Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

> ...a network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches at the Chinese walled site of Pingliangtai dating back 4,000 years to a time known as the Longshan period.

Reaction: If the site was "walled" (and not somehow occupied after the builders simply abandoned it), then obviously the engineering skills and social organization for large-scale infrastructure construction did exist.

> The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system.

Reaction: That "earlier understanding" sounds very comfortable and convenient, if you are an archaeologist with elitist social biases, or dependent on support from members of a social elite, or who is a member of his society's social elite. Wealthy and powerful people rationalizing that poor and oppressed people somehow "needed" them was already an old trope when the first pyramid was built.

It's the opposite. There's a lot of pressure in academia to find and publicize examples of "not hierarchical and male dominated" settlements, especially ones that achieved technical successes.

A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations that some bronze was likely imported, because it contradicted this narrative for a given location.

Notice "EARLIER understanding". Archaeology was a thing back when witch trials were all-too-common, and the Divine Right of kings was still mainstream thought. Howard Carter was ~done excavating Tutankhamun's tomb before British women had equivalent voting right to men.

I think your conflating a lot of different time periods for events which differ between nations.

Since you’re using a British Egyptologist as an example and we’re speaking English let’s stick to Great Britain.

The divine right of kings was considered on a significant decline by the Glorious Revolution in the late 1600s so that’s off by several centuries for the genesis of early/gentlemen archaeology began.

The last witch trial in England was also in the late 1600s so again off by several centuries.

And while you are correct about Howard Carter and women’s voting rights I think it’d be important to note that in 1902 parliament had not even given the right to representation for men who weren’t property owners either which was a significant if not majority of men.

I'm not confining archaeology to Howard Carter, nor his stereotype, nor his (generally) post-Victorian era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology

Following a few links - William Harvey (b. 1578, graduated from Cambridge 1593) both conducted excavations at Stonehenge, and was a prominent skeptic of allegations of witchcraft. But it was 70 years after his death that the last "legal" execution for witchcraft was performed in the British Isles (Janet Horne, 1727).

Meanwhile, Wikipedia also credits Robert Filmer (graduated from Cambridge 1604) with being one of the most famous exponents of Divine Right, and notes that that issue was pretty much settled - at least in Britain - by the English Civil War (1642-1651).

Yes, this is a central problem right now both in accademia and journalism.

Lots of things aren't published because they don't confirm the author's pre-existing narratives. And on the other side, there's lots of cherry-picking for stories and papers that do confirm a hypothesis, even if they're outliers or extremely rare or the author is clearly reaching for their desired hypothesis.

It's very Soviet-esque and should concern us all.

I'm on the fence on this, and feel like even if it were true, the academic & journalist types are obviously going to argue the s#!t out of their position.

Do you have sources that compare pre/post or show how non-conforming but equally significant news did not make it? (The "because of their prejudices" is the hardest thing to prove, you super-rarely get proof-of-intention in such matters, so just these facts should help the seal the case.)

> Do you have sources that compare pre/post

It's pretty useless to compare the post-blog/social media era journalism with old newspapers to compare biases.

Today we have journalism that will shameless give into their journalists personal biases, without editors calling out their bullshit. Quite the opposite, the editors probably want to dig in hard into the journos biases BECAUSE they feed into the reader's biases which get Twitter/FB clicks.

And they recruit based on that ability too.

Now that journalism is a low paying job that pretty much only attracts upper middle class kids who spent way too long in some University liberal arts degree and can afford the low paying early years of writing enough to get a gig at a REAL journo job at NYTimes type places (the few left where some basic level of fact checking and editorial professionalism is done)... which would be the type of orgs you're comparing it to historically.

...idk I feel like comparing the orgs to historical journalism simply on their adherence to bias/academic+journalistic integrity is waste of time. The job, market, and orgs have changed too much to go one-to-one.

To a certain extent it is the black swan more important than 1 million white swan. Just wish the black swan is real. Got any pic … or evidence, reviewed journal etc.

> There's a lot of pressure in academia to find and publicize examples of "not hierarchical and male dominated" settlements, especially ones that achieved technical successes.

It's more a realization that we only have a hierarchical, male dominated point of view on history and that there's a ton of backfill work to do because of that limitation.

> A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations

Welcome to science? If they were meeting in person someone would have bounced a muffin off his head. People take what they're doing really seriously.

The point is that the observations were completely uncontroversial and good science.

The problem was that they conflicted with a political narrative someone wanted. If someone takes that more seriously than following the evidence where it leads, they suck and should get out of science.

We have a serious problem if someone making a minor comment results in a 10-email tirade because "that's just science" or whatever nonsense is being used to justify it.

Have you not had meetings where you bike shed the copy on a website?

I wouldn't consider bouncing a muffin off someone's head to be "taking things seriously". Closer to the opposite.

even a large, stale, paperweighty muffin?

Welcome to ideology. Can’t believe your defending this.

> There's a lot of pressure in academia

Be careful to over generalize. There's a clear distinction in political divides between STEM departments and the humanities. But both even have inner differences. As an example, if you study Country X, you may or may not have certain conditions required to gain access to historical documents that are controlled by said country. Even if you don't live in that country and aren't leaving, those documents are on loan from said country and they control access.

Long story short, stop over simplifying things and google Simpson's Paradox.

STEM is also totally captured by left wing ideology. It's still more accountable to reality through controlled experiments, due to its domain of inquiry being the hard sciences, so maintains more scientific rationality, but the situation is bad nonetheless.

Is this something you've experienced or something you've been told. Because if the latter than my experiences differ from what you've been told.

It's what I've observed, and experienced through personal interactions.

The sample size of the people I've interacted with is admittedly very small.

Fair, but I'll mention that I'm in one of the most liberal states in America and it's not as big in my department. I routinely see professors and my advisor say stuff that is far from PC. Though I have heard of a junior professor say that we shouldn't refer to orphan processes because it might offend orphans. Kinda wish I was there, because as someone who is orphaned (single parent, not both) I particularly feel offended that he would think we're so weak that we'd need to be coddled.

Our union doesn't give the STEM departments much respect. They seem to particularly hate CS and the Economists...

Admittedly my sample size is small, but it gives evidence that we shouldn't aggregate beliefs about people. I'll admit, I'm frequently frustrated when people hear I'm in grad school that they immediately think I want to lick Stalin's boot. Such an interaction happened just yesterday on here where a user called me a communist when I was calling meritocracy a fool's errand. They didn't see the irony and somehow those comments got removed. Rare occurrence here...

Thanks for sharing your experience.

CS and Economics are the departments least influenced by left wing ideology from what I've gathered. I assume Math and Physics are similar in that respect.

I don't understand why ANY determination has to be made about "social elite" or ... "non-social elite" matters.

The fact that construction and some planning took place seems to just be evidence that some planning and construction took place.

They said the lack of evidence of social stratification in the burial sites and house sizes contrasted with other sites near by. Plus remember this is the headline a news site chose not the scientists.

It's very plausible journalists (including university PR teams) care more about social elitism than the archaeologists which is why it's the HN headline. The archaeologist is just using the only evidence they have which is some pipes, a cemetery, and few remaining structures to extrapolate about the community.

Causal evidence is basically non-existent in archaeology. You are correct that, deductively, we can conclude little more about society from this other than that construction took place. Archaeology attempts to collect all possible evidence and weigh the potential narratives. This can be especially effective at teasing out trends across many sites and cultures. Are we likely getting details wrong if we were to infer a specific society from these trends? Absolutely. We will likely never know most aspects of these cultures—but if that's your goal, even well-documented history will fail us. We know a lot about the lifestyles of european benedictine monks, for instance, because they were excellent record keepers, but we still can't answer basic questions about their lives.

Anyway, with this specific article social stratification is one of those things with little ability to extract a narrative from a single data point, but whose importance emerges when collated with others. And it does sound a bit editorialized for modern narratives, but that's probably not intended by the researchers.

> We know a lot about the lifestyles of european benedictine monks, for instance, because they were excellent record keepers, but we still can't answer basic questions about their lives.

That's why finding their garbage or where they emptied their latrines is often more insightful than finding yet another written record.

Only because they have left so much written record that we don't really expect that another record will tell us something we didn't already know. The less we know about some culture the more valuable written record would be - but often it isn't available. When we already know a culture well archeology can tell us where they ideals they wrote about themselves don't match reality. When we know nothing though, archeology leaves us with a lot of evidence that we don't really know what to make of.

Maybe. Though people rarely write down the things that we now find most interesting.

Have a look at very old newspapers or magazines. It's almost irrelevant today who won the latest elections or what scandal happened to whom; the old ads are typically the most fascinating part.

Similarly, we have a treasure trove of old clay tablets with complaints, mundane contracts, letters by normal people etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...

Those are much better at shining a light on how people lived, then the typical drivel about 'important' events we get in most early writing.

> I don't understand why ANY determination has to be made about "social elite" or ... "non-social elite" matters.

Generally, archaeology is interested in knowing information about past societies.

There's another example of bottom-up infrastructure construction in the barbed-wire telephone networks which sprung up in western America... and, of course, there's the whole FOSS movement.

If we trace the latter back through Unix and Bell Labs, both of these come together in the person of Alexander Graham Bell, though his vision of communications technology infrastructure was, of course, quintessentially top-down.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...

It's not "comfortable" or "convenient". People are just trying to piece together stuff to find the most likely hypothesis.

For instance, if you saw evidence of a successful space program you'd assume that it requires government. That's because there are natural difficulties with these enterprises that require some degree of coordination because you have free-rider problems, transit provider problems, etc.

The coordination mechanisms can be a whole bunch of things: we use markets very effectively today, but we also use governments or religions.

And yes, it could be another mechanism but someone has to postulate one such mechanism and find tests that it does not fail.

What's interesting is that the evidence pointed overall to one mechanism and now it points to another.

This sort of low-brow stuff fills people who read this stuff so much. "the elites", god.

Elites to poors - See! Without us you wouldn't have the pyramids!

Poors - WTF do I want a pyramid for?

Elite: did you say something? Get back to work!

Also the poors - All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

I feel like you read more into this and maybe added in your own biases.

I don't think these archaeologists are interested in worshipping society's elites. Maybe hundreds of years ago when you had to be an elite to be an archaeologist.

The Chinese government funds archaeology in the hope it legitimizes the Chinese state as the most ancient. Pointing to a time when the state wasn’t there, yet society flourished, would delegitimize the Chinese state in their eyes.

Perhaps they want to avoid another: "Century of humiliation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

The trouble is that the presence of a state doesn't prove anything. There is no such thing as a stateless society. Every society is governed, even if the governing isn't formalized in some way that is identifiable to a particular understanding. Families, tribes, etc. are societies that, too, are governed. You just have to define "govern" accordingly, and the Chinese state is very keen to understand "the state" as overbearing, master of initiative, controlling, intrusive, etc. But when you look at societies in the past, something also reflected in the writings of Thomas Aquinas in which he discusses the duties of the state and its citizens, the role of the state was and was seen in rather restrained terms (the total sum of concrete things a given state does is partly dependent on circumstances, of course). It functioned more like a referee. And that makes sense. Citizens live their lives in time and place and so on, and the state responds when something concerning the common good requires its attention. It is bottom up, in this sense (though we cannot reduce society to the sum of its individuals). But the state isn't "running" things as if it were some godlike puppet master that animates the universe.

The trouble with the present Chinese state is the manner in which it governs and the deeply flawed presuppositions about society, the state, and the individual that it is founded on. And so in this sense, it is clear why they would want to emphasize centralization to argue in favor of their particular vision of statehood, a kind of Tsarist, or as Koneczny would say, Turanian domination.

Societies do need a state, but it does not follow that they need something like the crushing behemoth that bears down on China.

Sounds like you’d have a hard time getting funding (or staying out of a reeducation camp) in China right now.

“State” has a more specific definition than government.

It usually means a bureaucratic, meritocratic, and stable administration.

China supposedly developed the first state as a result of constant warfare early on.

You're kidding right? Chinese philosophy always talks about a golden age prior to when the state didn't exist. Even the current Chinese Communist government believes in the idea of primitive communism, that is before the slave societies of e.g. the Shang dynasty, there were more or less stateless societies. Although already by the Zhou dynasty philosophers were stating that societal changes, specialization, etc. made going back to such ways close to impossible.

To be fair Pharaohs at least felt deep responsibility for own subjects well-being, active defence of state borders and common interest of own folk living there. But not to the self defeating level of Sargon of Akkad and the first socialist welfare state's collapse known to history.

Isn’t it great how technologists are smarter than every other profession?!?

If only...

https://xkcd.com/435/

(I'd put programmers in with the biologists, roughly.)

Computer scientists ought, by all rights, be hanging out with the statisticians in the no-man's land between physics and math. The actual practice of the field rates maybe about a psych, though.

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