7 ms·

Western science catching up to Indigenous Traditional Knowledge

22 points by mcone 9y ago

IntronExon 9y ago
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.
- stonogo 9y ago
  Don't anthropomorphize science. It hates that.
- qsymmachus 9y ago
  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/
  - haZard_OS 9y ago
    I have never actually met a scientist who espouses the dreaded "scientism". It is, I have come to believe, a bogeyman used to silence rigorous thinkers when they attempt to speak in a social/political setting. Also, virtually every branch of science utilizes both quantitative and qualitative tools. I'm not sure if you meant to be dismissive of the often subtle methods for reconciling these different scientific tools, but it seemed to me that you did.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    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.
    - wefj82321a 9y ago
      Yeah it's all been debated over the years too. I some how doubt an HN poster that appears to have a chippy attitude is going to be revealing anything new. What a waste this board is. Such generic, banal arguments for $pet_platform
    - tialaramex 9y ago
      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.
- wefj82321a 9y ago
  Thanks, Webster. But it says "Scientists...". Humans do indeed care about what others "know" as a method of discovery. IMO it's a bad headline in typical "western" fashion where the reality of reality is forgotten in order to stroke our ego. Everyone is, by the nature of reality, a scientist. "What will I discover tomorrow through my own agency?" So when indigenous people discovered it, they may not have been conscious of it, but they were abiding the model that was later explicitly defined.
gaius 9y ago
And what of all the “traditional knowledge” that is just superstition? A stopped clock is right twice a day...
- vpribish 9y ago
  I think Nostradamus predicted that!
- vlunkr 9y ago
  What of it? Science and traditional knowledge are not in competition. The article is just pointing out some interesting times where it was way ahead of science.
  - cholantesh 9y ago
    Your second and third sentence kind of contradict each other.
    - vlunkr 9y ago
      No, they came to the same conclusion
      - cholantesh 9y ago
        But to say something was ahead of something else implies a clear path. I think these are separate spheres of thought that make similar claims, the difference is that they make it on different bases.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      No, they do not. For example, look at Jewish and Muslim food laws. Back at 0AD (and earlier) science didn't know about microorganisms, but the population sure knew that e.g. mixing milk and meat was dangerous. Or that knackers, slaughterhouses and burial sites must be outside city limits to prevent disease spread.
scoofy 9y ago
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."
- danharaj 9y ago
  > "Little-to-no evidence for" Perhaps consider that empirical evidence isn't the only form of evidence nor the only admissible form of evidence and that the way science interacts with other ways of knowing is open to criticism.
  - haZard_OS 9y ago
    Sure. For example, there is also logical evidence (proof) and interview/eye-witness testimony but, of course, eye-witness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence by far.
    - danharaj 9y ago
      There are examples that more severely show the limits of Popperian falsification. Such an example: Godel's incompleteness theorems are unfalsifiable. E.g. the second theorem can be proved in primitive recursive arithmetic, which means that its falsification would demonstrate the inconsistency of the theories that it applies to, but this is an even stronger result than it claimed. So it's not even the case that empirical evidence is the ideal standard of evidence that we deviate from due to practical considerations. It is limited, period. Scientism is a philosophical sickness.
      - haZard_OS 9y ago
        I have never met nor even corresponded with a colleague who believes that empirical evidence has no limits (whatever that might mean). Again, the charge of scientism seems to be little more than a bogeyman to silence or shame rigorous thinkers. When asked if science can, in principle, discover everything, I wouldn't even know how to respond. I'm not sure what such a question even means. Scientists move forward in their research with the provisional assumption that progress can be made...what other option is there?
haZard_OS 9y ago
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.
gus_massa 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Throughout the article, "knowledge" should be in quotes and link to an Urban Dictionary definition.
sgillen 9y ago
> 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.
natecavanaugh 9y ago
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.
- skilesare 9y ago
  I wish that more Christians were like this Christian.
- leadingthenet 9y ago
  So then why are you a Christian, if I may ask?
  - natecavanaugh 9y ago
    For many reasons, many philosophical, some of them inductive, and I think that science is inherently limited in it's scope. For instance, I don't believe science is the realm for meta physics, even if it can help inform it. If you are curious as to my thinking and reasoning on it, two good books, relatively short reads, are Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. Tim Keller also gave a good Google Talk [0] on the book if you prefer that :) [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ
    - 9y ago
senectus1 9y ago
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.
aaron695 9y ago
> Australia has documented kites and falcons, colloquially termed “firehawks,” intentionally carrying burning sticks to spread fire. They literally used interpretative dance to document this. What a load of shit. Like the entire article. A great example of really bad western science. I wouldn't say it's getting worse though. This rubbish has always existed.
DanAndersen 9y ago
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-a-state/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...
Torgo 9y ago
"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."

22 points by mcone 9y ago

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.

stonogo 9y ago
Don't anthropomorphize science. It hates that.
qsymmachus 9y ago
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/
- haZard_OS 9y ago
  I have never actually met a scientist who espouses the dreaded "scientism". It is, I have come to believe, a bogeyman used to silence rigorous thinkers when they attempt to speak in a social/political setting. Also, virtually every branch of science utilizes both quantitative and qualitative tools. I'm not sure if you meant to be dismissive of the often subtle methods for reconciling these different scientific tools, but it seemed to me that you did.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  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.
  - wefj82321a 9y ago
    Yeah it's all been debated over the years too. I some how doubt an HN poster that appears to have a chippy attitude is going to be revealing anything new. What a waste this board is. Such generic, banal arguments for $pet_platform
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    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.
wefj82321a 9y ago
Thanks, Webster. But it says "Scientists...". Humans do indeed care about what others "know" as a method of discovery. IMO it's a bad headline in typical "western" fashion where the reality of reality is forgotten in order to stroke our ego. Everyone is, by the nature of reality, a scientist. "What will I discover tomorrow through my own agency?" So when indigenous people discovered it, they may not have been conscious of it, but they were abiding the model that was later explicitly defined.

gaius 9y ago

And what of all the “traditional knowledge” that is just superstition? A stopped clock is right twice a day...

vpribish 9y ago
I think Nostradamus predicted that!
vlunkr 9y ago
What of it? Science and traditional knowledge are not in competition. The article is just pointing out some interesting times where it was way ahead of science.
- cholantesh 9y ago
  Your second and third sentence kind of contradict each other.
  - vlunkr 9y ago
    No, they came to the same conclusion
    - cholantesh 9y ago
      But to say something was ahead of something else implies a clear path. I think these are separate spheres of thought that make similar claims, the difference is that they make it on different bases.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    No, they do not. For example, look at Jewish and Muslim food laws. Back at 0AD (and earlier) science didn't know about microorganisms, but the population sure knew that e.g. mixing milk and meat was dangerous. Or that knackers, slaughterhouses and burial sites must be outside city limits to prevent disease spread.

scoofy 9y ago

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."

danharaj 9y ago
> "Little-to-no evidence for" Perhaps consider that empirical evidence isn't the only form of evidence nor the only admissible form of evidence and that the way science interacts with other ways of knowing is open to criticism.
- haZard_OS 9y ago
  Sure. For example, there is also logical evidence (proof) and interview/eye-witness testimony but, of course, eye-witness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence by far.
  - danharaj 9y ago
    There are examples that more severely show the limits of Popperian falsification. Such an example: Godel's incompleteness theorems are unfalsifiable. E.g. the second theorem can be proved in primitive recursive arithmetic, which means that its falsification would demonstrate the inconsistency of the theories that it applies to, but this is an even stronger result than it claimed. So it's not even the case that empirical evidence is the ideal standard of evidence that we deviate from due to practical considerations. It is limited, period. Scientism is a philosophical sickness.
    - haZard_OS 9y ago
      I have never met nor even corresponded with a colleague who believes that empirical evidence has no limits (whatever that might mean). Again, the charge of scientism seems to be little more than a bogeyman to silence or shame rigorous thinkers. When asked if science can, in principle, discover everything, I wouldn't even know how to respond. I'm not sure what such a question even means. Scientists move forward in their research with the provisional assumption that progress can be made...what other option is there?

haZard_OS 9y ago

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.

gus_massa 9y ago

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 9y ago
Throughout the article, "knowledge" should be in quotes and link to an Urban Dictionary definition.

sgillen 9y ago

> 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.

natecavanaugh 9y ago

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.

skilesare 9y ago
I wish that more Christians were like this Christian.
leadingthenet 9y ago
So then why are you a Christian, if I may ask?
- natecavanaugh 9y ago
  For many reasons, many philosophical, some of them inductive, and I think that science is inherently limited in it's scope. For instance, I don't believe science is the realm for meta physics, even if it can help inform it. If you are curious as to my thinking and reasoning on it, two good books, relatively short reads, are Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. Tim Keller also gave a good Google Talk [0] on the book if you prefer that :) [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ
  - 9y ago

senectus1 9y ago

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.

aaron695 9y ago

> Australia has documented kites and falcons, colloquially termed “firehawks,” intentionally carrying burning sticks to spread fire. They literally used interpretative dance to document this. What a load of shit. Like the entire article. A great example of really bad western science. I wouldn't say it's getting worse though. This rubbish has always existed.

DanAndersen 9y ago

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-a-state/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...

Torgo 9y ago

"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."