Challenges to the credibility of two recent Netflix documentaries
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.
Key fact:
>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.
It's the same dumb junk the History Channel produces. Sad, but not anything new.
"Fantastic Fungi" was terrible. It was dazzling visually, but contained almost no actual information. Just a commercial for psychedelic drugs, ridiculous.
The very same Netflix, the discoverer of black Cleopatra? Not shocked
> 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.
The problem I see is how journalists are now trying to rewrite history and should instead be journalists.
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.
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The wikipedia page about the first documentary is quite frightening.
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.
It's edutainment, but the edu is silent.
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The scientists are upset because the documentaries do not comport with the “scientific consensus” on the subject matter.
There is no “consensus” in the scientific method. I’m going to assume all of the above is propaganda!
Re paywall - interesting. I posted this as a free link, but the tags for that get stripped out in the posting. TIL.
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.
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