Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure. We, offline, talked about the Graham Hancock, Flint Dibble debate on Rogan. I like debates personally. Flint Dibble represents mainstream archeology, and I actually like the whole science, the whole field of archeology. You’re trying to figure out history with so little information. You’re trying to put together this puzzle when you have so little and you’re desperately clinging onto little clues and from those clues using the simple possible explanation to understand. And now with modern technology, as Flint was trying to express, that you can use large amounts of data that’s imperfect, but just the scale and using that to reconstruct civilizations. There are different practices from the little details of what things they eat, how they interact with each other, what art they create to when they existed, what are the timeframes, all that kind of stuff. And that starts to fill in the gaps of our understanding. But still, the error bars are large in terms of what really happened. And that leaves room for things like Graham Hancock talks about lost civilizations, which I like also because you have a humility about, maybe there’s giant things we don’t know about or we got completely wrong. And that’s always good to remember. It’s confusing to me to imagine what… I don’t even know, where’d the Egyptians go? What happened? It seemed like they were doing so good. They had so much cool shit. But I was reading anthropological stuff in the Amazon about tribes that just through their societal structures and through their hunting practices that didn’t really develop practices that worked and bands of people that went extinct before they could turn into larger societies. And there’s a lot of people that got it wrong. For every explorer that leaves Borneo and arrives in South America, there’s probably hundreds more that just die at sea, get eaten by sharks, avalanche. And it’s so fascinating to me that all of us really, past our grandparents, don’t really even know where we came from. Do you know who your great great great grandparents are?…

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