Against Pseudo-Archaeology

By Leo Gura - February 19, 2025

I want to warn you about the trap of pseudo-archaeology.

As you get into spirituality, you’ll get sucked into the New Age and you’ll see that domain overlap with the domain of pseudo-archaeology. Myths of advanced ancient civilizations, Atlantis, ancient flood stories, ancient golden ages, people living in Antarctica, aliens building the Egyptian pyramids, etc. At first these ideas will sound appealing, playing on your sense of mysticism, wonder, openmindedness, and unconventional thinking, but eventually you will come to see that these are lower perspectives — self-deception — based on poor epistemology. The evidence for it just doesn’t exist and the people who engage in this type of unscientific speculation are falling for their own New Age biases. It’s not just that the content of these beliefs is wrong, the epistemic structure of how these beliefs are being formed is wrong. I’m talking about the kind of theories that people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson are pitching. The kind of New Age -fueled speculation they engage in is an epistemic trap that you should be intelligent enough to see through.

Unfortunately, podcasters like Joe Rogan have popularized and mainstreamed a lot of these bad ideas because they sound fascinating to uneducated people and they make for good, cheap slop for the endless content mill that is the alternative social media ecosystem.

Here are some good videos to help you deconstruct that misinformation:

More links:

What Graham Hancock Gets Wrong About Flood Myths

How Rogan Was Fooled By Graham Hancock

One of the most important lessons I hope you learn from me, from the Actualized work, is that spirituality is not about speculation, it is not about adopting New Age beliefs. Such things are false spirituality. True spirituality requires extreme epistemic rigor, more rigorous than science, not less. Distinguish between direct experience and speculation. Distinguish between grounded scientific evidence vs wild ungrounded wishful theorizing. Have the intellectual discipline and integrity to refuse wild speculation about history or the future. This is an important discipline for serous truth-seeking. Truth-seeking is NOT what Graham Hancock or New Age people are doing. Recognize that difference.

One of the most important lessons for you to learn is to stop your mind from adopting beliefs it wants or needs to be true. If you are unable to do this, self-deception is guaranteed. Be extra skeptical of any belief that feeds into your sense of the mystical and magical. Just because some aspects of spirituality are true — like God, Love, relativity, or the imaginary nature of things — does not mean that anything you want goes. Spiritual New Age fantasy is a serious, serious problem that you should be on guard against. Just because spirituality is valid does not mean that you don’t take scientific rigor and rationality seriously. Evidence for things still matters. Sound reasoning still matters. Scientific method still matters. Epistemic rigor still matters.

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