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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

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.

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.