Other Paths Were Always Possible
Other Paths Were Always Possible An essay on systems thinking, prehistory and the narrative that is missing 1. The hook: two ways to misuse the past In the magazine 1843 of The Economist I read the article How Graham Hancock became conspiracy theorists’ favourite historian about Graham Hancock and his Netflix documentary about a glorious civilisation some 13,000 years ago that collapsed around 12,000 years ago. A story about the so-called Atlantis and the sages who built it, leaving behind grand ruins that still astonish us today. It is a reading of history that appeals to many: grand and sweeping, a lost paradise with us as its descendants. Unfortunately it is not supported by real science. Hancock says it himself in the article, almost accidentally: there is no evidence in what archaeologists have studied. That is a classic epistemic trap — the theory is formulated such that every absence of evidence becomes evidence of a cover-up. Archaeologists find nothing? Then they haven’t looked hard enough, or they’re hiding something. This mechanism makes the theory immune to refutation. It is not falsifiable in the Popperian sense. That is not proof the theory is correct, but it shields it from the normal corrective workings of science. ...