
Astronomers do not Date Sappho’s ‘Midnight’ Poem - srikar
http://dhayton.haverford.edu/blog/2016/05/20/astronomers-do-not-date-sapphos-midnight-poem/
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tremon
I feel articles such a this are important, even though we already knew the
problem it's describing. Shoddy science and shoddy journalism should be called
out in the strongest words possible, and I'm glad this article does:

 _Despite the link to the article in the “press release,” nobody at UTA [..]
apparently could be bothered to read the article. I shouldn’t, therefore, be
surprised that most other people [..] have likewise ignored the article. While
not surprised, I am disheartened to see that even purportedly reputable, pro-
science sites that typically demand “evidence” and “data” expend no effort to
read the original article_

 _In the best case, Cuntz et al. [..] would simply confirm what Herschberg and
Mebius concluded two decades ago [..] There is nothing new here—their newer
methods do not justify more than a paragraph._

 _We have a poorly constructed article [..] authors all lack expertise in the
field [..] conclusions border on indefensible [..] writing and style is
Wikipedian [..] risks violating scholarly norms and practices with respect to
citations and intellectual integrity_

------
aidenn0
For a more modern example of why you can't reliably date poems by their in-
universe information, consider the song "Tom's Diner"[1], which has a series
of events that is impossible for any single day in New York in the range of
time that the author could have composed it.

Since the composer was around to ask, she was able to relate that it was a
composite of several days of events, which is quite reasonable.

As a side note, the wikipedia link assumes that the newspaper story about the
actor was a front-page story, which is reasonable, but not necessarily true,
so we don't even know that Vega was referencing the NY Posts' article on
William Holden.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner#.22Tom.27s_Diner...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner#.22Tom.27s_Diner_Day.22:_The_date_of_the_composition)

~~~
p4wnc6
I feel this is a silly idea. _Of course_ physicists (many of whom love poetry)
understand the difference between a literal depiction of a real event (as is
clearly the case in the Sappho poem) and an artistic description that seeks to
establish value through means other than a literal description.

Acting like Cuntz, et al., must have pursued the assumptions and analysis they
pursued because they have some kind of infantile understanding of poetry,
literal vs. non-literal depiction, literary devices, etc., is ridiculous. No
one, certainly not Cuntz, et al., is going around saying all parts of poems
that resemble literal descriptions must therefore be perfect eyewitness
accounts of actual events.

And all of that is irrelevant to the task of astronomically dating the poem by
_assuming_ a certain literal description. The result is implicitly modulo that
assumption, and if the assumption turns out wrong, that's not a criticism of
the work otherwise based on it.

~~~
tremon
_if the assumption turns out wrong, that 's not a criticism of the work
otherwise based on it._

True. It is however, a criticism of everyone that conveniently forgot to
mention that critical assumption, and that starts with the UTA press release.

 _Acting like Cuntz, et al., [..] have some kind of infantile understanding of
poetry_

That's not the most damning criticism in the article though. The most damning
is that they seem to have copied entire paragraphs off Wikipedia, which
suggests they have some kind of infantile understanding of science.

~~~
p4wnc6
> That's not the most damning criticism in the article though. The most
> damning is that they seem to have copied entire paragraphs off Wikipedia,
> which suggests they have some kind of infantile understanding of science.

I agree about this. If the other article had been about this and a small
amount about the continually beaten dead horse of qualifying your research (or
qualifying media headlines) with caveats and assumptions, then it would have
been reasonable.

------
mdiqsu
i don't understand this part:

"that Sappho died around 570 so it is therefore valid to use 570 as a date for
their analysis and, then, for people to conclude that Sappho was writing in
570. "

is that a ridikulusly strong prior? i don't understand how one estimates the
date of publikation of a pome when assuming a date of publikation. am i
missing something?

also this appears to be published in the 0.00 impact faktor, thai "Journal of
Astronomical History and Heritage". prof. cuntz appears not to be a complete
joke though, he has published most of his papers in high impakt jurnals. this
paper seems like a bar chat that was done for entertanement, the qestion is
why it was published in a jurnal instead of just pushed to arxiv, espeshially
this jurnal.

i say this is more an indiktment of the media, not of prof cuntz. any good
jurnalist wuld know to check the qality of the sorce and immediately realize
that this is just a playful exersise, not a serius paper.

------
p4wnc6
This seems like a clumsy and spastic criticism of the Cuntz, et al paper.
Don't get me wrong, just as happens like 99% of the time, some science paper
sweeps some assumptions under the rug and some university PR machine hypes it
beyond what is reasonable.

But there is no hint in any of this that people are privileging scientific
inquiry above other kinds of inquiry. I'm certain that any of the paper's
authors would admit straight away that they had to make assumptions (that is
just called _all of science_ ) and that the assumptions, which they might
argue are defensible, can certainly be criticized by others. Indeed, their
assumptions seem very reasonable to me, I see no fault with making the
assumptions they made (even if other academics in turn can point out
improvements upon those assumptions), and I consider it good science for them
to turn the problem into an analytical one clearly by making such assumptions.

I can't comment on the near allegations of plagiarism. The fact that an
earlier paper made a similar claim does not seem really at all relevant to me
though. At least from what is quoted in this piece, the two don't seem
directly related, and it's extremely common for a result such as this to be
rediscovered sometime later. You can complain that they should have done
better legwork to identify the earlier work, but that kind of complaint is
extremely different and not nearly such a grave accusation as plagiarism.

I more blame PR hype machines (especially universities) for the attitude that
it's reasonable to trumpet results up beyond the weight of the actual
arguments they make. "Scientists" aren't doing that, except in so far as they
play bullshit PR games to get papers published, just like academics in every
other field, including historians.

I think maybe this person should read _That Chocolate Study_ on Slate Star
Codex [0] and calm down a minute. Either we fix what's wrong with the reward
system that forces academics to behave this way when publishing, or else we
expect the basic literacy of anyone consuming headlines derived from research
papers is insanely high and that they will account for possible errors,
misleading hype, need for more data, challenging assumptions, etc., on their
own.

It doesn't seem super productive to me, though, to make a whiny fit about what
some other academics did in order to publish their paper. It's a whiny fit
that's been thrown over and over and over with no results ever.

[0] < [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/30/that-chocolate-
study/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/30/that-chocolate-study/) >

