7 ms·

From the publication: “The speculation that the hand gesture herein presented is a freemasonry’s conveyed code is fascinating, but it is hard to accept.” This

From the publication: “The speculation that the hand gesture herein presented is a freemasonry’s conveyed code is fascinating, but it is hard to accept.” This sentence concluded a very short paragraph that apparently aimed to explore whether the hand sign could have a Masonic meaning. But instead of giving any explanation for their conclusion, the authors merely postulate the above without any given reasoning. I’m surprised to find this in what appears to aim to be a scientific analysis. Even more so would it surprise me if any conscious reader found this conclusion satisfactory. Any thoughts?

bgoated01 2y ago
Having been involved in peer reviewed publishing before, I wonder if this was an afterthought prompted by a peer reviewer's comments on the paper. Perhaps they quickly added this point just to get it to pass review. Sloppy, if so, but I've seen similar (though not as blatant) things happen.
- crdrost 2y ago
  I mean the whole paper is sloppy here. They kind of are writing to a biomedical journal and then say "well, it's NOT biomedical..." as kind of a little brush-off? And then they go through a couple explanations they have heard and dismiss them without really going through the evidence. (I especially liked the sloppiness of self-contradiction, in one section they're like "well there are no Hebrew letters that work for this" which is wrong, you could make decent arguments for both shin and tsadeh -- but then almost immediately after they're like "well this could be an M or W, W can symbolically be the Hebrew letter Vav...") And after cursorily dismissing them they just say "therefore, it's an aesthetic meme. This is just what perfect hands look like, sorry." A hypothesis that was not considered, for example: 'We asked people at school to imagine that they were going to be sitting still for the next three hours on a stool, and to sit on it in a way that was perfectly relaxed. We then prompted them "remember, in old times you'd have had to sit here for three hours, really relax." Finally, we then picked up their left wrist, turned it, and placed it on their chests saying "great, now can you just hold this hand here," and took a photograph. In 30% of these photographs we also see, even without syndactyly, that the two fingers get forced together just by the process of having your wrist twisted by an artist and then the fingers having to conform to the contours of the chest.' I don't know what that percentage is, but I'd be surprised if it were 0%, right?
  - burnished 2y ago
    The genius of your proposition is that you wouldn't have to be surprised, you'd just know
- karaterobot 2y ago
  There were enough basic grammatical errors in that article—not to mention a general lack of clarity and specificity—that I initially wondered whether it was a preprint, or maybe somebody's blog. But no.
  - standardly 2y ago
    "According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize crypto-jews each other" "According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize masonic followers each other" I have never heard this verbiage before... Did an AI write this? Or, can someone explain to me how "used to recognize followers each other" is grammatically sound?
    - mkl 2y ago
      It's not grammatical. Reading the article parts of it seemed poorly machine-translated to me (and the whole thing seemed mostly a sequence of straw-men).
      - b112 2y ago
        And yet... I recall when young, people were commenting on how most media came from centralized locations. That with newspapers, and then radio, and now TV, pronunciation was moving towards being less regionalized, diverse, yet also that the choice of words to use, the synonyms to use, was changing. I also recall the same being said for a variety of things, such as spell checkers, and grammar checkers used in wordprocessors. Some grammar was "OK", but other forms were being pushed by (most especially) earlier wordprocessors, with grammatically valid text being marked with that wavy underline. Now we have AI. My point? Kids are going to be raised in a world with AI. If it spends a decade or more spewing blather such as this, an entire slew of people will grow up, from 10 to 20 years old, 15 to 25 years old, learning to cobble together sentences in this sort of way. Not only will they read it, but "helpful" assistants will change their normal prose, into this gibberish. So I'm sorry mkl, it sort of will be grammatical. And no, I'm not happy about it.
runjake 2y ago
32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of. However, there were numerous other fraternities and secret societies during that era, although they were typically gender-specific. Seeing both men and women using the same hand signals suggests these were likely common societal practices of the time. And since, presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going to be immortalized in a painting.
- fidotron 2y ago
  > 32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of. Would you actually be able to say it if they were?
  - flir 2y ago
    The other guard always lies.
    - runjake 2y ago
      Link to the logic puzzle that flir is referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves
      - nosmokewhereiam 2y ago
        Ask what would the other do and do the opposite.
        m463 2y ago
        I wonder if you could do that with tristate logic somehow. maybe with more guards or other variables.
        flir 2y ago
        Solve for the general case. Maybe you need num_guards-1 questions? I doubt you could solve for 50 guards with 1 question.
panarchy 2y ago
This reads like it belongs in an episode of The Curse of Oak Island not an article.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 2y ago
I noticed that too. Eventually they drew the conclusion that people just copied each other to look cool. I have no idea whether there's more to the 'hidden meanings' conjectures or not, but if you're going to dig into a topic, dig in properly. Waste of reading time in my view.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
Could also be from some defunct offshoot off the freemasons or some other adjacent secret society. The rosicrucians are perhaps most well known, but secret hermetic societies were fairly in-fashion during the renaissance. Given the secrecy involved, it's probably very hard to know what is and is not (and has been) a significant gesture. I'd also personally not be surprised if hermetic symbolism cropped up around the Medici-adjacent artists in particular, given the Medicis' proximity to Pico della Mirandola who was fairly important in bringing together this new mix of christian, jewish, gnostic and neoplatonist mysticism.

bgoated01 2y ago

Having been involved in peer reviewed publishing before, I wonder if this was an afterthought prompted by a peer reviewer's comments on the paper. Perhaps they quickly added this point just to get it to pass review. Sloppy, if so, but I've seen similar (though not as blatant) things happen.

crdrost 2y ago
I mean the whole paper is sloppy here. They kind of are writing to a biomedical journal and then say "well, it's NOT biomedical..." as kind of a little brush-off? And then they go through a couple explanations they have heard and dismiss them without really going through the evidence. (I especially liked the sloppiness of self-contradiction, in one section they're like "well there are no Hebrew letters that work for this" which is wrong, you could make decent arguments for both shin and tsadeh -- but then almost immediately after they're like "well this could be an M or W, W can symbolically be the Hebrew letter Vav...") And after cursorily dismissing them they just say "therefore, it's an aesthetic meme. This is just what perfect hands look like, sorry." A hypothesis that was not considered, for example: 'We asked people at school to imagine that they were going to be sitting still for the next three hours on a stool, and to sit on it in a way that was perfectly relaxed. We then prompted them "remember, in old times you'd have had to sit here for three hours, really relax." Finally, we then picked up their left wrist, turned it, and placed it on their chests saying "great, now can you just hold this hand here," and took a photograph. In 30% of these photographs we also see, even without syndactyly, that the two fingers get forced together just by the process of having your wrist twisted by an artist and then the fingers having to conform to the contours of the chest.' I don't know what that percentage is, but I'd be surprised if it were 0%, right?
- burnished 2y ago
  The genius of your proposition is that you wouldn't have to be surprised, you'd just know
karaterobot 2y ago
There were enough basic grammatical errors in that article—not to mention a general lack of clarity and specificity—that I initially wondered whether it was a preprint, or maybe somebody's blog. But no.
- standardly 2y ago
  "According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize crypto-jews each other" "According to this hypothesis, the gesture was a secret sign used to recognize masonic followers each other" I have never heard this verbiage before... Did an AI write this? Or, can someone explain to me how "used to recognize followers each other" is grammatically sound?
  - mkl 2y ago
    It's not grammatical. Reading the article parts of it seemed poorly machine-translated to me (and the whole thing seemed mostly a sequence of straw-men).
    - b112 2y ago
      And yet... I recall when young, people were commenting on how most media came from centralized locations. That with newspapers, and then radio, and now TV, pronunciation was moving towards being less regionalized, diverse, yet also that the choice of words to use, the synonyms to use, was changing. I also recall the same being said for a variety of things, such as spell checkers, and grammar checkers used in wordprocessors. Some grammar was "OK", but other forms were being pushed by (most especially) earlier wordprocessors, with grammatically valid text being marked with that wavy underline. Now we have AI. My point? Kids are going to be raised in a world with AI. If it spends a decade or more spewing blather such as this, an entire slew of people will grow up, from 10 to 20 years old, 15 to 25 years old, learning to cobble together sentences in this sort of way. Not only will they read it, but "helpful" assistants will change their normal prose, into this gibberish. So I'm sorry mkl, it sort of will be grammatical. And no, I'm not happy about it.

runjake 2y ago

32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of. However, there were numerous other fraternities and secret societies during that era, although they were typically gender-specific. Seeing both men and women using the same hand signals suggests these were likely common societal practices of the time. And since, presumably the hand positions are secret, they're not going to be immortalized in a painting.

fidotron 2y ago
> 32° Freemason here. The images and descriptions do not match any masonic hand positions I am aware of. Would you actually be able to say it if they were?
- flir 2y ago
  The other guard always lies.
  - runjake 2y ago
    Link to the logic puzzle that flir is referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves
    - nosmokewhereiam 2y ago
      Ask what would the other do and do the opposite.
      - m463 2y ago
        I wonder if you could do that with tristate logic somehow. maybe with more guards or other variables.
        flir 2y ago
        Solve for the general case. Maybe you need num_guards-1 questions? I doubt you could solve for 50 guards with 1 question.

panarchy 2y ago

This reads like it belongs in an episode of The Curse of Oak Island not an article.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 2y ago

I noticed that too. Eventually they drew the conclusion that people just copied each other to look cool. I have no idea whether there's more to the 'hidden meanings' conjectures or not, but if you're going to dig into a topic, dig in properly. Waste of reading time in my view.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

Could also be from some defunct offshoot off the freemasons or some other adjacent secret society. The rosicrucians are perhaps most well known, but secret hermetic societies were fairly in-fashion during the renaissance. Given the secrecy involved, it's probably very hard to know what is and is not (and has been) a significant gesture. I'd also personally not be surprised if hermetic symbolism cropped up around the Medici-adjacent artists in particular, given the Medicis' proximity to Pico della Mirandola who was fairly important in bringing together this new mix of christian, jewish, gnostic and neoplatonist mysticism.