this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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But I mean nothing Graham Hancock says is that damaging. He suggests that there really was an ancient Atlantis type civilization, which has been suggested by thousands of people including Plato. No one who listens to him talk is actually gonna be swayed against their beliefs one way or the other
Plato did not suggest ancient Atlantis existed. He was very clear that he was illustrating a hypothetical "great society" to discuss his views on effective and beneficent government.
When he discussed it sinking it was a divine punishment from the gods of Olympus because they had strayed from a righteous path. All of it is meant to be a parable.
I mean that's our interpretation of a translation of something said thousands of years ago. But if they want to they can choose to believe what they want. IMO an ancient island sinking due to gods is no different than saying "high tech civ nuked itself out of existense" but with less context. I'm not saying this really happened, but its not like its impossible, just extraordinarily unlikely to be true.
I'm not sure if you're arguing that it being fictional is an interpretation or that its demise from the ire of the Gods is an interpretation.
If it's the former, you are incorrect. The single best primary source being his own protege and student Aristotle who also makes it clear the whole thing is didactic invention. (There are debates that some individual events within the story are inspired by actual events in Egypt and Athens, but its existence is never presented as fact. The entire idea that this was some historical account came mostly from a judge writing his own history books in the 19th century.)
This is also not debatable due to translation. It's Plato. The best scholars of all time in both language and history have studied this, literally for centuries. There is not any serious or scholarly debate about his intentions with this story. And multiple, equally capable translations of Aristotle corroborate that.
If you're talking about the destruction of Atlantis, it's been too long for me to argue that specifically, but the idea that it was divine punishment is the prevailing view of that story.
Even if all the scholars think it wasn't literal doesn't mean he didn't mean it literally, that could just be how we have been interpreting it
Plato wasn’t writing in some long-dead obscure language that we only have vague translations of, it was Greek. It’s not a matter of interpretation.
You can't even intrepret my English correctly, how can we assume we know what was going through some dudes head several thousand years ago?? Also I'd like to see where Plato wrote "I made it all up about Atlantis" cause AFAIK we just assumed this is the case
Communication isn't what you say, it's what the other person hears.
My brother in Saint Jerome, the best minds in history have been nitpicking Plato's works for centuries. There are libraries filled with commentaries of his works. Of course, they may be all wrong /s
PS: Saint Jerome is the patron of translator.
And for centuries we thought Troy was a myth made up by Homer until we found that shit. The fact that people act like we can make no mistakes and know everything already pisses me off. Way to kill the intrigue of ancient life.
We make lots of mistakes. But shit like this about super races is a tier below "Aliens made this".
But like that's at least interesting, more so than "we crawled out of the woods ~10k years ago, invented everything, end of story" which feels... like it can't be true to me. We have been functionally the same for ~200k years, we didn't do anything in 190k years??
it's basically just that we needed writing to really start building up stockpiles of knowledge and build upon things, and we didn't start really permanently writing things down until we needed bookkeeping for tax reasons, which wasn't necessary until we fucked up by inventing civilization.
Like seriously, everything we know in the modern world may very well stem from our ancestors in the fertile crescent wanting to brew beer and bake bread, it's so fucking funny.
Well our best guess now place farming starting like 12k years ago, which falls in line with the timeframe of Atlantis. Like I get what you're saying but it doesn't necessarily follow that there was definitely no civilization before the fertile crescent, its just very unlikely and extremely difficult to prove.
It’s damaging because it adds doubt to any kind of scientific consensus.
“They” don’t want you to know that vaccines are dangerous.
“They” are only pushing chemo for big pharma.
“They” don’t want to admit that this was where ancient civilizations had some global empire.
It’s the same kind of attitude of “fantastical claim you can believe if you just dismiss all the evidence that you don’t like”
And that is very damaging because it further erodes understanding of the scientific method.
A slight distrust in government is healthy I think
Distrusting the government is not the same thing as believing baseless gibberish just because it disagrees with science that has been used to inform government decisions.
Anyone else remember when Joe Rogan was a harmless comedian?
I remember when he was a fuckin' gameshow host.
I was just talking about this the other day. Absolutely incredible.
Same with Trump!
The belief in the existence of a super-race (or whatever term Hancock uses) is dubious. While the idea on its own may seem harmless, it opens the door for racist idealogies. Everything has to be taken in context, and crackpot archeologists have been making this argument for ages in order to justify later arguments for eugenics.
I know it may appear that Hancock questioning the established historians and "big archeology" is above suspicion, but it is done in an unambiguously dishonest way. He refuses to acknowledge sound logical arguments put forth by multiple well-respected sources and hand waves things away as common sense. Essentially, he is frustrating because his arguments muddy the waters of logical discussions and introduce doubt in a community that certainly does not get paid enough for this shit.
He never talks about a super race
The survivors of the cataclysm that brought their advanced knowledge to the ancient peoples is the super race.
Right, cause super race is when people travel and share knowledge
Yes, if those people are technologically so advanced as to be indistinguishable from wizards. In Graham Hancocks mythology, these people brought the secrets of agriculture and advanced maths to indigenous peoples around the world. A lot of his evidence for this comes from ancient religious texts and artifacts. So, if these people are so advanced that they are worshiped by the natives I think it's fair to say he is describing a super race.
Not only that, according to his lore they also had psionic powers and could make stuff levitate.
Wonder if they were friends with the lost civilization on Mars (yes, he also believes this)...
If you believe Edgar Cayce then this is fact, but then you have to believe in channeling and spirit and all kinds of kooky shit. But who really knows anyway?
Sure techno wizards sound cool AF. Still don't see how this is a super race when its just people who travel to other places after their civilization gets flushed. If we collapse and I move to south america am I a "super race" or did I just move a bit lol
South America has the equivalent level of technology to wherever you come from so no. You wouldn't be different enough to change any civilizational paradigms. For a less strawmanny example, if you moved to another country tomorrow and revealed the secrets to clean, unlimited power and used techniques and methods to do so that were far outside of our current understanding of physics then maybe you would be.