Just want to say thanks for this excellent comment. Out of curiosity, would you be up for sharing more about your own research? I always wanted to be an archaeologist as a kid; wound up becoming an historian almost by accident instead.
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email: breen85 [at] gmail [dot] com
Pitts is probably known to HN readership for his early work on neural networks which put him in dialogue with people like Claude Shannon. It's fascinating to see how much that early world of 1940s/50s era computer researchers overlapped with people literally cutting into animal brains (not to mention experimenting on their own via psychedelics and the like).
That’s almost too good to be true! Never has a name been more apt. It’s sort of recursive - like the telos of his name was to give rise to the guy who came up with “Telos.”
To my surprise, he said yes. But it was done in a very le Carré-esque style. My professor had an interview with MI6 which he thought he bombed, and then didn't hear back from them, confirming his assumption... until he got a completely out-of-the blue job offer from an obscure UK government agency that involved lots of travel to Norwegian fisheries. He told me with a smile that it wasn't until he turned down the offer that he realized that he had gotten the MI6 gig, but he failed the final test!
"The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all has vanished; in every deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there: of London, of England, of the World, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were they of adamant), only slower. The mysterious River of Existence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the former Billow with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it? Where! Now this Book of Boswell's, this is precisely a revocation of the edict of Destiny; so that Time shall not utterly, not so soon by several centuries, have dominion over us. A little row of Naphtha-lamps, with its line of Naphtha-light, burns clear and holy through the dead Night of the Past: they who are gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed, though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that little miraculously lamplit Pathway; shedding its feebler and feebler twilight into the boundless dark Oblivion, for all that our Johnson touched has become illuminated for us: on which miraculous little Pathway we can still travel, and see wonders."
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/animal-pa...
By the way, on the off chance that anyone reading this was involved in or has a friend or family member involved in this kind of work, please let me know if you think they might want to talk to me! I'm currently interviewing people. Contact info in my profile.
Hanson here appears to be backing up his claim with three hyperlinks. One thing that troubles me about rationalist-affiliated writing is that it tends to rest on what looks, at first glance, like a decent evidence base, but this evidence often breaks down under a little scrutiny. For example:
• Hanson's first link is to a recent National Geographic article that summarizes an archaeology finding from Bronze Age China. The summary is, IMO, misleading in one key respect. It calls the find "astonishing" because "parts" of the site "date back 4,300 years, nearly 2,000 years before the oldest section of the Great Wall—and 500 years before Chinese civilization took root on the Central Plains." The Great Wall reference is a non sequitur: it's a bit like saying that a find from the Old Kingdom of Egypt is astonishing because it dates back to two thousand years before the building of a Roman aqueduct. There's no real connection, and it's not at all news that agricultural civilizations existed in China circa 2300 BCE. Whether we want to call these societies "Chinese civilization" or not is debatable. But this finding, while really interesting and cool, is very different from what Hanson seems to be reading it as -- which is to say, as evidence for the belief that future discoveries might yield signs of "advanced civilizations" which far predate the Bronze Age as it's currently imagined. After all, in 2300 BCE, written records and urbanized societies already existed in a fairly large swathe of Eurasia.
• His second link is simply to the Wikipedia page for Göbekli Tepe. Which is a totally fascinating site, I agree. It certainly does have unique features, such as the megalithic carvings. But again, it is not evidence of an entirely unknown "advanced" civilization; instead, the people who built Göbekli Tepe clearly fit into the existing archaeological record relating to the Neolithic Near East. We've known for some time that early agricultural societies were emerging in the fertile crescent around the same time as this site. What's fascinating about this site is that it appears to predate agriculture in the region. However, it is thought to fit into a transitional stage ("Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in sequence to wild wheat found on Karaca Dağ 30 km [20 mi] away from the site, suggesting that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated"). So again, IMO this has nothing to do with his claim about "lost" civilizations which don't fit into our existing chronology.
• The final link is to a Nature write-up from two years ago relating to a contested claim about when humans arrived in the Americas. Again, this has nothing to do with evidence for an "advanced civilization" that has previously not been discovered.
All three of these links reference really interesting and important work which I very much hope continues to be funded and elaborated on. I'm convinced that there are incredible mysteries in store in the future, especially in the field of underwater archaeology. Yet to my reading, none of these reports relate to phenomena that scholars "confidently predicted would never be found." Any archaeologist or historian with a sense of humility will gladly admit that there are a huge number of unknowns in the historical record. None of this can be leveraged as a basis for the existence of "lost advanced civilizations" (by which he appears to mean agricultural or otherwise technologically-advanced civilization that far predate the Agricultural Revolution as its currently understood, and which were forgotten after some kind of hypothetical period of decline).
For that, you need what Hanson waves away: actual archaeological or historical evidence.
At some point I should make a collection of all the kid's scribbles I've seen in archives. I remember one in the Huntington Library that was a contemporary copy of John Donne poems, written in beautiful script, but interspersed with a 4-year-olds scribbles of faces and animals via quill pen. It was hilarious.
I also love Darwin's kids drawings on the back of his "Origin of Species" manuscript: http://theappendix.net/posts/2014/02/darwins-children-drew-v...
That said - 2017 was, in retrospect, a pretty easy time to visit Iran, and I wouldn't risk it now given the events of the last few months. But I very much hope to be able to go back.
I can confirm what several others here are saying - Tehran is a cosmopolitan, fascinating city, and Iranians are wonderful, on the whole. Some of the biggest surprises for me were
1) the religious and cultural pluralism on display - I saw Zoroastrian temples, synagogues, and plenty of churches (with the prominent exception of Bahá'i, who are forced to live in the shadows). Not to mention that the vast majority of Iranians I talked to about religion were on the atheist-agnostic spectrum, although they participate in religious holidays and customs in much the same way that my lapsed Catholic family did when I was growing up.
2) How much Iranians like American culture, and how connected they are to it by friends and family who live in the US. I knew this from before, of course, but it was surreal to be, say, talking to an older couple in a tiny provincial village and end up discussing their favorite taquerias in Orange County (that really happened to me). Or the kids in a mall who insisted on taking a bunch of selfies with me when they found out I was from the US.
Anyway, I found the whole trip to be extraordinary and came away from it convinced that, on the level of culture and society if not our current governments, Americans and Iranians are natural allies. I hope for a future where that can happen.
At the risk of being pedantic, I wrote an entire post about how this is completely wrong, tracing the origins of the error back to a confused Victorian writer:
https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2018/08/opium-or-cucumber-de...
The issue isn't so much that AI has replaced essay writing. It's that it has the potential to create convincing (but fundamentally nonsensical/illogical) replicas of academic essays, which have the potential to make an already difficult job of assessment even harder (somewhat analogous to the problem of deepfakes).
By the way, I'm currently thinking about writing something on this topic; if anyone has any thoughts please get in touch. Contact info in my profile.
Nick Wilding's discovery of a forged Galileo manuscript is another fun example of this type of research: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/a-very-rare-bo...
“M[argaret] says that you have ‘grown up.' I wonder - I suppose I would be said to have ‘grown up’ too - respectably working at a desk from 9 to 5:30, doing some teaching, married and with young, and so on. But is it in us really to alter after our 20s? I think not in fundamentals. I am sure that I shall go to my grave with my shoes untied, my trousers unpressed, my hair overdue for a cut, and probably imperfectly shaven. I shall still leave undone those things which I ought to have done — and shall still feel unhappy and guilty about it.”
"After the burial the Scythians cleanse themselves as follows: they anoint and wash their heads and, for their bodies, set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover these over with wool mats; then, in the space so enclosed to the best of their ability, they make a pit in the center beneath the poles and the mats and throw red-hot stones into it. . . . the Scythians then take the seed of this κάνναβις (kannabis) and, crawling into the tents, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath. This serves them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water."
What's especially fascinating to me is that Herodotus wrote that account circa 440 BCE, within a few decades of when this find has been dated, and his "Scythians" were probably part of a larger cultural group of Indo-European nomads stretching to what is now Western China.
"In 2001, the renegade statistician Leo Breiman described 'two cultures' of using statistical models 'to reach conclusions from data.' The first 'assumes that the data are generated by a given stochastic data model.' The second 'uses algorithmic models and treats the data mechanisms as unknown.' This essay sketches the diverse sources of this second algorithmic culture, one stemming more from an engineering culture of predictive utility than from a scientific culture of truth."
As an historian, I was also interested by the part in the conclusion that drew a parallel between recent conceptual shifts among historians of science and data scientists.* Plus I just think it's cool that historians are now starting to really dig into the intellectual history of machine learning in the same way that they study, say, the history of biology or physics.
*This passage: "For at least three decades, professional historians of science have pushed against a vision of science modeled on theoretical physics; we now celebrate the diverse forms of knowledge focused on the careful empirical study of particular things. Exponents of data-focused computational science have a sur- prisingly similar evolution. Just as history of science embraced the study of the particular as it disconnected from a Cold War prioritizing of theory, the data sciences moved beyond the aggregates of mathematical statistics to draw upon granular data sets to characterize particular things—individual people, diseases, films. In a key manifesto celebrating the 'unreasonable effectivenessof data,' three Google researchers argued in terms that echo humanist denun- ciations of reductionist knowledge: “sciences that involve human beings rather than elementary particles have proven more resistant to elegant mathematics.” Something else is needed. 'Perhaps when it comes to natural language proces- sing and related fields, we’re doomed to complex theories that will never have the elegance of physics equations. But if that’s so, we should...embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effective- ness of data.'"
The idea of taking a pill to cure a disease did exist; it would’ve been called a “specific.” Pills were handmade but were fairly common based on what I’ve seen, although cordials, electuaries, and other drinkables predominated.
One of the more interesting examples is Robert Boyle's list of "desiderata" for future scientific discoveries which includes entries like "Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams" and "Freedom from Necessity of much Sleeping exemplify’d by the Operations of Tea and what happens in Mad-Men."
[1] https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/46...