At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.
I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.
My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it, BUT it also means he 100% believes in whatever his current goal is and he's achieved a lot more than I ever will because he's unwavering in his beliefs and goals, whereas I'm always doubting and second guessing.
Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?
I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.
My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140413131827/http://www.decisi...
I'd get the Monty Hall problem question right off the bat, but only because I've encountered it before, not because I can naturally reason through it better than Erdös.
What is more interesting is, even after I pointed out that this answer has a 50% chance of finding the door and I'm looking for a 100% solution, some candidates refused to give it a second thought, didn't change their answer, and insisted that this is the best course of action.
[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3915578/door-in-an-...
It's inconceivable (for example) that Paul Erdos, a world class mathematician, would fail to solve this problem if it were actually communicated clearly.
This is me, the logic of Monty Hall Doors does not make sense to me, so luckily I found this one: https://www.rossmanchance.com/applets/2021/montyhall/Monty.h...
After running the process 500 times, the ratio seems insane (using the stay tactic, 67% loss & 33% wins) - it makes me able to accept "that is just how it is then", but absolutely does not explain WHY, because in my mind, once you open the door, the situation resets to 50/50 - so there should be no difference if I stay or switch. The fundamental misunderstanding of statistics is probably what is the problem.
It's funny to observe own mind in this process, and how much of a "struggle" there is to convince one-self that what seems logical and sensible is in-fact a wrong interpretation and can only exists due to lack of understanding.
> My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
That is so true - before the own idea/concept gets put to test, it's easy to be delusional about how correct your own "idea" is. As long as it is in the vacuum of your own brain, you can keep it protected and shielded from all that nasty truth that tries to bully and beat it.
There is a reason why a lot of coders do not want others to see their code and do a code review on it...
It's hard to show how to explain the problem just writing about it, but by making them choose one of 3, and then making assumptions about which door will reveal the car, and if it is better to switch. You can easily demonstrate that in two out of three situations it is actually better to switch.
The N=100 build intuition very quickly. I disagree that it doesn't explain anything. After playing, people quickly understand that the likelihood that they chose the correct door initially is very small and when all 98 other doors are revealed, the remaining door provides a red flag that their intuition is off.
Note that often I would explain the logic behind switching and still have them not believe me. Their intuition wouldn't be shaken by arguments or even small demonstration. Only when actually playing an the N=100 case would they start to understand.
Yeah this is the way I found it the easier to understand intuitively
I've thought about this and the conclusion was:
What you believe you know makes you what you currently are. You can't just believe in a contradictory position. You could believe that you have been proven wrong, which would then change your belief.
Changing your point of view, looking at things from the vantage of someone else with different life experiences and the resulting belief systems would be dishonest at best, and claiming that you are capable of changing your beliefs on a whim is like being able to rip your arm off.
You can, at best, adapt your own belief to encompass theirs with caveats or simply not care about your truths.
One way or the other he still was a bullshitter, blowhard, huckster,...
That means that in the end, the "single way of thinking" was the right way of thinking.
But don't despair, there is still a lot of pseudoscience around: creationism, global warming denialism, anti-vax, astrology, etc. Some of these are even oficial policy for governments around the world.
Do you really want the answer?
People don't always say what they think and aren't consistent because they may hold multiple conflicting beliefs. This isn't lying or a lack of curiosity. It's the opposite, and perfectly rational.
Actually, if you don't think you have any conflicting beliefs you should think about it harder or seriously question how open-minded you really are.
You can give someone all the evidence that convinced you about something, but it will only convince them if they share enough of your foundational assumptions. At the core of all beliefs lie some assumptions, not facts.
This quickly becomes philosophy, but I encourage you to seek more if you really want this answer. You are pulling on a thread that I promise will bring enlightenment. I wish more people asked this more often and really meant it. It would resolve a lot of pointless conflict.
What I see instead, especially on places like HN or Reddit, is people trying to reassure themselves because they want to settle a question "once and for all" instead of seeking better answers. They want praise for what they "know" and to take a break, but there is no perfect truth, just better answers, and this process never ends.
> the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
This stops being as relevant when you're put under pressure to make real decisions based on what you believe is true. You are forced to weigh the consequences of the decision, not just what you think might be true. This is a compromise, but I struggle to call this dishonesty.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts
"However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964.
"Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."
Von Daniken was obviously just particularly good at pushing his brand of the nonsense; all of those authors though are interesting examples of the sort of anti-academic and conspiracy theorists that have reached their apogee in recent years via social media.
Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.
The problem is that Erich von Däniken's "science fiction" was pseudo-scientific claptrap, which he sold as the truth, that perpetuated harmful cultural stereotypes, was patronizingly racist, also plagiarized French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians", and he never admitted he was wrong despite mountains of indisputable evidence.
At least Hanna-Barbera framed The Flintstones as fiction. Yabba Dabba Doo!
And at least Scooby Doo's whole schtick was that supernaturalism is just creeps wearing rubber masks. Scooby Doobie Doo!
When I got older and understood how media industry works, I liked his "product execution & market fit" even more :-)
1. Can obviously be made
2. Can be made very fast
There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.
If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.
The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.
Beyond the strong whiff of racism, I think there was also this idea that civilization went on a single path (grain, the wheel and domesticated horses/oxen/mules, bronze, iron, guns, steam, etc.) and so anyone which didn’t follow that path was basically developmentally challenged. This definitely did not consider the possibility that not every region had the prerequisites to follow the same path.
Even today, these types bring up Baalbek's massive triliths on a regular basis, and state they could not have been built by such classical civilisations.
The question isn't whether the ancient aliens framework logically supports racism, since it's false anyway and racists don't care about logic (otherwise etc etc). The question for racists is which frameworks most conveniently provide tidbits for them to distort for their own purposes. No logic, pure association and confirmation bias.
There's a ratio involving pi between the base lengths of the pyramid and its height. This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi.
But, consider a measuring wheel, where you can mark off distances very accurately by counting revolutions of the wheel, say, 1 cubit in diameter (I know, I know, what's a cubit?). Then, if the height is laid out in cubits, the ratio of pi is there while being completely ignorant of it.
When I was a boy, I asked my mom how the Egyptians made their pyramid foundations straight. Without looking up from her book, she replied "pull a string tight". Then I thought I'd trip her up with how they made the foundation level. Without hesitation she said "dig a trench and fill it with water."
She shoulda been an engineer!
I have responded to a sibling comment with more information or examples. I hate this because I don't care about pyramids or Egypt, but I feel myself compelled to respond, I'm so sorry it's not against you, It's a recent pet peeve.
The 'wheel' itself was discovered everywhere. Round things are easier to move, but you need an axle to make it useful. And roads or flat terrain to make use of that. Incas had pulley systems, which indicates they could probably have built an axle quite easily too, but had no use for it, because, well, no flat roads.
And even then Northern Manchurians knew about the wheel for sure, and knew about roads, but still used sleds until at least the Russian conquest.
Sorry, I'm quite boring about this, but it bothers me when people talk about 'inventing the wheel' like it was something special. The wheel itself is meh. The axles are what makes it usable, and the roads make it useful.
Is it possible that Adam and Eve were aliens?
If so, then that means [blah blah blah as if this is now an accepted fact]
No wonder your fam has no critical thinking
> It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize...
And for you, too.
Science the method is pretty damn great. Science the institution is closer to any other agenda-driven information source. If you’re doing first-hand, first-principles science, great. But if you’re doing the “here’s a study...” game, you’re relying on external authority you aren’t equipped to interpret, which, in practice, isn’t so much different from the people who think CNN or Fox News or Ancient Aliens is gospel.
Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe. I guarantee you, it makes sense, once you know enough information (it always does, even if they’re actually insane, that helps it make sense). But to say, ”this person won’t even accept science” and hand wave it off as a “them” problem, emotional religion etc, are the words of a politician, not a scientist.
If someone wants to hold something up as true, its correct to disbelieve it until evidence is provided.
These people don't provide evidence, what they do is show you something cool and then beg the question. "Look at this cool rock in this place it might be hard to get a rock to, really makes you wonder who put it there huh". Literally any dumb science "content producer" is going to be able to get you closer to truth than listening to that bunk.
Not to mention that:
>It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize
>Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe.
Seems like you quoted them having investigated it.
But having done so you call them a politician.
I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations".
It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.
As you allude to, there are always other explanations.
I read it as a teenager and it really stuck with me as a completely different, more spiritually influenced take on science fiction and “ancient aliens” theories of the era. She won the Nobel Prize on the strength of her more autobiographical and feminist prose, so Shikasta is an outlier in her own body of work too.
Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.
It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.
A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.
It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.
But it's not like people don't like their outlandish theories anymore. Alas, they've become very politicised, too.
To give an example that's hopefully not too polarising: many people like to blame inflation on greed.
Now it's mostly drawn down to explaining people what sensor and perspective glitches are.
I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now.
Godspeed Erich.
Notable for "Chariots of the Gods" (1968).
His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it.
We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine.
But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff.
Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things.
Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories.
Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.
This demographic was called "new age" by the marketers, but almost no one who bought such books called themselves new age.
But people who wrote such books became very aware of the demographic profile too. And while there had certainly been grifter cult leaders before who didn't sincerely believe what they preached, now they realized that they could go straight to profit, just by writing a book. No need for the messy high-intensity "make a cult" step. The bookstores were on their side now.
But sometimes you see current reality with a different eye, not necessarily in E.v.D. way and surely not in the establishment's way.
Rest in peace, your ideas were good entertainment.
Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.
I like fantasy, but it should be at least a little bit consistent.
What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.
I cannot respect him as an author or thinker, only as a human.
Rest in ascension.
- If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on.
- Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?
He's up there riding that chariot now.
The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).
Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.
Think of it like Marvel universe stuff.
We'd go on long walks and let our 'what if' imagination run wild.
In both cases, it's their God of the Gaps.
(Not to be confused with the Boss of the Ross. Or Hermes. Or Nike.)
We live in a society where corruption is rife and ordinary people are largely excluded from most major institutions ... That is the atmosphere that breeds these things.
We also live in a corrupt society and occasionally that emerges as a scandal.
Certain secrets are kept better than others. Now and then real conspiracies do become public knowledge like the Tuskegee Experiment or Scientology's infiltration of parts of the US government.
This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.
But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Archeology by itself is always going to have limitations, and there are vast swatches of history we are almost completely ignorant about
EvD is certainly guilty of taking himself much more seriously than the evidence suggests. But there's always going to be that "what if"
Its an unproven hypothesis.
It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about.
When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.
You don't have to agree with it. But the lack of evidence doesn't disprove the hypothesis. Yes it doesn't prove it either.
That said, it's still an extremely low probabilty that life from other systems came and visited our particular rock some time in the past million years (and interacted with humans).
Speak for yourself. I find it very easy to dismiss.
Just as I find easy to dismiss horoscopes, creationism, anti-vaxers, global warming denialism, etc.
You could personally dismiss it, but you can't proof your point either. Like general archeology says humanity is only as old as the oldest evidence of it ever found, and some pseudo scientific hypothesis might say humans are older. You can't prove or disprove that. But you can't prove or disprove either that humanity is exactly as old as the oldest evidence we have. But when some older bones are discovered then you have proof that humanity is at least that old.
So yeah, absence of evidence doesn't disprove the hypothesis.
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Hundreds More Nazca Lines Emerge in Peru's Desert
FYI, Erich von Däniken's book "Chariots of the Gods?" is racist pseudo-scientific claptrap. My Archaeoastronomy professor at the University of Maryland, John B. Carlson, despises it.
It attributes the achievements of ancient non-European civilizations to extraterrestrial visitors, undermining their intelligence and capabilities, promotes speculative theories without empirical evidence, misinterprets artifacts, ignores scientific consensus, perpetuates harmful cultural stereotypes, and plagiarizes French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoastronomy
>Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the interdisciplinary[1] or multidisciplinary[2] study of how people in the past "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used these phenomena and what role the sky played in their cultures".[3] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky by other cultures.[4][5] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.[6]
A Brief History of the Center for Archaeoastronomy
https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~tlaloc/archastro/cfaintro.html
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]
Archaeoastronomy was one of the most interesting courses I took at uni, and professor Carlson was extremely enthusiastic about it. It really opened my mind to how smart and motivated ancient people were, not at all like our stereotypes from "The Flintstones" and "Chariots of the Gods?".
For example, The Anasazi Indians made significant astronomical observations that they integrated into their architecture and cultural practices. They tracked solar and lunar cycles, aligning their buildings and ceremonial sites with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes. A fascinating example is the "Sun Dagger" at Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, where they used sunlight and shadow patterns on petroglyphs to mark important times of the year.
They deserve an enormous about of credit for what they achieved without all our received technology, and left behind for us to reverse engineer.
https://spaceshipearth1.wordpress.com/tag/anasazi-indians-as...
https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/education/prehistoric-southwest/su...
It's disappointing when people reflexively attribute ancient achievements like that to religion (or aliens), when it's actually hard objective observation based science that deserves credit!
>[then vixen99 took issue at my use of "FYI" and tried to argue that we should respect irrational and racist opinions by framing proven objective facts as opinions, just to be fair to loonies: "How about IMO rather than FYI ? We can make up our own minds."]
DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2024 | parent | next [–]
Sometimes (and often) pseudoscientific bullshit is just objectively wrong, and you'd have to be completely out of your mind, or just trolling, to "make up your own mind" to believe it.
No sane flat earthers in this day and age actually believe the earth is flat, or deserve to have their presumed beliefs respected or even humored, because they're just being contrarian and trolling for attention, so it's perfectly valid to say to them "FYI, the Earth is not flat."
I refuse to couch my firm disbelief that the Earth is flat as an opinion that might possibly be wrong, by saying "IMO, the Earth is not flat." Flat Earthers (also Young Earthers) certainly aren't couching their crazy beliefs as opinions, so don't deserve it in return.
"Chariots of the Gods?" is also that objectively wrong: there is no possible universe in which its claims are true. It's all based on historically ignorant Argument from Incredulity and inherently racist assumptions. In the 50th anniversary edition, von Däniken refused to address, admit, or correct any of the many widely proven errors in the book that made him so much money and fame, so he doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
Believing in pseudoscientific claptrap like Homeopathy, or the objectively false stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's Ark is just as ridiculous. They're physically and mathematically and logically and practically impossible. So it's also fine to say "FYI it's biblical fiction, and the Earth is definitely not 6000 years old, and you absolutely can not fit and feed and clean that many animals in a wooden ark." It's not my opinion, it's objective information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4OhXQTMOEc
To pretend otherwise feels like humoring a small child who still believes in Santa Claus.