Sounds like a "guess" rather than a "solution". They have noticed a numerical coincidence and formed a hypothesis. Without additional evidence tying the 819-day count to astronomical observations its not particularly convincing.
>We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
The same individual of whom it's been said
>ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told.
So yeah, scholarship of the Maya civilization is extraordinarily challenging.
Dude, those indios were gonna go to hell if they kept reading those books. Letting them be tortured for all eternity would be truly depraved.
I think the word you were looking for is “narrow-minded”. But even then, Landa thought he had gone through enough to see that there was nothing of value in the Maya books. Even tried to learn the language a little. He just didn’t have the mental and cultural framework to care about other perspectives.
You know they tortured people right? This wasn't some soft-minded priest who just wanted to save them from the devil, by offering them waffles and a nice little chat.
Even before East India Company, India faced several outsider attacks.
From Alexander the Great to various Khan's, then Mughals, then Portuguese etc.
Some important Indian texts were burned/destoryed in these attacks, For eg., the Nalanda University
Still, a lot of texts remained both in written format and in Oral format.
Nalanda U operated for 600 years from 427 CE (!!!) holding over 9m texts [2] The importance of texts from that generation at that scale cannot be overstated
Two more factors, India had contact with most of the world since the beginning, so no new disease wiped it on contact. Also you can not overestimate the population of India.
Using the word "literature" is highly eurocentric here. These weren't really books, more like very specific manuals for an esoteric and very small caste of priests.
Yeah, I'm all for investigating this line of thinking further, but all sorts of weird coincidences come up in numerology that no serious person would consider "science".
Maybe. What becomes clear when visiting the archeological sites of Mayans and even predecessors to the Mayans is how absolutely serious they were about the calendar, the seasons, the pathways and timings of the sun and moon, the comings and goings of the animals in accordance with the calendar, etc. I wouldn't call the hypothesis in that paper numerology. It's entirely in line with what they devoted incredible amounts of energy to. Circumstantial, sure, but a bit more than coincidental.
Science doesn't have some super clear, strict, reductive definition like the "scientific method" you may have been taught in school. The idea that all science must make or test predictions is just based on an old misinterpretation of the philosophy of Karl Popper, mainly by physicists. The only real general requirement I think you can make is that all science involves some level of interrogation and study of the physical world. Anthropology qualifies in abudance.
This is a nonsense definition. Science absolutely must follow the scientific method. What you are talking about is natural philosophy and protosciences - its the difference between alchemy and chemistry - which is all the difference in the world.
There are different scientific methods and different senses that need to be used for abstract topics like Alchemy. Just because most of the worlds population lost the ability to use these other senses to understand the science behind Alchemy does not make it any less important. What you are referring to in your one-size-fits-all "Scientific Method" is called Scientism. A belief, just like religion, that the only method that matters is the accepted method.
Are you actually on HN arguing that alchemy is some kind of real thing, a skill that we lost? Different senses? Is this a joke?
My understanding of alchemy is that its practitioners tried to transmute matter from one kind to another, e.g. lead to gold, because they didn't know enough about how matter worked to know they'd always fail.
Yes It really was and is a thing. There are lots of people on Hacker News that are not in the place of dismissing things they don't understand. And yes it was a skill that was lost. The only joke is the fact that people lost touch with a lot of ancient knowledge and think everything revolves around this so called accepted "Scientific Method" belief that has dominated our world for way too long.
Being that you didn't back up your claim about alchemy with anything, I don't believe you have any idea what you're talking about. Turn off the Ancient Aliens, or whatever YouTube series has given you these ideas about lost ancient knowledge. Work on your epistemology. People will tell you literally anything sensational if it's supported by advertising and makes them a buck. All the content I've seen about ancient lost knowledge is chock full of easy to debunk claims and willful misrepresentation of what we know about ancient history. It's content that preys on the curious but uneducated.
You don't need evidence to understand something, and most importantly, I don't need to prove to you or anyone else that I have studied alchemy to understand that is a thing that most people don't really understand. Your just someone on the internet, like everyone else. Because you bought into the belief that there is only one "Scientific Method" doesn't make you special.
Then why does the word science predate the scientific method? Clearly it used to carry meaning, even if you find it now meaningless in your zeal for the scientific method.
Because people used to have far weaker vocabulary. Science before “the scientific method” was roughly some very vague “thinking about the world logically”. It was too open ended to be useful and it wasn’t until the scientific method brought some rigor that it became useful.
So I'm supposed to divine what you're thinking because you think it's bait?
I ask, because usually, when I hear people say "hurr durr scientific method", the defition that comes out of their mouth excludes almost all of science except 2 or 3 fields. And I'm not interested in having a discussion with a silly disagreement in terminology at the core.
I'm not sure where you're getting all your veiled insults from. I'm not an anti-intellectual, and I'm not bashing school. But yes, kids get taught straight up incorrect things in school all the time. That doesn't mean I think school is bad, in fact I encourage it. It's just a fundamental consequence of the fact that information is never perfect, and neither are the teachers or authors communicating it.
Try to examine your own biases and figure out why you're placing me in some kinda crackpot category just because I think anthropology is a valid field of science.
This is anti-intellectualism in the sense that the world is unbalanced when the focus is solely on the intellect. Reason is important, but its not the only facility that matters in this world. The reason why there is so much negativity towards intellectualism is that our world has been shaped in a horrific way due to this imbalance.
The concept of where definitions reside is a philosophical question that has been debated for centuries. One prominent view is that definitions exist in a realm of abstract objects, separate from the physical world, as argued by Plato in his theory of Forms. However, other philosophers have proposed different views, such as the idea that definitions are constructed through language and human understanding. Ultimately, the nature of definitions is a complex and contested topic in philosophy.
