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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Severus Alexander, post: 4310523, member: 84744&quot;]This attitude is laudable in many ways, but it has a dark side too.&nbsp; We&#039;re all affected by confirmation bias, and we all have our individual biases as well.&nbsp; That&#039;s why the search for knowledge must be a collective effort - aided of course by those who depart quite vociferously from the academic consensus.&nbsp; But when a failure to accord an academic consensus due respect snowballs, we get the disasters of vaccine and climate denialism.</p><p><br /></p><p>By all means examine the facts for yourself, and I welcome the many times you&#039;ve presented your interesting and educated reasoning in this forum.&nbsp; But if you fail to accord due respect to a consensus of those who have spent their lives collectively examining a wider range of facts, and applying the best available methods to those facts, then you just come across as arrogant; plus, I fear, your readers are more likely to dismiss you as a crank.&nbsp; (After all, we&#039;re neither experts nor even dilettantes in many cases.&nbsp; Who are we going to go with?&nbsp; The experts, or the apparent crank?&nbsp; I hasten to add I&#039;m not asserting you&#039;re a crank, just that your disrespecting the academic consensus sometimes makes you appear so.)</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Well, yeah, where <i>you&#039;re</i> the one deciding what counts as competent. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie2" alt=";)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />&nbsp; Then in the next breath you go on to say:</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s fair to say you have a pretty low opinion of what you call &quot;modern professional academia.&quot;&nbsp; Maybe you think this is a fair disregard for incompetent scholarship, but stated so generally, it&#039;s clearly a failure to accord due respect.&nbsp; From your tiny area of expertise (everyone&#039;s area of expertise is tiny!) you can&#039;t possibly be in a position to generalize like that.</p><p><br /></p><p>My understanding is that Feyerabend, who was a philosopher (not an historian or archaeologist) examining the nature of truth in science, held an extreme position on whether science ever discovered truth.&nbsp; Extreme then when Kuhn was a big deal, even more extreme now.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is something I know little about, so I&#039;m asking this from a position of great ignorance.&nbsp; Does the alternative narrative go something like this, though?&nbsp; Positivist archaeologists, who just measured things, had turned archaeology into a desert because no &quot;interpretation&quot; (in a very broad sense) was allowed.&nbsp; This was followed by a kid-in-the-candy-shop overenthusiasm for interpretation, causing the &quot;disasters&quot; you allude to, and which has now been largely corrected.&nbsp; But it&#039;s surely a mistake to long for that old positivist desert, no?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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