
Western science catching up to Indigenous Traditional Knowledge - mcone
https://theconversation.com/its-taken-thousands-of-years-but-western-science-is-finally-catching-up-to-traditional-knowledge-90291?xid=PS_smithsonian
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natecavanaugh
I'm a Christian, and what most would consider a fundamentalist (though
formerly strict creationist), and I at times feel that science is incredibly
dismissive of historical and traditional knowledge, often out of a default
presupposition of beliefs.

But this is the great benefit of empirical science to our understanding of the
world. I truly believe in the philosophical principle that the person stating
the positive position in an argument has the burden of proof on it's
shoulders.

So while we would all love for our deeply held beliefs to be treasured by
science, it's for our benefit that scientists don't work that way, and that we
should have the burden to prove what we believe.

And if it's truth, there should be some way to reason to it, whether
scientifically or philosophically.

So when traditional knowledge is validated, I say great. But let's not start
cherry picking according to our biases and using that to somehow infer that
"science" is the issue. Sure, some in the scientific community can come off as
condescending, but that's a personal issue and one of approach, not one that
is fundamental to the empirical study of the world.

~~~
gus_massa
Science is about finding evidence to prove or disprove things. (Or "refute"
things, if you want to be more precise.)

There is a lot of knowledge in science and a lot of knowledge that is
historical or traditional. The problem is that (almost) all the low handling
fruit have been picked and there is a lot of intersection. To use a silly
example, "drink water when you are thirsty" is science, historical or
traditional knowledge? Curare is poisonous? Use heat to melt cooper? A lot of
historical or traditional knowledge has been absorbed in science, in
particular many medicinal plants have been confirmed and there are now
artificial procedures to produce the same active component or some improved
version.

So most of the things that are usually called "historical and traditional
knowledge" are in the difference, i.e. things that have not been confirmed in
a scientific acceptable way, or that have been debunked. So most of the
leftovers are wrong or are very difficult to test (or both, wrong and
difficult).

Just imagine the 20th season of MythBuster. In the fist seasons they pick
popular myths and "confirmed" or "busted" them. Then they run out of popular
myths and had to pick more obscure myth, and then crazy or weird ideas. They
run out of authentic myths and started reproduce scenes in movies or to create
their own myths. I enjoyed the show, but it's difficult to imagine what could
they do in the 20th season.

The current state of science is similar. Most of the good parts of the
historical and traditional knowledge has been assimilated and extended. The
current questions are weird. (Is the neutrino it's own antiparticle?) The
leftovers of historical and traditional knowledge are wrong or are very
difficult to test (or both, wrong and difficult).

~~~
natecavanaugh
This was such a good comment I'm sorry it took me so long to see it. Honestly,
you've nailed it. I'm heartbroken that there isn't more that can be
empirically proven, but I think those also hint at where we should double down
on what can be shown.

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haZard_OS
From the article:

"Science is promoted as objective, quantifiable, and the foundation for “real”
knowledge creation or evaluation while Traditional Knowledge may be seen as
anecdotal, imprecise and unfamiliar in form."

    
    
      That's because "Traditional Knowledge" IS anecdotal and imprecise. 
    
      Science as a process does not simply discount so-called Traditional Knowledge out of hand. But to imply (as portions of this article seem to) that modern science is acting arrogantly or elitist when stories steeped in sympathetic magic are glossed over by ecologists is laughable.

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sgillen
> _The Lakota and Cheyenne can be considered more objective than white
> accounts of the battle that are tainted by Eurocentric bias_

I'm not denying that the white accounts are biased but let's not pretend
anyones account is objective.

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gus_massa
The article begins with a bad example:

> _A team of researchers led by Mark Bonta and Robert Gosford in northern
> Australia has documented kites and falcons, colloquially termed “firehawks,”
> intentionally carrying burning sticks to spread fire._

They didn't document that the falcons carry the burning sticks, they
documented first hand witness of falcons carrying the burning sticks. There
are no videos of the falcons carry the burning sticks.

~~~
jasonkostempski
Throughout the article, "knowledge" should be in quotes and link to an Urban
Dictionary definition.

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gaius
And what of all the “traditional knowledge” that is just superstition?

A stopped clock is right twice a day...

~~~
jandrese
Filtering out which parts are factual and which parts are superstitious
nonsense is where the science comes in. That and discovering the mechanism by
which the old way works. There's a lot of knowledge hidden in ancient wisdom,
but it comes encrusted with a thick shell of bullshit.

~~~
Lorkki
> Filtering out which parts are factual and which parts are superstitious
> nonsense is where the science comes in.

Literally, and in the historical sense. That's pretty much how the Royal
Society got started.

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senectus1
Deliberately misleading title.

Scientist have _proven_ what the indigenous have claimed and practiced...
congratulations to both.

Why make it sound like One side is a loser.. sounds like race or belief
baiting to me.

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Torgo
"The worldwide attention given to the firehawks article provides an
opportunity to explore the double standard that exists concerning the
acceptance of Traditional Knowledge by practitioners of Western science."

I'm not losing any sleep over this "double standard."

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DanAndersen
The main advantage of Tradition is time. I think the areas where the article
is most compelling is when it focuses on drawing knowledge from traditional
practices that have been done for long period of time in a stable society (the
bit about "clam gardens" in particular).

A traditional practice is a sequence of small, imprecise experiments extended
throughout a large period of time. It's risk averse and only tweaks things
slowly, but it has the benefit of probably not breaking everything when you do
it, because if it was going to have catastrophic consequences it probably
wouldn't have persisted for this long without anyone noticing. A 'traditional'
system of medicine probably doesn't have the underlying principles exactly
right, and it gets stuck in local optima, but it usually falls into the
'ineffective' category when it goes wrong rather than 'insane side effects.'
Admittedly, tradition has issues when the underlying system changes rapidly
and practices that made sense in the past no longer make sense to do, and
there's a catch-up time that has to happen.

Science has advantages of being able to more rigorously and skeptically re-
evaluate assumptions and to tease out underlying causes and principles. But at
the same time it's also prone to human frailties in how it's conducted -- see
the replication crisis. Taleb might call it a lack of 'skin in the game,'
where researchers are institutionally motivated to publish whatever they can
that gets them a p-value below 0.05 and at the end of the day they're probably
not changing their own personal habits or practices based on what their
research says (because the strength and weakness of science is that it finds
ways to detach the researcher from the research). The 'danger of a single
study' comes when initial findings become loudly reported and the general
population (or rather institutional powers) who want to be Modern and Cutting-
Edge and moving toward the Future and Progress will take the initial findings
as a stamp of approval.

The main issue is when we use science not just for 'what are the facts?' but
'how should we live?' and apply our initial findings universally. Because
society doesn't want to wait to make a change, and our scientific processes
usually do not have the advantage of time that tradition does, we start to
embody the long-term experiment into the culture. And what's worse is that we
get pressure to adopt it more widely than may be prudent. Why would a
government official only promote a new idea in a single isolated population
when they can reap the benefits of the new science by pushing the idea onto
the whole country? When it's right, it has great reward, but when it's wrong
the costs are great. And so we got the 'low-fat' craze that has led to great
costs and suffering, forcing these generational oscillations to try to get
people back on track to something with more scientific support.

Scott Alexander's book review of "Seeing Like a State" [0] points to this same
attitude of hubris when it came to the 'modern rational scientific' thinking
of the High Modernists in architecture:

>First, there can be no compromise with the existing infrastructure. It was
designed by superstitious people who didn’t have architecture degrees, or at
the very least got their architecture degrees in the past and so were
insufficiently Modern. The more completely it is bulldozed to make way for the
Glorious Future, the better.

>Second, human needs can be abstracted and calculated. A human needs X amount
of food. A human needs X amount of water. A human needs X amount of light, and
prefers to travel at X speed, and wants to live within X miles of the
workplace. These needs are easily calculable by experiment, and a good city is
the one built to satisfy these needs and ignore any competing frivolities.

>Third, the solution is the solution. It is universal. The rational design for
Moscow is the same as the rational design for Paris is the same as the
rational design for Chandigarh, India. As a corollary, all of these cities
ought to look exactly the same. It is maybe permissible to adjust for
obstacles like mountains or lakes. But only if you are on too short a budget
to follow the rationally correct solution of leveling the mountain and
draining the lake to make your city truly optimal.

>Fourth, all of the relevant rules should be explicitly determined by
technocrats, then followed to the letter by their subordinates. Following
these rules is better than trying to use your intuition, in the same way that
using the laws of physics to calculate the heat from burning something is
better than just trying to guess, or following an evidence-based clinical
algorithm is better than just prescribing whatever you feel like.

>Fifth, there is nothing whatsoever to be gained or learned from the people
involved (eg the city’s future citizens). You are a rational modern scientist
with an architecture degree who has already calculated out the precise value
for all relevant urban parameters. They are yokels who probably cannot even
spell the word architecture, let alone usefully contribute to it. They
probably make all of their decisions based on superstition or tradition or
something, and their input should be ignored For Their Own Good.

The result was ugly rectangles that no one wanted to live in, at the cost of
destroying sections of cities that had grown organically over time to solve
their local particular problems.

The experiments of reality have to be conducted no matter what, and sometimes
those experiments cannot be sped up. Not everything about social effects can
be revealed in a 12-week study, and sometimes 50 years or more are needed to
reveal the negative effects of a policy. Are there ways to effectively contain
the high-variance experiments of science to small populations while keeping
most people on the low-variance experiments of tradition?

[0] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-
like...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-
state/)

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scoofy
Empiricism and the scientific method don't care about what anyone claims to
know until it can be tested in a falsifiable setting. This headline is an
insult to critical thinking. Of course folk lore ought to be considered when
considering hypotheses. "Little-to-no evidence for" does not mean "is false."

~~~
kevin_b_er
They improved the headline. The original article is linked at the bottom and
the title for that was "It’s taken thousands of years, but Western science is
finally catching up to Traditional Knowledge".

From this you may see the original angle and intent of the article.

EDIT: Post URL was updated since to point to said article.

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we've updated the link from [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-
nature/why-science-ta...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-
science-takes-so-long-catch-up-traditional-knowledge-180968216/?no-ist).

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IntronExon
Science isn’t interested in what you “know” it’s interesed in what can be
demonstrated, and independently replicated.

Edit: Although plenty of scientists do study cultural knowledge as a place to
formulate potentially useful hypotheses to be tested. Ethnopharmacology is a
whole field dedicated to the prospect, just for one example.

~~~
qsymmachus
As an epistemology science is extremely rigorous – if something can't be
measured (and thereby tested), science can't claim to "know" anything about
it.

This is an excellent standard for particle physics, but can be extremely
limiting in other contexts. You probably claim to "know" a great number of
things, despite the fact that you have never "measured" any of these things
(or could ever hope to measure them). Whether or not we can consider this
knowledge is an old debate[1].

When taken to extremes, the scientific world view just devolves into
"scientism", which denies the possibility that we can know _anything_ outside
the strictures of the scientific method.

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-
empiricism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/)

~~~
IntronExon
In what context can something real not be measured? Putting aside the strawman
of “scientism” I’m curious what “other contexts” you have in mind in which
cause and effect aren’t linked? Something as ephemeral as emotion is well
studied, right? Even if you believe in an interventionist god, those
interventions would be measurable.

~~~
tialaramex
For the superstitious there's a useful epistemological dodge here.

The Roman Catholic Church says that Transubstantiation is a real phenomenon.
When a priest says the magic words, ordinary wine and bread are transformed
into the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ. It's not a metaphor, it really
happens, it's a miracle. BUT although they are flesh and blood, they continue
to have all the same detectable properties they had before, there is no way to
distinguish them from ordinary bread and wine.

This is a rock solid, but completely useless epistemological argument. You can
do it (to similar lack of actual effect) for anything, maybe I believe that
this rock is actually the entire planet Jupiter except that it has all the
same properties as an ordinary rock.

