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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

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This is a discussion forum. It’s not “obvious” to everyone, including people who correctly identify their non-expertise.

(This comment continues the trend of abusing the “appeal to authority.” Humanity collects and specializes knowledge because we recognize the general impossibility of knowing everything ourselves.)

Jesus christ the number of people that learned a list of fallacies but never understood them or their applications and now mindlessly accuse people online of them in ways that aren't at all applicable while thinking they're so much smarter than everyone else cause they memorized this list of gotchas that aren't actually gotchas regularly astounds me.

Please learn what the fallacies actually mean and maybe read actual organized debate rules. I promise you, in one of those "the researcher has years of experience in the field and you're a programmer, they are more likely to be correct" is valid support for an argument and not some how negated by "I cast 'appeal to authority' fallacy" without an actual argument that indicates why the authority does not have weight.

As Feynman once remarked, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Archaeology is a soft science at best and highly dependent on interpretation. Given the replication crises afflicting even hard sciences like medicine, we should be skeptical about the claims of any given researcher. And while a domain expert may be more likely to be correct than a layman, their overall probability of being correct may be less than chance, as in the case of pre-industrial doctors.

I assure you that there's no replication crisis in archaeology. Why? Because almost nothing in archaeology uses replication. You can't excavate the same sections twice, you can't test the same samples twice, and you can't replicate the same historical events to test theories of formation processes.

Archaeology is a historical science like evolutionary biology and geology.

Another thread posted an example where for over a hundred years a Swedish skeleton was thought to be male because it was buried with weapons, but then just a decade ago it was found by DNA evidence to be female.

Surely bone anatomy is much more reliable to interpret than a half million year old pile of sticks yet it was still gotten wrong. Anything that needs interpreted will invite incorrect interpretations and should be taken with a grain of salt.

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