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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

Balance would be nice, yes, but I think the conservative approach is closer to correct, especially given the natural human bias toward believing sensational theories.

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Maybe not closer to correct, but definitely less likely to admit errors. But sometimes the negative space around a particular thing becomes overwhelming. To me this is like circumstantial evidence—in general it’s weaker than physical evidence, but in high enough numbers it can serve.

But what does the negative space indicate? It says something is missing - which few will dispute - but there are many possible answers in a sort of superposition. Speculation about this answer or that one isn't reliable. It resolves to one answer (or a few) when you have actual evidence.

Sure, you can’t always make a definitive statement, but you can at least determine classes of things. Same way we can determine a murder occurred without recovering a weapon or sometimes even without finding a body. Maybe we can’t be very specific about the how, but IME it is also OK to draw comparisons to modern tools so long as those comparisons are helpful.

Speculation may usefully provide leads to investigate, but it's meaningless as a conclusion and won't be accepted by scientists or anyone else serious (including courts); they require evidence.

> you can’t always make a definitive statement

It's far short of that. Human speculation is wildly unreliable and we seem to always overestimate it, perhaps because it's emotionally satisfying: What other speculative answer would we choose but something that satisfies our emotions? Lacking evidence, nothing compels us to face the unpleasant or unexpected. Look what our understanding of nature and the world was before we required evidence (before science).

The problem is that you get a vastly distorted picture because of different survivorship rates of artifacts. In the Stone Age people used mostly wood tools but stone tools didn’t rot away.

Quite.

> Balance would be nice, yes

What is more sensational:

a, you can drill a hole and cut a 100 ton stone block with a chisel

b, you create a hole with a drill, you use some for of stone cutting technology that supports cutting 100 ton stone blocks?

It can be legitimately unclear. Relatively-advanced technology being available to early humans is remarkable. Likewise, achieving difficult tasks without the relatively-advanced technology is remarkable. Some prototypical examples of this:

- Incan stonework with stones 'perfectly' cut to fit without mortar -- did they have advanced tools to support that? Or just persistence?

- Greek fire -- is there some lost mechanism here? Or just the growth of legends?

- the pyramids (I think not so controversial among academics, but certainly in pop culture)

Neither of those is particularly sensational. What's your point?

That's an interesting thought. I wonder if you can quantify this belief? That Weibull (presumably) distribution would be an interesting and useful thing to know.

Quantify the belief that humans are biased toward sensationalism? No, I have no idea how to do that. Actually you could make an argument that it's a bit circular, that "sensationalism" is defined as the kind of ideas that humans are biased towards and which are therefore more able to cause a "sensation".

But if you don't see how people yearn to believe in big dramatic things like conspiracies, aliens, bigfoot, or even simple narratives about single people changing the course of history, and how they only accept the complicated and/or boring reality with conscious effort, then, well, you seem to be living in a better universe than I am.

Unfortunately, you also sometimes throw out explanations like "they did X in substantially the same way as their descents were doing X up until the late 1800s" or "they used it for Y, just at it was used at other sites throughout the world."

At least in the case of things like migrations, we're starting to get overwhelming genetic evidence.

I agree that's an overcorrection. People doing things the same way they have for centuries should be high on the list of plausible, boring explanations.

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