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Ed Barnhart: evaluation

30 Sept 2024 Lex Fridman Podcast #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America

“There was some student who surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked them about their Greek sign and their Maya sign, and his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better, which that’s fascinating.”

— Ed Barnhart

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ed Barnhart
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
30 Sept 2024
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…So this idea that every day represents, carries a spirit. There’s modern day astrology. Most people kind of consider astrology this maybe a bit unscientific woo-woo type of set of beliefs, but do you think there’s some wisdom that astrology carries? From your scholarship of the Maya calendar, do you think if we carry that to the astrological perspective on the world, do you think there’s some wisdom there? I don’t know. I have a woo-woo part of me. I would like to believe that stuff. But I don’t think as a scientist, I cannot come up with a biological scientific reason why that would be true. And when you look at it objectively, I mean really? Is everybody born with the sign Scorpio a moody person? That’s just objectively not true. But it is funny how oftentimes these Maya horoscopes, for lack of a better word, do hit the mark. There was some student who surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked them about their Greek sign and their Maya sign, and his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better, which that’s fascinating. At least that’s fun. But no, I think I’m too much of a scientist to believe that. I just don’t have any foundation in science that would allow us to believe that the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny. I agree. And yet there’s so much mystery all around us that … What I do like is the inbuilt humility to that worldview, that there’s this whole, you can call it a spiritual world, but a world that we don’t quite understand. And then you can wonder about what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then you can construct all kinds of systems to try to interpret that, and then there is where the human hubris can come in. But it’s good to be humbled by how little we know, I suppose.…

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