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There is parsimony between recent interest in fasting for health and the fact that so many cultures & religions prescribe ritual fasts. Christianity, Islam, Hin

• wutbrodo 6y ago
  TL;DR: it seems trivially true that non-scientific, traditional knowledge can be a powerful source of understanding, especially when combined judiciously with science. > That doesn't mean traditions and beliefs are necessarily true, but they didn't evolve randomly either. Successful memes serve a purpose, and that can be rational outside of cultural rationality. The belief that no knowledge exists outside of the scientific establishment is one of the biggest weaknesses of the center-left technocratic memeplex (of which I'm proudly a part). It leads not only to the myopia of believing that your opponents don't deserve a hearing because they're "anti-science" (for ever more creative interpretations of science..), but also to unforced errors from the ability to reason about uncertainty, like <everything our public health authorities have done during the pandemic>. I believe that the scientific method is the greatest engine for rapid, high-quality knowledge generation in human history, and consider its manifestation in the scientific establishment to be one of the crowning achievements of humanity. But this doesn't make its manifestation perfect: as with all human systems, it's composed of people who are not immune to pettiness, narrow-minded, selfishness, and even occasionally stupidity. And as with all institutions, the human flaws of its constituents are magnified 1000-fold due to the challenges of incentive design and modeling large systems. Please note, this is decidedly _not_ a criticism of scientists beyond "they're human"; I wouldn't be surprised if the average scientist was well below the median for all of the negative qualities I described. It's just an acknowledgement that they're human, they have flaws, and those flaws affect how science is produced. Proper science is vastly superior in efficiency and confidence to many other forms of epistemology, but the imperfection of the scientific establishment means that it occasionally mishandles or abdicates responsibility for certain whole sections of knowledge-space. In these situations, reasoning under uncertainty requires cautiously looking at other sources of knowledge; they may be "lower-quality" in many ways than the scientific method, but they're better than simply assuming that absence of evidence = evidence of absence. When I was younger, I had this insight in the context of ayahuasca rituals while in Peru (I had the insight _before_ the ritual, to be clear haha). The scientific community had abdicated its responsibility to study the potential of psychedelics for improving mental health; how else to interpret shaman guiding an ayahuasca ritual than as an analogue of a therapist[1] trained in psychedelic therapy, whose expertise is shaped not through RCTs but centuries of trial and error? The fact that the West is taking slow, halting steps towards studying psychedelic therapy 70 years after its popularization here is pretty damning, IMO: as somebody who treated science as a valuable but flawed source of knowledge, I've been a happy user of LSD for years, and consider it an immensely helpful tool for mental health. There are a million examples of this if you stop and think about it. Fifty years ago, yoga and meditation made you a kook; the scientific establishment started studying it and now, it's weird among some circles not to regularly do yoga and meditate. This is again something you can learn easily through examining "unscientific" tradition + self-experimentation, with an appropriate model of the downside risks. [1] I'm using intentionally clinical language here to make the comparison clear, though I'm aware that it's a little reductive to ignore the spiritual dimension most shamans would describe their work as having.
  • wittyreference 6y ago
    Samzdat has an absolutely excellent article on the distinctions between state-level (often technocratic) knowledge and on-the-ground knowledge, and the difficulties of communicating between the two and acting on them. It's part of a discussion of the book Seeing Like A State. I think you'd find it stimulating. https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/
    • wutbrodo 6y ago
      I've read this post, and Seeing Like a State after SSC's review of it (thank you for the reference though!). Both of these came after my Peruvian epiphany, but they really helped sharpen my understanding of epistemology. Though my focus here is a little different: instead of focusing on how top-down policy privileges techne over metis due to its legibility[1], I'm primarily interested in how the individual can make better use of metis from outside his bubble. This is the main thing I look for when I travel, and a nine-month, and a 6-continent backpacking trip I took in my early 20s was a really transformative experience for exactly that reason. [1] The reason I don't focus too much on this aspect is because I've already found it productive to model politics and policy as a natural disasters, or millions of monkeys banging on typewriters: I don't think most humans are capable of what I'd consider critical thinking, and they're certainly not capable of exercising it in large, complex systems. I get that this is a little nihilistic, but in practice it just means being selective about how you choose to spend your time with and not getting too drawn into cases where you can't control it, like politics.