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.
I mean, yes, I agree. But typically both the most vocal self-proclaimed defenders, and the decriers, of "Western culture" consider Islamic culture to be separate from it.
Societies go through waves of secularism vs religious intolerance. while Galileo was subjected to house arrest due to heresy in promoting a model of the solar system that is "correct" today, Islamic societies were making tremendous advances in math and science. It is more the societal balance of secular tolerance versus religious intolerance that dictates who is advancing in math and science at a given point in time. Considering Italian culture today, paper and pasta came from China, tomatoes came from the Americas, vinifera wine grapes came from Persia/Black Sea regions, while much of the basics of civil engineering was homegrown in the Roman Empire.
"Western science" is a pretty novel concept, just starting in the past 250 years. For 1,500 years prior to that, many Western scientists were struggling to survive the various bouts of Christian intolerance towards science. Interestingly, it is only now that the secrets of long-lasting Roman concrete are starting to be understood after the recipes were lost for almost 2,000 years. There are numerous other examples where people had figured out how to do something but the knowledge was lost in the sands of time of societal collapse and/or religious intolerance. Book burning is a fast way to lose a lot of knowledge. Isaac Asimov wrote a great short story "Nightfall" about how temporary bouts of societal insanity destroy the continuity of knowledge.
I'd say the Muslim world (at least the main bit west of the Indus) is not considered part of Western civilization for much the same reason that Russia is not considered part of Western civilization.
Russia's tradition of absolute autocracy puts it at odds with the West, as does the Muslim emphasis on divine law.
Well, I'd agree that totalitarian tendencies of Russian governments have been at odds with the kind of liberal syncretic cosmopolitanism that I consider to be _my_ version of "Western culture", but there are plenty of right wingers in America today heaping praise on Putin and Russia, for "defending traditional Western culture" as they conceive it -- i.e. patriarchy, religious intolerance, and white supremacy. (They are perhaps _somewhat_ less prominent than the folks celebrating Orbán. But they're hardly invisible.)
But the question of what exactly "Western culture" is, or should be, is kind of the issue here. If you're trying to define some kind of canon of art, music, and literature, then excluding Russians, who were in direct dialogue with their more westerly peers, seems like a significant error. Can you say with a straight face that Tchaikovsky and Pushkin aren't significant contributors to the canon? (Of course, a lot of the great artists of Russian history were persecuted by the state.) If you decide that the culture you're talking about perhaps first became identifiable in Europe, but was never really tied to region, then clearly they shouldn't be excluded. And contributors to the canon of the cosmopolitan culture today would include folks like Bright Sheng -- a Chinese-born American, whose _Dream of the Red Chamber_ is one of the best new operas of the past decade.
Russia is part of Europe, so yeah, these artists are part of Europe's history and canon. Now, the question of whether they are Western depends on whether you want to include all of Europe in the definition of West or just Western Europe and exclude Eastern Europe. I see people often excluding or including Eastern Europe, depending on the context. For example, if people are going to talk about the West during the Cold War, they will probably exclude Eastern Europe. Nowadays, sometimes people will include all of Eastern Europe in the EU as West, and sometimes they won't. Sometimes people will also use the term West to designate a geopolitical alliance, so they exclude Russia and Belarus, but not other countries in Eastern Europe.
Basically, Western is used to refer to at least the civilization of Western Europe, which obviously includes the Anglo offshoots, and the term may or may not include Eastern Europe and even East Asian democracies, depending on the intention of whoever is using it.
In relation to the Muslim world. The Muslim world is not only not part of the West, but is its opposite. If by West you mean Western Europe and Christianity, then obviously the Muslim world is not included in this. If by West you mean Europe and extending to those who adopt the products of European enlightenment, such as reason, secularism and liberalism, then the Muslim world is the opposite of that, because obviously, they have the opposite of secularism and liberalism.
The idea that science started in the Muslim world is pretty silly. Sure, there were seeds of an idea, but one could also say that the ancient Greeks had seeds of an idea of science, but in fact the scientific revolutions that created modern science occurred in Europe between the 15th century and the 19th century. Those who do the most elite science per capita today are still Europeans by far, and especially NW Europeans. Look at the Nature Index, which controls for quality at least somewhat.
Yes but the reason Western Europeans and Americans do so much research isn't because of anything inherent to them or their geography. It's an purely an accident of history. (And this is the entire point of the blog post I was originally referring to.) And the aspect of "Western culture" that actually _does_ drive Westerners to do so much science very clearly owes a lot to the Islamic world. Early "natural philosophers", when people were still describing what they were doing as science without calling themselves scientists, would certainly have told you it was worthwhile to read and learn from the great texts of the Ottoman scholars, from which we got much of the basis of the mathematics required for coherent analysis, and the origins of experimental logic.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine moved his capital there he originally renamed it to "Nova Roma", but the city more popularly became known after him as "Constantinopolis".
Rick's point thought may be that the name "Byzantine Empire" was a western exonym: the empire's own inhabitants called themselves "Roman" (even though they mostly spoke Greek) right up until 1453.
They describe the folk wisdom that enabled these amazing weapons to be produced, then add scientific analysis to explain what the steps actually do. Of course the folk wisdom is not "accurate" about some of the mysticism re why the steps work - but as an engineering matter, it is "effective" in producing the result.
Concurrently, people in another part of the world learned how to make "Damascus steel" swords with similar properties and manufacturing concepts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel
Successful cultures have their own forms of scientific method of using trial and error development of successful technologies over decades or centuries. The effectiveness of some of the solutions is truly astonishing given the rudimentary tools they could work with.
Yeah, that's the SSC post I was thinking of. It's possible that the "mad Arab" joke showed up somewhere in the comments, or in some other rationalist blog commenting on the SSC one -- hard to recall all the details seven years later...
In Los Angeles I think. But as I said, I don't think they're really "American", they're a product of syncretic cosmopolitanism. There's amazing fusion food in Japan as well. And don't get me started on how in Australia you can find Thai and Indonesian and Indian stuff merged in with indigenous ingredients and more traditionally-"Western" British-descended stuff. Like, kangaroo satay wellingtons, spiced with bush pepper and lemon myrtle, and with a peanut sauce that substituted in ground wattle seed for some of the peanuts.
A friend down in LA took us to a favorite restaurant of hers which is basically a "high-end Italian restaurant" as you'd encounter it in Tokyo -- they had a marinara that was using the kind of plum they make umeboshi from, rather than tomato. And for quite a few years there was a restaurant in Palo Alto that was doing modern high-end Indian -- like, it was aspiring to replicate what the local equivalent of a Gary Danko or French Laundry would be, in Delhi or Hyderabad. So, heavily influenced by Indian traditions, but drawing on everything. (And I was told by a couple friends from there that they were doing a good job at it. It was really freaking good. Sadly they did not survive the pandemic.)
As Americans, we can't really say there's an "American" food that defines all 330 million of us as a nation. The U.S. has enough crop and bio diversity that most of the ingredients in world cuisines can be grown, slaughtered or processed here.
Also, American foods have cultural cachet throughout the world, where people will pay a premium for what we are accustomed to as mass market goods (Kraft shelf-stable "cheese", Spam, fast food chains, to name a few).
The Kogi taco truck. They'd post on Twitter where they'll pop up for a couple hours and you had to chase them around the LA area. When I finally ate them, I was shocked that they lived up to the hype and then some.
One of the years I attended the California Democratic Party Convention as a delegate (2010, maybe?) it was in Los Angeles they did a food truck event one evening, and Kogi came, and I was duly impressed. They were worth waiting in line for.
> 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.
What's the appropriate time and place for indigenous knowledge? Are we talking about going on a walkabout and knowing specific types of mushrooms, kind of time and place?
The time and place for indigenous knowledge is when the time and resources to do proper science and/or refer to scientific results are unavailable, which is actually quite often.
In the COVID19 pandemic, the indigenous knowledge of East Asia that wearing masks is the responsible thing to do when you suspect that you have a respiratory infection, or are in an environment where you are at high risk to be exposed to people who have a respiratory infection, proved to be extremely valuable.
People just started wearing masks more, even before science eventually caught up and concluded that wearing masks was effective.
And even after science reached the same conclusion as indigenous knowledge, actually getting the message out to people was slow and fraught with difficulty.
If you expand indigenous knowledge to organizations as in the blog post, it's pretty obvious that a lot of decisions are made through proper science, but through the knowledge indigenous to the organization.
Firstly, that's not what people mean by indigenous knowledge and you know it. Amazonian tribes weren't going around wearing surgical masks when the Conquistadors found them, were they?
But even if we roll for a moment with your redefinition of the term to mean "any claim I happen to like", masks are a terrible choice to demonstrate the point given that all the hard evidence shows no impact of community mask wearing. There is simply no scientifically valid evidence for masks, all claims to the contrary are lies. You're spreading misinformation.
See Cochrane's review for an example of how hard it is to actually find valid evidence for mask wearing against viruses, but you don't need a rigorous metastudy to see it. Just look at graphs of reported cases and try to work out when mask laws were changed. You can't because they didn't change, they didn't change because mask wearing had no effect.
And scientists knew that. It's why at the start they said, correctly, there was no particular reason to wear masks.
Do you have any other examples, this time of actual indigenous knowledge? Stuff that they "knew" before the west turned up?
I think the Indians knew about that thing that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother. I can't recall exactly - not ergot, but some sort of plant fungus thing.
Anyhow lots of old herbal medicines kinda worked, like ma huang for asthma and congestion. Sure eventually you could figure out the chemistry involved, but at first you just tried things and observed what worked. You can do a surprising amount of science & engineering without a rigorous conceptual model.
Our understanding of gravity is basically folk knowledge.
Surely the context matters RE: any hierarchy of knowledge? If I was going to be stranded on a remote island I'd prefer to be with a tribe of indigenous hunter-gatherers than a bunch of scientists, but vice versa if we have to sequence the human genome.
I will concede a scientific approach is generally more applicable to a wide range of problems, but in situations where experimentation is costly, just doing what's worked in the past is a pretty good strategy.
Maybe not "indigenous knowledge" per se, but traditional Christian norms of chastity, marriage, community, and family work much better than our current atomized, secular norms.
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.
Mortality is overwhelming determined by heredity and lifestyle (I going to lump suicide and being murdered in gang violence with lifestyle). Some good or bad luck, of course. In some cases, the healthcare system cures people of something that would have killed them, and thus their life is extended. I speculate that one reason the US had much higher COVID fatalities - setting aside we likely way overcounted - is that the US has a high percentage of "unhealthy" and/or elderly people that have been kept alive by the healthcare system, but are fragile.
Based on the patients I see come through the hospital, it's the cigarettes. I'm too lazy to scrounge for data but I think smoking rates fell at around the same time college rates increased.
My personal bias is that college completion sorts for people who are more future-oriented with better impulse control (broadly. There are also TONS of environmental influences at work.). When college was less-accessible, we couldn't sort for this behavior (and smoking was also WAY more common anyway).
None of this is meant to be a value judgment. It's just how economic pressures have sorted people recently.
I wonder how much of it is influenced by family dietary 'choices' that carry on into adult life having been learned/ingrained. Eating a less processed diet on average looks like it leads to meaningfully better long term health outcomes.
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.
Abundance but with redistribution in the service of fairness and (in a rational world) fossil fuel externalities reasonably priced in.
P.S. Instead of helping poorer countries leapfrog energy sources by coercion we should just let them do what they determine is in their best interests. We can help them by ramping up clean energy RD&D at home.
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.
But Kuhn would point out that science isn’t really falsifiable in the sense Popper thought either. Discovering anomalies in the orbit of Uranus and discovering anomalies in the orbit of Mercury didn’t lead to the overturning of Newtonian physics, the way that a Popperian falsificationist would thing. And good thing, too, because holding on to Newton in the fact of anomalies for Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune! But when they did the same thing and postulated Vulcan to explain the orbit of Mercury, they soon realized they couldn’t see Vulcan and needed to postulate an invisible planet. It’s only when another theory came along (Einstein’s) that better explained the Mercury observations that they finally gave up on Newton. No observations were able to do it, only new theory, which is the opposite of everything Popper would say.
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?
Going to college doesn't make you healthier, college attendance is just acting as a proxy for other factors such as social class, intelligence, conscientiousness, impulse control and so forth.
Perhaps healthier lifestyles are more popular in college grads' social circles. People do herd, and whole foods and exercise have long been popular among my college grad friends. Perhaps they're less popular in non-college-grads' social circles. ( I think I probably just said the last thing you said in different words.)
College makes you wealthier. Perhaps it's just that then you can afford better food.
Or perhaps it's just a correlation caused by where people live. Different places are dominated by different grocery stores.
Or perhaps healthier people are more likely to go to college. I know people whose health has kept them from going to college.
In any case, since people live a lot longer if they eat healthier, it might make sense to have a large negative sales tax on vegetables, fruits, and legumes. It might make sense to have health insurance discounts as you improve fitness. (Not that I know how to design such policies. I assume it's complicated.)
There might be something to the healthier lifestyles among college students, though healthier food might be overrated. There's still binge drinking and late-night pizza and ramen as college poverty staples.
Universities, though, generally promote wellness by having exercise facilities and PE might be a core component of general education requirements, just as it was in grade school. I remember in 2-year and 4-year college I had to pay a health fee in addition to tuition; this did offer a form of universal healthcare where a campus infirmary was available to all, and for more serious cases you could be referred to an affiliated hospital. If the university had a teaching hospital, students could be part of the hospital's medical network.
Large campuses also encourage walking with landscaping, quads, and colleges often far apart to encourage movement. University towns are also known for heavy bicycle use.
So that would depend on college having more, or "better," routine than the things people do instead in that age range if they don't go to college. It's not clear to me how broadly that's true-- plenty of low wage jobs are all too routine-heavy, for example.
As an extreme case, this would predict that people who join the military out of high school would end up healthier than college grads, since military life is nothing if not routinized. It's... actually not completely implausible that that could be the case, but good luck trying to correct for selection bias on that one!
Fair points, and my response wasn’t fleshed out enough to really note why college would be different than other post-grad routines. A few things jump out at me that make college a unique experience: Paying for or otherwise funding the experience, as opposed to working or being in the military. Structure in day-to-day events while allowing for a fair amount of variability (different classes, different topics). Interacting with a huge number of peers, outside of a work setting. This makes for a pretty low stress environment (as opposed to stressful situations like exams and such), which is good for brain development.
Leaving the military, though, can be hell on the veteran. There's the matter of homelessness, untreated PTSD, substance abuse, and a hard shift to a non-routinized life. It's concerning that when many veterans leave the armed forces for civilian life, they look to work in law enforcement or private security.
"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.
Same. I don’t follow how the cohort thing works as a control. Also, no offense, but college having a causal effect (besides the credential accessing better jobs and status and income, which is inherently zero sum) seems ludicrous. Really, by what mechanism??!
You're right that they don't do electives or lectures on this stuff. But during a student's time at university they get access to the opinions, ideas and lifestyles of wealthier people who, because of their status and income, can afford the best advice and information. Also doctors who work in university towns or campuses tend to have to be more accountable because they're dealing with wealthier patients who complain and refuse to take 'pull yourself together' as the final word on their illness. You get used to being treated with more respect by healthcare workers and come to expect it going forward. An extension of 'cultural capital' beyond childhood and your parental home, I guess. But, yes, good luck demanding greater respect of medical professionals if with your Ivy League degree you end up waiting tables in the Rust Belt.
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.
Also the vast majority of people with low time preferences go to college. People with low time preference also are much more likely to do things like exercise, cook meals instead of eat out, choose not to eat a half gallon of ice cream in one sitting, not do hard drugs or drink heavily, etc.
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.
Definitions of "Western" that exclude the main centres of Islam are highly problematic. It's like discussion of the Dark Ages that ignores Byzantium.
I mean, yes, I agree. But typically both the most vocal self-proclaimed defenders, and the decriers, of "Western culture" consider Islamic culture to be separate from it.
Societies go through waves of secularism vs religious intolerance. while Galileo was subjected to house arrest due to heresy in promoting a model of the solar system that is "correct" today, Islamic societies were making tremendous advances in math and science. It is more the societal balance of secular tolerance versus religious intolerance that dictates who is advancing in math and science at a given point in time. Considering Italian culture today, paper and pasta came from China, tomatoes came from the Americas, vinifera wine grapes came from Persia/Black Sea regions, while much of the basics of civil engineering was homegrown in the Roman Empire.
"Western science" is a pretty novel concept, just starting in the past 250 years. For 1,500 years prior to that, many Western scientists were struggling to survive the various bouts of Christian intolerance towards science. Interestingly, it is only now that the secrets of long-lasting Roman concrete are starting to be understood after the recipes were lost for almost 2,000 years. There are numerous other examples where people had figured out how to do something but the knowledge was lost in the sands of time of societal collapse and/or religious intolerance. Book burning is a fast way to lose a lot of knowledge. Isaac Asimov wrote a great short story "Nightfall" about how temporary bouts of societal insanity destroy the continuity of knowledge.
A shame the movie adaptation of Nightfall was such trash.
And yes! I love the example of marine concrete.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22231
I'd say the Muslim world (at least the main bit west of the Indus) is not considered part of Western civilization for much the same reason that Russia is not considered part of Western civilization.
Russia's tradition of absolute autocracy puts it at odds with the West, as does the Muslim emphasis on divine law.
Well, I'd agree that totalitarian tendencies of Russian governments have been at odds with the kind of liberal syncretic cosmopolitanism that I consider to be _my_ version of "Western culture", but there are plenty of right wingers in America today heaping praise on Putin and Russia, for "defending traditional Western culture" as they conceive it -- i.e. patriarchy, religious intolerance, and white supremacy. (They are perhaps _somewhat_ less prominent than the folks celebrating Orbán. But they're hardly invisible.)
But the question of what exactly "Western culture" is, or should be, is kind of the issue here. If you're trying to define some kind of canon of art, music, and literature, then excluding Russians, who were in direct dialogue with their more westerly peers, seems like a significant error. Can you say with a straight face that Tchaikovsky and Pushkin aren't significant contributors to the canon? (Of course, a lot of the great artists of Russian history were persecuted by the state.) If you decide that the culture you're talking about perhaps first became identifiable in Europe, but was never really tied to region, then clearly they shouldn't be excluded. And contributors to the canon of the cosmopolitan culture today would include folks like Bright Sheng -- a Chinese-born American, whose _Dream of the Red Chamber_ is one of the best new operas of the past decade.
Russia is part of Europe, so yeah, these artists are part of Europe's history and canon. Now, the question of whether they are Western depends on whether you want to include all of Europe in the definition of West or just Western Europe and exclude Eastern Europe. I see people often excluding or including Eastern Europe, depending on the context. For example, if people are going to talk about the West during the Cold War, they will probably exclude Eastern Europe. Nowadays, sometimes people will include all of Eastern Europe in the EU as West, and sometimes they won't. Sometimes people will also use the term West to designate a geopolitical alliance, so they exclude Russia and Belarus, but not other countries in Eastern Europe.
Basically, Western is used to refer to at least the civilization of Western Europe, which obviously includes the Anglo offshoots, and the term may or may not include Eastern Europe and even East Asian democracies, depending on the intention of whoever is using it.
In relation to the Muslim world. The Muslim world is not only not part of the West, but is its opposite. If by West you mean Western Europe and Christianity, then obviously the Muslim world is not included in this. If by West you mean Europe and extending to those who adopt the products of European enlightenment, such as reason, secularism and liberalism, then the Muslim world is the opposite of that, because obviously, they have the opposite of secularism and liberalism.
The idea that science started in the Muslim world is pretty silly. Sure, there were seeds of an idea, but one could also say that the ancient Greeks had seeds of an idea of science, but in fact the scientific revolutions that created modern science occurred in Europe between the 15th century and the 19th century. Those who do the most elite science per capita today are still Europeans by far, and especially NW Europeans. Look at the Nature Index, which controls for quality at least somewhat.
Yes but the reason Western Europeans and Americans do so much research isn't because of anything inherent to them or their geography. It's an purely an accident of history. (And this is the entire point of the blog post I was originally referring to.) And the aspect of "Western culture" that actually _does_ drive Westerners to do so much science very clearly owes a lot to the Islamic world. Early "natural philosophers", when people were still describing what they were doing as science without calling themselves scientists, would certainly have told you it was worthwhile to read and learn from the great texts of the Ottoman scholars, from which we got much of the basis of the mathematics required for coherent analysis, and the origins of experimental logic.
Ironic, a discussion on mislabeling using the term "Byzantium." 😄
But what about Constantinople? Why'd they change it? :-D
That's no one's business but the Turks.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine moved his capital there he originally renamed it to "Nova Roma", but the city more popularly became known after him as "Constantinopolis".
Rick's point thought may be that the name "Byzantine Empire" was a western exonym: the empire's own inhabitants called themselves "Roman" (even though they mostly spoke Greek) right up until 1453.
I was just making a joke-y reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo0X77OBJUg
As an example, I recall this excellent Nova episode on the traditions of making Japanese Katanas: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-samurai-sword.html
They describe the folk wisdom that enabled these amazing weapons to be produced, then add scientific analysis to explain what the steps actually do. Of course the folk wisdom is not "accurate" about some of the mysticism re why the steps work - but as an engineering matter, it is "effective" in producing the result.
Concurrently, people in another part of the world learned how to make "Damascus steel" swords with similar properties and manufacturing concepts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel
Successful cultures have their own forms of scientific method of using trial and error development of successful technologies over decades or centuries. The effectiveness of some of the solutions is truly astonishing given the rudimentary tools they could work with.
I think the post you're talking about is https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/, though it doesn't contain the claim that universal culture arose from Islamic culture.
Yeah, that's the SSC post I was thinking of. It's possible that the "mad Arab" joke showed up somewhere in the comments, or in some other rationalist blog commenting on the SSC one -- hard to recall all the details seven years later...
Counterpoint... weren't bulgogi tacos invented IN America? IJS...
In Los Angeles I think. But as I said, I don't think they're really "American", they're a product of syncretic cosmopolitanism. There's amazing fusion food in Japan as well. And don't get me started on how in Australia you can find Thai and Indonesian and Indian stuff merged in with indigenous ingredients and more traditionally-"Western" British-descended stuff. Like, kangaroo satay wellingtons, spiced with bush pepper and lemon myrtle, and with a peanut sauce that substituted in ground wattle seed for some of the peanuts.
A friend down in LA took us to a favorite restaurant of hers which is basically a "high-end Italian restaurant" as you'd encounter it in Tokyo -- they had a marinara that was using the kind of plum they make umeboshi from, rather than tomato. And for quite a few years there was a restaurant in Palo Alto that was doing modern high-end Indian -- like, it was aspiring to replicate what the local equivalent of a Gary Danko or French Laundry would be, in Delhi or Hyderabad. So, heavily influenced by Indian traditions, but drawing on everything. (And I was told by a couple friends from there that they were doing a good job at it. It was really freaking good. Sadly they did not survive the pandemic.)
As Americans, we can't really say there's an "American" food that defines all 330 million of us as a nation. The U.S. has enough crop and bio diversity that most of the ingredients in world cuisines can be grown, slaughtered or processed here.
Also, American foods have cultural cachet throughout the world, where people will pay a premium for what we are accustomed to as mass market goods (Kraft shelf-stable "cheese", Spam, fast food chains, to name a few).
The Kogi taco truck. They'd post on Twitter where they'll pop up for a couple hours and you had to chase them around the LA area. When I finally ate them, I was shocked that they lived up to the hype and then some.
They kick-started the modern food truck movement.
One of the years I attended the California Democratic Party Convention as a delegate (2010, maybe?) it was in Los Angeles they did a food truck event one evening, and Kogi came, and I was duly impressed. They were worth waiting in line for.
"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.
To summon Beattleguise only takes three times.
> 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.
I just think tools have their appropriate time and place.
What's the appropriate time and place for indigenous knowledge? Are we talking about going on a walkabout and knowing specific types of mushrooms, kind of time and place?
The time and place for indigenous knowledge is when the time and resources to do proper science and/or refer to scientific results are unavailable, which is actually quite often.
In the COVID19 pandemic, the indigenous knowledge of East Asia that wearing masks is the responsible thing to do when you suspect that you have a respiratory infection, or are in an environment where you are at high risk to be exposed to people who have a respiratory infection, proved to be extremely valuable.
People just started wearing masks more, even before science eventually caught up and concluded that wearing masks was effective.
And even after science reached the same conclusion as indigenous knowledge, actually getting the message out to people was slow and fraught with difficulty.
If you expand indigenous knowledge to organizations as in the blog post, it's pretty obvious that a lot of decisions are made through proper science, but through the knowledge indigenous to the organization.
Firstly, that's not what people mean by indigenous knowledge and you know it. Amazonian tribes weren't going around wearing surgical masks when the Conquistadors found them, were they?
But even if we roll for a moment with your redefinition of the term to mean "any claim I happen to like", masks are a terrible choice to demonstrate the point given that all the hard evidence shows no impact of community mask wearing. There is simply no scientifically valid evidence for masks, all claims to the contrary are lies. You're spreading misinformation.
See Cochrane's review for an example of how hard it is to actually find valid evidence for mask wearing against viruses, but you don't need a rigorous metastudy to see it. Just look at graphs of reported cases and try to work out when mask laws were changed. You can't because they didn't change, they didn't change because mask wearing had no effect.
And scientists knew that. It's why at the start they said, correctly, there was no particular reason to wear masks.
Do you have any other examples, this time of actual indigenous knowledge? Stuff that they "knew" before the west turned up?
I think the Indians knew about that thing that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother. I can't recall exactly - not ergot, but some sort of plant fungus thing.
I feel like this is an awesome time to bring up Ray Cats, as a forward-looking application of this idea
https://www.theraycatsolution.com/#10000
Anyhow lots of old herbal medicines kinda worked, like ma huang for asthma and congestion. Sure eventually you could figure out the chemistry involved, but at first you just tried things and observed what worked. You can do a surprising amount of science & engineering without a rigorous conceptual model.
Our understanding of gravity is basically folk knowledge.
Surely the context matters RE: any hierarchy of knowledge? If I was going to be stranded on a remote island I'd prefer to be with a tribe of indigenous hunter-gatherers than a bunch of scientists, but vice versa if we have to sequence the human genome.
I will concede a scientific approach is generally more applicable to a wide range of problems, but in situations where experimentation is costly, just doing what's worked in the past is a pretty good strategy.
Maybe not "indigenous knowledge" per se, but traditional Christian norms of chastity, marriage, community, and family work much better than our current atomized, secular norms.
editorial error in last sentence: “tow concepts” -> “two concepts”
Thanks, fixed!
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 !!
HAHAHA it means years of life LEFT!
But anyway, good job looking at the y-axis! I have taught you well... ;-)
I suspect it’s to be interpreted as: 50 more years at age 25, so expected death at 75.
First graph threw me as well.
Maybe it's a test !!!
🐾🐾🐾🐰🐾🐾🐾🐾🐇
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?
Not sure if that's a factor, but most of it is lifestyle choices.
Mortality is overwhelming determined by heredity and lifestyle (I going to lump suicide and being murdered in gang violence with lifestyle). Some good or bad luck, of course. In some cases, the healthcare system cures people of something that would have killed them, and thus their life is extended. I speculate that one reason the US had much higher COVID fatalities - setting aside we likely way overcounted - is that the US has a high percentage of "unhealthy" and/or elderly people that have been kept alive by the healthcare system, but are fragile.
Obese, high percentage of obese people. “Elderly people kept alive” by a functioning public health system is a feature of other countries, not US.
I did not use the word "public". But agree emphasize on obese.
Based on the patients I see come through the hospital, it's the cigarettes. I'm too lazy to scrounge for data but I think smoking rates fell at around the same time college rates increased.
My personal bias is that college completion sorts for people who are more future-oriented with better impulse control (broadly. There are also TONS of environmental influences at work.). When college was less-accessible, we couldn't sort for this behavior (and smoking was also WAY more common anyway).
None of this is meant to be a value judgment. It's just how economic pressures have sorted people recently.
I wonder how much of it is influenced by family dietary 'choices' that carry on into adult life having been learned/ingrained. Eating a less processed diet on average looks like it leads to meaningfully better long term health outcomes.
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.
Ideology takes over science. Sounds familar....
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.
Abundance but with redistribution in the service of fairness and (in a rational world) fossil fuel externalities reasonably priced in.
P.S. Instead of helping poorer countries leapfrog energy sources by coercion we should just let them do what they determine is in their best interests. We can help them by ramping up clean energy RD&D at home.
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.
But Kuhn would point out that science isn’t really falsifiable in the sense Popper thought either. Discovering anomalies in the orbit of Uranus and discovering anomalies in the orbit of Mercury didn’t lead to the overturning of Newtonian physics, the way that a Popperian falsificationist would thing. And good thing, too, because holding on to Newton in the fact of anomalies for Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune! But when they did the same thing and postulated Vulcan to explain the orbit of Mercury, they soon realized they couldn’t see Vulcan and needed to postulate an invisible planet. It’s only when another theory came along (Einstein’s) that better explained the Mercury observations that they finally gave up on Newton. No observations were able to do it, only new theory, which is the opposite of everything Popper would say.
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?
Going to college doesn't make you healthier, college attendance is just acting as a proxy for other factors such as social class, intelligence, conscientiousness, impulse control and so forth.
Perhaps healthier lifestyles are more popular in college grads' social circles. People do herd, and whole foods and exercise have long been popular among my college grad friends. Perhaps they're less popular in non-college-grads' social circles. ( I think I probably just said the last thing you said in different words.)
College makes you wealthier. Perhaps it's just that then you can afford better food.
Or perhaps it's just a correlation caused by where people live. Different places are dominated by different grocery stores.
Or perhaps healthier people are more likely to go to college. I know people whose health has kept them from going to college.
In any case, since people live a lot longer if they eat healthier, it might make sense to have a large negative sales tax on vegetables, fruits, and legumes. It might make sense to have health insurance discounts as you improve fitness. (Not that I know how to design such policies. I assume it's complicated.)
There might be something to the healthier lifestyles among college students, though healthier food might be overrated. There's still binge drinking and late-night pizza and ramen as college poverty staples.
Universities, though, generally promote wellness by having exercise facilities and PE might be a core component of general education requirements, just as it was in grade school. I remember in 2-year and 4-year college I had to pay a health fee in addition to tuition; this did offer a form of universal healthcare where a campus infirmary was available to all, and for more serious cases you could be referred to an affiliated hospital. If the university had a teaching hospital, students could be part of the hospital's medical network.
Large campuses also encourage walking with landscaping, quads, and colleges often far apart to encourage movement. University towns are also known for heavy bicycle use.
I wrote this in response to a similar question above, but I wouldn’t discount the benefits of routine while the brain is still developing.
So that would depend on college having more, or "better," routine than the things people do instead in that age range if they don't go to college. It's not clear to me how broadly that's true-- plenty of low wage jobs are all too routine-heavy, for example.
As an extreme case, this would predict that people who join the military out of high school would end up healthier than college grads, since military life is nothing if not routinized. It's... actually not completely implausible that that could be the case, but good luck trying to correct for selection bias on that one!
Fair points, and my response wasn’t fleshed out enough to really note why college would be different than other post-grad routines. A few things jump out at me that make college a unique experience: Paying for or otherwise funding the experience, as opposed to working or being in the military. Structure in day-to-day events while allowing for a fair amount of variability (different classes, different topics). Interacting with a huge number of peers, outside of a work setting. This makes for a pretty low stress environment (as opposed to stressful situations like exams and such), which is good for brain development.
Leaving the military, though, can be hell on the veteran. There's the matter of homelessness, untreated PTSD, substance abuse, and a hard shift to a non-routinized life. It's concerning that when many veterans leave the armed forces for civilian life, they look to work in law enforcement or private security.
"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.
Same. I don’t follow how the cohort thing works as a control. Also, no offense, but college having a causal effect (besides the credential accessing better jobs and status and income, which is inherently zero sum) seems ludicrous. Really, by what mechanism??!
You're right that they don't do electives or lectures on this stuff. But during a student's time at university they get access to the opinions, ideas and lifestyles of wealthier people who, because of their status and income, can afford the best advice and information. Also doctors who work in university towns or campuses tend to have to be more accountable because they're dealing with wealthier patients who complain and refuse to take 'pull yourself together' as the final word on their illness. You get used to being treated with more respect by healthcare workers and come to expect it going forward. An extension of 'cultural capital' beyond childhood and your parental home, I guess. But, yes, good luck demanding greater respect of medical professionals if with your Ivy League degree you end up waiting tables in the Rust Belt.
> Really, by what mechanism??!
My guess would be more stability and routine while the brain continues to develop, but I realize that’s just the story I’m creating for myself.
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.
Also the vast majority of people with low time preferences go to college. People with low time preference also are much more likely to do things like exercise, cook meals instead of eat out, choose not to eat a half gallon of ice cream in one sitting, not do hard drugs or drink heavily, etc.