How Reason Can Fail

I watched Netflix’ “Ancient Apocalypse” and loved it. For those unfamiliar, it lays out a hypothesis by a man named Graham Hancock, who suggests that there was an ancient civilization which was wiped out by a catastrophic comet or meteorite impact.

According to Hancock, those that survived dispersed around the world, carrying with them the advanced knowledge from their lost civilization. Their insights spurred the hunter-gatherer tribes to develop agriculture, build great monuments, and accelerate into more advanced societies themselves.

It sounded epic, the documentary’s visuals were stunning, and Hancock provided all kinds of evidence that sounded convincing.

He claimed that mainstream archeologists and historians were prematurely shutting down the possibility that such an advanced civilization could have existed during the Ice Age.

I could relate to the frustration he felt towards these intellectuals being close-minded and unwilling to consider different perspectives.

Then the other day I listened to the Joe Rogan Experience episode where Hancock was joined by Flint Dibble, a mainstream archeologist who disagreed with his ancient apocalypse hypothesis.

The episode was incredibly illuminating, as it became clear that Hancock’s position was that there could be an ancient civilization before the Ice Age, and archeologists couldn’t be sure that such a civilization didn’t exist because they had only excavated a small percentage of certain likely areas such as the Sahara, the Amazon, and the Oceans.

However, even Hancock admitted he had no evidence of such a civilization–it was a lot of speculation based on circumstantial evidence that was open to interpretation.

Once again, I’m sympathetic to Hancock’s disappointment at the certainty with which mainstream archeologists and historians write him off, but it became clear from Dibble’s explanations, that there was good reason for the mainstream skepticism of Hancock’s position.

The scientific process requires maintaining some degree of doubt, and an openness to being surprised by new evidence, but when Hancock’s evidence bumped up against Dribble’s additional context, Hancock’s arguments became unconvincing, and I felt that he was actually the one who refused to question his own assumptions.

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Watching this exchange, I was struck by a disturbing realization–how many other times had I let my perspective be swayed when I’d only heard arguments on one side without having them directly confronted by the strongest counter-evidence?

And so I’ve made a new sensemaking rule for myself, to mentally label my positions with extreme doubt if I haven’t had the position directly critiqued by its opposition yet.

It’s possible to find evidence to construct a convincing argument for most any position, and no matter how smart you are, your own rationality can only protect you up to a point. Ultimately, your lack of context is going to limit your ability to properly judge the information. You just don’t know what you don’t know.

That’s why I’m building Qrio–we need an organized, evergreen system where the evidence from different positions can bump up against each other productively. With this kind of collaboration across a diversity of perspectives, we’ll have sufficient context to allow us to effectively use our rationality to come to informed positions on important topics. (Consider supporting Qrio’s development through this fundraiser.)

It’s true that there’s still much of the ancient world left to be discovered, and perhaps someday archeologists will find evidence of an ancient civilization–it’s possible–but I do think the current reasonable position is that it’s significantly less probable than the mainstream narrative.

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