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From the article: "Later on, Scheller and Freund realised that Pliny didn’t say what Facciolati-Forcellini claimed he did, but they liked the idea so they inst
by pferde 3y ago
From the article:
"Later on, Scheller and Freund realised that Pliny didn’t say what Facciolati-Forcellini claimed he did, but they liked the idea so they instead supported it"
I wonder, how many historical so-called facts are similarly based on a whim of some historiographer or other? We should take everything with a grain of salary... I mean, salt. :)
- newsclues 3y agoNot just history, but any field of study. Trusting experts is a problem, because experts are human.
- toolz 3y agoI believe life is most pleasant when you choose to err on the side of trusting experts, but there is something quite amusing (to me) that programmers have "cargo culting" and if you write code and deeply invest in any community you'll meet experts all the time that do things just because others do them, but then you'll meet someone in another highly trained field and just trust what they say is all evidence based. It's rather curious how many high skill professions seem to default to trusting others based on their credentials.
- toyg 3y agoThe problem is that, as soon as you hit moderate complexity, validating claims becomes difficult, time-consuming, and full of traps. Are you going to microscopically analyse every sausage you eat? If not, how do you trust that it's safe? Experts.
- toolz 3y agoI get what you're saying, but I also understand that poses it's own problems. Just because trusting the experts is the best we can do, does not mean that it doesn't sometimes come with significant consequences. History is littered with people abusing their expert status to maliciously achieve some goal. The first example that comes to my mind is the Tuskegee experiment, where the US public health service and CDC allowed 100 of the 400 men in their study to die, refusing to provide them with treatment for syphilis and preventing them from getting treatment by other means, so they could study the men. They also never revealed to those men that they had syphilis.
- blowski 3y agoIt’s why pluralism is so important, where experts hold each other to account. It’s worrying when not believing some dogma causes you personal problems.
- hef19898 3y agoThat behaviour is morally beyond bankrupt and racist. Doesn't mean the people involved were or were not experts in their fields so.
- tim333 3y agoI'm happy eating sausages in the UK but less so in say Nepal. No experts involved, just a look at the shops.
- hef19898 3y agoAll things considered, Nepalese meat is propably saver than industrial one. After all, the remains seen on the sreetside are from the same day, meaning whatever meat you buy was still alive in the morning.
- tim333 3y agoHaving eaten in both places and gotten ill in Nepal I'm skeptical. He's a pic of a typical meat shop there. https://c8.alamy.com/zooms/6/445bf76d991f4c27a9b88318955c2e35/mw252f.jpg https://c8.alamy.com/zooms/6/445bf76d991f4c27a9b88318955c2e3... and uk https://www.ballardsbutchers.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/landscape_medium/public/2021-08/jimmy-craig-ballards-butchers.jpg?itok=KvHrEcTW https://www.ballardsbutchers.co.uk/sites/default/files/style... note differences in cleanliness, refrigeration and so on.
- hef19898 3y agoThe issue is not the meat, it's the dust. Properly washing it before cooking takes care of that. Vegetables are no different in that regard.
- toyg 3y agoWithout stringent laws, drafted with experts, your "rule of looks" wouldn't be worth the bits it's written on.
- cf1241290841 3y agoThat sounds like a belief. Laws are obviously incomplete, circumvented and broken all the time. There is no substitute for common sense when it comes to not getting food poisoning. Some data: There is the show "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern" in which he ate weird stuff around the globe. He mentioned across several interviews that he never got sick on one of his trips by mostly just staying away from stuff like known bad tap water. At the same time he had gotten food poisoning 4 times in the last decade in the US. Including >Worst case was in Portland, Maine eating mussels at a crappy restaurant that I shouldn't have been eating in in the first place. On the road, in the third and fourth world I have not gotten sick. https://web.archive.org/web/20230607121840/https://starcasm.net/does-andrew-zimmern-ever-get-sick-the-travel-channel-icon-dishes-on-his-most-regretful-culinary-experiences/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230607121840/https://starcasm.... If i recall his rule of thumb is that if the local grandmas eat there and they dont use stuff you have to be exposed to for a while to tolerate it (rotten food / tap water in India) you are good to go.
- cf1241290841 3y agoYou cant actually trust that its safe to eat, you just like the idea and act accordingly. And deal with the consequences of the uncaught error cases. Tainted food still occurs. At best you can be confident / trust that a product is created in a given process which manages certain risks through certain means. Also, finding faults in said process is a lot easier then coming up with it or executing it. Be it making a sausage that is unlikely to make you sick or coming to an expert judgement with sufficient confidence to act on. It doesnt require the ability to validate a process to find it faulty, you just have to detect an error case occurring that isnt dealt with.
- paleotrope 3y ago“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” ― Michael Crichton
- yonaguska 3y agoUsually, the cost of doing something the wrong way as a programmer is minimal compared to say- a doctor or a rocket scientist. There's not really a governing body on how to do things, as in actual engineering- and most of the work we do is under the constraint of time. saving time means deferring decisions to others. I personally find that there's a lot of value in sifting through and examining the myriad of opinions on a given subject, and coming to your own conclusion, but in the professional world, this a luxury for but a few.
- tim333 3y agoExperts plus common sense and direct evidence I think works. Experts sometimes come out with complete nonsense, especially if there's politics involved.
- newsclues 3y agoTrust but verify. Asking experts to provide rationale for their decisions should be welcomed by experts.
- hef19898 3y agoAll the people I consider experts I ever encountered, where more than happy to explain their rationals. I learned a shit ton of things listening to them.
- cf1241290841 3y agoI would argue its over relying on complexity management solutions, so less a problem of experts but the inability or unwillingness to live with degrees of uncertainty and manage your confidence/trust accordingly. The whole expert thing becomes really problematic once people start making circular arguments to justify their existence and then promptly overrely. So the perceived necessity or benefit of having an expert means there has to be somebody you can trust. Which you then promptly overdo without functioning checks and balances. Expertise cant stem from demonstrated conviction and cant require trust, thats is describing religion and Ponzi schemes. You arent doing experts any favor by treating them as such, at best they still all have incomplete expertise and cant shoulder your reckless levels of trust.
- cies 3y agoAnd this is quite an irrelevant fact. How many people know/remember that the US faked an attack on it's fleet on August 4 to join the Vietnam war?
- hef19898 3y agoThe Tonkin Incident. Well, Wikipedia has a decent enough write up of the whole Vietnam War, including the French one, including Tonkin. The problem is less that those crucial facts are not know, but rather that they get ignored in public discourse.
- cies 3y agoExactly! Same for the --benign-- roman wages in salt story. It will get ignored.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd than all kinds of people will use that bit for all kinds of weird theories.
- cies 3y agoThat do not harm a million Iraqi or Viet civs. Plenty of groups believe/ promote all kinds of "weird theories". As long as they are harmless I dont care. The moment it involves cutting baby penisses or promoting hate I'm voicing myself out against.
- hef19898 3y agoThe cutting baby penisis remark was totally uncalled for, and can be seen offensive.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident One real attack August 2, one confused incident where actually no attack happened. It's kind of true but really it's hardly a false flag operation (paraphrasing and being kind to US administration - US Navy breached territorial waters, exchanged fire on Aug 2, then on Aug 4 they fired upon radar returns and possible signals traffic. The second time there was no actual North Vietnamese and the Navy expressed doubts but US administration wanted to escalate and both incidents became conflated. It's not the same as for example pre-planned false flag operations. Is there a fine line? Yes. exactly where that is is hard to say.
- marcosdumay 3y agoOne of my favorite ones is that the entire idea that any ancient population ever believed that the Earth is flat seems to come from a semi-fictional biography of Columbus from the 18th century. Somehow people just read an interesting book and decided that their great-grandparents all believed on that stupid thing.
- bombcar 3y agoThe sad thing is it obscures the real issue people were bringing up with Columbus - they said the world was much larger than he thought so he would starve and die before getting to the indies. They were right, too, as the size of the planet was pretty accurately known. He just lucked out that someone had left a continent for him to run into.
- PurpleRamen 3y agoDidn't he also never reached the continent, just some islands, which then were used as a starting point for more expeditions?
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoNo, he definitely reached Central and South America. But even until his death he had insisted he had reached the East Indies.
- PurpleRamen 3y agoAh, according to Wikipedia, he only reached the continent on his third and fourth voyage. On his first two expeditions, he was only cruising around the Bahamas, Cuba, etc.
- runeofdoom 3y agoI think I recall that his grants from the Spanish crown (and part of his fame) were tied to him having made it to the East Indies. So there would have been motivation for him to stick with his stories.
- gretch 3y agoI personally am very skeptical of the other salt theory - salting the earth as a means of disrupting enemy soil. I started to think about it in depth when thinking about weed control in my own backyard - should I salt my own soil? The I realized how quickly it would wash away in the next rain. And for ancient times, the sheer volume of salt one would need in order to disrupt a significant amount of land. I dunno maybe it happened, but it seems like a very very dumb way to go about it. Then again, humans repeatedly prove the magnitude of our stupidity.
- dexwiz 3y agoYeah it would take a ludicrous amount to kill a field. Might as well put down gold foil weed barrier.
- edaemon 3y agoThis same site has an article on that very myth: http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/12/salting-earth.html?m=1 http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/12/salting-earth.html... To summarize, salting an area was a real thing, but the evidence suggests that it was done to make the land more fertile and not less. The idea was to replace your enemy's city with weeds and greenery, as if it had never existed.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoInterestingly, accidentally making the soil too salty to support agriculture is one of the consequences of improperly managed irrigation over longish time scales, like decades to centuries. It's well understood now but I don't believe that it was to ancient peoples. I don't know how this could be weaponized or if anyone ever made a serious attempt at it. But it's experienced as massive regional catastrophe when it does, and the cause is clear even if not understood. There are places in arizona and california where salt crystals visibly form on the surface of what used to be farmland: it's plausible this would have been seen in the irrigation agriculture societies of mesopotamia and the ancient eastern mediterranean. Certainly easy to make the jump to fantasizing/praying about it happening to your enemies, once you've seen or heard of it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- buzzin__ 3y agoPliny the Elder and his son Pliny the Younger are also involved in debunking another historical fakery. This one is about Jesus actually existing and not being made up 100 years later and 1000 kms away, in a different country and in a different language. As much as you can prove a negative, this guys do it by never mentioning him, despite being at the right place and time, and writing about other religions and prophets. Even the wikipedia entry on this subject starts with a huge logical phalacy.
- gamblor956 3y agoThe Elder Pliny would have been a small child when Jesus died. Not many 10 year olds in the historical record discussing religion.
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