Thank you so much & yes I will be at the IABS too — looking forward to meeting up there! It would be great indeed.

The problem of academia.edu is that there are really absolutely no checks and balances. Arxiv.org at least prevents submission of atrocities like the IVC paper. I hope we can establish something like arxiv for humanities in the future…

The unwritten rules of what is “proper” or not in humanities academia are really opaque for me. My previous supervisors in Hamburg encouraged me to simply upload things to academia.edu so other people can cite it when it doubt. A proper preprint culture like arxiv.org might help humanities.

:)

… since the publications are there and can be read anyway. I know some people in Buddhist studies/indology who, after many years of writing, just decided not to submit their PhD. Of course, many things might be better said in a book than in an article, for sure.

I must admit that I find the article oriented culture of the STEM field I am moving in right now a bit more rewarding. It means earlier publications and more visibility and interaction with the wider research community. Plus, aborting a PhD might feel less like a failure…

The author decides a priori that the Indus Valley seals represent a language and then decides that the language of the Indus seals is Sanskrit. Why? He can exclude all agglutinative languages (which include for them Sumerian and Dravidian etc.), because:
3/

Fortunately, anybody with some serious Sanskrit background would agree. That’s the irony of this paper: anybody smart enough to understand it (be it people with enough Sanskrit knowledge, or computer scientists who understand the theory), will also disagree with it.

Still I believe it’s good to comment on it, so people who are looking up search engines or will
Ask the LLMs of the future once they have digested this data, will have a more complete picture.

I had a very telling “conversation” with the author on another platform before, just as other people had. To summarize: my experience is that they are not interested in a scientific dialogue, these are well-funded politically motivated pseudoscientists.