Next month Graham Hancock is getting a splashy eight-episode Netflix series to present his false claim that a lost Atlantis-like civilization was destroyed by a comet at the end of the last Ice Age. The series is dishonestly framed around the notion of Hancock as a truth-teller locked in battle wih a blinkered “academia,” a favorite theme of Hancock’s since his Fingerprints of the Gods phase. Hancock will be appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast on the day of release to promote the series, in which Rogan also appears. I imagine I [Colavito] will have something to say about the show when it debuts on Nov. 11.
Kinda horrifying. On the plus side, no involvement of PNAS or NPR, but, yeah, it does give the impression that this sort of Netflix experience is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the pseudoscience media.
Googling Graham Hancock and Joe Rogan leads to a bunch of links. I was amused to see that one of them was a link to a podcast where they are joined by Michael Shermer, that notorious believer in ghosts. Maybe Brian Wansink and Michael Walker were unavailable for this particular media exposure opportunity.
Some googling also turned up this revealing review from 2013 on a site called Mysterious Universe (“brings you the latest news and podcasts covering the strange, extraordinary, weird, wonderful and everything in between”):
Yet another cable television show dedicated to examining the paranormal and the unexplained is set to debut next week with Joe Rogan Questions Everything on the channel that brought us Sharknado and Sharktopus, SyFy. Joe Rogan Questions Everything joins a showvalanche of shows about the unexplained on cable. Rogan, a comedian, UFC commentator, podcaster, and former host of Fear Factor, intends to bring an element of comedy to his studies of fringe subjects where he not only seeks eye-witness accounts, but opinions from the scientific community. The show will tackle a different topic each week, and will feature guest appearances from Rogan’s comedian friends as they attempt to question everything. Among the topics we know will be covered are Bigfoot, UFOs, and what amounts to cyborgs – and we’re not talking about the female MMA fighter Cris “Cyborg” Santos, who some would say is hard to explain in her own right. . . .
“I have always been fascinated by fringe subjects since I was a little boy; whether it’s UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, or just weird fringe subjects where there are believers and non-believers. I’m an open minded person, and although I’m fascinated by these things, I’m also very skeptical, but if I had to guess, I’d say most of it is bullshit,” Rogan said in a recent interview about the show.
This kidding/not-kidding thing reminds me of the complicated interaction between hacks and true believers in the worlds of journalism, junk science, and political conspiracy theories. For example, when Freakonomics flirted with climate change denial, there was a similar two-step where they’re either supporting a fringe theory or just-asking-questions. And even more so for the 2020 election deniers who pushed all sorts of ridiculous arguments. As I wrote at the time, another thing that’s going on here, I think, is the tradition in this country of celebrating lawyers and advocates who can vigorously argue a case in spite of the facts. I always wonder how much these people really believe the theories they are pushing, but I guess part of the gimmick is they can promote their ideas and also describe them as mostly bullshit at the same time. It’s win-win. And anyone who seriously questions them and threatens the flow of media adulation can be labeled as a killjoy Stasi terrorist.
I guess you’ve identified a new role for ChatGPT. It seems capable today to take untruths and argue them eloquently. The fact that it can also present truths, though, distinguishes it from some of the crowd you cite.
I don’t see why you are horrified by this idea (other than that the idea of a catastrophe on such a scale is horrifying). Evidence for such a catastrophe at around that time accumulates more and more each year.
Regarding Atlantis, there definitely could have been some world-spanning civilization that has only survived in garbled myths. The disturbing thing is people who think they know what happened for sure 10,000 years ago. The same people also believe Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon just because it says so in lots of books.
Sorry, that was meant as a reply to Andrew who said “kinda horrufying”.
It’s fascinating to see the limits of someone’s critical thinking when leaving the area of their expertise so starkly stated.
You say that evidence for a (specific?) catastrophe continues to be found. But I could’ve said the same about power posing or any of the nudgelords–you’re dealing with phenomena so ill-defined, so nebulous that you’re firmly in the territory of motivated reasoning and the garden of forking paths. The underlying belief that such a thing must exist (some global catastrophe or some true effect of power posing) lets you fit the data to the story, fill in the dots with all of the twists and curves.
Similarly, the “definitely could have been some world-spanning civiliation that has only survived in garbled myths” entails a sense that you can’t be wrong in your belief that it’s practically a statement of faith. It also requires a severe flattening of who talks about Atlantis when. Plato wrote about Atlantis for a specific purpose, so did Ignatius Donnelly in the nineteenth century. The latter is much more influential on Hancock’s ideas. As a product of its time (the late 1800s), though, Donnelly’s work seeks to enshrine Europeans as the natural heirs to civilization and naturalize global imperialism. Again, someone who knew the outlines to the story they wanted to tell (“it’s good, actually, to have Europeans run global empires”) and used data however they could to support it.
I’d also note that ‘someone who thinks they know what happened for sure 10,000 years ago’ is a better descriptor for Hancock than for most archaeologists, who know what data we have but also know its limitations.
I’m not even aware of any controversy that something catastrophic happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
If there are Younger Dryas “deniers” I’d like to read/hear what they have to say though. It isn’t horrifying to me.
The question being investigated now is what caused the catastrophe. Apparently Graham Hancock thinks it was a comet but I haven’t watched this series.
Ok, well I couldn’t find anyone denying the Younger Dryas happened and was a time of catastrophic climate change, at least for North America and Europe.
So I’d guess you aren’t familiar enough with the topic to figure out that is what I referred to. Anyone with even a passing familiarity knows the Plato account claims a catastrophe 9000 years before Solon, which corresponds to the end of the YD pretty much spot on.
I also watched part of the show and the cause of the catastrophe doesn’t play much of a role (so far). Rather its telling people about similarities between the myths and megalithic sites found all over the world along with some anomalous dates.
There is no game changing evidence here but I don’t see what is so horrifying about speculating there was some bronze/iron age level seafaring civilization that got destroyed.
(I’ll reply to this because I am not getting a reply button to your comments)
You’re right, there is no controversy about the Younger Dryas existing and it was a pretty sudden climatic downturn in Europe and North America, less clear outside of those upper latitudes as you note. Your use of catastrophe led me to think you were talking specifically about the comet strike idea, which tends to have loud claims of being found followed by quieter debunkings (hence my allusion to nudgelords).
If you want to go the route of “I believe the details of Plato’s account but poke fun at the idea of Caesar crossing the Rubicon”, your 9000 years before Solon’s time does roughly correspond to the end of the YD… but then what is the catastrophe it refers to? The YD had a very sudden onset (a climatic downturn within the timescale of a human lifetime), but it lasted for a thousand years. Is the end of the YD what destroyed Atlantis?
But more broadly, this is bickering about details to avoid talking about the actual meat of the argument: you want to speculate that there’s a 14,000-13,000 year old bronze/iron age civilization that was destroyed by the YD (by whatever mechanism). What evidence would you expect/what place should they be?
The YD was a sudden climatic downturn, yes. Conditions quickly went back to those of the last glacial maximum. But the conditions beforehand were not nearly as warm as the Holocene. During the Bolling-Allerod interstadial (which gets abruptly ended by the YD), Magdalenians are hunting reindeer in the south of France, European tundra was being replaced by boreal forests.
In Southwest Asia, you have the Natufian culture, where you get evidence for people becoming sedentary and hunting gazelles/gathering and processing cereals (archaeologists find grindstones, stone foundations for houses, plant and animal remains that indicate people were living at the site year-round). The Late Natufian is associated with more mobility, though it’s unclear whether this culture change occurs before the YD begins.
People were definitely in North America but it still looked very different from today–a viable ice-free corridor doesn’t open up through modern-day Canada until around the same time that the YD starts. Again, the evidence we do have from North American sites before the YD look like people who hunted animals and ate a wide variety of foraged foods (for example, the coprolites from Paisley Cave, OR). In South America, Monte Verde (in modern-day Chile) has extremely good preservation of a site ~15,000 years ago: wooden foundations remain, hearths, evidence for a wide variety of plant foods and marine foods. People definitely had the ability to sail, so you’re right there.
All of this looks different from what you find at bronze/iron age sites when those develop much later. Nor do these sites have evidence for metalworking, agriculture, cities, writing…
I guess to sum up: speculation is totally fine–you need to have ideas to test! But you have to interact with data at some point. And if you start deciding that your model is too good to be inconvenienced by data that don’t fit, then you start getting into the realm of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
This even leaves off Hancock’s idea (maybe not in this series, but definitely in his books) that remnants of the lost civilization deliver technology to everyone else around the world after this disaster.
“And if you start deciding that your model is too good to be inconvenienced by data that don’t fit, then you start getting into the realm of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.”
Jesse–this is Anonid00d’s modus operandi. He thinks colonoscopies cause colorectal cancer, COVID vaccines led to excess mortality, deaths from COVID early in the pandemic were due to vitamin-C deficiency, among many other insane, non-evidence-based conspiracies. He’s a deeply troubled person.
They got flooded by the catastrophic sea level rise. So submerged near the coasts and largely destroyed. Those who survived were largely the “barbarians” who knew how to live outside cities. The theory conveniently predicts destruction of much of the evidence and relies on indirect stuff like similar myths and construction practices.
It is a vague theory but consistent with the evidence we have. Throw it in the denominator of Bayes rule with the rest. You cannot get an accurate posterior probability without including all these. Don’t be horrified by people who want it investigated.
Have you ever looked into the evidence that it happened? It isn’t mentioned in his commentaries nor by Cicero, only 100 years later and involves a supernatural pipe player.
Anoneuoid –
> They got flooded by the catastrophic sea level rise. So submerged near the coasts and largely destroyed.
Weren’t you recently arguing that sea level rise can’t happen fast enough to be an existential threat to community?
Nope. You (and unanon) have serious reading comprehension issues. Please stop responding to my posts with your strawmen.
Enough! Please move on, thank you. To think that we have a comment thread devoted to the idea that Atlantis was a real thing . . . c’mon. This is contrarianism being taken to a ridiculous extreme. I guess the plus is that this is now considered contrarianism. Back when I was a kid, you had serious people claiming that Noah’s ark, Moses crossing the Red Sea, etc., were real.
Anoneuoid: as I said in last thread, we have all kinds of contemporary evidence that Caesar lead his army from his province in the Po Valley towards Rome on a particular date one winter, and the boundary between his province and Italy ran along the river Rubicon, so in that sense we have evidence that he crossed the Rubicon, but the details about saying “the die has been cast” appear in later writers. So it depends what you mean by “crossed the Rubicon” (the act of invading Italy, or a story about a witticism).
“Kinda horrifying.”
So why is this horrifying? I don’t really consider Netflix some impartial conveyer of truth or scientific information or anything close. I doubt they cast themselves in that light. It’s just an entertainment outlet aimed at making money. Seems like they can have any kind of a show they want. I bet they have lots of dumb shows already.
There is always going to be these conspiracy/psuedo-science types, so what is the alternative? That the show isn’t aired? That it comes with some sort of warning label decided on by a panel of ‘experts’? Now *that* would be horrifying.
Jd:
To me it’s kinda horrifying that this stuff would be so popular, also horrifying that a dishonest show is getting wide exposure. The problem is not that it’s “dumb”—the Three Stooges are dumb too, but I don’t find them horrifying—the problem is the dishonesty.
You say, “There is always going to be these conspiracy/psuedo-science types.” I guess I’d just be happier if there was less of it, also I’d be happier if it were not promoted in a misleading way. Columbia University is a private institution too, and I’m not happy when Columbia promotes dishonest things either.
Yeah, but what is the alternative? Who is going to decide what is science and what is psuedo-science on an entertainment platform? I see more horrifying things about that. I’d be happier if there was a lot less of a variety of things on media, but the alternative is censorship or warning labels or something, and that seems far worse in the long run. There shouldn’t be censorship of beliefs and if people want to make a pseudo-science show about theirs, then I don’t see what is wrong with that, even if it is portrayed as science. No one is forced to watch it or believe any part of it.
Columbia and Netflix are hardly analogous. One is a purported respected institution of learning and science and the other is an entertainment outlet.
Also, what about this is dishonest? I read the link. I watched the trailer. It just seems like a bunch of hype about some journalist who thinks he has uncovered some things despite academia. This seems like your typical production aimed at the conspiracy theory / pseudo science crowd in order to make another buck. The guy even says something like, “I don’t claim to be an archeologist or a scientist. I am a journalist.” Where is the dishonesty?
> To me it’s kinda horrifying that this stuff would be so popular, also horrifying that a dishonest show is getting wide exposure.
In isolation it doesn’t seem to me like a problem.
In context, where so many people are firmly convinced that millions are dropping like flies because of the COVID vaccines, and that those deaths are being hidden by a vast conspiracy, where the Governor of Florida is earning political capital from those widespread conspiratorial beliefs by calling for a grand jury investigation…..
It does start to get somewhat concerning, not the least because Rogan is a key player in the propagation of COVID vax conspiracies.
I don’t want to say “don’t ask questions” but I think at some point “just asking questions” can have a deliterious net effect – and I suspect we’ve reached that point.
Well, for one, Netflix could at least not try to pass it off as a *documentary series*, since that does seem like they’re trying to be a conveyer of truth or scientific information.
And yeah to Andrew’s point, just because there’s always going to be conspiracy/pseudo-science things doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t critique them. There’s always going to be bad science (unknowingly and knowingly), that doesn’t mean we should abandon critiquing it and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
I live in North America. We should spend more time investigating our continent. From 13,500 to 11,000 years ago there was a widespread culture here, the Clovis point people. Their DNA is still widely found in Native Americans using the Anzick-1 marker. The appearance and disappearance of this culture is very interesting; I’m sure that people who hunted mammoth have an engaging story.
Are there any Atlantis artifacts as beautiful as a Clovis point?
When it comes to belief systems and rational Bayesian behavior, my favorite example is from Couy Griffin, a NM County Commissioner who was part of the Capitol Insurrection of January 6:
“My vote to remain a no isn’t based on any evidence, it’s not based on any facts, it’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”
As far as I can tell, here is the latest regarding his conviction and his unrelenting views
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/end-of-the-road-couy-griffin-s-appeal-dismissed-by-nm-supreme-court/ar-AA149FHX
>the tradition in this country of celebrating lawyers and advocates who can vigorously argue a case in spite of the facts
I went to a Quaker school that didn’t allow debate teams or the like, because they thought it was wrong to learn to argue in favor of something you didn’t think was true. I guess I am really old fashion.
A few days ago you mocked a book titled, Aliens: the Alien Agenda, and now you don’t believe in Atlantis. Seems like the only conspiracy here is that you are trying to cover something up!
> joined by Michael Shermer, that notorious believer in ghosts
Shermer followed up, stating, “As I’ve always said (and repeat here), there’s no such thing as the paranormal or supernatural; there is just the normal, the natural, and mysteries as yet unexplained by natural law and chance/contingency” https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2014/12/04/shermer-has-a-woo-experience-admits-there-may-be-something-to-it/
Anonymous:
I followed the link, and I’ll just say that someone whose skepticism is so weak it could be shaken “to its core” based on a broken radio that started working again, is not much of a skeptic.
Y’know how Batman has to keep letting those supervillains escape from prison, otherwise he’d have no opponents that are worthy to oppose him as a crimefighter? It seems that Shermer’s doing something similar. There are zillions of people out there who don’t believe in the supernatural. What makes Shermer a professional skeptic is that he thinks it’s a big deal to disbelieve in the supernatural. So he has to massively inflate the importance of a trivial incident such as an intermittently-working radio. By making that incident a big deal, he’s making his skepticism a big deal by association.
I’m not saying Shermer’s doing this in any calculating way, just that by being a professional skeptic all these years, it’s natural for him to want to think of the opposition as being intellectually worthy.
If you think he’s actually a skeptic, watch his interview with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. He swallows whole their Just-So storifying about evolution.
“As I wrote at the time, another thing that’s going on here, I think, is the tradition in this country of celebrating lawyers and advocates who can vigorously argue a case in spite of the facts.”
I have, in contexts I can’t remember, heard reference to cultural scholarship on the peculiarly American fascination with hucksters. Does that ring any bells?
Afeman:
No, I don’t know anything about this literature. What I was thinking of were:
1. The old TV show L.A. Law, where you get the impression that it’s the lawyers’ job to do what it takes to win.
2. The O. J. Simpson trial, where, yes, people were outraged that he got off, but his defense team also became some sort of folk heroes, in a you-gotta-hand-it-to-them way. Not a lot of people were saying it was kind of disgraceful for the lawyers to come up with clever, creative strategies with the goal of letting a killer go free.
3. The Theranos lawyers, who did all sorts of creepy things but it’s like, hey, that’s their job, so they just keep going.
4. The episode when New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm seemed to be trying to force a mistrial for a convicted killer on the grounds that she (the killer, or more specifically the person who hired the shooter) didn’t get a heroic legal defense.
All this seems like a change compared to, say, the Perry Mason TV show in the 1950s where the hero’s job is to cleverly save innocent people, or the Dirty Harry movies in the 1970s where you’re supposed to be disgusted by judges who let bad guys run free. I feel like there’s more of an attitude now of the legal process being a game rather than a way to reach justice. And, yes, I understand that the old-fashioned view is naive and can even be dangerous; still, I prefer it to the cynical idea that the purpose of a trial is to determine which side has the better lawyer.
See also the P.P.P.S. here.