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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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The person who is the smartest has to enter the room looking to confirm that they are right. Therefore it's his or her duty to seek to enlighten others and also to hopefully seek out some other smartish dude who might hold a small part of what is always a correct but partially complete knowledge jigsaw. If somebody cleverly obliges, this is proof that they are indeed also smart ......just not the smartest in the room.....
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| The person who is the smartest, has to enter the room looking to confirm that they are right. |
Not necessarily. Somebody who is the smartest in the room they are entering will presumably be the smartest in most rooms they enter and will either assume it, or be actively looking for someone smarter.
| Therefore it's his or her duty to seek to enlighten others |
Who laid this duty on them?
| and also to hopefully seek out some other smartish dude who might hold a small part of what is always a correct but partially complete knowledge jigsaw. |
Surely this applies to everyone but, I agree, it is what smart people should do.
| If somebody cleverly obliges, this is proof that they are indeed also smart |
Why is it clever to oblige? Why is it proof?
| ......just not the smartest in the room..... | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I think I should point out that all this 'smartest person in the room' stuff has nothing to do with vainglory or wishing to impress. Much less a 'bluffers' guide'. It won't get you the girl either. It is a strictly technical exercise in how to acquire, how to recognise, why it is important to isolate a quality which is -- supposed to be -- the point of this site.
| To see things other people can't see, but should be able to see. |
That last phrase is the operative part. What we refer to colloquially as 'the six-year-olds rule', obvious stuff that is forever elusive because of cognitive dissonance. Sometimes referred to as 'the pursuit of wisdom' as distinct from what everyone else claims to be beavering away at, 'the pursuit of truth'. This can always be exposed as a charade by the simple posing of the question: "And what was the last truth you found?"
You should all be asking yourself that.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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We got featured in some dude's blog which, while not important in itself, may tell us a little about how we are faring. It arose because of some beef the gentleman (not named, which in a blog is a bit weird) was having with Hatty. Join the club, pal.
| A long while ago I posted about my interactions with Ms V, the historical ultra-sceptic whose shifting beliefs about the origins of Cerne Abbey and various other Dark Age issues gradually reduced me to incredulity. |
Attagirl!
| I concluded that to justify those ideas, someone would have to dispose of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon writing. |
That is indeed exactly the proposition.
| Yesterday, as a result of a similar discussion about what may or may not have happened at Beckery just west of Glastonbury in the 5th century (archaeological opinion at the moment is that it was a very early monastic settlement of some kind), I spent far too long discovering that yes, that is indeed exactly the proposition. |
It goes on for some time so I'll spread it out.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Every document claiming to be prior to the 12th century is a forgery. At this point, because it would be impossible not to, I will name Ms V fully as Harriet Vered. |
Strewth, it's him that's being shifty about naming names.
| Her main claim to public notice is The Megalithic Empire (2012) |
Why do people find that stating a plain fact ('she wrote a book') cannot be done plainly if they're dissing the person? What's your main claim to fame, Mr X?
| a book arguing that the stone monuments of western Europe were markers in a vast system of trading routes. This is quite a fun suggestion taking advantage of the fact that we don’t really know what most of these places were |
You have to wonder, if he's capable of this degree of fairness, why he's dissing The Hat anyway. Apparently people can't just disagree they've got to put the boot in with the utmost savagery. You'd never catch me doing that.
| even if it doesn’t work in detail |
So we've reached the meat'n'potatoes. It's (a) an excellent idea, it (b) purports to explain things requiring explanation but (c) it falls down on detail. So let's have an example.
| (a mystical earth-mysteries site, no less, has a nice review pointing out the gaps in the argument, especially when it cavalierly sweeps aside the possibility of water-based transport in prehistory). |
Needless to say, there are larges sections of the book devoted to just this subject. I don't suppose anyone would notice, but the dude is implicitly saying he hasn't read Megalithic Empire. That's a bit rich when you're taking a book to task for not working in detail. And that's the only detail he bothers with because, having shown why the book doesn't work in detail, he moves on to ad hominem...
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Meanwhile, this elderly website |
He is referring to the Megalithic Empire forum. I suppose 2012 is quite old in internet years.
We prefer the term 'accompanying it'. Though you could say the book promotes the website, if you were so inclined.
| does so in rather a light-hearted way |
Books and accompanying websites can be many things from heavy to light but, believe me, they cannot be undertaken light-heartedly.
| suggesting that it is, if not exactly satire as some have guessed |
Satire of what? Did these people say? "I read a satire yesterday." "A satire of what, pray?" "I couldn't say." "Does that make it good satire or bad satire." "I couldn't say."
| aimed modestly at injecting some new ideas into a field devoid of them |
This definitely sums the central problem of the whole AE project. Even in a field that is recognised as lacking new ideas, the notion of coming up with new ones is suspect.
| and who could object to that, even if one of the ideas is that modern humans originated not in Africa but the Arctic. |
Let's have some new ideas but they mustn't be new ideas.
| It’s positive to have insights coming into the discipline of history from outside, even if they turn out not to have legs. |
Are you sure, old chap? You're not going to dismiss it without reading it, are you? No, he's going to discuss my favourite person instead...
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| The Megalithic Empire’s co-author is Michael J Harper, a far more challenging figure, it turns out, than Ms Vered. |
Memo to Mr X: she worked on them all actually, though I agree with you on the main point.
| His other books include 2003’s The History of Britain Revealed, which champions the idea that the inhabitants of the British Isles have always spoken English (not Old English, mind you, but modern English, the stuff I’m typing) and that French and German are derived from it |
Not exactly but close enough. I recognise the review he took this from since, again, he hasn't read it.
| 2014’s Meetings With Remarkable Forgeries, arguing that ten axial historical texts from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to Voltaire’s Candide are fakes |
This is absolutely not the case. Interestingly, he has take this from the medium.com piece I wrote about bogus books in general.
| and the latest, Revisionist Historiography, which was only published last year and hasn’t received any reviews. It’s a bit expensive for me to try out, especially given the amount I’ve been spending recently. |
I'd be happy to send you a free review copy if you're a bit strapped for cash. Or even if you aren't, I'm not proud when it comes to reviews. Anything else...?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| I grappled with all this rather more than I should have done, but then much of my approach to the world has manuscripts and their implications at its heart. I’m used to people attacking the credibility of the Gospels, and have often made the point that compared to many other ancient texts their credentials are actually rather good, but at least Mr Harper is fair in asserting that virtually every important text historians rely on is fake. |
He's practically in the same business we are.
| As far as English historical documents are concerned, the Harper-Vered thesis is that there were two great campaigns of forgery, in the 12th century and the 16th, both politically-motivated: the first to cement the rule of the Norman kings and the Church they brought with them, and the second to bolster the Tudors and their pet Church as they justified a national identity separate from that of Europe and Rome. |
This shows a startlingly close knowledge of our work and put like that does sound a tad unlikely.
| This is, I feel, not remotely likely: such initiatives were unnecessary, and the theory requires assuming, contrary to what we know, that texts are no older than the oldest datable copy: that inevitably leads you to look for fakes and forgeries regardless of the circumstances surrounding the texts themselves. |
This is a bit silky. We say that in the absence of surrounding circumstances, the oldest surviving copy is the only evidence of its age and should therefore be regarded as its likely age. This is quite orthodox. The only difference is that we do not accept an expert's opinion constitutes surrounding circumstances.
| Cast an eye towards this interview with Harriet Vered. The interviewer is generally very sympathetic to her ideas, but when (at 0.59) he asks why, given their absolute control over land, the Norman kings couldn’t just give their new abbeys and churches anything they wanted without engaging in an elaborate fraud involving inventing an entire fake history for a country, Ms Vered can’t answer, merely repeating that that’s what happened. At 1.09-1.10, discussing Samuel Pepys’s diary, she clearly thinks it’s prima facie absurd that such a document could have existed for 150 years without being published, and therefore that too must be a much later fake. |
Live interviews should never be held against one.
| Because these assertions don't rest on evidence, I thought there must be a set of beliefs behind them, and so there is. |
Coming from a Christian this is a bit rich.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Mr Harper and those he associates with call it Applied Epistemology, though it bears only a remote relationship to the philosophical study which goes under that title. |
Thank God for that.
| In the account of The Applied Epistemology Library, this is translated into a set of rules to govern enquiry, to which a set of people are committed: AEists, they call themselves. |
Short for Applied Epistemologists, old man. You know, like you call yourself C of E.
The rules boil down thus:
- If the truth is not simple, prove it!
- If what was differs from what is, prove it!
- If different inputs will produce the same outcome, prove it! |
That's not at all bad.
| I’m not clear where these dicta come from |
| and I’m not sure I can think of practical meanings for the last one |
It's usually expressed as 'one input, one output' but I'm not sure I don't prefer your version.
| but on the face of it these are not particularly objectionable guides to thinking in a variety of disciplines. |
Well, hang about, if these are useful all over the shop and they are ours (or at any rate not so familiar you have heard of them) surely we're entitled to a bit of credit for that alone?
| The AEists don’t often stick to them, though |
Like Christians really. The dude has gone through our work and marked our papers which is impressive.
| because there are other motivations operating. |
Uh-oh, we are about to be accused of some kind of conspiracy theory-itis.
| It must surely be simpler to believe that English history is real, and its core texts genuine, than to assume they were all produced in two completely otiose campaigns of fraud. |
It's coming...
| In fact, the bigger rule and the one which clearly excites the AEists more than the stated ones, is the injunction to come up with interesting, unorthodox ideas, even if they involve contradicting yourself. |
That's a bad thing?
| Mr Harper says: an orthodoxy is established as soon as two people are agreed on something. This is the origin of the Applied Epistemological mantra 'Everything you say must be original to you (or it isn't worth saying)'. To an extremist, and all AE-ists are extremists, if you say something completely original except that you said it last week, an orthodoxy has been formed, and you shouldn't say it. But this is a counsel of perfection and, so as long as you feel a little uncomfortable spouting something you said last week, that is usually enough since it will force the brain to put a slight spin (even a literary flourish) on such a hackneyed thought. Obviously you would rip your own tongue out rather than repeat what somebody else said last week. … As long as you get your brain used to constantly 'diving down' you will eventually bottom out ie actually start being compulsively original. |
Sound advice.
| This is, of course, an ideology – a counter-orthodoxy, if you will – |
| and where it takes you is, for instance, claiming (as Mr Harper implied on well-known alternative historian Graham Hancock’s website in 2003), that the Ancient Egyptians created Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika as reservoirs and the northern course of the Nile is due to artificial engineering. |
Precisely so. It's a technique for coming up with new ideas. Not that I said this.
| One might counter that this is explanation is a lot less ‘simple’ than the Nile not flowing into the Indian Ocean or west to the Atlantic because there are bloody great mountains in the way, or that Lake Victoria doesn’t look ‘squarish’ at all |
You might indeed but since I know this I expect I advanced reasons for supposing it might not be so in this case. We're still waiting for the ideology bit.
| but one suspects Mr Harper is just saying something plainly ludicrous for the sake of it. |
Not this again. I'd like to meet anybody who has ever said something ludicrous for the sake of being ludicrous.
| Should you be tempted to believe any of this, consider the 14 species of Mastacembelus spiny eels unique to Lake Tanganyika, which would have taken longer than 5000 years to develop. |
Fine be me.
| No, the root of AEism, if such a thing can be said to exist... |
You can't have it both ways. Criticise something for all kinds of sins and then question whether it exists.
| ... lies not in high-minded rationalistic principles, but rather in the belief that people are largely liars or fools, and those who expose them should consider themselves superior. |
Let's just break this litany down a bit.
* Yes, as stated, AE is a set of high-minded principles
* Yes, we believe people believe things that aren't true
* Yes, anybody who points this out would consider themselves superior.
| You will recognise this as the same energies that drive conspiracy theories. |
I knew we'd get there eventually.
| It produces ideas that dissipate when actual data are applied to them, but you have to wonder how much their proponents actually believe in them: perhaps they just find reality a bit dull. It's hard to tell. |
Fair point, now give us some examples.
| In Harriet Vered’s interview on Adzcast, she insists that ‘we don’t have a single Anglo-Saxon church in this country’ (which will be news to the good parishioners of Wing, Brixworth, or St Peter’s Monkwearmouth).... |
I can assure you Hatty knows a lot more about the antecedents of these churches than the parishioners do.
| .... ‘you can’t date a stone cross’ (pity poor Rosemary Cramp, then, who devoted her entire life to dating Dark Age sculpture) |
As I said, we don't accept expert's opinions as evidence.
| and alleges that orthodox archaeologists force their unsubstantiated ideas on the general public. |
They teach them in classrooms and on the telly, if that's what you mean.
| In fact, for instance, English Heritage who own Stonehenge are quite open in stating that nobody knows what it was for (though they speculate, quite reasonably). Is she ignorant, malicious, or mischievous? |
All three, the minx, though in this instance Hatty is adding her opinion as to what Stonehenge was for to the great many that English Heritage has put forward over the years. Neither of them pretends they know what Stonehenge was for.
| My contrary experience is that people, no matter their degree of ignorance about facts, are generally neither liars nor fools, though they might be either on occasion. And this is probably where my unconscionable credulity arises. |
Well said. Now work on it! /ends
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Can you tell the difference between a new but valid theory and a new but non-valid one? Not by your initial reaction -- we are always hostile to new theories. Even us here who are seeking them, or at any rate are inured to them. But assuming you can get over that, how do you know which to pursue and which not?
Assume you cannot use baggage. In other words, the person or source it's coming from, the style of presentation, its affinity with other theories, its topicality, its importance. Nothing, It's just been plonked down before you and you've got to say either 'Go on' or 'Sod off'.
Do you, for instance, have red lines? Anything involving alien visitations, lost civilisations, secret societies, that sort of thing? Do you, as many do, reject anything that requires rejecting the norms of science? This is, as we know, a slippery slope because the norms of science often get labelled 'fundamental laws of the universe' and, personally, I wouldn't bother with any theory that really did that.
Of course I am trained to know the difference between norms and laws which puts me in good stead when it comes to any existing paradigm, assumptions that most people would regard as 'demonstrably true' but which I have found over many years to really mean 'universally taught'. But, I suspect, only when it's me doing it. I'm not entirely confident of being able to do if someone plonked something in front of me that they just thought up.
Though I get the right humpty if anyone does it to me.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Can you tell the difference between a new but valid theory and a new but non-valid one? |
I try to, as the second might interest me.
| Mick Harper wrote: |
Not by your initial reaction -- we are always hostile to new theories. Even us here who are seeking them, or at any rate are inured to them. But assuming you can get over that, how do you know which to pursue and which not? |
It must meet the "new" bit (not easy) and it must strike me fairly quickly that it will generate "new ideas" that the inventor/originator has not seen, that I could use.
| Mick Harper wrote: |
Assume you cannot use baggage. In other words, the person or source it's coming from, the style of presentation, its affinity with other theories, its topicality, its importance. Nothing, It's just been plonked down before you and you've got to say either 'Go on' or 'Sod off'. |
I tend to go for the whacky stuff.
| Mick Harper wrote: |
Do you, for instance, have red lines? Anything involving alien visitations, lost civilisations, secret societies, that sort of thing? Do you, as many do, reject anything that requires rejecting the norms of science? This is, as we know, a slippery slope because the norms of science often get labelled 'fundamental laws of the universe' and, personally, I wouldn't bother with any theory that really did that. |
I am not really looking for material that is correct. I am more looking for a instinct, a bit of speculation, a unique but incorrect voice. That I can work on.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Can you tell the difference between a new but valid theory and a new but non-valid one?
I try to, as the second might interest me. |
So you can tell the difference. Let's see...
| It must meet the "new" bit (not easy) |
| and it must strike me fairly quickly that it will generate "new ideas" that the inventor/originator has not seen, that I could use. |
I think you mean 'it concerns something I'm interested in'.
| I tend to go for the whacky stuff. |
This is the problem we are trying to solve. All new theories appear 'wacky' to the human brain.
| I am not really looking for material that is correct. I am more looking for an instinct, a bit of speculation, a unique but incorrect voice. That I can work on. |
So you are claiming that you can tell whether a new theory is valid or invalid but ignore the distinction and move swiftly on to a second stage. It sounds admirable but not transferable.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Should I be bothered if it is transferable?
I don't really care.
My starting point is a quick look, I mentally categorise it into. "good," "interesting," "dubious," "bad."
I ignore good (everybody will go there, and normally already are) and bad (that's me, you got to narrow your search) so that leaves interesting and dubious (wacky) which I focus on to see whether there is a speck of gold in the pan. If there is, I might have a starting point. Of course most of the time there isn't. But who said looking for gold was easy or profitable?
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Grant
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Ignore ideas that people really want to be true: aliens; ghosts; convenient conspiracy theories.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Neither of you are being particularly helpful. It is easy enough avoiding (or embracing) truly off-the-wall stuff, what I am interested in is the kind of stuff people dismiss as off-the-wall but isn't -- and how to avoid them doing this.
Take this story I posted up on Medium yesterday https://medium.com/p/9294b75bbbc7 It has been viewed by two people, read by one person, liked by and commented on by no-one. It sounds hellova important to me but probably off the wall to everyone else (except youse guys but unfortunately you don't count.).
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