11/17/2019 15:16

Educated Lay Person Christmas List

Recently I switched up my periodical subscriptions; Antiquity is now my scientific journal of choice and I recently received my first 5 issues in a blue plastic bag from Belgium.

I was so excited that I wanted to share all the fascinating articles with a small group of like-minded introverts. If only I could find such a coterie of confederates! All I want for Christmas, at least in one version of my wish list, is a collection of amateurs who would share the enjoyment of this quotation:

The research history of the [Viking] grave provides an instructive case study at the intersection of evidential constraints, the influence of contemporary epistemological positions and the phenomenon of cumulative false assumptions in forensic decision-making. (Neil Price et al., "Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581", Antiquity 93 367 (February 2019), page 191, references omitted.)

Even today I am not entirely bereft. A few people quietly tolerate me describing the topic of the article. The limitation is that they don't engage with the implications for archeology, for high school education, for criminal justice, for verisimilitude in fiction, or whatever other tangential associations might occur to an active mind.

In actual reality would a discussion group made up of like-minded introverts be a logically self-consistent concept? I'm not sure, but that could be a topic of discussion if ever the group materializes.


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