Science as a Brief Candle in the Dark

[steve_bank]

Philosophers have been positing naturalism since as far back as Thales of Miletus. But the disadvantage was that the ancients only had their own two eyes to measure the universe. They didn't have the tools to discover that the natural world is both far grander and far more fine-grained than at first appearances.

So what do we do when something strange happens that can't be easily understood--like why did someone get sick just three days after talking back to the village leader? With only a superficial understanding of the world, we can either say, "We don't know" which is unsatisfying, or we can say he was cursed by the gods, or some other unfalsifiable doctrine. Unfalsifiable, that is, until we invented microscopes and discovered germs.

Exactly. Science only became really successful with the age of scientific instruments. The invention of mechanical clocks. The invention of reading glasses. Then telescopes, microscopes, thermometers, and using the tools of alchemists to develop chemistry. This lead to whole new worlds to explore,not hinted of in the Bible and unknown to the Greek philosophers. Now the best minds had something to work with. Progress could be made. Science as an enterprise became organized. Rise of things like steam engines drove physics and the invention of thermodynamics. Scientific instruments allowed science to grow beyond the bounds of armchair theorizing. The experimenters became kings of science.

Not disagreeing, but it is more than just the physical instruments, which don't solve the "garbage-in garbage-out" problem. Armchair theorizing was also limited by a lack of formalized intellectual principles for empirical observation. The need for random and/or representative observations, larger samples, control over extraneous variables, and accounting for chance co-variation are all essential to scientific progress. Also, secularization and legal protections of free thought are neccessary conditions for sound science on a large scale. Authoritarian dogmas which include monotheism coercively prohibit honest questioning of many core assumptions. Germs were observed via early telescopes 200 years before germ theory of disease was accepted, with the early theories viewing germs as effects rather than causes of diseases. Even micro level observation itself doesn't get you very far if it is not done in a rigorous systematic way where all assumptions are questioned and all alternatives are considered.

Science is at least as much about the principles of reasoning applied before, during, and after the observations and data collection than the about the observations and data itself.

How is carpentry not about logic and reasoning?

 

[Keith&Co.]

How is carpentry not about logic and reasoning?

Probably cause of all the swearing.

 

[Tammuz]

Yup.

Also, modern civilisation, democracy, wealth and wellbeing. My guess is that if and when the shit ever hits the fan for humans (global catastrophe-wise) superstitions such as religion will dramatically increase again.

Not good (if true) but might at least make many of us feel more grateful for and appreciative of the present, even if it's imperfect. Most of us here live in fortunate times.

This is also why I'm a little more sympathetic than most to pre-modern communities, and those unwashed in science.

Sympathetic, sure. Doesn't mean one would want to live without modern science, medicine, etc.

 

[steve_bank]

The myth that somehow pre technology was the good all days. Nonsense.

People died from tooth inactions and simple cuts today we just clean with alcohol or other antiseptics and put on a clean bandaid.

In the early 1900s tuberculosis was epidemic in the USA. Measles and smallpox outbreaks.

People did hard labor every day to get by.

It wasn't too long ago access to books and knowledge was limited to upper middle class and above, they were relatively expensive.

I watched a show on an aboriginal group in Sourh America. They have some outside contact. They are fully occupied every day with food gathering and hunting, and maintain spears, bows, and arrows, When they trek to vist another clan they are constantly looking for food and game as they travel.

The concept of universal leisure time across all social strata is a post industrialization idea.

Positives and negatives. Luddites may have a point, too much technology may diminish us by taking away meaningful work.

Developing controlled fire and heat was science. Controlled heat today is everywhere in industry. Herat and edged metal tools for cutting are still a major part of technology.

 

[rousseau]

Yup.

Also, modern civilisation, democracy, wealth and wellbeing. My guess is that if and when the shit ever hits the fan for humans (global catastrophe-wise) superstitions such as religion will dramatically increase again.

Not good (if true) but might at least make many of us feel more grateful for and appreciative of the present, even if it's imperfect. Most of us here live in fortunate times.

This is also why I'm a little more sympathetic than most to pre-modern communities, and those unwashed in science.

Sympathetic, sure. Doesn't mean one would want to live without modern science, medicine, etc.

Sympathetic as in 'lack of knowledge is a product of economics'.

People living in well established democracies tend to look at the superstitious as ignorant rather than themselves as lucky to lack ignorance.

 

[Politesse]

The myth that somehow pre technology was the good all days. Nonsense.

People died from tooth inactions and simple cuts today we just clean with alcohol or other antiseptics and put on a clean bandaid.

In the early 1900s tuberculosis was epidemic in the USA. Measles and smallpox outbreaks.

People did hard labor every day to get by.

It wasn't too long ago access to books and knowledge was limited to upper middle class and above, they were relatively expensive.

I watched a show on an aboriginal group in Sourh America. They have some outside contact. They are fully occupied every day with food gathering and hunting, and maintain spears, bows, and arrows, When they trek to vist another clan they are constantly looking for food and game as they travel.

The concept of universal leisure time across all social strata is a post industrialization idea.

Positives and negatives. Luddites may have a point, too much technology may diminish us by taking away meaningful work.

Developing controlled fire and heat was science. Controlled heat today is everywhere in industry. Herat and edged metal tools for cutting are still a major part of technology.

This post misrepresents non-industrialized societies. It may be true that foragers are always on the lookout for food, but the actual time they spend engaged in manual labor is much smaller than, say, an American line worker might expect. The vast majority of your man-hours in a capitalist system go to creating profits, not subsistence. A person providing only for themselves usually only needs to put in a few hours a day, broken by occasional mass harvests of seasonal vegetables or the week-long commitment of a hunt. Beware ethnographic documentaries; someone makes choices about where to point the camera and what to "voice over" the image to make it seem more exciting; they are more interested in thrilling/titillating American and Chinese viewers than accurately representing the often boring realities of everyday life in any human community, and racist stereotypes and popular myths abound.

There are costs and benefits to every economic system; personally, I have never been convinced that any given system is ideal, or clearly superior to all others. Whatever you strive for as a goal, you will pay for it in another arena. Do you want short term security, or long term sustainability? Social justice or optimized material prosperity? Do you want quality of product or productivity of a field? Do you want physically healthy variation in diet, or mentally healthy variation in lifestyle options and intellectual activities? The idea that technology is inherently linked to any particular economic system is largely a myth; most of us trade/pay for what we need in that regard anyway, regardless of our economic strategy. You get Nikes the same way the Caduveo or the Chalco do: by buying them from a store who bought them from a distributor who paid the Nike Corporation to ship them from their factories in the industrial charnel-houses of Guangdong and Vietnam. While a factory is needed somewhere in the equation, from that point onward it's a question of access and affordability, not a contingent ability to produce from one's own local economy.

 

[rousseau]

The myth that somehow pre technology was the good all days. Nonsense.

People died from tooth inactions and simple cuts today we just clean with alcohol or other antiseptics and put on a clean bandaid.

In the early 1900s tuberculosis was epidemic in the USA. Measles and smallpox outbreaks.

People did hard labor every day to get by.

It wasn't too long ago access to books and knowledge was limited to upper middle class and above, they were relatively expensive.

I watched a show on an aboriginal group in Sourh America. They have some outside contact. They are fully occupied every day with food gathering and hunting, and maintain spears, bows, and arrows, When they trek to vist another clan they are constantly looking for food and game as they travel.

The concept of universal leisure time across all social strata is a post industrialization idea.

Positives and negatives. Luddites may have a point, too much technology may diminish us by taking away meaningful work.

Developing controlled fire and heat was science. Controlled heat today is everywhere in industry. Herat and edged metal tools for cutting are still a major part of technology.

This post misrepresents non-industrialized societies. It may be true that foragers are always on the lookout for food, but the actual time they spend engaged in manual labor is much smaller than, say, an American line worker might expect. The vast majority of your man-hours in a capitalist system go to creating profits, not subsistence. A person providing only for themselves usually only needs to put in a few hours a day, broken by occasional mass harvests of seasonal vegetables or the week-long commitment of a hunt. Beware ethnographic documentaries; someone makes choices about where to point the camera and what to "voice over" the image to make it seem more exciting; they are more interested in thrilling/titillating American and Chinese viewers than accurately representing the often boring realities of everyday life in any human community, and racist stereotypes and popular myths abound.

There are costs and benefits to every economic system; personally, I have never been convinced that any given system is ideal, or clearly superior to all others. Whatever you strive for as a goal, you will pay for it in another arena. Do you want short term security, or long term sustainability? Social justice or optimized material prosperity? Do you want quality of product or productivity of a field? Do you want physically healthy variation in diet, or mentally healthy variation in lifestyle options and intellectual activities? The idea that technology is inherently linked to any particular economic system is largely a myth; most of us trade/pay for what we need in that regard anyway, regardless of our economic strategy. You get Nikes the same way the Caduveo or the Chalco do: by buying them from a store who bought them from a distributor who paid the Nike Corporation to ship them from their factories in the industrial charnel-houses of Guangdong and Vietnam. While a factory is needed somewhere in the equation, from that point onward it's a question of access and affordability, not a contingent ability to produce from one's own local economy.

One interesting point Paul Theroux made in his book I'm reading right now is that the idea that some of the tribes in Africa want to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is a myth. Once brought over to Western style capitalism, most of them preferred the relative abundance.

But I do agree that there are costs and benefits of every economic system. And I would take that a step further and claim that conversations around economic systems shouldn't be laden with value judgments at all. More realistically, various economic implementations are just what happens, and what are continuing to evolve. No one built 'capitalism', it just appeared out of a long process of individuals making decisions. And clearly it's appearance had nothing to do with the sustainability of our species, because that isn't how we're built.

The myth is that people are rational actors who make decisions on some kind of perfect logic, and that history has any type of directionality. That's not the case. For the most part we're just making decisions based on our immediate environment so the most people can continue eating, and hopefully marry/reproduce. If sustainability becomes the only viable method for us to achieve that outcome, then that's what we'll end up pursuing.

Then to say hunter-gatherers had it right would be a bit backward too, because they didn't choose that lifestyle, it was just a reality before technology took off. It wasn't until relatively recently that we even realized that sustainability was a problem.

 

[Politesse]

Then to say hunter-gatherers had it right would be a bit backward too, because they didn't choose that lifestyle, it was just a reality before technology took off. It wasn't until relatively recently that we even realized that sustainability was a problem.

Well, this is a mix really. I don't think a lot of people in the ancient world thought of ecology in exactly the same terms as we do now, but in various ways "sustainability" has long been a concern. Many ancient cultures knew the signs of, say, an over-harvested forest, a distressed fishery, overtaxed soils, etc, and knew how to respond to those threats. Rappaport's "Pigs for the Ancestors" is a classic ethnography documented such a mostly-unconscious system of economic sustainability. However this information may have been encoded in myth, religious authority, folk wisdom, etc, the effect was often a much more well-balanced system on the whole where long-term sustainability is concerned. Part of the problem of the modern world, often attributed to capitalism but in truth more a function of the advance of transportation and refrigeration technology, is that policy-makers often live nowhere near the location where food and materials are produced, and have no personal stake in keeping those environments healthy. Like most things, this problem affects everyone, regardless of their ideological affiliation with any particular economic system.

I don't know of anyone who wants to "go back" to an exclusive hunter gatherer strategy as such - even ancient foragers would have been quick to take advantage of modern technologies and markets if they were available. There has been a renewed interest, by indigenous peoples and alien researchers alike, in recovering, learning from, and even monetizing the traditional botanical and ecological knowledge that those strategies cultivated over the centuries. There's a lot of knowledge and skills out there that were badly threatened by missionization, colonialism, and misguided government management over the last six hundred years. Long story short, capitalism isn't necessarily the same thing to everyone, and it certainly isn't a package deal. I agree with you that it is more of an emergent property of the world as it now exists, than any sort of coherent project by one culture or another. I think we should be careful not to confuse capitalism and industrialization, two trends that are often related but not mutually contingent.

And peoples such as the Koisan and Basarwa who do currently practice foraging strategies have certainly fought manfully to maintain their rights to the land base necessary to practice them; a mostly losing battle, alas.

The myth is that people are rational actors who make decisions on some kind of perfect logic, and that history has any type of directionality. That's not the case. For the most part we're just making decisions based on our immediate environment so the most people can continue eating, and hopefully marry/reproduce. If sustainability becomes the only viable method for us to achieve that outcome, then that's what we'll end up pursuing.

Very true! But it is entirely possible to realize this truth too late to save your society/economy/political regime, as history has demonstrated a great many times. In my own region, the Redwood lumber industry has provided a stirling example; it went from boom to self-consuming ourobouros in less than a century.

 

[steve_bank]

The myth that somehow pre technology was the good all days. Nonsense.

People died from tooth inactions and simple cuts today we just clean with alcohol or other antiseptics and put on a clean bandaid.

In the early 1900s tuberculosis was epidemic in the USA. Measles and smallpox outbreaks.

People did hard labor every day to get by.

It wasn't too long ago access to books and knowledge was limited to upper middle class and above, they were relatively expensive.

I watched a show on an aboriginal group in Sourh America. They have some outside contact. They are fully occupied every day with food gathering and hunting, and maintain spears, bows, and arrows, When they trek to vist another clan they are constantly looking for food and game as they travel.

The concept of universal leisure time across all social strata is a post industrialization idea.

Positives and negatives. Luddites may have a point, too much technology may diminish us by taking away meaningful work.

Developing controlled fire and heat was science. Controlled heat today is everywhere in industry. Herat and edged metal tools for cutting are still a major part of technology.

This post misrepresents non-industrialized societies. It may be true that foragers are always on the lookout for food, but the actual time they spend engaged in manual labor is much smaller than, say, an American line worker might expect. The vast majority of your man-hours in a capitalist system go to creating profits, not subsistence. A person providing only for themselves usually only needs to put in a few hours a day, broken by occasional mass harvests of seasonal vegetables or the week-long commitment of a hunt. Beware ethnographic documentaries; someone makes choices about where to point the camera and what to "voice over" the image to make it seem more exciting; they are more interested in thrilling/titillating American and Chinese viewers than accurately representing the often boring realities of everyday life in any human community, and racist stereotypes and popular myths abound.

There are costs and benefits to every economic system; personally, I have never been convinced that any given system is ideal, or clearly superior to all others. Whatever you strive for as a goal, you will pay for it in another arena. Do you want short term security, or long term sustainability? Social justice or optimized material prosperity? Do you want quality of product or productivity of a field? Do you want physically healthy variation in diet, or mentally healthy variation in lifestyle options and intellectual activities? The idea that technology is inherently linked to any particular economic system is largely a myth; most of us trade/pay for what we need in that regard anyway, regardless of our economic strategy. You get Nikes the same way the Caduveo or the Chalco do: by buying them from a store who bought them from a distributor who paid the Nike Corporation to ship them from their factories in the industrial charnel-houses of Guangdong and Vietnam. While a factory is needed somewhere in the equation, from that point onward it's a question of access and affordability, not a contingent ability to produce from one's own local economy.

I was responding to the myth that there was a preindustrial idyllic life. 19th century farming was a hard c easels life. Infant and youth mortality was high. Alcohol was consumed daily as a pain relief.

The American plans Native Americans who lived in the open were beat by the time they were in their 30s. Someone who made it to 40s was a wise elder.

In the past when resources were used up the culture died out or moved.

So far the post war peiod has been the good days of humanity in a thousands of years perspective.

As always culture and civilization change.

The question is if western civilization will change as in historical types of collapse and re4structuring or if we can change proactively to adapt. Our hierarchy at the top especially conservatives have a 19th century socio economic paradigm that IMO is not sustainable. The question is whether or not wide open free market system scan remain stable in the future.