases where EvD is wrong

But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss

Archeology by itself is always going to have limitations, and there are vast swatches of history we are almost completely ignorant about

EvD is certainly guilty of taking himself much more seriously than the evidence suggests. But there's always going to be that "what if"

>But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss

Its an unproven hypothesis.

It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about.

When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.

Existence of extra-solar-system planets was an unproven hypothesis until the 90's but of course anyone could take a guess at its probability.

Sure - it was considered a near certainty planets orbited other stars given all that was known about the formation of our solar system.

That said, it's still an extremely low probabilty that life from other systems came and visited our particular rock some time in the past million years (and interacted with humans).

Yes, and the proponents of that hypothesis built tests to prove their hypothesis. Thats good. They never demanded I take it on faith.

Why do you need evidence to write books about a hypotheses you have? Many people do that. And I think he never claimed to know the truth about it, he was just presenting his ideas of how it could be.

You don't have to agree with it. But the lack of evidence doesn't disprove the hypothesis. Yes it doesn't prove it either.

You can write as many books as you like. But if you spend all your energy trying to convince people of your unproven hypothesis, rather than testing and proving that hypothesis, no one has to take you seriously.

Some things can't be tested (easily). There are many string theory scientists that wrote many books about a completely unproven theory. I guess you take them equally seriously.

Sagan comes in with a great quote -

The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).

Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.

This also applies to certain "conspiracies."

In both cases, it's their God of the Gaps.

(Not to be confused with the Boss of the Ross. Or Hermes. Or Nike.)

One of the problems is we do have massive gaps. Mainly because we have no written records from the Stone Age, and barely anything from certain other cultures. Von Däniken exploits that.

Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.

The problem is that does happen in real life. Intelligence services and organised crime work actively to hide their tracks. As do corrupt officials and some of the military.

We live in a society where corruption is rife and ordinary people are largely excluded from most major institutions ... That is the atmosphere that breeds these things.

My favorite way to cut apart those two is to ask: How many people need to keep a secret, how long and how perfectly would they need to succeed, and what motive do they have to do a good job?

That's a fair question, but we do live in a surprisingly secretive society. I think that shifted over a lot during the Cold War period. It became acceptable to hide large sections of public spending from the public.

We also live in a corrupt society and occasionally that emerges as a scandal.

Certain secrets are kept better than others. Now and then real conspiracies do become public knowledge like the Tuskegee Experiment or Scientology's infiltration of parts of the US government.

Around a decade back, I and a bunch of colleagues explored these theories and despite knowing they were all bunkum, the sheer entertainment value they served was gold.

Think of it like Marvel universe stuff.

We'd go on long walks and let our 'what if' imagination run wild.

Weird critique from Sagan, who wrote a bestselling novel based on the idea of contact with extraterrestrials.

The explanation is in the word "novel": it's a fictional book that is explicitly presented as fictional. Fiction means "made up", not claimed to be based on facts.

Like many I also read his and related work as a young child. It's fantastic stories.

Later I also learned that he is a charismatic dude that can also laugh about his work, which is something I will always appreciate in people. I think he believed bits and pieces he wrote or at least found them interesting overall. A lot of it is just also viewing ancient cultures from different angles.

It's very different from people today that turn everything into a cult and is "us vs them".

Something I cannot stop to notice is how a lot of actual science (not pseudo-sience like what Däniken does) have very fringe ideas nowadays. There is that weird "advanced civilization" context that feels like humans will turn into weird "philosophy robots". The whole "they will make themselves robots" with the idea that somehow that brings eternal life when most even more simple machines don't last as long as humans. There is that weird idea that it will be fine to go on generational ships. There is the idea that people will be fine with simply freezing themselves completely abandoning any contact with any human they ever interacted with. Very weird concepts, but somehow they are essentially "aliens must be like that" when empirically... aliens have been drinking, partying and enriching themselves, waged wars, plundered and raped for thousands of years with essentially no sign for change. You have horrible times (middle ages, world wars) and you have good times (post napoleonic times/long peace, post WW2 and times during Pax Romana). People for thousands of years dream of some world, be it mythical creatures or aliens that somehow are just philosophers and scientists.

This seems almost as absurd. Yet there are people that call themselves scientists and believe those things almost considering them for granted. (the whole Kardoshev Scale is essentially fringe science as soon as you consider it anything but a completely arbitrary scale)

But that's not bad. In fact it's good. The whole dreaming up stuff to motivate to explore more is a strong driver for science. Doesn't matter if it's discovering a new continent, dreaming up machines that allow for global communication, or what could lie hidden in a pyramid. The channels on Mars might have been imaginations, but I am certain if that fascination wasn't there astronomy would be a lot poorer.

And while Däniken had a lot of imagination and didn't apply the scientific method I think that he made a lot of people interested in both the stars and ancient cultures.

I really wished that in today's society there would be more space between science, fantasy and what is essentially charlatans, cults, sects and so on.

Being curious can and should exist outside of academics. And disagreeing and questioning things should exist outside of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccers.

And maybe it should be more than some video game or Netflix series lore.

And I mean curiosity that isn't just endless YouTube video watching, but something a bit more active. There is nothing wrong with challenging truths. Like there is nothing wrong with finding good arguments for abstruse ideas (earth being flat or something) to learn something new. Nothing wrong to come up with "science" behind vampires and zombies.

It's just bad that suddenly you wake up in some weird cult and are shunned for thinking a bit out of the box and using imagination. And for not making clear lines and distinctions.

I hate how a lot of that makes people part of groups or something and how they somehow find their way into politics. It's bizarre and given that this seems to be a somewhat new development I think it's also completely unnecessary. Even with "futurists" and scientists the whole "fusion vs fission vs other ways of power generation" is sometimes a bit weird to watch.

I think a bit more imagination would be a good thing in today's world. Viewing things from different, even fantastical angles would be beneficial. Imagining where things could go doesn't have to be left to hypothetical alien civilizations. There was a time when people thought Esperanto would mean that people could all talk to each other on equal footing. There was a time when the US, Europe and Russia were building space stations together. There was a time when national borders seemed to become less important. From today's perspective a lot of these things seem like fever dreams, and it feels like we're heading into the dark ages yet again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226224

DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru's Desert

FYI, Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?" is racist pseudo-scientific claptrap. My Archaeoastronomy professor at the University of Maryland, John B. Carlson, despises it.

It attributes the achievements of ancient non-European civilizations to extraterrestrial visitors, undermining their intelligence and capabilities, promotes speculative theories without empirical evidence, misinterprets artifacts, ignores scientific consensus, perpetuates harmful cultural stereotypes, and plagiarizes French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy

>Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary[1] or multidisciplinary[2] study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures".[3] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.[4][5] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.[6]

A Brief History of the Center for Archaeoastronomy

https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html

DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]

Archaeoastronomy was one of the most interesting courses I took at uni, and professor Carlson was extremely enthusiastic about it. It really opened my mind to how smart and motivated ancient people were, not at all like our stereotypes from "The Flintstones" and "Chariots of the Gods?".

For example, The Anasazi Indians made significant astronomical observations that they integrated into their architecture and cultural practices. They tracked solar and lunar cycles, aligning their buildings and ceremonial sites with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes. A fascinating example is the "Sun Dagger" at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, where they used sunlight and shadow patterns on petroglyphs to mark important times of the year.

They deserve an enormous about of credit for what they achieved without all our received technology, and left behind for us to reverse engineer.

https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-as...

https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/su...

It's disappointing when people reflexively attribute ancient achievements like that to religion (or aliens), when it's actually hard objective observation based science that deserves credit!

>[then vixen99 took issue at my use of "FYI" and tried to argue that we should respect irrational and racist opinions by framing proven objective facts as opinions, just to be fair to loonies: "How about IMO rather than FYI ? We can make up our own minds."]

DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]

Sometimes (and often) pseudoscientific bullshit is just objectively wrong, and you'd have to be completely out of your mind, or just trolling, to "make up your own mind" to believe it.

No sane flat earthers in this day and age actually believe the earth is flat, or deserve to have their presumed beliefs respected or even humored, because they're just being contrarian and trolling for attention, so it's perfectly valid to say to them "FYI, the Earth is not flat."

I refuse to couch my firm disbelief that the Earth is flat as an opinion that might possibly be wrong, by saying "IMO, the Earth is not flat." Flat Earthers (also Young Earthers) certainly aren't couching their crazy beliefs as opinions, so don't deserve it in return.

"Chariots of the Gods?" is also that objectively wrong: there is no possible universe in which its claims are true. It's all based on historically ignorant Argument from Incredulity and inherently racist assumptions. In the 50th anniversary edition, von Däniken refused to address, admit, or correct any of the many widely proven errors in the book that made him so much money and fame, so he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

Believing in pseudoscientific claptrap like Homeopathy, or the objectively false stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark is just as ridiculous. They're physically and mathematically and logically and practically impossible. So it's also fine to say "FYI it's biblical fiction, and the Earth is definitely not 6000 years old, and you absolutely can not fit and feed and clean that many animals in a wooden ark." It's not my opinion, it's objective information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc

To pretend otherwise feels like humoring a small child who still believes in Santa Claus.

The Morning of the Magicians was written by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, not Charroux.

Didn't Carl Sagan (no stranger to selling books) pretty much stomp von Däniken's "theory" into cornmeal well before the turn of the century?

Belief in aliens and UFOs was popular in the 1970's. Looking back on it now, it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was. Maybe it was the high lead content in everything...

Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common since everyone is expected to carry a digital camera with them all the time (in their phones). Similar for Loch Ness etc.

But it's not like people don't like their outlandish theories anymore. Alas, they've become very politicised, too.

To give an example that's hopefully not too polarising: many people like to blame inflation on greed.

> Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common

Now it's mostly drawn down to explaining people what sensor and perspective glitches are.

UFO phenomenon peaked with TV and Movies of 1950s. There is no other better explanation for UFO than influence of mass media on human minds, where some of them could not distinguish reality and what they saw on screen.

> it's amazing to me how gullible everyone was

I have some bad news for you.

Yeah, I know what you mean! I tried looking up "gullible" in the dictionary, and it was censored!

Don't believe me: do your own research.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com