Indigenous knowledge _becomes_ science when it is translated into rigorous models that make predictions about the world, and those predictions are tested against what actually happens in the world.
I may be mis-remembering, but I _think_ it was Scott Alexander who had an essay about how when folks like that Twitter shouter decry "Western culture" -- liberal syncretic cosmopolitanism -- the thing they're angry at isn't even actually Western, it has roots that go back at least to the early Ottoman empire's tolerance of other cultures in Istanbul, and to folks like Ibn al-Haytham. It's fundamentally characterized by not caring about the ancestry or pedigree of the ideas it embraces -- it just cares that things _work_. It's very hard to persuade your kids to continue Time Honored Traditions when they have the choice to go sample the best on offer from every culture in history, plus things that are being invented by the profusion of creativity of an interconnected world. Bulgogi tacos aren't Korean or Mexican or American or really anything else -- they're just _delicious_. And the Japanese and Taiwanese have been advancing Western culture at least as much as anyone in the actual West, in the last half-century or so. They've punched _way_ above their weight class, comparing the percentage of population to the value they've delivered in technological and cultural advancement.
For millennia we had various forms of ancestor-honoring, blood-and-soil tribal cultures, and then some mad Arab summoned Cosmopolitanism from the void, and exactly as you'd expect for a horror out of the Necronomicon, it proceeded to devour the world. I sorta get why so many people are freaked out by this, but I for one welcome the memetic Beast from Beyond -- it's made the world a lot _better_ than what came before.
> That doesn’t mean that indigenous knowledge is worthless, or somehow “below” science on some hierarchy of ways of understanding the world. No such hierarchy exists, except in the minds of people who like to make hierarchies of things
Oh come now, this feels like chickening out.
You could certainly come up with some pretty reasonable hierarchies of ways of understanding the world. For instance, you could put ways of understanding the world that are more likely to give you true beliefs above ones that are more likely to give you false beliefs. Does that sound like a reasonable way to construct a hierarchy?
Why would you want to do such a thing? Well, for instance, if you were interested in believing true things then such a hierarchy might be useful.
Now, I don't think I'm necessarily a "person who likes to make hierarchies of things". I'm not too interested in rating the top albums of all time, nor the top movies, nor the most bangable members of BTS. But methods of finding things out seems important enough that it's worth thinking about a little more.
Imbedded in science as testable is the key concept of falsifiability, brought to our attention by Karl Popper. These core concepts of transferable, testable, and falsifiable are intrinsic to all threads of science. I would also add the ethos of open knowledge, without which the first three are moot.
I would be skeptical of the claim that Chinese authors are dominating scientific publishing. There is certainly a metric that they are dominating. But there’s a lot of reason to believe that this metric is bad precisely because it’s been the one people talk about, and therefore has become subject to gaming.
New Zealand is currently undergoing an unprecedented experiment in attempting integrate indigenous knowledge into its schools and scientific institutions in the form of Mataraunga Māori (MM).
Recent changes include giving MM the highest weighting of all research areas in terms of academic funding (universities are bulk funded based on research output of faculty measured by both individual output; i.e. papers, as well as research area- i.e. biomedical research is weighted higher than humanities– MM is now given the maximum weighting). Additionally, government research grants now have specific criteria for MM.
As far as I can tell, the major consequence so far is that a lot of very mediocre academics have been given a huge career boost by switching their research output from fields like geology and freshwater ecology to MM. Longer term I worry that this will cause grave damage to New Zealand science as it incentivizes merging all fields of science with MM, as opposed to having indigenous knowledge and science as separate areas. Additionally, I worry that it will isolate New Zealand science from that of other countries; an American or British educated chemist or geneticist is a far less viable candidate for an academic / research position within NZ universities / research institutes because they’re unlikely to contribute much to MM.
I have been thinking about wealth distribution a lot lately as it relates to climate change. It all started with an optimistic blog by Hannah Ritchie, https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ted-talk . Her basic message is that “We can live well and tackle our environmental problems at the same time.” In other words, we don’t have to give up our standard of living to fix climate change. I basically agree with that and feel that if we are to succeed in stopping global warming, we will need more optimism and more innovation.
That was all well and good until I saw a post at skepticalscience.com pointing to an article by Nikayla Jefferson from Yale Climate Connections, https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/09/opinion-lets-free-ourselves-from-the-story-of-economic-growth/ . Her subtitle reads, “A relentless focus on economic growth has ushered in the climate crisis. We need a better definition of well-being.” I countered with a comment pointing to Hannah’s post. Other commenters weighed in with one referencing the work of Matthew Stewart, e.g. “The 9.9% Percent.” I started feeling guilty for believing I could have my cake at eat it too.
Where does all this leave me? It leaves me a little conflicted but still believing that an abundance mentality is better than a scarcity mentality but I also believe we should always be mindful of making sure that a rising tide actually does lift all the boats and not just the boats of the more fortunate. I believe that we have had our turn with using fossil fuels to lift our boat and that we now need to lead the transition to energy technologies with lower emissions for this country as well as help developing countries leap-frog past fossil fuels.
Deutsch/Popper would say that science is falsifiable, which is subtly different to testable. You can test an indigenous belief, but as your article shows you can't say it's false for many reasons. So it fails the falsification test.
Re: No. 2, I strongly suspect this has more to do with the jobs available to people without college education. Far more likely to have to work multiple jobs, sometimes with bad commutes and erratic/long hours, which impacts ability to leas a healthy lifestyle - time to exercise, time to sleep well consistently. Financially, far less likely to have good health insurance and to get regular checkups, more likely to wait until something is urgent to get it checked and then more likely to be severe, not as likely to be able to do preventative health. Emotionally, strain of less security/not as good of financial situation contributes to falling into things that lead to deaths of despair - drugs, alcohol, etc. Even fentanyl often begins via opioids unknowingly laced with them, and if you don’t have good healthcare, more likely to turn to unsafe street opioids.
On working-class wealth increasing and household debt decreasing: is it possible to tease out whether Obamacare and/or the flattening of health expenditure as a % of GDP might have caused a decrease in medical debt over the past decade big enough to contribute to these trends? Medical debt was reported on a lot at the time of the GFC, and it's almost certainly disproportionately a working-class issue, but I don't know how to tell whether it's actually big relative to other factors affecting net wealth.
On college and health: what are the plausible stories for how going to college would cause you to live a healthier lifestyle ? I doubt very much that it's anything to do with the content of the classes themselves, unless you're in a health sciences major which the vast majority are not. The best guess I can come up with is that it's a mimetic peer group effect: going to college populates your social circle with people who on average were living healthier already, and you learn healthy behaviors from their example. Any other possibilities?
"That’s consistent with research that tries very carefully to account for selection effects." Reading through the paper I wouldn't characterize it that way. The authors themselves say more research is needed on selection bias as the existing studies are missing some things. It's in my mind by far the most likely option.
It seems like one possible contributor to #2 is that the causality runs the other way, that healthier people are better educated, rather than better educated people being healthier. It's trivially easy to imagine a severe health problem (encephalitis, serious car accident, etc, etc) that could prevent a person from obtaining a college degree, but essentially impossible to imagine one that would make getting a degree more likely. Thus you would always expect to see those who have completed a college degree (or any other accomplishment, frankly) be healthier than those who have not.
Indigenous knowledge _becomes_ science when it is translated into rigorous models that make predictions about the world, and those predictions are tested against what actually happens in the world.
I may be mis-remembering, but I _think_ it was Scott Alexander who had an essay about how when folks like that Twitter shouter decry "Western culture" -- liberal syncretic cosmopolitanism -- the thing they're angry at isn't even actually Western, it has roots that go back at least to the early Ottoman empire's tolerance of other cultures in Istanbul, and to folks like Ibn al-Haytham. It's fundamentally characterized by not caring about the ancestry or pedigree of the ideas it embraces -- it just cares that things _work_. It's very hard to persuade your kids to continue Time Honored Traditions when they have the choice to go sample the best on offer from every culture in history, plus things that are being invented by the profusion of creativity of an interconnected world. Bulgogi tacos aren't Korean or Mexican or American or really anything else -- they're just _delicious_. And the Japanese and Taiwanese have been advancing Western culture at least as much as anyone in the actual West, in the last half-century or so. They've punched _way_ above their weight class, comparing the percentage of population to the value they've delivered in technological and cultural advancement.
For millennia we had various forms of ancestor-honoring, blood-and-soil tribal cultures, and then some mad Arab summoned Cosmopolitanism from the void, and exactly as you'd expect for a horror out of the Necronomicon, it proceeded to devour the world. I sorta get why so many people are freaked out by this, but I for one welcome the memetic Beast from Beyond -- it's made the world a lot _better_ than what came before.
"But Hernandez is deeply wrong. Indigenous knowledge is not science."
Sorry, Noah, but she said it 8 times, so she must be right. That's how proggie twitter works. Do better.
> That doesn’t mean that indigenous knowledge is worthless, or somehow “below” science on some hierarchy of ways of understanding the world. No such hierarchy exists, except in the minds of people who like to make hierarchies of things
Oh come now, this feels like chickening out.
You could certainly come up with some pretty reasonable hierarchies of ways of understanding the world. For instance, you could put ways of understanding the world that are more likely to give you true beliefs above ones that are more likely to give you false beliefs. Does that sound like a reasonable way to construct a hierarchy?
Why would you want to do such a thing? Well, for instance, if you were interested in believing true things then such a hierarchy might be useful.
Now, I don't think I'm necessarily a "person who likes to make hierarchies of things". I'm not too interested in rating the top albums of all time, nor the top movies, nor the most bangable members of BTS. But methods of finding things out seems important enough that it's worth thinking about a little more.
editorial error in last sentence: “tow concepts” -> “two concepts”
Your first graph. You wrote a great piece about really looking at graphs. Do you really think half of all 25 yo w/o a ba die by 50 !!
Imbedded in science as testable is the key concept of falsifiability, brought to our attention by Karl Popper. These core concepts of transferable, testable, and falsifiable are intrinsic to all threads of science. I would also add the ethos of open knowledge, without which the first three are moot.
Re number 2, does this have to do with college-educated people getting health benefits at salaried jobs?
I would be skeptical of the claim that Chinese authors are dominating scientific publishing. There is certainly a metric that they are dominating. But there’s a lot of reason to believe that this metric is bad precisely because it’s been the one people talk about, and therefore has become subject to gaming.
New Zealand is currently undergoing an unprecedented experiment in attempting integrate indigenous knowledge into its schools and scientific institutions in the form of Mataraunga Māori (MM).
Recent changes include giving MM the highest weighting of all research areas in terms of academic funding (universities are bulk funded based on research output of faculty measured by both individual output; i.e. papers, as well as research area- i.e. biomedical research is weighted higher than humanities– MM is now given the maximum weighting). Additionally, government research grants now have specific criteria for MM.
As far as I can tell, the major consequence so far is that a lot of very mediocre academics have been given a huge career boost by switching their research output from fields like geology and freshwater ecology to MM. Longer term I worry that this will cause grave damage to New Zealand science as it incentivizes merging all fields of science with MM, as opposed to having indigenous knowledge and science as separate areas. Additionally, I worry that it will isolate New Zealand science from that of other countries; an American or British educated chemist or geneticist is a far less viable candidate for an academic / research position within NZ universities / research institutes because they’re unlikely to contribute much to MM.
I have been thinking about wealth distribution a lot lately as it relates to climate change. It all started with an optimistic blog by Hannah Ritchie, https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ted-talk . Her basic message is that “We can live well and tackle our environmental problems at the same time.” In other words, we don’t have to give up our standard of living to fix climate change. I basically agree with that and feel that if we are to succeed in stopping global warming, we will need more optimism and more innovation.
That was all well and good until I saw a post at skepticalscience.com pointing to an article by Nikayla Jefferson from Yale Climate Connections, https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/09/opinion-lets-free-ourselves-from-the-story-of-economic-growth/ . Her subtitle reads, “A relentless focus on economic growth has ushered in the climate crisis. We need a better definition of well-being.” I countered with a comment pointing to Hannah’s post. Other commenters weighed in with one referencing the work of Matthew Stewart, e.g. “The 9.9% Percent.” I started feeling guilty for believing I could have my cake at eat it too.
Where does all this leave me? It leaves me a little conflicted but still believing that an abundance mentality is better than a scarcity mentality but I also believe we should always be mindful of making sure that a rising tide actually does lift all the boats and not just the boats of the more fortunate. I believe that we have had our turn with using fossil fuels to lift our boat and that we now need to lead the transition to energy technologies with lower emissions for this country as well as help developing countries leap-frog past fossil fuels.
Deutsch/Popper would say that science is falsifiable, which is subtly different to testable. You can test an indigenous belief, but as your article shows you can't say it's false for many reasons. So it fails the falsification test.
Thanks as always for your work.
Re: No. 2, I strongly suspect this has more to do with the jobs available to people without college education. Far more likely to have to work multiple jobs, sometimes with bad commutes and erratic/long hours, which impacts ability to leas a healthy lifestyle - time to exercise, time to sleep well consistently. Financially, far less likely to have good health insurance and to get regular checkups, more likely to wait until something is urgent to get it checked and then more likely to be severe, not as likely to be able to do preventative health. Emotionally, strain of less security/not as good of financial situation contributes to falling into things that lead to deaths of despair - drugs, alcohol, etc. Even fentanyl often begins via opioids unknowingly laced with them, and if you don’t have good healthcare, more likely to turn to unsafe street opioids.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for articulating that Indigenous knowledge is not science, even if it holds truths and wisdom.
I have progressive friends I love dearly who refuse to not see the difference. Your argument is crystal clear.
On working-class wealth increasing and household debt decreasing: is it possible to tease out whether Obamacare and/or the flattening of health expenditure as a % of GDP might have caused a decrease in medical debt over the past decade big enough to contribute to these trends? Medical debt was reported on a lot at the time of the GFC, and it's almost certainly disproportionately a working-class issue, but I don't know how to tell whether it's actually big relative to other factors affecting net wealth.
On college and health: what are the plausible stories for how going to college would cause you to live a healthier lifestyle ? I doubt very much that it's anything to do with the content of the classes themselves, unless you're in a health sciences major which the vast majority are not. The best guess I can come up with is that it's a mimetic peer group effect: going to college populates your social circle with people who on average were living healthier already, and you learn healthy behaviors from their example. Any other possibilities?
"That’s consistent with research that tries very carefully to account for selection effects." Reading through the paper I wouldn't characterize it that way. The authors themselves say more research is needed on selection bias as the existing studies are missing some things. It's in my mind by far the most likely option.
It seems like one possible contributor to #2 is that the causality runs the other way, that healthier people are better educated, rather than better educated people being healthier. It's trivially easy to imagine a severe health problem (encephalitis, serious car accident, etc, etc) that could prevent a person from obtaining a college degree, but essentially impossible to imagine one that would make getting a degree more likely. Thus you would always expect to see those who have completed a college degree (or any other accomplishment, frankly) be healthier than those who have not.