https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rFXrGFbhQuo
Today I wanted to do something a little bit different, but I think it’s relevant. I think it’s important and it’s fun. I hope. I hope it will be fun. Well, I’m going to have fun anyway. I hope you have fun too. I want to talk about one of my favorite TV shows. And honestly, I don’t watch much TV anymore. I don’t have cable anymore. I’m too lazy to set up my external antenna system. So yeah, I’ve been going completely TV-less. I hardly watch anything at all. But there used to be a show on, and last time I checked it was still on, Ancient Aliens. Ancient Aliens is an excellent show. It’s one of my favorite shows. And what I like to do is sort of break down what I think the show is about and why I like it so much and how it’s relevant to sense-making and how it’s relevant to models and how it’s relevant to science itself and what all of that means. So the show Ancient Aliens is basically a show about linking the presence of aliens in the past to events in the past, which we have a hard time explaining. And I sort of mentioned aliens before. I’ve talked about conspiracies and aliens and lizard people and things like that. But the thing that makes the Ancient Aliens show interesting is that it really highlights the value of science and shows the weaknesses when we deviate from the scientific method, because that’s what’s important. The scientific method is a reliable method that is invariant across perspectives or something. It doesn’t matter to some extent what you’re applying the scientific method to. It gives you a way to understand results in a fashion that makes them true and false, that has upsides and downsides. I’ll definitely be going over that at some point. But it also gives you a way to move it forward. So a true answer isn’t the end, but a false answer is. So that’s, again, good and bad. And it gives you reliability. So it doesn’t matter what you apply that method to. It seems to work. But that doesn’t mean you can apply the method to everything. That’s where people make a mistake. They’re like, oh, the scientific method works. Therefore, we can use it on everything. No, you can’t. the scientific method on because you don’t have a proper framework or you don’t have a proper way to understand truth of a situation, for example. And so scientific method very much requires a definition of truth up front. So that can be very problematic. We don’t always have access to the truth or a truth or a reasonable truth that we can point to. So the trick that ancient aliens does is it specifically goes outside of the scientific method framework deliberately. It uses what’s called non-fossifiability. So Mark, what the hell is non-fossifiability? Using these big words, stop it. So what non-fossifiability means is that the claim can’t be disproven. There’s no way. There’s no set of information. There’s no process. There’s no method by which you can prove definitively that the statement is false. There’s no possible way to falsify the statement. Why is this important? Well, this is important because the scientific method relies on this explicitly. It has to be a falsifiable claim or you can’t use the scientific method on it. So again, can’t use the scientific method on everything. What can’t use the scientific method on? Ancient aliens. The ancient aliens theory cannot have the scientific method applied. There’s no science that can disprove that ancient aliens built the pyramid. It’s not possible. It’s not possible. You may say, Mark, it’s clearly unscientific to believe that ancient aliens built the pyramid. I don’t think it’s unscientific to believe that. I do think it’s silly to believe that ancient aliens built the pyramids. Sure. But you can’t disprove it. You can’t say that ancient aliens weren’t there doing the work. It’s not possible. Right? You can say, oh, look, there’s all this evidence that humans did some work, granted, but that doesn’t preclude the ancient aliens from having done most of the work or shown the humans how to do the work or in fact done the work and then humans tried to copy it later. You can’t just prove any of that. It’s not possible. No, there’s no type of evidence to bring to bear. The interesting thing about something like ancient aliens is that while there’s no falsifiable evidence, there’s no end to possible evidence that would point to ancient aliens being the builders of the pyramid. Right? Because we could always find something like some exotic metal that we thought the ancients didn’t have the ability to make. Right? And then we can go, aha, ancient aliens, they’re there. There’s evidence of ancient aliens. The problem is evidence that ancient aliens were present also doesn’t prove that they built the pyramids. So it could have been that the metal was found by pure accident because accidents happen. And then the aliens showed up. There’s no way around these problems. There’s no way. And what’s the trick they’re really using here other than this falsifiability trick and the positive evidence trick where there’s no amount of negative evidence but any evidence of something can be thought to, you know, can be attributed to the aliens. So what are you talking about, Mark? This is confusing. So the fact that the pyramids exist is evidence that aliens could have done it. Sure. The fact that there are no pyramids anywhere else in the Sahara is evidence that the aliens erased them. But that’s not a good definition of evidence. Right? And that’s where the problem comes in. But there are lots of pieces of evidence that like our lack of ability to explain how the in a fashion that has evidence is evidence or is at least claimed to be evidence that ancient aliens built the pyramids. And this goes on and on. And this is why it’s not useful to make these claims outside of a scientific frame because this can go on forever. There’s no there’s no limiting factor. There’s no stopping point. You can just keep making these crazy claims. And there’s an infinite number of claims, actually, technically speaking. So you can take a mystery. And what’s a mystery? It’s something we don’t have enough information about. And you can say, well, ancient aliens did it. You can do that for all mysteries. Sure. Why not? It’s not helpful. You could also say those are people or you could you could say, oh, well, well, clearly, clearly what happened here was the time travelers had access and they did that so that our society would shape itself in a way that the time travelers themselves would exist. Sure. Now we’re in a we’re in a loop. Great. So the reason why I like the show Ancient Aliens so much is because they play with this quite a bit. And if you listen real carefully to the stuff they say, it’s hysterical. It’s completely hysterical. But the other reason why I like it is because because they’re relying on the positive evidence that they’re saying, oh, this is evidence that aliens were here or that aliens did something. This this this claim that we couldn’t have done this without aliens is viable because there’s no evidence that that we were doing similar things. Fair enough. But that’s not a very strong claim. The claims they make are based on archaeological findings, like actual archaeology in most cases. And it’s also based on the the things that are that are absent that that I find interesting. So for example, you can say, well, there’s no amount of people that can move a stone up a ramp. The ramp would have to be whatever. But you know, that’s ridiculous and absurd and unnecessary. Like you can always build a crane and like they knew how to build cranes. I hate to break it to you. You know, so all of the richness of the archaeological evidence and the lack thereof to me is fascinating. Like that’s what that’s where I find all the all the goodness in it. And the the the the way the show functions, the way it plays with the words and the things that the claims that they make because they’re specifically explicitly unscientific, I find fascinating. It’s so much fun. It’s so much fun. But there’s so many good nuggets of information out there that just you know, like I’m not I’m not trying to prove ancient aliens. But the fact that something looks winged to me might might you know, you could you could Oh, well, that’s because of the Jungian archetypes. You chalk it up to that and say that’s a universal symbol throughout all cultures. And that’s why it looks like the aliens must have taken it from point to point to point. Fair enough. In fact, they use that in ancient aliens a lot. All cultures have a life breath myth or flood myth. And we think that’s because the ancient aliens told everybody about it. It’s like, okay, I suppose. Or there’s pyramids in South America. And there’s pyramids in Egypt. And therefore, okay. You know, and then every once in a while, they’ll throw a curveball like oh, Tutankhamun. I think it was Tutankhamun had cocaine in his system as a mummy. Therefore they had contact with South America. Maybe now I’m interested. Maybe they did. But then that destroys the ancient alien. Now you don’t need ancient aliens anymore. Although, you know, there’s all these arguments about whether or not we could boat across and crazy, crazy talk. Of course we could. Not very likely to succeed. But you know, it was certainly done. So that’s the funness of the show is just listening to what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and using this non-fossil fiability and the positive evidence, plus using absence of evidence as evidence itself. And they do this all the time, all the time. It’s like the format of the whole show is just one of those things. And that’s what makes it a lot of fun for me because I get to spot all this stuff while at the same time listening to these nuggets of information that I can link into something that’s not ancient aliens for an explanation. So I hope this sort of highlights some of the dangers in this non-fossil fiability in not having a reliable method that’s applicable across disciplines or across frameworks to count on to give you intelligibility and to help you. Because otherwise we have to rely on other kinds of intelligibility. And I’m not implying that science is the only way to get intelligibility. I certainly don’t think so. Not a big fan of over applying science, which we’re doing a lot of. But you have to know where your intelligibility is coming from. And maybe absence isn’t the best way to understand intelligibility because maybe there’s more absence than there is presence. And therefore you can get lost more easily. And I think that’s one of the things that’s fun about the show is it’s easy to get lost in some of their theories for a while and have a lot of fun with them. But the danger in that show is primarily in a loss of sense making because you’re being persuaded by ideas that are specifically non-scientific but presented as science because they’re using scientific findings, archaeological findings, and a bunch of theoretical science really that were hypothetical science is probably closer to the truth to make assertions about the world, right, to form axioms. And at some point I’ll do a video on axioms, I promise. And move forward from there. So the logical thought is intact, but the starting point is garbage. And that’s where the danger is. The other danger is in watching these things, of course, you’re being somewhat careless. And maybe if you’re doing it deliberately like I do, you’re not. But maybe you’re being somewhat careless with the thing that I value most when you watch my videos, which is, and the thing I always try to be appreciative of, which is your use of your time and attention.