Astronomers do not Date Sappho’s ‘Midnight’ Poem

Astronomers do not Date Sappho’s ‘Midnight’ Poem(dhayton.haverford.edu)

29 points by srikar 10 years ago | 7 comments

tremon 10 years ago |

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 10 years ago |

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...

p4wnc6 10 years ago | |

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 10 years ago | | |

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.

mdiqsu 10 years ago |

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 10 years ago |

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/ >