So why are the ancient Mayan readings so well believed?

[Archinist]

So, why do modern people and scientists actually believe them? They were ancient people who probably had plenty of false superstitions about magical beings and whatnot, plus extremely poor telescopes. How could they possibly accurately predict that the world would end in 20xx, if they didn't have enough knowledge/tech to clearly see into space? And how could modern technology not see what they could see? If there was a planet coming at earth in 20xx, then surely our modern telescopes could easily spot it from a mile away. If not, then what chance did their telescopes made out of mud and melted sand have of seeing a planet, which would be even further away?

[Iroscato]

Do you have any evidence that legitimate scientists put any stock whatsoever in the ramblings of ancient people?

[Ziggy Stardust]

They aren't well-believed, for one thing. Hell, the whole "world will end in 2012" thing is actually based on a misinterpretation of Mayan readings; there is no evidence the Mayans themselves actually believed the world would end in 2012 (2012 just happened to mark the end of one of their measurements of time). The only modern people who buy into that are a very small, very fringe group of crazies/obsessives, usually New Age type people using it as an excuse to criticize modern society.

Also, the Mayans didn't have telescopes at all. Even if they did, it wouldn't be made from mud and melted sand. Because that doesn't make any sense.

[Flagg]

Pseudo-Anthropology, new age bullshit, and lots of acid.

[Terralthra]

Fewer people believe in ancient Mayan superstitions than believe in ancient Palestinian and Arabian superstitions, to say nothing of Indus valley superstitions.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm sure every civilization has had people who believe the old myths and legends of what came before, the Greeks were pretty amazing about this in antiquity. As cultural change has sped up its only natural then that people would know of and wish to believe in such old things.

Its nothing but snake oil exploiting the desires of people to be part of something greater, and in the case of the Mayan specifically, its also integral with the modern conspiracy theory myths, which are just a replacement for mainstream religion for many people who wish to rant and rave how not religious they are.

[Flagg]

Fewer people believe in ancient Mayan superstitions than believe in ancient Palestinian and Arabian superstitions, to say nothing of Indus valley superstitions.

Well I think the issue is less people buying into what the ancient Mayans actually believed, but buying into the crystal skulls and faux Mayan culture and a lot of the bullshit new age hippy myths of what the people of that time and civilization were really like. At least that's my understanding.

[Archinist]

Well, according to yahoo answers, plenty of people believed in it, even though it wasn't signifying the end. There are dozens and dozens of questions on Y/A with people both saying that yes the world will end on 2012 and others asking if it will and are apparently genuine. It is also quite a well-known idea as well, and information can be found quite readily by looking it up, as opposed to other ending times where you are required to dig through many articles and do more research.

[Iroscato]

Many people are stupid and will believe all sorts of shit. There really isn't much more I can say dude.

[Joun_Lord]

Well, according to yahoo answers, plenty of people believed in it, even though it wasn't signifying the end. There are dozens and dozens of questions on Y/A with people both saying that yes the world will end on 2012 and others asking if it will and are apparently genuine. It is also quite a well-known idea as well, and information can be found quite readily by looking it up, as opposed to other ending times where you are required to dig through many articles and do more research.

Thats dozens and dozens of people on a internet message board. The internet allows people of all types of crazy to come together. You can find groups dedicated to how most world leaders are Reptillians, message boards dedicated to the Nostradamus prophecies (and quite a bit of History Channel programming), and entire sections of tumblr talking about how they share headspace with famous people and actually animals trapped in human bodies.

Some of those have easily dozens of followers, sometimes hundreds. Does that mean that belief in Reptillians or the Nostradamus prophecies are prevalent? Nyet, it means there are people that belief in that shit but by no means is it widespread or common.

Anytime crazy shit is even given the time of day its never really considered something thats actually going to happen. Very few people thought the world was actually going to end in 1999 or 2000, most people thought that the Mayan calendar ending meant nothing more then the Mayans would have needed to make new calenders, when Harold Camping continuously predicted the world was ending only the most deluded fucks actually gave him money and shit.

Most people just used that shit as a chance to get drunk and party. At most people might have thought it might have been possible in the same way that the Earth suddenly opening up and ejecting the leather clad rape legions of hell is possible. Sure it could happen but its highly, highly, HIGHLY unlikely. How the hell would hell get leather, they have no cows.

Sure some people bought into that world ending shit, some people built doomsday bunkers for the 1999/2000 apocalypse, some fucking idiots gave Harold Camping all their worldly goods, some people really thought the world was going to end because some old fuck said it would, because it was some arbitrary number on some arbitrary calendar, or because some ancient people made calendars that eventually need replacing.

Most relatively sane people, pretty much any scientist who is actually a scientist and not some wackaloon Christian "scientist" doesn't believe any of that garbage.

[Simon_Jester]

Archinist, you're missing some important things.

1) "Plenty of people" on Yahoo Answers out of the entire population of the world isn't very impressive. If 500 people post questions on Yahoo Answers that only proves 500 people take this thing seriously, out of a population of hundreds of millions of Internet users.

This is a great example of 'selection bias.' You see the 500 people who took this seriously enough to post questions on Yahoo Answers, but you don't see the 500,000,000 people who thought it was nonsense or the 5,000,000,000 people who've never heard of it.

2) Also, some percentage of questions on Yahoo Answers are created by trolls, and we can't tell which questions are trolling.

2) This idea of the world ending in 2012 is 'famous' in the sense that most people know about it from pop culture. It was not, however, widely believed. Almost no one acted like that the world was going to end in 2012. Compared to the level of mass hysteria you see in a society where a lot of people really did expect the world to come to an end (say, Europe in the year 1000), there was effectively nothing. All that happened is that one person would communicate to another, "hah, these silly people think the world will end on such and such a day." And once in a while a gullible or mentally ill person who hears this actually believes it, or an ignorant person thinks it's somehow plausible.

That does not equate to many people actually believing it, or to there being any especially good reason to believe it.

[InsaneTD]

The thing that always gets me about the Mayan one is the fact they mention the Mayan calender is a circular calender, but everyone forgets that circles don't "end" as such. It keeps going forever. All 2012 was, was the end of a cycle on the calendar.

[mr friendly guy]

Its a combination of a. gullibility and b. propagation of the idea.

Even though most people did not believe in it, a lot of people would have heard this idea being peddled. So I would argue that propagation played a bigger part than gullibility. Even if some idiot believes almost anything, if the idea isn't propagated they won't believe in it without hearing it first. They also have to compete against other contradictory bullshit ideas for the hearts and minds of the gullible. I mean if another doomsday scenario came out saying the world will end in 2013 instead of 2012, only the most dumbest person won't see the contradiction so will only believe in one of those doomsday scenarios.

So perhaps we should focus on how the Mayan prophecy bullshit got popularised back in the day.

[Zixinus]

Very few really believed it, by that I mean "seriously thought that something apocalyptic will happen and built nuclear bunkers with enough supplies to last years inside" (that's real belief). The only reason it might SEEM like many people do is because crazy people trying to raise a bruhaha make for interesting documentaries. So they blasted this bullshit all over. Where there is fear, there is money that could be made by exploiting that fear so scammers made a bunch of shit of up to further propagate this. Which was also interesting when people believed them. Thus a self-fueling cycle started and it got into popular consciousness, like the usual pseudo-scientific or outright superstitious bullshit.

The 2012 thing is just a new-age woo-infused recycle of what people were afraid of what will happen when the calenders hit 2000. Which consisted entirely of people having to buy new calenders. Which is what happened to the Mayan calender essentially, people had to start counting days and stuff from the beginning and that's it.

There is nothing cosmic about calenders. Thinking that the world will end is like thinking that the world will end because the calender ends. In fact, there is nothing really special about it, not anymore than a regular watch going 12:00. There are fewest shadows at 12:00, which may seem mystical until you realize that we designed clocks around the fact.

Meanwhile, the modern descendants of the Maya people and experts on Mayan culture really wish that they would stop asking this stupid shit and that the scammers would go away.

To my knowledge, the Mayans did not have telescopes. You can't make telescopes out of mud and sticks, you need glass or something equally malleable and transparent. The Mayan had apocalyptic legends but almost all cultures have such. They could not have foretell a comet hitting the Earth anymore than the Eskimos did before the Colombian exchange or the Kalahari bushmen could or even the Greeks for that matter. They only could if it was a regular occurrence like the Haley comet. One veering off Earth to hit it and it being big and fast enough to actually cause damage? Fat chance, even now we are not 100% against such a threat.

[Archinist]

The other thing is that if the Mayan calendar actually DID say that the world would end on a certain date, no doubt the percentage of believers would go up from something like a few million people to probably a few hundred million people, which is still a bit odd, since modern technology would surely be able to predict such a major event, assuming the end was not based off from "magic".

[Zixinus]

The other thing is that if the Mayan calendar actually DID say that the world would end on a certain date, no doubt the percentage of believers would go up from something like a few million people to probably a few hundred million people, which is still a bit odd, since modern technology would surely be able to predict such a major event, assuming the end was not based off from "magic".

You do not understand stupidity, willful ignorance and the preference of people to think that they are smart even when they are not. Most of all, the human ability to keep searching to find things you want to hear and ignore everything you don't want to, even when you shove it into their face. They are so deep in their own little self-built image of the world that they refuse to leave it and it is always you that's ignorant and close-minded.

There have been an incredible depth of studies that show that vaccines do not cause autism. Yet many people now believe or just "suspect" that it does based on a handful of what amounts to anecdotes, with the result that previously almost-extinct diseases have made a comeback. The theory for evolution has become the foundation of modern biology, for which fossils and other evidences that we have in such quantity that museums and such barely are able to store them in their museums. Yet there are still ardent creationist calling it "just a theory". We have conclusive evidence that the Earth is round and a sphere, yet there are still people that insist that it is flat.

If you want an explanation for this behavior, it will not be a rational one but a psychological one.

[Simon_Jester]

The other thing is that if the Mayan calendar actually DID say that the world would end on a certain date, no doubt the percentage of believers would go up from something like a few million people to probably a few hundred million people...

Why would you expect that to happen? Is there a reason you would make that prediction, and if so, what reason?

[Elheru Aran]

The other thing is that if the Mayan calendar actually DID say that the world would end on a certain date, no doubt the percentage of believers would go up from something like a few million people to probably a few hundred million people...

Why would you expect that to happen? Is there a reason you would make that prediction, and if so, what reason?

Additionally: There are frequent predictions that the world will end at some close date, from one direction or another. Rarely is there mass hysteria as you might expect. Mockery is the more usual result.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes.

A person who just doesn't know anything about superstition, pseudoscience, and generalized woo-woo nonsense will think: "Wow, a prediction of the end of the world? That is such an unlikely thing!"

But the reality is, people go crazy and predict or expect the world to end all the time. It's a common bug in human psychology to expect the entire world to end, just as it's a common bug to believe in conspiracies. These are illusions our brain is naturally good at generating.

So there is no reason to think of any specific conspiracy theory or claim about the date of the world ending as "special."

It'd be like saying "wow, this e-mail says that a Nigerian prince needs me to forward him five thousand dollars so he can get millions of dollars which he'll share with me!" If that kind of claim were rare it might at least merit investigation.

But in reality, there are countless claims like that- people who say "I'll give you a huge reward in exchange for a large up-front payment that I can then run away with and never speak to you again."

They're called scam artists, and nobody with a brain listens to them.

Some scams are more successful than others, but that doesn't mean the successful ones are somehow 'more plausible' or 'better' and more worthy of your attention and trust.

Some conspiracy theories are more popular than others, but that doesn't mean that a popular conspiracy theory is more likely to be true than an unpopular one.

Some claims that the world will end on a certain day or in a certain year are the ramblings of one crazy person who no one listens to, while others become fairly large-ish religions. The "end in 2012" claim falls somewhere in between those two extremes- and that has nothing to do with its credibility or special status.

[Zixinus]

The funny thing is that people have been predicting that "the end is nigh" for more than thousands of years, including fairly recently. Penn and Teller actually did an episode detailing how there were doomsday predictions yearly in modern Western countries even in the 19th and early 20th century.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I suspect that big-budget disaster film from 08/09 called "2012" has something to do with it. Even if almost all who went and saw it (myself included and it was god-awful) don't believe it at all it got enough people talking about it, and the idea was there when 2012 itself rolled around.

[Starglider]

The 1999 millenial survivalist craze was a much bigger deal than the 2012 doom-mongering, and even the former was a small fringe movement. To be fair it had a somewhat more plausible basis, though still completely blown out of proportion of course.

[Iroscato]

I suspect that big-budget disaster film from 08/09 called "2012" has something to do with it. Even if almost all who went and saw it (myself included and it was god-awful) don't believe it at all it got enough people talking about it, and the idea was there when 2012 itself rolled around.

I remember that mammoth fountain of shit. You know you've fucked up when you deliver world-shattering destruction and make it boring.

[Ziggy Stardust]

The other thing is that if the Mayan calendar actually DID say that the world would end on a certain date.

Actually, no, it did not. There is no known record of a Mayan apocalypse myth. Although the 2012 "end of the world" comes from some scholarly work in the 1960s, modern experts almost universally concur that they are false and not grounded in any solid fact.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Supposedly, the Mayan calendar has no entries for years beyond 2012. Which some people immediately assumed meant it was the end of the world, as we know it, and the wingnuts felt perfectly fine.

Instead of just simply assuming the Mayans just couldn't conceive that far ahead, that it was utter bullshit, or a combination of the two.