4 ms·

It's actually an amazingly good reason to think an idea has merit. Unless you think all your ancestors were just idiots.

jmchuster 8y ago
That's my dad's favorite (unironic) phrase -- "3000 years of chinese medicine can't be wrong"
- jeena 8y ago
  My dad has the exact opposite phrase, if someone tells him "We've been doing it like that for 20 years already!" he just very dry responds "And you've been doing it wrong for those 20 years."
CodeMage 8y ago
Would those be the same ancestors that believed in the healing power of bloodletting and leeches? Or are we taking about those who knew for a fact that the Sun went around the Earth? Or are we talking about my ancestors in particular, who believed thunderstorms were caused by Perun chasing Veles around the world?
- rosser 8y ago
  Do you have any idea how many "folk" remedies — specifically including leeching — have subsequently been validated, in at least some contexts, by modern medicine? How many plants the daft old witch in the forest used in ancient times, from which we now extract some medicinal compound or other to treat the very same ailment? The general position here seems to be that because the ancient herbalist didn't have a notion of acetylsalicylic acid, the willow bark he dispensed for pain wasn't even "wrong", despite its being the correct treatment from the tools he had available. Huh?
  - CodeMage 8y ago
    I don't know what "the general position" seems to be here and I don't really care. My reply to the grandparent comment was on point: the age of a belief is not a valid measure of its correctness.
    - rosser 8y ago
      > the age of a belief is not a valid measure of its correctness. Exactly. Its correctness is. The "general position" I'm seeing is that if a piece of knowledge wasn't premised on a contemporary understanding of the world (which is itself, with a probability that approaches unity, also wrong in critical and meaningful ways), it can't have been "right". Even when it turns out it was, when examined through the lens of that understanding. Hence the mention of willow bark: we didn't even understand aspirin's mechanism of action until the last ~half century. Does that make every doctor who prescribed it before that point wrong, or even just "not right", for having done so? EDIT: Phrasing
      - jhbadger 8y ago
        You need to read Asimov's essay "The Relativity of Wrong" http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm Ancient people and people 50 years ago were both wrong about a lot of things, as we no doubt are today, but there is a very different sort of wrong between the pre-scientific world of mythology and the self-correcting methodology we have today.
        rosser 8y ago
        I'd actually already read it, but thanks for linking to it; it had been many years! That said, I'm not the one painting the hard and bright distinction between "right" and "wrong". I know the dude who thinks the earth is flat is "more wrong" than the person who thinks it's spherical. I'm instead trying to point out the presumption structurally inherent in "we know more than those benighted, unenlightened sods that came before us did" being not merely a reason, but a requirement to dismiss anything said sods might have to offer. Consider: all of the out-of-hand dismissal of meditation, or mindfulness in general, in this thread. As far as I can tell, the dismissal boils down to taking "We didn't invent it", "The evidence is generally at best weakly supportive, and doesn't conclusively refute the thesis", and, "But unscrupulous people do unscrupulous things and hide their misdeeds behind these concepts" as sufficient cause to nope right on past with prejudice. The thing is, if you're properly playing "science", you don't get to "nope" out like that. Replicate it or refute it, sure, but not repudiate it. Empirically demonstrated results that run counter to our intuitions, and are at all replicable, are the things we should be paying the most attention to, because that's where we're most likely to learn something new. (Even if it's just about our intuitions...) We've instead somehow made a more-or-less collective, and as far as I can tell unexamined choice somewhere along the way to interpret skepticism not as, "I will neither believe nor disbelieve without evidence" but rather as, "If something doesn't comport with my [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of our [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of reality, it should be mocked and dismissed." And, no matter how hard I try, I can not wrap my head around how the latter follows from anything except yet another case of over-privileging our own perspective, and patting ourselves on the back for being so clever as to have inherited the trials-and-errors of aeons of ancestors, without crediting more than a token named few of them for any of that work (and often in some backhanded way that undercuts them as much as credits them. "That Newton. He sure was smart. Too bad he drank so much mercury..."). So, yes, Asimov was right. Of course our knowledge improves and is refined over time — assuming we're pursuing correct-enough theories that we don't get stuck in various local minima of understanding. But I wasn't disagreeing with him in the first place.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    The problem is that herbalists are forced to go through trial and error to come up with this information (tradition just means that someone else already did), because they do not have a working model of how their herbs work. Modern medicine has a vastly better model of human biochemistry (although it obviously still has huge gaps), which allowed it to develop a ton of new drugs in a surprisingly short amount of time (around 100-150 years, which is nothing on the scale of human history). Regarding leeches and bloodletting, of course it helps in some cases, in the same way that executing random actions sometimes helps: by chance. To get from anecdata to systematic application, you need scientific inquiry to form a model of why it helps.
brian_cloutier 8y ago
> Unless you think all your ancestors were just idiots This doesn't follow, you can be smart and also wrong. It's also possible to be smart and not have good enough tools. The randomized controlled trial (RCT), for instance, is a marvelous tool that might sound obvious to you, but that's only because you received the kind of education which wasn't possible for most of history. Those ancestors from a millenia ago, however smart they were, didn't have RCTs and didn't have the world-view which would make them value RCTs and even if they did their peers certainly didn't have the right world-view to value things learned from RCTs and as a result, through no fault of their own, those ancestors had a much harder time understanding reality than we do.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  You could also be super smart and be giving the wrong information.
soperj 8y ago
Considering Religion, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that is true.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  That your ancestors were idiots? Because they very well probably knew something that you don't. Religion doesn't even have to be based in fact to have merit. The fact that it has been around forever indicates that it is quite beneficial for it's adherants.
mythrwy 8y ago
I was reading an article on very old pyramids they found in Peru a few days ago. There is a pit at the top, they think for burnt offerings. Why was everyone doing burnt offerings? The Old Testament mentions them and ancient peoples in many geographically isolated parts of the world were doing them. It's really weird, there must be something in the human psyche that resonates with the idea of burnt offerings. Or maybe burning offerings produced effects from the gods, but I'm guessing it didn't do anything but be a ceremony or totem. It's still weird and has me puzzled but I'm pretty sure objectively it wasn't all that great of an idea and certainly don't think we should take up doing burnt offerings now even though it was pretty common practice in ancient times.
- adinobro 8y ago
  Be aware that for a number of cultures "burnt offerings" were more like "roast offerings". They often eat the cooked meat. This is one of the ways that the priests got food.
chongli 8y ago
I don't consider Plato to be an idiot but his model of the solar system was entirely without merit. It dug a very deep hole for astronomy, leading to centuries of wasted effort despite the existence of Aristarchus's more accurate model.
zaphirplane 8y ago
you’d have to be an idiot to go against 10,000 years of ancestors believing in the flat earth or the god fire

jmchuster 8y ago

That's my dad's favorite (unironic) phrase -- "3000 years of chinese medicine can't be wrong"

jeena 8y ago
My dad has the exact opposite phrase, if someone tells him "We've been doing it like that for 20 years already!" he just very dry responds "And you've been doing it wrong for those 20 years."

CodeMage 8y ago

Would those be the same ancestors that believed in the healing power of bloodletting and leeches? Or are we taking about those who knew for a fact that the Sun went around the Earth? Or are we talking about my ancestors in particular, who believed thunderstorms were caused by Perun chasing Veles around the world?

rosser 8y ago
Do you have any idea how many "folk" remedies — specifically including leeching — have subsequently been validated, in at least some contexts, by modern medicine? How many plants the daft old witch in the forest used in ancient times, from which we now extract some medicinal compound or other to treat the very same ailment? The general position here seems to be that because the ancient herbalist didn't have a notion of acetylsalicylic acid, the willow bark he dispensed for pain wasn't even "wrong", despite its being the correct treatment from the tools he had available. Huh?
- CodeMage 8y ago
  I don't know what "the general position" seems to be here and I don't really care. My reply to the grandparent comment was on point: the age of a belief is not a valid measure of its correctness.
  - rosser 8y ago
    > the age of a belief is not a valid measure of its correctness. Exactly. Its correctness is. The "general position" I'm seeing is that if a piece of knowledge wasn't premised on a contemporary understanding of the world (which is itself, with a probability that approaches unity, also wrong in critical and meaningful ways), it can't have been "right". Even when it turns out it was, when examined through the lens of that understanding. Hence the mention of willow bark: we didn't even understand aspirin's mechanism of action until the last ~half century. Does that make every doctor who prescribed it before that point wrong, or even just "not right", for having done so? EDIT: Phrasing
    - jhbadger 8y ago
      You need to read Asimov's essay "The Relativity of Wrong" http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm Ancient people and people 50 years ago were both wrong about a lot of things, as we no doubt are today, but there is a very different sort of wrong between the pre-scientific world of mythology and the self-correcting methodology we have today.
      - rosser 8y ago
        I'd actually already read it, but thanks for linking to it; it had been many years! That said, I'm not the one painting the hard and bright distinction between "right" and "wrong". I know the dude who thinks the earth is flat is "more wrong" than the person who thinks it's spherical. I'm instead trying to point out the presumption structurally inherent in "we know more than those benighted, unenlightened sods that came before us did" being not merely a reason, but a requirement to dismiss anything said sods might have to offer. Consider: all of the out-of-hand dismissal of meditation, or mindfulness in general, in this thread. As far as I can tell, the dismissal boils down to taking "We didn't invent it", "The evidence is generally at best weakly supportive, and doesn't conclusively refute the thesis", and, "But unscrupulous people do unscrupulous things and hide their misdeeds behind these concepts" as sufficient cause to nope right on past with prejudice. The thing is, if you're properly playing "science", you don't get to "nope" out like that. Replicate it or refute it, sure, but not repudiate it. Empirically demonstrated results that run counter to our intuitions, and are at all replicable, are the things we should be paying the most attention to, because that's where we're most likely to learn something new. (Even if it's just about our intuitions...) We've instead somehow made a more-or-less collective, and as far as I can tell unexamined choice somewhere along the way to interpret skepticism not as, "I will neither believe nor disbelieve without evidence" but rather as, "If something doesn't comport with my [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of our [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of reality, it should be mocked and dismissed." And, no matter how hard I try, I can not wrap my head around how the latter follows from anything except yet another case of over-privileging our own perspective, and patting ourselves on the back for being so clever as to have inherited the trials-and-errors of aeons of ancestors, without crediting more than a token named few of them for any of that work (and often in some backhanded way that undercuts them as much as credits them. "That Newton. He sure was smart. Too bad he drank so much mercury..."). So, yes, Asimov was right. Of course our knowledge improves and is refined over time — assuming we're pursuing correct-enough theories that we don't get stuck in various local minima of understanding. But I wasn't disagreeing with him in the first place.
- majewsky 8y ago
  The problem is that herbalists are forced to go through trial and error to come up with this information (tradition just means that someone else already did), because they do not have a working model of how their herbs work. Modern medicine has a vastly better model of human biochemistry (although it obviously still has huge gaps), which allowed it to develop a ton of new drugs in a surprisingly short amount of time (around 100-150 years, which is nothing on the scale of human history). Regarding leeches and bloodletting, of course it helps in some cases, in the same way that executing random actions sometimes helps: by chance. To get from anecdata to systematic application, you need scientific inquiry to form a model of why it helps.

brian_cloutier 8y ago

> Unless you think all your ancestors were just idiots This doesn't follow, you can be smart and also wrong. It's also possible to be smart and not have good enough tools. The randomized controlled trial (RCT), for instance, is a marvelous tool that might sound obvious to you, but that's only because you received the kind of education which wasn't possible for most of history. Those ancestors from a millenia ago, however smart they were, didn't have RCTs and didn't have the world-view which would make them value RCTs and even if they did their peers certainly didn't have the right world-view to value things learned from RCTs and as a result, through no fault of their own, those ancestors had a much harder time understanding reality than we do.

jacquesm 8y ago
You could also be super smart and be giving the wrong information.

soperj 8y ago

Considering Religion, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that is true.

jjeaff 8y ago
That your ancestors were idiots? Because they very well probably knew something that you don't. Religion doesn't even have to be based in fact to have merit. The fact that it has been around forever indicates that it is quite beneficial for it's adherants.

mythrwy 8y ago

I was reading an article on very old pyramids they found in Peru a few days ago. There is a pit at the top, they think for burnt offerings. Why was everyone doing burnt offerings? The Old Testament mentions them and ancient peoples in many geographically isolated parts of the world were doing them. It's really weird, there must be something in the human psyche that resonates with the idea of burnt offerings. Or maybe burning offerings produced effects from the gods, but I'm guessing it didn't do anything but be a ceremony or totem. It's still weird and has me puzzled but I'm pretty sure objectively it wasn't all that great of an idea and certainly don't think we should take up doing burnt offerings now even though it was pretty common practice in ancient times.

adinobro 8y ago
Be aware that for a number of cultures "burnt offerings" were more like "roast offerings". They often eat the cooked meat. This is one of the ways that the priests got food.

chongli 8y ago

I don't consider Plato to be an idiot but his model of the solar system was entirely without merit. It dug a very deep hole for astronomy, leading to centuries of wasted effort despite the existence of Aristarchus's more accurate model.

zaphirplane 8y ago

you’d have to be an idiot to go against 10,000 years of ancestors believing in the flat earth or the god fire