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Michael Shermer vs. "alternative history" Hancock and Crandall

angrysoba

Philosophile
angrysoba
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Get your popcorn ready for this three-hour extravaganza where Michael Shermer "debates" some "alternative history" people about whether there was some ancient lost civilization that was disrupted by a massive comet, which made the remaining humans revert to hunter-gethererism again after having had great but now lost wisdom.

Hancock is someone I have never heard of before but appears to buy into a lot of obviously silly things. He gets very angry, very quickly and spouts all kinds of ridiculous nonsense about Atlantis and other things. He is sensitive about the way the mainstream of academia have treated his crackpot theories, and he is a master of equivocating on his positions, at one time claiming to only be passing on someone else's theories and refusing to defend them, and at other times clearly pushing the ideas and getting stroppy when they are dismissed.

He also wipes the floor with Shermer, as does Joe Rogan who both rightly (in my opinion) point out Shermer's well-poisoning tactics and his reliance on general principles of argument in lieu of specific knowledge about the subject at hand.

But Hancock really is a crackpot.

 
rjh01 said:
Shame on Michael Shermer for debating a crackpot. The debate might give the crackpot credibility.
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I think he likes to debate crackpots which isn't really the problem. The problem is that he doesn't do his homework, so when he turns up to debate people who have been fashioning their crazy theory for decades he looks out of his depth.
 
angrysoba said:
I think he likes to debate crackpots which isn't really the problem. The problem is that he doesn't do his homework, so when he turns up to debate people who have been fashioning their crazy theory for decades he looks out of his depth.
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Yeah. It's hard to be an expert on everything.

I did listen to the whole show - pretty entertaining. Shermer got a few general points in to good effect, but overall it sounded like, "teach the controversy."
 
So, we were NOT hunter-gathers 12,000 years ago...?

We were in fact talented stone masons who built the largest stone structure the world has ever known?

Interesting.
 
King of the Americas said:
So, we were NOT hunter-gathers 12,000 years ago...?

We were in fact talented stone masons who built the largest stone structure the world has ever known?

Interesting.
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Yes, apparently the site is that old. Are you thinking it was dated incorrectly?
 
marplots said:
Yes, apparently the site is that old. Are you thinking it was dated incorrectly?
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7,000 years older than Stonehenge...

...with construction requiring a force that was similar or even bigger than those who stacked up the pyramids.

We were supposed to be small band of tribal units with simple stone tools.

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The multiple asteroid induced end of the ice age and resulting flood theory was really intriguing.
 
King of the Americas said:
7,000 years older than Stonehenge...
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One of the benefits of working with stone - it lasts a long time.

...with construction requiring a force that was similar or even bigger than those who stacked up the pyramids.
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Pretty cool, huh?

We were supposed to be small band of tribal units with simple stone tools.
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Maybe that's why it's a rare find.

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The multiple asteroid induced end of the ice age and resulting flood theory was really intriguing.
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I didn't really get the connection. Is it that one idea is somehow dependent on the other?
 
marplots said:
One of the benefits of working with stone - it lasts a long time.



Pretty cool, huh?



Maybe that's why it's a rare find.

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I didn't really get the connection. Is it that one idea is somehow dependent on the other?
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Hancock postulates that a flood that covered coastal cities in over 100 ft of water, likely 'erased' the advanced civilizations revert us 'back' to hunter gather.
 
King of the Americas said:
Did you watch the whole interview?

Shermer ended up agreeing with most of what Hancock said!
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I think Shermer ran out of steam, and was probably worn down by Hancock's belligerence. I don't think he agreed with Hancock.

There's a good summary of the debate here by a guy called Jason Colavito.

Here are some important points:

Hancock, on the other hand, was eloquent but idiotic, and painfully quick to anger at the least provocation. I was frankly surprised that he couldn’t hold his cool for more than a few minutes at a time. When asked why we have no ancient metal tools or writing from the lost civilization, Hancock suggested that after the comet, the surviving people chose not to use metal or writing after the disaster to undo the destroyed civilization’s sins. (He later clarified that he thought that the ancients believed themselves “to blame” for the comet.) Shermer, blind to Hancock’s storytelling, couldn’t engage him in the idiocy of this warmed-over Atlantis story and instead said that the explanation was “OK” before moving on.

Part of the problem is that Hancock happily toggled between two different conceptions of “civilization” and Shermer didn’t call him on it. Sometimes, Hancock spoke (reasonably, if improbably) that in some locations monumental architecture and perhaps cities could have existed earlier than we thought. At other times, he spoke of a world-bestriding civilization that could reach from the Americas to Europe to Asia and beyond. He cites the two interchangeably, but Shermer allowed him to speak of Atlantis and a single Stone Age city as though the latter would prove the former.
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The same blogger has written a very long review of Hancock's book here:

in most circumstances Graham Hancock is a compelling writer and in another age might have been a well-regarded middlebrow popularizer of archaeology and science. But the economics of publishing have destroyed much of the middlebrow market, and the fringe is a more profitable place to ply one’s trade. Speaking as someone who found Fingerprints of the Gods to be entertaining and engaging, even when it was wrong, I can say that Magicians of the Gods is not a good book by either the standards of entertainment or science. It is Hancock at his worst: angry, petulant, and slipshod. Hancock assumes readers have already read and remembered all of his previous books going back decades, and his new book fails to stand on its own either as an argument or as a piece of literature. It is an update and an appendix masquerading as a revelation. This much is evident from the amount of material Hancock asks readers to return to Fingerprints to consult, and the number of references—bad, secondary ones—he copies wholesale from the earlier book, or cites directly to himself in that book.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Hancock is wedded to his Donnelly-inspired lost civilization, and the long shadow of its Victorian origins casts a pall over the new work. Thus, we find Hancock repeating Donnelly’s arguments even when they are uncomfortably Victorian and, frankly, more than a little racist, imperialist, and colonialist. We learn in Magicians, for example, that the lost race were white men with red beards, who came from the Caucasus region and spread civilization to all the little brown peoples of the earth. We learn that all of the non-white peoples of the earth mistook them for angels or gods, and that even the Jews thought of them as the Watchers and the Nephilim. By sheer coincidence, these masters of the universe, in addition to being white, also espoused values identical to those of modern Christians, with anything that seems too regressive or uncouth merely a remnant of indigenous superstition.
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angrysoba said:
I think Shermer ran out of steam, and was probably worn down by Hancock's belligerence. I don't think he agreed with Hancock.

There's a good summary of the debate here by a guy called Jason Colavito.

Here are some important points:
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I watched the whole interview...

Shermer and his other skeptic admitted they were wrong about Hancock, said they'd fix their mistakes, and both spoke well of Hancock and the big guy with the beard.

Shermer 'ran of out steam'... BWAAAAHAAAAHAAAA.

More like he ran out of room to stand, with a room so full of facts contrary to 'accepted science.'
 
King of the Americas said:
I watched the whole interview...

Shermer and his other skeptic admitted they were wrong about Hancock, said they'd fix their mistakes, and both spoke well of Hancock and the big guy with the beard.

Shermer 'ran of out steam'... BWAAAAHAAAAHAAAA.

More like he ran out of room to stand, with a room so full of facts contrary to 'accepted science.'
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HAHAHAHAHAHA!
 
John Jones said:
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
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Did you watch the whole thing?

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Things Shermer agreed to:

-His magazine wrongly characterized Hancock and his arguments
-That we were more than mere hunter gatherers 12,000 years ago
-A massive flood wiped out evidence of a civilization before this hunter gatherer phase
-The scab lands contain the timeline and geological evidence of the end of the ice age
-That Hancock is both reasonable and well researched
 
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