Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I felt that my work was being deliberately misrepresented and I felt that I, as a human being, was being insulted and wronged in ways that are deeply hurtful. My wife and I have six children between us and we have nine grandchildren. And of those nine grandchildren, seven are of mixed race. And this is my family, and these are kids who are going to grow up and read Wikipedia and learn from reading Wikipedia that Grandpa was some kind of racist. This is a personal issue for me, and I’m afraid I carried that personal anger into the debate and it made me less effective than I should have been. But ultimately I do want to pay tribute to Flint. He is an excellent debater. He’s got a very sharp mind. He’s a very clever man and he’s very fast on his feet. And I recognize that. I was definitely up against a superior debater in that debate. I’m not sure that I have those debating skills and I certainly didn’t have them on that particular day. I also admire about Flint something else, which is that he was willing to be there. Most archaeologists don’t want to talk to me at all. They want to insult me from the sidelines. They want to make sure that Wikipedia keeps on calling me a pseudo-archaeologist, or a purveyor of pseudo-archaeological theories. They want to make sure that the hints of racism are there, but they actually don’t want to sit down and confront me. At least Flint was willing to do that and I’m grateful to him for that. And I think in that sense it is an important encounter between people with, let’s say, an alternative view of history and those with the very much mainstream view of history that archaeology gives us. And he’s also a very determined character. He doesn’t give up. So all of those things about him I admire and respect. But, I think he fought dirty during the debate, and I’ve said exactly why in this video that I now have up on YouTube. To say a positive thing that I enjoyed, I think towards the end and him speaking about agriculture was pretty interesting. So the techniques of archaeology are pretty interesting, where you can get some insights through the fog of time about what people were doing, how they were living. That’s pretty interesting. It’s very interesting. It’s a very important discipline. And I’ve said many times before, publicly, I couldn’t do any of my work without the work that archaeologists do. I emphasize very strongly in this video that I don’t study what archaeologists study. But nevertheless, the data that archaeologists have generated over the last century or so has been incredibly valuable to me in the work that I do. But, when I look at the Great Sphinx and the studies of archaeology saying that this is the work of the pharaoh Khafre, despite the absence of any single contemporary inscription that describes it to Khafre, and in fact the presence of other inscriptions that say that it was already there in the time of Khufu, I am not looking at what egyptologists study. They just dismiss all of that and lock into the Khafre connection. At Gobekli Tepe, I’m not really looking at what archaeologists look at, I’m looking at the alignments of the megaliths and how they seem to track precession of the star Sirius over a period of time. Archaeologists aren’t interested in any of that. So I value and respect archeology. I think it’s an incredible tool for investigating our past, but I wish archaeologists would bring a slightly gentler frame of mind to it and a slightly opener perspective. And also that archaeologists would be willing to trust the general public to make up their own minds. It’s as though certain archaeologists are afraid of the public being presented with an alternative point of view, which they regard as quote, unquote, “dangerous,” because they somehow underestimate the intelligence of the general public and think the general public are just going to accept that. Actually by condemning those alternative point of view, archaeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view, because there is a great distrust of experts in our society today. And behaving in a snobbish arrogant way, we archaeologists are the only people who are really qualified to speak about the past and anybody else who speaks about the past is dangerous. That actually is not helpful to archaeology in the long term. There could be a much more positive and a much more cooperative relationship. And I can see that relationship with a gentleman like Ed Barnhart. Was very much the case with archaeologist Martti Parssinen from the University of Helsinki and with geographer Alcio Arranzi, Brazilian geographer. Very, very senior figure who I worked with in the Amazon for season two of Ancient Apocalypse, looking at these astonishing earthworks that have emerged from the Amazon jungle and which more and more are now being found with LiDAR. Indeed, we found some of them ourselves with LiDAR while we were there.…

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