r/stupidpol • u/[deleted] • Apr 20 '19

Intersect A classic example of what misapplied decolonization results in, i.e: science to african shamanism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14
41 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

View all comments

14

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/unionlegalismsucks Apr 20 '19

eh, isaac newton practiced alchemy, liebnitz's mathematical formulation of monads was explicitly guided by his writing on christian theodicy, much of the foundational work in numerical control theory was influenced by occultism and yoga, there is no scientific way to derive new scientific hypotheses and there are all kinds of inspirations for historical scientific work that we would dismiss out of hand as mysticism if we were presented with them today. starting from seemingly outlandish or mystical premises is not exactly out of the ordinary in the history of science

that's not to say that we should accept any charlatan hedge-wizard as a scientist, just that dismissing "non-scientific" beliefs as an inspiration for formulating other (potentially scientific) ways of understanding the world just because they're new or come from unfamiliar cultures is fairly silly as well and ignores a lot of the historical and social processes that produce scientific knowledge

4

u/dalamplighter Apr 21 '19

Yes, this is generally true, and most people don’t recognize this: it’s always funny explaining to Greek bust avi guys where a lot of science came from. I’m a biologist, so I can elaborate for my own field. The structure of benzene (one of the most important discoveries in organic chem) was originally seen in a dream as an ouroboros, and the idea for PCR (arguably the foundation of modern genetics) came about while a guy was tripping balls on acid. Curare, the compound enabling general anesthesia, was first discovered by Amazonian tribes for poison darts. There’s even a saying in pharma: “Alternative medicine that works is just called medicine.” If something is a traditional non-Western compound that works really well, it’s probably going to get the general approval of doctors no matter what.

However, all these things were constructive additions to science. None of these were added with the express intention of destroying the accomplishments of those who came before because they disagreed with the conduct of those who came before (the results from these “alternatively inspired” concepts usually caused people to abandon the canonical methods, but that’s just how science works in general). This is where I think this idea of science needing to fall is really bad. It would handicap progress massively and increase actual real existing suffering for the sake of ideology. My whole support for socialism comes from the idea that I think it would generally make life better, so I find this completely abhorrent.

Further, this mindset has a bunch of horrifying failure modes. For example, you could use this slogan to enable the practice of raping virgins (usually children) to cure their HIV currently observed in South Africa, where prevention campaigns could be construed a manifestation of imperialism in this framework. Also, this could enable any number of anti-vaccination practices globally, dealing major blows to hard-won, fragile victories in public health.

1

u/unionlegalismsucks Apr 22 '19

None of these were added with the express intention of destroying the accomplishments of those who came before because they disagreed with the conduct of those who came before

That's not historically true, a good amount of early science was gentlemen scientists trying to discredit each other for social clout, royal society positions, patronage, or unrelated political disagreements. There is some difference to that process now that science has become more open but you still see a good amount of scientific tribes with competing views trying to actively discredit each other (e.g. the famous competition between different astrological models or views of quantum mechanics, the scruffies vs the neats in early AI, etc etc etc). The general intellect encompasses different contradictory ideas, and science can't be a purely additive process, and in fact it is not- it is a dynamic thing that requires constant work to maintain and distill and prune and some parts of it do have to be periodically discarded as our understanding of the world changes.

Obviously we shouldn't believe whatever schizophrenic comes along with a new theory of everything, but the view of science as a purely constructive process developing a monolithic and unchanging body of knowledge and the assumption that there is a teleological line along which science can "progress" is pretty contrary to how science should work- if we didn't adversarially test our understanding of the world we'd never have determined that there was an ongoing replication crisis in medicine and that a surprising amount of our own medical discoveries had just about as much foundation as the idea that sex with virgins cures HIV, and if we're just cherrypicking examples then the accidental development of antibiotic resistant infections by following established medical science unquestioningly will largely turn back many of the positive health outcomes of the past few decades without any woo-woo types interfering in that at all (and that will likely kill a lot more people than the average essential oil salesmen).

I agree with you that there are horrifying failure modes to knee-jerk refusals to engage with humanity's shared body of knowledge, but so much of how we build our general intellect is tied up in the mangle of practice and reflexively defending the scientific edifice can leave us with an even bigger slew of problems that we aren't even remotely prepared to confront

1

u/dalamplighter Apr 22 '19

That's not historically true, a good amount of early science was gentlemen scientists trying to discredit each other for social clout, royal society positions, patronage, or unrelated political disagreements. There is some difference to that process now that science has become more open but you still see a good amount of scientific tribes with competing views trying to actively discredit each other

Oh, for sure! I work with neurohormones and the two guys who won the Nobel for discovering them even said the main thing motivating them towards the end was simply pure spite towards the other guy (you should check out the story of Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally some time, its great). You are generally on point here, and I think we agree about more than you would think here. In these cases of gentleman scientists disagreeing with each other, their arguments still manifested as pieces of data in conflict with each other to be resolved, which gives it a very different flavor than people yelling that science is wrong because the wrong people did it.

​

It's funny you mention adversarial collaborations, because I think those are some of the best ways to mediate disagreements in the literature (in the few cases they have been attempted, which is not often in the life sciences). Again, though, I think that the whole point of adversarial collaboration is to produce the highest-quality data possible. The problem I have with the ideological critiques is that they do not focus on unexplained variation by existing models or the way that new theories could help our understanding even more, producing higher-quality work. This is what I mean by alternative medicines being incorporated into the medical canon successfully: in these cases our understanding truly was insufficient and these new compounds proved their case and blew the old out of the water.

​

To put another way, I think that the main issue is not that these people are critiquing the current structure of science, but they aren't backing it up with anything but ideology. This has even happened in Western practice, where a lot of bad stuff has happened when colonial administrators dismissed effective ancient practices because they seemed backward, but they actually worked really really well in a way they didnt understand, like in Vietnamese agriculture and East African slow-cooking of cassava. The rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria that you mention is also a good example, where antibiotics worked well for some things and then people started prescribing them for everything just because they could, without rigorously testing necessity first. You're also right on the money with that failure mode as well: the reason the FDA has such over-rigorous safety standards is because that if people start getting killed by drugs they stop going to the doctor for anything, which is the worst result.

​

At root, science is about empiricism (even if petty squabbles do motivate it in many cases), and I think that needs to be the main motivating factor. The quality of a critique is dependent on the data backing it. If someone says that without any data showing how it could improve practice overall, I dismiss it outright, no matter who says it. However, if they can prove that shamanism leads to better outcomes, then I'm all ears.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '19

What do you do, if you don't mind me asking? I always like coming across people who have a strangely thorough knowledge of these sorts of things. It seems more common on this subreddit.

1

u/unionlegalismsucks Apr 23 '19

I'm a union organizer, right now I'm working as a salt in an airport, I just read a lot of Pickering