Rise and Fall
Deep in the desert there sits a beautiful oasis, ruled by a monarch unlike any other in Erdas. His name is Cabaro, the Great Lion, and he reigns over a kingdom of animals, jealously guarding his golden talisman. No human has ever set foot in the Great Beast’s territory. The journey to his oasis is impossible. As a team, Conor, Abeke, Meilin, and Rollan have achieved the impossible before. But now that team is broken—the friends scattered by a devastating betrayal. The young heroes and their spirit animals have already sacrificed much in their quest for the talismans. But with the world crumbling all around them—and a ruthless enemy opposing their every move—their greatest sacrifices are yet to come.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2022–2024years
50% neutral50% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The short answer is that I comment because I enjoy it, not because I feel any sort of moral obligation to correct people. I'm also not talking about the specific, reasoned viewpoints that come from people like Hossenfelder who are deeply familiar with consensus ideas and simply disagree with them. Those are often the best people to talk to!
I've found that correcting certain other kinds of people usually isn't worth anyone's time though. Writing up long corrections 1) often comes across as rude or presumptuous 2) takes a lot of effort 3) is highly repetitive (the same sorts of misunderstandings come up consistently) and 4) isn't very fun
You can argue these are because I'm bad at communication and some other way of reaching people would be more effective. That's probably true.
However, it's just plain hard to write academically informed information that's also individualized to a person who may not have any of the relevant background knowledge.
Let's explore that idea a bit more, because I want to emphasize some examples and (hopefully) illustrate that different things need different approaches and knowledge, not all of which I have relevant expertise in.
One set of common misunderstandings stem from a lack of familiarity with the past decades / centuries of archaeological research. This is entirely understandable (not everyone is an archaeologist/anthropologist), but it means that explaining a lot of the context that they're missing. Imagine someone who's only ever read about Babbage asking where all the gears and shafts in a modern computer are. Sure, I can give them a hand-wavy explanation "we don't need them anymore because we have better ways of doing things", but getting into the details of how and why gets very long, very quickly.
An example of this is Thor heyerdahl of kon-tiki fame, a popular person to discuss whose views ultimately stem directly from 19th century hyperdiffusionist thought. Most people bringing him up aren't intending to bring that up, but in doing so they tend to incorporate a lot of his assumptions in their understanding that make understanding modern narratives difficult. "Correcting" that involves dissecting that weird mixture of unconscious preconceptions and addressing the huge semantic gulf that's developed over the years.
Another example in the same vein is just the whole idea of Roman collapse encoded in Gibbon's Rise and Fall, which continues to define popular perceptions of the end of the empire. Entire bookshelves have been written by much better authors than me addressing his shortcomings.
Do I write yet another short dismissal or a longer (yet fatally flawed) breakdown of my own? Is responding to Gibbon's shortcomings appropriate if the person I'm responding to doesn't actually know or fully agree with Gibbon, they've just partially adopted some of his ideas through cultural osmosis? I don't have an answer.
Then you have the people who are starting from preconceived ideas and are obstinate about staying there. This is where I'd put Hancock and unfortunately, you can't reason someone out of a position they're holding for emotional reasons by simply providing better info.
There are entire journal issues dedicated to just correcting Hancock's books and analyzing why modern evidence and methodologies don't support his ideas. Hancock himself operates under an assumption that critiques and corrections are simply "the academy" keeping him down.
Personally, I don't really care about Hancock himself being wrong. What I do care about is the impact he has on his audience and the popularization of his ivory tower mafia conspiracy. One of the most important relationships archaeologists/anthropologists have with the public is trust. The field needs the public to trust that researchers are not professional looters looking to gain monetarily. They need the public to be willing to aid researchers with fieldwork (e.g. permits, interviews, land use). They need the public to trust the information they produce even as it changes, because otherwise what's the point of research?
I'm of the opinion that Hancock is poisonous to all of that based on my personal experiences. You can disagree.
Another thing I want to draw attention to is the idea of the "mainstream" though. Archaeology and anthropology are not like mathematics. It's rarely obvious when one idea is "more correct", whatever that means. "Academic circle-jerk" in the sense of there being one single, homogenous school of thought largely doesn't exist. Everyone from grad school onwards is heavily incentivized to critique others harshly outside their in-group. It's not that Hossenfelders don't exist, it's that nearly everyone is one. So yes, I fully agree that not everything is black and white.
- There are two separate questions under consideration here.
One is the capabilities of commercial general aviation air travel in terms of total elapsed travel time.
The second is the general commercial utilisation of air travel.
In the case of the first, advances in aircraft speed have been all but entirely offset by increased frictions in other parts of the air transport system. 2014 travel between NYC and Chicago is only barely faster than it was over 80 years ago. Moreover, aircraft speed is flat or declining since the late 1950s and the introduction of jet-powered aircraft.
The cost side is based on economics and other factors. In part, it is a question of both supply and demand. Costs have fallen through technological efficiencies; jet engines of today are roughly as efficient as propellor engines of the 1950s, not merely faster as was initially the case. They've also fallen through nonaeronotical advances: more efficient booking, higher seating utilisation, tighter seating spacing, and the like.
Statista's data extend only to 2007. Gordon gives data to the 1940s.
Among the big surprises to me a few years back was that peak avaiation fuel (at least through the mid-2010s) had occurred by 2000. Total passenger miles increased, but only through much higher load factors.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings... (Search for "aviation fuel usage data".)
http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecast...
Gordon's data show inflation-adjusted passenger price per mile as essentially flat since 1990. Given miles travelled is a function of price per mile ... a similar relationship holds. Rise and Fall, p. 401.
