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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In year 0, the science did not know anything because "science" as we define it today did not exist. The scientific method was not widely practiced until 16th century (and even then it was severely limited).
And in another 2000 years people will laugh at you calling what we do today science.
Sure, we invented a process we defined as the scientific method; but it's unfair to say that ancient people, philosophers, medical practitioners etc. didn't practice their own version thereof.
Science is a method, it doesn't 'know' anything. Anyway, to say that there's no competition, but argue that one school of thought is 'ahead' implies a destination that both (and potentially others) are racing towards.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
Godel's incompleteness theorem exists in a particular deductive system, it in no way holds weight outside of that system. His completeness theorem shows the mathematical logic is complete. Different deductive frameworks have different axioms.
All of which are essentially irrelevant to inductive systems like the natural sciences, for which Popper is writing.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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 :)
thanks for sharing. I watched it, but remain unconvinced. I'm a little disappointed, because I was hoping for a compelling or novel take on the issue. That worldview just looks so narrow and reductive to me. The god of Abraham exists, but only because people think he does. He's real in the same way our thoughts are real. I see this as a far more profound position because god becomes a manifestation of his believers' collective consciousness (for better or worse).
The electrons bouncing between the neon molecules in a bar lamp and our electrochemical responses occurring in our neuron synapses orders of magnitude closer to the notion of god than than the rituals and ceremonies religions use to worship him, in my opinion.
This is why I see Christianity as hubris. to claim atheism requires faith is to say that religion asserts it has absolute knowledge (the doublespeak goes both ways). If god is this all powerful, omnipresent creator of all space and time, its overwhelmingly likely that we wouldn't be able to comprehend him. We barely comprehend the <literally anything> and I'm expected to believe ancient peoples could comprehend the nature of gods existence? Nay, instead they willed him into existence, their actions an expression of that will.
didn't mean for this post to be so long. I guess I'm just a little unimpressed by this preacher who states we're not trying hard enough to understand each other then strawman's the arguments for atheism.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. I have some to share in response, and I don't disagree that some arguments against atheism are strawman arguments.
But I do think that calling it reductive, while at the same time explaining all of life in mechanical, chemical and electrical terms seems contradictory.
One theory I've read on Quora somewhere, which for me is intriguing, is one that was used to explain why there might not be any evidence of alien life.
The theory, if I'm remembering correctly (and am too busy ATM to go looking for it) is that alien life forms may have evolved to a size and lifespan so far beyond our own that they may move at a pace that seems glacial for us, and hence we don't recognize it as intelligent or even as a single entity.
This also reminds me of the description of the largest or oldest organism in the world (I believe) in a North American forest (again, too busy to look up the details) and it's been posited that it may have slowly migrated across the North American continent over the span of human history, which on a different time scale, would look as an intelligent being moving around.
For me, this line of thinking could explain apparent lack of evidence for God (though I think there is compelling philosophical reasoning for at least a theistic position).
Of course, this will fall within your own presuppositions for what it might indicate.
But I think that in the same way that God is outside of the physical realm, you wouldn't really find concrete evidence of Him in the physical world.
That requires a leap of faith that many are uncomfortable making, but I have found that there are plenty of atheists and theists who are comfortable making leaps of faith on all sorts of matters (like if their spouses or children love them, or believing in aliens as the creators of life without bothering to ask where the aliens came from).
I don't have a problem with faith, but I hope my mind never becomes so rigid as to not explore other options, or so flexible I never decide to believe in anything.
Regarding your view about the video, one thing I appreciated about the book that I don't remember seeing in the video, is the acknowledgement that God doesn't have anything that one can definitively declare as absolute proof, but rather something that is open enough for you to come to your own conclusion on.
I do think atheism requires faith, as it states a position that is ultimately unverifiable.
But again, I don't have a problem with faith. I think strong atheists (those who proselytize the absence of deity) operate far more on faith than those who are merely skeptical.
Do I think that ancients could comprehend an omniscient, all powerful creator fully?
Of course not. As you say, we barely comprehend anything.
But do I think that ancients had the ability to reason, understand when something was a miracle and when it wasn't? Of course.
For instance, when Mary showed up pregnant, everyone's default reaction wasn't to assume that the God of the universe had impregnated a 14 year old girl with the Messiah that would redeem humanity.
Instead, everyone, including Joseph, went to the logical conclusion, and assumed she'd stepped out on him.
I think there's often a modern day bias against ancient thinkers because they didn't have all of the information we have today.
But I don't believe that instantly makes them wrong.
I don't say any of this in an attempt to intellectually convince you of anything, but rather to explain the areas of my thought that allow me to reason my way to belief in God (though there's more that would go to specifics).
And, btw, thank you for watching the video. It's a long time to commit to watching something where you're not sure you'd get anything out of it, and it sounds like there wasn't much new there for you to buy into, but I appreciate the time you committed to understanding my viewpoint :)
Appreciate your perspective. One small quibble is that you saying you are Christian did not really aid your point, as far as I know. As in, without it your argument still makes sense to me.
Gods are un-necessary. How do I prove this? Not needing a thing, I think I may not need but I could be needing it and not know it - like some vitamin or mineral or social que.. I mean then which one of these Gods or which group of Gods? How do I prove which one I need if I do not need it? And if I need a God for some reason what reason? What benefit? Who benefits from this need the God the man who says what the Gods say? Why do beliefs have Gods attached to them and not something else... these are the questions that keep me up at night.
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).
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.
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 M...
"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."
46 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadEdit: 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.
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/
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.
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
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.
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.
A stopped clock is right twice a day...
Literally, and in the historical sense. That's pretty much how the Royal Society got started.
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.
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.
All of which are essentially irrelevant to inductive systems like the natural sciences, for which Popper is writing.
From this you may see the original angle and intent of the article.
EDIT: Post URL was updated since to point to said 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."
> 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.
I'm not denying that the white accounts are biased but let's not pretend anyones account is objective.
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.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ
The electrons bouncing between the neon molecules in a bar lamp and our electrochemical responses occurring in our neuron synapses orders of magnitude closer to the notion of god than than the rituals and ceremonies religions use to worship him, in my opinion.
This is why I see Christianity as hubris. to claim atheism requires faith is to say that religion asserts it has absolute knowledge (the doublespeak goes both ways). If god is this all powerful, omnipresent creator of all space and time, its overwhelmingly likely that we wouldn't be able to comprehend him. We barely comprehend the <literally anything> and I'm expected to believe ancient peoples could comprehend the nature of gods existence? Nay, instead they willed him into existence, their actions an expression of that will.
didn't mean for this post to be so long. I guess I'm just a little unimpressed by this preacher who states we're not trying hard enough to understand each other then strawman's the arguments for atheism.
One theory I've read on Quora somewhere, which for me is intriguing, is one that was used to explain why there might not be any evidence of alien life. The theory, if I'm remembering correctly (and am too busy ATM to go looking for it) is that alien life forms may have evolved to a size and lifespan so far beyond our own that they may move at a pace that seems glacial for us, and hence we don't recognize it as intelligent or even as a single entity. This also reminds me of the description of the largest or oldest organism in the world (I believe) in a North American forest (again, too busy to look up the details) and it's been posited that it may have slowly migrated across the North American continent over the span of human history, which on a different time scale, would look as an intelligent being moving around.
For me, this line of thinking could explain apparent lack of evidence for God (though I think there is compelling philosophical reasoning for at least a theistic position). Of course, this will fall within your own presuppositions for what it might indicate.
But I think that in the same way that God is outside of the physical realm, you wouldn't really find concrete evidence of Him in the physical world.
That requires a leap of faith that many are uncomfortable making, but I have found that there are plenty of atheists and theists who are comfortable making leaps of faith on all sorts of matters (like if their spouses or children love them, or believing in aliens as the creators of life without bothering to ask where the aliens came from).
I don't have a problem with faith, but I hope my mind never becomes so rigid as to not explore other options, or so flexible I never decide to believe in anything.
Regarding your view about the video, one thing I appreciated about the book that I don't remember seeing in the video, is the acknowledgement that God doesn't have anything that one can definitively declare as absolute proof, but rather something that is open enough for you to come to your own conclusion on.
I do think atheism requires faith, as it states a position that is ultimately unverifiable. But again, I don't have a problem with faith. I think strong atheists (those who proselytize the absence of deity) operate far more on faith than those who are merely skeptical.
Do I think that ancients could comprehend an omniscient, all powerful creator fully? Of course not. As you say, we barely comprehend anything.
But do I think that ancients had the ability to reason, understand when something was a miracle and when it wasn't? Of course.
For instance, when Mary showed up pregnant, everyone's default reaction wasn't to assume that the God of the universe had impregnated a 14 year old girl with the Messiah that would redeem humanity. Instead, everyone, including Joseph, went to the logical conclusion, and assumed she'd stepped out on him.
I think there's often a modern day bias against ancient thinkers because they didn't have all of the information we have today. But I don't believe that instantly makes them wrong.
I don't say any of this in an attempt to intellectually convince you of anything, but rather to explain the areas of my thought that allow me to reason my way to belief in God (though there's more that would go to specifics).
And, btw, thank you for watching the video. It's a long time to commit to watching something where you're not sure you'd get anything out of it, and it sounds like there wasn't much new there for you to buy into, but I appreciate the time you committed to understanding my viewpoint :)
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).
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.
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.
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 M...
I'm not losing any sleep over this "double standard."