> The Kamitakamori tools? Piltdown fossils? The pattern roughly seems to be "if you have physical artifacts that support a theory / fit a pattern they will be accepted (even if bogus)
Two examples from over a century is not evidence of unreliability.
> if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected".
Evidence is a requirement in all scholarship; the rest is speculation - which can be useful as a direction for searching for evidence, but is not sufficient to be accepted in any field. What field accepts claims without evidence?
They didn't say things should be accepted without evidence. That's a laughably bad-faith reading. They proposed a different standard of evidence that they think is less infeasibly high while still not accepting nonsense. I don't totally agree but it's a reasonable direction to argue.
As for the examples, when they start with "swings over the years" they're clearly taking a long-term perspective, and not trying to claim that modern archaeology will "believe anything" (especially not when their more prominent claim is that modern archaeology believes too little).
> laughably
Ridicule is the refuge of those without an argument. Maybe try standup or Twitter.
Maybe try actually reading what the person you're arguing with is saying and responding to that.
IMHO when we choose ridicule, we destroy that relationship - we make clear we are uninsterested in what the other person has to say or in reason, or even in respecting them on a basic level, and that we lack worthwhile arguments. I stop reading there. I understand the temptation but life is too short.
Oh, so you pattern-matched on a single word and skipped the part where I did, in fact, make an argument. Great work.
But more importantly, where did MarkusQ ridicule you? What's your excuse for not reading what they actually said, but instead imagining something they said that was conveniently easy to criticize?
The important part of my phrase "laughably bad-faith" was the bad-faith part. That's what destroys "that relationship".