I was talking with Greg Cochran on the phone (not an interesting story, really, so I'm not telling it) and noticed that he quickly related topics to the people who are doing research on them, often someone he knows. For example, the footprints at White Sands, or the distribution of the lactase-digesting gene in Yamnayan skeletal remains. It creates another level of memory and likely adds to expertise in a field because you just remember more of it that way. I can read about stuff - and Greg seems good at that avenue as well - but having an immediate visual and personality attached to whatever shows up for a pre-Clovis or Population Y bit of data has to provide one reinforcement for memory. Even if they're a jerk. I followed the research out of Dartmouth and Geisel Medical, and Harvard and McLean because I sort of knew a few people in those places (many more my last ten years, oddly) but my friends would often say things like "Alan Green thinks that alcohol dependence..." Because they know him. I have to think it is a large part, whether subtly or quite consciously, of who they think are the Real Experts and the real deal. Sometimes it might even be a negative, if they know someone personally and know him to be a jerk and shallow.
Yet it also is the most likely avenue for everyone believing the same wrong thing, undermining the written knowledge right in front of you, if you could but separate it from whether the person you associate with it is more generally a fool or an expert. It's why talented amateurs or people from unrelated fields can sometimes see more clearly and... are sometimes completely misled. They are less influenced by who The Experts are supposed to be, which is mostly a negative but is also a very powerful inoculation against the worst of the academic diseases. Greg was bemused that so many anthropologists could have believed so much crap for so many years (approx 1960-2010) when there was such a solid foundation from the anthropologists before that. Hard to argue with him on that score. How do the Dark Years in any field even come to be? His training in physics before showing up in anthropology likely helped, not because there would be something magical about physics, but because it would have a different set of experts and assumptions. It is similar to CS Lewis's suggestion that we read books from the past to offset the prejudices of the present, not because there is something magical about the past, but because we cannot read the books of the future and have to have something to set against our own day. Anthropologists stopped listening to the missionaries, businessmen, and military personnel in an area. It looks like they listened to the journalists, who would be the single profession most trapped in the present.
It happened in psychology as well and I saw the end of it. Well, part of it. A solid core of real knowledge was developing, most from neurology, when Freud came along and told Vienna what it wanted to hear, giving it an excuse to discuss sex endlessly as if odd fantasies were the key to understanding Life, The Universe, and Everything. Freudianism died a long painful death in the field, as the joy of appearing smart just by talking about penises took many forms and hung on forever. It has been powerful enough that Kinsey has withstood it in reputation, even though his reports on child sexuality can only come from actually molesting children and then writing it down in scientific language. Even wokesters can't give up the idea that we desperately need this insanely false information about how many people follow every fetish, so Kinsey still gets a pass.
I got distracted from my original topic about memory again, didn't I?
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