Seems like I’m ranting about discovery recently, anyway Solving History is some bloke called Olly Steeds going around “solving” mysterious history. He did an episode on Atlantis and then today it was the Nazca lines.
The episodes go reasonably plausibly some investigation of the stuff some general over view then it’ll suddenly go off the deep end. The bloke will basically ignore real science and then out will come the fringe wackos like dowsers.
It’s someone investigating with no clear idea how to investigate and no understanding of how to evaluate evidence.
And their bumbling meandering from science to pseudo science from one crack pot theory to the next all framed as evidence in such a shoddy framework you can’t draw any useful conclusions.
It makes me want to throw things at the tv.
Anyway if all goes well tomorrow I fly back to the UKÂ so once I’ve recovered from the jet lag I can get back to working on moving to the US
Comments
I've had the same rant about many 'documentary' shows. They start with slightly plausable theories, using words like 'might have' and 'seems like' and 'people have speculated' and so on. They then change pace and show you some pictures and stuff and then, when it's conclusion time, they rebrand everything they've just speculated about as 'new evidence'. It drives me up the wall.
I like a good mystery, and I appreciate new and interesting theories, but don't pass theory up as evidence or fact. That just pisses me off.
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People have this tendancy to use the words "Scientific theory" without really knowing what that implies. They tend to thing any idea someone came up with is a scientific theory.
People like the idea of doing a scientific investigation but they have no training in the scientific method they string together a load or random occurances and present them out of context as facts. And often the truth is far more interesting than these fairy tales these people come up with.
Towards the end of that program it got even more ridiculous the bloke was taking some concoction of the San Pedro cactus which contains mescaline which if you have too much is deadly (and too much is typically in the gram range) and it causes weird hallucinations he was relying on a "shaman" who he continually refered to as "an expert" and made statements like "We just have to trust him" while quaffing some liquid containing some unknown quantity of the drug. Then he wandered round the desert completely out of his gourd seeing things to "get in touch" with the Nazca's.