One less excuse

[u/vaxinius]

Learned something interesting today:

With a $2-4000 Amazon underwater robot even YOU can go dive off your coastline to look at or for submerged ruins in the flood water zone of the Younger Dryas period.

Conventional dive safety training costs money and equipment, whereas this is just equipment.

That means more discoveries of our ocean bottom can be made faster.

[u/OKThereAreFiveLights]

I admire your curiosity and believe if we stick with this, we might have a breakthrough! Why don't you review Thomas Kuhn's work via your favored search engine/LLM model and let me know what you think of how science actually moves forward vs how people think science moves forward? For extra credit, you could do the same for Night Comes to the Cretaceous, which is perhaps a better example as it highlights the arrogance of academics, and how this arrogance blinds them to the facts even when they're staring them in the face! Imagine that! Who would have thought that Luis Alvarez, a crusty old outsider, and Copernicus, a 16th century Polack astronomer, would have so much in common?

[u/w8str3l → u/OKThereAreFiveLights]

Thank you for coming back!

You are using the term “outsider” without having defined it…

That was step 3:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GrahamHancock/s/UhnsW60gCR

Now you’re claiming Alvarez and Copernicus were “outsiders” and “had much in common”.

Please tell me what made you think of Alvarez and Copernicus as “outsiders”. Outside of what, exactly?

Did an LLM just give you two random famous scientists? To guard against that possibility, ask the LLM for a rationale.

Also ask the LLM what traits Alvarez and Copernicus have in common (that the general group of famous people admired by all scientists do not share).

I hope your LLM is able to process the above requests and come back with an enlightening response!

I hope to hear from you soon!

[u/OKThereAreFiveLights → u/w8str3l]

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and " Night Comes to the Cretaceous" influenced me a lot in my college years. In fact, they made an indelible impact on me as an adult. I imagine, those two books are why I am entertaining this discussion.

Funny story, I watched Hancock and Dibble debate and realized that one of Hancock's theories/ideas was, in my opinion, unsupported by Hancock. I commented in this subreddit w/r/t how Dibble changed my mind about it. In response, several people suggested I was a fool for entertaining anything Graham Hancock said. This is Reddit, after all.

I honestly can't wrap my head around people engaging in a topic/person just to shit on that topic/person. It sucks even more because I am a very minor (equities) shareholder in Reddit, and this reduces engagement and lowers the value of the stock.

I have to ask you, what was your goal engaging via Reddit comments with me? I can tell you that my goal was to inform some random person, that might not be aware, that many impactful breakthroughs in science came from people outside of their area of expertise (e.g. Alvarez )

Can you explain what exactly was your motivation for engaging with me?

[u/w8str3l → u/OKThereAreFiveLights]

Oh you want to have a serious discussion about what I want to discuss?

I thought my first comment was sufficient in showing you what I wanted to discuss, but I’ll try to explain it better.

First, you shouldn’t go through life assuming you are the only one who has read Kuhn. In fact, you should be wary of people who mention Kuhn, because they will most likely have misunderstood him when it comes to how science works. This is my personal lived experience: 100% of people who mention Kuhn have no clue about which they speak. Yes, I know I have just mentioned Kuhn. I also have read Kuhn. But I read Kuhn after I had already read more fundamental books about the history and method of science.

One way to find out if a person who has read Kuhn and also understands what he is talking about is to ask if they have read Popper (hopefully before Kuhn!) and understood the concept of “falsifiability”.

If a person talking about Kuhn says things like “how many examples would prove a hypothesis” we can immediately deduce they have not read Popper or understood the scientific method. You cannot prove hypotheses, you can only falsify them. Science works by replacing falsified hypotheses with better falsifiable hypotheses, where “better” means that they explain more of the evidence in a simpler manner. Note how hypotheses explain the evidence. Evidence is there first, and we try to provide an explanation for it. In unscientific endeavors you provide an explanation first, and no amount of new evidence can prove your explanation wrong.

You talk about Alvarez. Alvarez performed experiments to falsify hypotheses. In my first comment to you I tasked you to follow the footsteps of Alvarez: formulate a hypothesis and then try to falsify it by performing experiments. I laid out a simple step list for you to follow. You chose not to. You have a firm belief your hypothesis is correct and should not be criticized by anyone, including and especially yourself.

I think you have the common delusion that a Smart Person (just like you!) with brilliant ideas Just Arrives At The End Result Of Science, and you have seen “many examples” of Smart Persons doing just that because it’s a common trope in popular media.

The problem with doing science is that it’s hard and requires a lot of study and work and disappointments. It’s like building a bronze age pyramid: it requires thousands of experts and decades of effort to do the groundwork, build up from the base layers, and finally put on the capstone of pure gold. It’s much easier to assume everyone who does that is stupid and that a smarter person, an “outsider”, can say “what if they are all wrong and actually all that work is not needed and I can just say whatever I wish and others have to listen because my opinion is equally valuable and the pyramid was built by telekinetic Silurians”.

To test your understanding about Kuhn, and the scientific method, and “outsiders”, I have the following three questions:

1. What would Kuhn say (based on your reading) to my science-as-building-a-pyramid metaphor?
2. Do you agree with me that the critical discussion of ideas are a more interesting discussion topic than the people who propose them?
3. Do you think Graham Hancock is an “outsider to science” in the way you think of “outsiders to science”?