In my experience, the majority of documentaries have, at a minimum, a major slant or bias towards a particular message or outcome and will usually hide that bias and present themselves as objective truth. They should be consumed as entertainment and probably shouldn't shift your priors very much on the state of the world.
Some of them are probably exactly what they convey themselves as (relatively unbiased, informative, etc.), but if you are not already an expert in the topic, you can't tell the difference between those ones and the ones that are basically propaganda.
Yep. My wife and I watched all of Ancient Apocalypse and it was really interesting as well as fun to talk about. Definitely some interesting points included as well.
Made us want to visit the Scablands in Eastern Washington, which we didn't even know existed.
It's worth a watch if nothing else. Ultimately, nothing in the documentary is going to change your life but it is very interesting all the same.
The response from Graham Hancock is an interesting read.
Labeling as sci-fi is also a stretch. He's videoing and documenting real sites that exist around the world. The origin and timeline around those sites is speculation, but that certainly doesn't make it sci-fi.
My issue with labeling is the same weak link as ever: it relies on trusting the labeler. I think the consumer having a general rule of thumb of "treat this as entertainment and not educational" for all documentaries is the safer, more broadly applicable solution.
I don't know about you, but I don't really trust Netflix to consistently find the line between documentaries that are honest purveyors of truth vs. ideological cheerleaders.
This attitude "if we can't do it perfectly, we should just give up" is very frustrating.
Yes, it's impossible to correctly classify all video productions, and you won't ever get a guarantee that everything said in a "documentary" is correct, but labelling clear examples of pseudo-science as just that will slightly improve the situation, it won't make it worse.
The fact that you don't see the problems in labeling expressive content/speech by the group that is hosting the content shows we have markedly different world views and/or priorities. Which isn't a problem, but it does indicate we probably won't have a useful conversation on the topic.
I will just say that the problem lies in what you think is "clear" vs. what the person/group doing the labeling thinks is "clear". That determination is usually anything but "clear".
> I will just say that the problem lies in what you think is "clear" vs. what the person/group doing the labeling thinks is "clear". That determination is usually anything but "clear".
Scientific community has a pretty strong consensus that this is not science. It's pretty clear cut.
We're not even talking about cancelling it, just about showing the contextual information that the information presented is in a stark conflict with the scientific consensus.
The "Scientific community" is not the one doing the labeling (nor is that even a coherent enough thing that one could hypothetically trivially ask it; it's an inherently organic, diffuse, grass roots concept). Netflix (or similar) is. If the last 3 years have taught me anything, it's that I don't trust organizations like Netflix etc. to decide what it is the scientific community has or does not have consensus on (which is also a much murkier question than you seem to believe that it is). Sometimes, the scientific consensus is obvious. Sometimes it's obvious that there is no consensus (yet). And other times, some people or groups think that there is (or is not) consensus when the opposite is true.
Indeed, it's Netflix who is doing it. And has been always doing it. It's in a way a strawman to discuss whether they should be doing it or not, because they've been always evaluating what they're distributing. They do have to make calls on what is Nazi propaganda and what isn't. It's possible that they got it wrong a couple of times, but it doesn't seem to be a systemic problem in the case of Nazis.
The push here is whether they should make a better job at labelling or not.
> Sometimes it's obvious that there is no consensus (yet).
So, do you think there's no scientific consensus on Ancient Apocalypse being pseudo science?
In what ways would labelling it as pseudo-science on Netflix make the world a worse place?
The existence of easy calls doesn't get rid of the case of hard calls. I think the damage of making the wrong call when it's hard more than offsets the advantage when it's easy. The labels are less important when scientific consensus is obvious (as in these cases), and they are more likely to get it wrong in cases where a (correct) label would be useful, since it's exactly the cases when it is isn't easy and obvious to determine the scientific consensus that having someone tell us what it is is helpful.
Treating something as entertainment does not prevent you from learning from it, or taking what it says as fact. I learned a lot about the structure of the US government from reading Tom Clancy.
No one is mistaking that as a documentary but he is still able to insert a lot of his biases into it.
>The series was produced by ITN Productions and released by Netflix on 10 November 2022.[8][9] Hancock's son Sean Hancock is "senior manager of unscripted originals" at Netflix.[8]
(from Wikipedia, but I have had it from other sources before)
These are two different cases; Cave of Bones is a case of scientists that are arguing, there seem to be a lot of questions about the science but we will see. Hancock is a fantasist who has fabricated a fictional narrative.
"Fantastic Fungi" was terrible. It was dazzling visually, but contained almost no actual information. Just a commercial for psychedelic drugs, ridiculous.
> But many archaeologists and anthropologists—in critiques published in scientific journals, academic and professional websites, YouTube videos, and a letter to Netflix—argue the shows promote theories that don’t represent a scientific consensus
That’s not how truth works. The documentaries may be accurate or inaccurate, but the documentary’s claims being unpopular has no bearing on either.
While watching these I could see the strong bias that the scientists had and how they were posterchildren for peer review. They land on a unique place on the psuedoscience spectrum where they're well trained yet pursuing their work for personal gain. They aren't in it to learn something but to be important. They want the truth to be exciting and they want to be the people to find it. That's not what motivates people of science.
I could see all of this being a person of science and seeing all of the ugly aspects of academia. I'm not sure the average viewer will pick up on these things. It's irresponsible to publish without better context.
I do give the creators credit for having the scientists speak and have a lot of camera time. It allows for these judgments to be made. If they hid behind narration and drone shots it would be much more difficult to pick up on these things.
Because they are meant to be entertainment first and education second, and that's what people are looking for. There's a reason the History Channel pivoted exclusively to shows about aliens building the pyramids and the like.
It's 2024 and people still watch documentaries believing it makes them more knowledgeable. This and a myriad of podcasts and stupid self published (or not) books.
That’s like saying books are edutainment because Dianetics and Freakonomics exist. No medium is universally good or bad, only what specific people make with it.
And yet your sweeping claim is still incorrect. That’s the only thing I’m objecting to here: identify specific titles, sure, or even companies but it’s just silly to say the entire genre is useless.
Again, that’s incorrect as stated. You could qualify that to say some fraction isn’t educational, or that you don’t think it’s educational enough, but in the broad form that claim is grossly overstated.
I used to love documentaries but eventually noticed that they usually had rather low information density. A documentary that took two hours to watch often could be summarized in an article that took five to ten minutes to read.
I used to like documentaries a lot but after Discovey/NatGeo started to do dramatisation in almost all documentaries, most of the substance was exchanged by irrelevant dialogs along the way plus factual inaccuracies are rampant.
If you don’t follow basic research and knowledge that largely undermines your hypothesis, you are likely to create an experiment that fails to account for the understood confounding factor that your hypothesis ignores.
> There is no “consensus” in the scientific method.
But there is consensus on how to use the scientific method, and sometimes the evidence accumulated with that method mostly agree with a specific part of the hypothesis space, in which case the consensus is to call that part the consensus
There’s an underlying issue here that there’s little incentive in most domains to convey truth or the best attempt at truth, culturally and societally, at least in my opinion.
On the consumer side, people want entertainment and interesting. Much of reality and its corners are interesting but there’s often a high barrier of entry in terms of prior knowledge and absorptive capacity overall to find the interesting bits and probe them. As such, information has to be conveyed to a general audience’s ability to understand things and often the nuanced interesting bits are lost. Many things just aren’t spectacularly interesting on a daily basis to any life changing degree.
Even outside the general audience, even science struggles with incentive for truth. Much research published these days is targeted around publishing papers and maintaining certain metrics to be considered relevant and drive future work (their livelihood). Science is a long twisted road with many failures and we don’t make it practical to travel. So people come up with incremental often very weak publications just to put food on the table. Occasionally a few go beyond publishing semi-useful to nearly useless results and go out and forge data or manipulate methodology in ways to achieve certain conclusions. It happens all the time. Combine that with the ever growing reproducibility crisis and while I give certain publication platforms more credit than a documentary, I certainly don’t put most as useful or in many cases even that credible. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just the way things are in our institutions.
And with the internet we have a platform for anyone to spew anything they want as truth. We have people who have a lot of incentives to put misinformation out there to their benefit. Businesses and their marketing/propaganda arms are at the forefront. Governments around the world do it. And now we have automated and widely available technology to produce all sorts of somewhat believable information.
These issues have always existed in our society of free speech but competition and economic incentives are becoming clearer for many in the value of lying over truth telling or at least attempts at truth telling. There’s just so much value to be had in manipulating information out there.
Now there’s still value in understanding or trying to understand truth. If you understand things you have a competitive advantage, but you also tend to have more advantage if you exclusively understand truth, so teaching others how to distinguish nonsense or presenting them with truths you discover is often putting oneself at a competitive disadvantage. So the more we pressure people and normalize and accept these pressures everywhere, we shouldn’t be surprised to see complete and utter trash information everywhere we look. And it’s only going to get worse.
