Cite?
i’ve heard this a lot the last year, but ISTM that there are two things being conflated. Netflix has reached something like market saturation and isn’t growing its subscriber base. That, in and of itself, is not a problem.
For investors, hoping to make money from an increased stock price, this is presented as “Netflix is in crisis mode.” Not because they’'re not turning profit, but because their stock isn’t increasing in value.
Netflix is the perfect platform for this sort of thing. A good chunk of the SF and Fantasy offerings there feature a debunked researcher who turns out to be right. Troll was a very recent #1 film on Netflix.
I don’t profess to be liberal, but I am a trained Earth scientist and I say Hancock is a woo-pedlar.
No, he does not.
You mean “researchers”
And your science degree would be in …?
His ideas are a crock of shit.
Oh, why, oh why do human cultures tend to come up with common tropes. If only there was some common feature to all these human cultures that could explain it. But alas, they have absolutely nothing in common, these human cultures. So it must have been aliens Atlanteans
Because lies usually offend me.
Bolding mine.
That is definitely the best catch-phrase I’ve heard all week. I’m totally stealing it.
And @Novelty_Bobble nailed it. That’s the only mystery here.
This “documentary” is little more than a gussied-up conspiracy theory.
The only thing missing is the shadowy cabal trying to keep it a secret.
But boy does this garbage sell to the rubes. Being as this is CS I’ll refrain from further comment on the larger phenomenon.
Uh, did you forget about the greatest cabal of all? ACADEMIA ITSELF is arrayed against poor little Graham.
I think there’s plenty of “this is the truth THEY don’t want you to know about” to go around, here.
I don’t understand the skepticism surrounding the ideas presented in this documentary.
Far from mere theory, proof of an ancient civilization was provided by a Miskatonic University-sponsored geological expedition to Antarctica back in the 1930s.
You may have good reasons to think the market is wrong, but it seems a bit disingenuous to present this view by asking me for a “cite” when you are obviously aware of the performance of the stock.
The stock price IS simply the market consensus of the value of the company’s business, i.e. its future profitability. You may disagree with that consensus and have a more positive view of the company’s prospects, but it’s not that anyone is conflating two separate things.
Here are some thoughtful discussions on the question of the evidence that would be left behind by any such putative civilization. As you can see, this is a recurring question around here.
Nov 2008:
Feb 2016:
May 2022:
And for comic relief, here is a discussion on another loonie “theory” about the past that has nothing going for it except sheer attractiveness to the cluelessly naive.
Dec 2016:
I think that “research or perish” and government grants have a lot to do with this breed of “scientist”.
Dr. J. Doe comes up with a hypothesis that he feels is grant worthy. He goes through the process and gets approved. Now, he has to accomplish what he set forth in his grant request, otherwise he will not be funded for further research. So, he ends up finding “evidence” that indicates his hypothesis is valid. It is a self-sustaining cycle. Even if Dr. Doe secretly believes that his hypothesis is a bust, he is not going to find evidence that indicates that conclusion.
Does Graham Hancock get government grants? It would be pretty hypocritical of him to do so (see Lords of Poverty), not that this would stop him. But AFAIK his “research” is paid for by grift, not government?
Very possible, but I think the same principle applies. He needs to find what his patron is hoping he will find.
Yes, very much so. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
IMO you’re both sorta right but talking past one another.
A fast-growing company’s stock is priced based not on today’s earnings, but on tomorrow’s. For some vague net present value notion of what / when constitutes “tomorrow”.
Substantially every successful company evolves from fast-growing to slow-growing to stable in size. And in almost all cases the stock price is more optimistic than the eventual reality once the slowing phase begins. Doubly so for a business in a currently darling industry and double-double so if it’s during a general boom time in stocks in general.
Which is where IMO Netflix finds itself. As a business, they’re doing fine and can continue to do fine for potentially decades to come. As a quick-buck growth stock they’re doing notso nice. And there is no logical disconnect that both those things can be true simultaneously.
But, dude! Doesn’t it, like, blow your mind that civilizations as distant as the Mesoamericans, the Mound Builders, the ancient Egyptians, and the Sumerians all built pyramids?! That’s gotta mean something, right? There’s no way all those disparate cultures could have figured out how to pile up rocks to make a pyramid - literally the simplest structure to build - by themselves, right? It must have been aliens!
The Younger Dryas is not a “theory”, it is a term for a period of climate data observed in the geological record.
He meant to refer to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which posits that the rapid cooling of the Younger Dryas period was caused by a comet impact. Supposedly this catastrophic impact and subsequent climate change is what wiped out Hancock’s ancient civilization.
Interestingly, Hancock also likes to claim that the standard theory of a 1-2 punch combo - climate change anf the arrival of humans - cannot explain the disappearance of the Ice age Megafauna, and point to this alleged comet as a more likely cause.
It’s interesting how here, too, he robs ancient people of agency. Hunter-gatherers couldn’t have possibly hunted away the mammoths! Egyptians couldn’t have built the pyramids! It’s a minimization of human capability and therefore culpability.
I note that Graham Hancock is also ‘skeptical’, to put it generously, about the idea that modern climate change is caused by human action. It seems to me that one can draw a clear line between the logic that leads to each conclusion.
Oh, I’m familiar with that one.
And a longer post from that thread:
I came across my old copy of Martin Gardner’s (Fads and Fallacies) In the Name of Science, from 1952. He covers everything from Hollow Earth to orgone boxes to ESP to Dianetics, a century of hoaxes, crackpots, deluded scientists, bad research, and miscellaneous facts yoked together with superglue. Pseudoscience is like pyramids. It can be found all over the world in many guises but comes from basics about humanity’s need to believe, to challenge authority, and to overrate their own knowledge, along with the certainty that suckers exist to be fleeced. Hancock’s whole long career can be dropped in without a ripple. Anyone familiar with real science from real scientists can tell the difference in a nanosecond.
