> "We will turn to this question later, but it is important to keep in mind that the decline of scientific activity is the rule, not the exception, of civilizations. While it is commonplace to assume that the scientific revolution and the progress of technology were inevitable, in fact the West is the single sustained success story out of many civilizations with periods of scientific flourishing. Like the Muslims, the ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations, both of which were at one time far more advanced than the West, did not produce the scientific revolution."
.. so far, so good. There's always the risk that the West might internally reject the scientific revolution. This paragraph is a useful reminder that historical "progress" isn't linear or monotonic.
This article is very good on the background in the era of the Caliphate and early scientific progress in medieval Europe. Where it falls down is the past century. We can draw comparison with the Meiji restoration; Japan went from insular agrarianism to a world power to collapse to continued scientific development through to the 21st century. As did much of the Far East. Why not the Middle east?
> Japan went from insular agrarianism to a world power to collapse to continued scientific development through to the 21st century. As did much of the Far East. Why not the Middle east?
There are lots of theories, of course, but one I find interesting is that East Asia, in addition to never being colonized to the same extent as most places, emerged with national boundaries largely intact. The Middle East was under foreign control for, well, basically forever (Romans -> Ottomans -> mandates) and ended up with some pretty weird national boundaries. This encouraged a lot of strife.
There's also the oil theory; countries with huge natural resources seem to often struggle to develop normally.
And the Neo-Assyrians. It's easy to lose track, but they get credit for arcade-supported aqueducts, while Romulus and Remus were still in diapers, to water the Hanging Gardens of ... Nineveh.
But they were known at the time mostly for impaling their enemies.
Can confirm. That's why Russia is sliding down scientifically. People gravitate to where money and prestige is, and when you have money squirting from the ground, that demands (and receives) disproportionate attention. Another side effect of this is that it suffocates technology and innovation by both depriving it of investment, and by shaping the tax structure that excludes the possibility of survival for most non natural resource businesses unless they cheat on their taxes. It's a complex problem without a clear solution. Only Norway has been able to manage it well so far.
Not ethnic diversity, but lack of a shared identity. Outside of the major cities, the people living in the middle eastern countries were more loyal to their tribe and village than whatever power happened to currently be in charge of the country. That's also why it seems like so much religious extremism comes out of the middle east; a shared religion is one of the only things in common among the people living there, so any calls to action normally use religion as common ground to bring people together.
This is saying people are loyal to their tribes, and view the government's interests as unaligned with those of their tribe, presumably giving rise to a lack of common cause in something that a government might foster like scientific development. But if "tribe" were synonymous with "ethnic group" then you'd actually be saying that multiple ethnic groups sharing a government are a cause (not necessarily the only one) of scientific stagnation. But it sounds like you're not. So what defines these tribes if not ethnic group?
I think implicit in your argument is a belief that utility ("interests") trumps identity ("who we are") in loyalty dynamics. I think that belief is.. not universal..
I believe the OP was suggesting that externally-imposed boundaries can hold areas in an unstable state for long periods of time, but when they are gone there is unrest that takes time to achieve a stable society and that scientific progress is best achieved when people arent worried aobut their food/safety/corrupt warlord.
I think it may be more useful to think of "tribe" or "clan" as a political organizations that form the base of decentralized governments than ethnic groups, since many tribes can exist within any given ethnic group, and many ethnic groups can exist within geographic areas governed by decentralized bodies.
So, 'tribe' here doesn't necessarily mean an ethnic group. Depending on scenario, it might really just mean 'village'; in some sense, large regions of some countries never _really_ became part of the nation at all.
A hypothesis: not diversity, but division. Consider the Kurds; their traditional territory is in about 5 modern countries, and they don't particularly get along with any of their governments.
That isn't directly related to "scientific development", but that, like most things, relies on economic and political stability.
The theory rsynnott is referring to is what you'll find if you google "colonial borders"
For example, some people have pointed out when European colonialists set borders, they were more concerned with natural resources and the opinions of competing colonial powers than with what the locals thought of the borders.
Some people go further, thinking in at least some instances colonial governments intentionally created the situations for internal strife, as doing so could make regions easier to control. Set the borders so that area is 75% Religion A, 25% Religion B then you can appoint powerful local deputies from Religion B. Your powerful deputies will never support a popular revolution, as it'd make them lose all their power.
Later the colonial power leaves, but the borders stay in the same place - along with a generous helping of resentment and fear between the groups - and the stage is set for internal strife, political blocs formed along ethnic lines, and so on.
And if European colonists produced messed up borders, why couldn't Ottoman colonists have caused the same effects?
That doesn't mean ethnic diversity causes the problem - but there are several elements that set the scene for problems, and ethnic voting blocs are an easily measured component, though not sufficient on their own.
The Ottoman situation was arguably even messier, because the Ottomans had one set of provinces, and then the Mandatory authorities had a somewhat different one.
Could you elaborate? In both Ireland's and Korea's cases, despite their relatively small size, both nations have notable scientific output. What's different about them?
Both do NOW. In Ireland’s case, honestly, we probably have the EU, a massive stabilising influence, to thank for that, along with treaties that make the border a day-to-day non-issue (you can walk across it without noticing). In the case of Korea, the opposite happened; the border became so fixed due to external influence that there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.
Dublin has long been a cultural center, since early Christianity, but modern Irish science benefits hugely from the tax incentive to move Pfizer there.
South Korea is the successful planned economy, like Singapore; on paper it's an open economy, and people are free to start businesses, but the top level is heavily coordinated between the government and megacorps. It was a military dictatorship for years while growing at over 5% a year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Chung-hee
The point that marks the end of the Islamic Golden Age is the Siege of Baghdad of 1258.
As the Mongols expanded, each time they encountered an empire, they offered them two alternatives: a) Pay tribute to the Mongols, b) War with the Mongols and their vassal nations.
The caliphate chose the war option, unaware of the true military strength of the Mongols, who they considered primitive barbarians. The result was the complete destruction of the empire, their infrastructure including libraries, and the death of most scholars.
However, parts of Spain were under Islamic control from 711 AD to 1492 AD, and Sicily from 878 AD to 1060 AD. It was there were books from Islamic libraries were translated to Latin, giving origin to the European Reinassance.
Yes. But the Mongols (Golden Horde) reached Germany eventually in the late 14th century, but that was their apotheosis; they never came back after that.
It is very possible that the achievements of modernity have changed the game. That said, the game was (is?) rise and fall. Rising civilizations leave a heritage to be mined, so there is an overall direction of rise... but every one of the many scientifically advancing cultures in history has declined. It would be prudent to expect the same for ours.
That said, modernity has almost certainly changed at least some of the rules. Even the term "The West" has become complicated. Our civilization is now essentially global. A scientific invention in France immediately arrives in Seoul. A joke told in Houston is heard in lagos. A book popular here is likely popular there.
The practical link between Rio De Janeiro and Tokyo is stronger now than Baghdad and Casablanca then.
There's common interests between the nations and modern technologies have helped facilitate the exchange of both goods and ideas, but I doubt if we can call ourselves a "global civilization" just yet. That would mean some sort of world government, which we definitely don't have. And to me, that just means that the rules of the game haven't changed at all.
Civilization and government aren't the same thing, and the rules.
The Phoenician civilization didn't have a single government, yet we consider them a single civilization. The definition isn't a hard one with a clear "is" or "is not," but I think we're clearly there.
Also, even the politics is highly intertwined. Political turmoil or change in one place causes an effect in other places.
> in fact the West is the single sustained success story out of many civilizations with periods of scientific flourishing
I find this statement problematic. The West is leading the current period of scientific revolution, as the Muslims, the ancient Chinese and Indians did during their periods of scientific achievement.
Globalization certainly makes it harder to end, although certain political forces in the Western world would love a return to a mix of authoritarian fascism and religious monarchies.
When Japan was conquered by USA in 1940s, the USA treated it with much more respect than the Europeans did vs the Ottoman Empire from WW1.
As a result, Japan was able to regrow into a world power. While the countries that formerly constituted the Ottomans are under a constant civil war (and major military groups, like ISIS, dream of re-establishing a religious empire of old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Caliphate)
Its not very hard to imagine a "cut up Japan", a hypothetical disarmed Japan where the USA would split between Britain / France / Russia / other members of the allies.
In fact, we can look to the (eastern part) of the Soviet Union to see how well splitting up countries went during WW2. The East / West Germany thing almost surely stunted Germany's growth back into its world standing.
--------
With that being said: the Ottomans were certainly in a decline by the late 1800s, before WWI broke out. But I can't imagine that WWI did those countries any favors.
the looming threat of communism from Russia and China played an important role in US's post-war policy in Japan and Japan's immediate post war recovery. While Japan was allowed to stay united as one, the Korean peninsula was divided, though the territory was never part of the WW2 theater. The Korean civil war led by the communist North likewise boosted Japan's quick recovery.
Well, when your region of the world has been torn asunder by everything, including colonial powers, fascist reactionaries and nationalists, liberal market economies, and international communism; the only remaining cultural artifact that you can call your own is religion. If you want to unify the Middle East, you have to do so under the guise of religion, and in practice that means conservative religious extremism. Iran is sort of a microcosm of this: they deliberately adopted theocracy as any form of secular government or economy was viewed as surrender to one's oppressors.
The only problem is that there's at least three dominant forms of religion in the area to unify under: Sunni and Shiite Islam, and Zionist-compatible Judaism. This has more or less created a local cold war between Sunni theocracies (e.g. Saudi Arabia), Shiite theocracies (e.g. Iran and half of Iraq), and Israel. These hostilities are often fought with insurgencies, which means lots of violence in the border areas between the three religions. This is not a great place to live.
Immigration law is quite complicated and fraught. Every country has a mostly but not entirely irrational fear of demographic shifts (see Texas and Israel), and so they heavily restrict who can enter their country. However, the demands of capitalism mean that most countries have to provide a practical immigration path for college-educated individuals such as scientists. Immigration for the working class is generally disallowed or heavily restricted as a form of labor market protectionism, which means there is vast disparities in who is and isn't allowed to leave a country.
This creates an interesting problem: it is very difficult for these countries to convince educated scientists to remain in their country. Scientists generally don't get along with theocrats all that well to begin with. However, we've also chosen the immigration policy that is most likely to select for (relatively) liberal emigrants and filter out more conservative ones. So there's a vicious cycle: it's easier for scientists to leave the Middle East, which makes the region more conservative, which makes more scientists want to leave.
“Iran is sort of a microcosm of this: they deliberately adopted theocracy as any form of secular government or economy was viewed as surrender to one's oppressors.”
Iran had a secular, democratic government. It was overthrown by the UK and US who installed a brutal dictatorship just so they could get their oil cheap, so you can kind of see how Iranians might conclude that “democracy” isn’t worth the paper it’s written on and the only defense is a bigger bunch of bastards than the other guys’.
That's only because the vast majority of middle eastern people are poor. Parent comment is correct saying that it is much easier for educated scientists to leave, and they do leave, which is a self feeding loop draining everyone capable of positive change out of the region.
In recent history we've had the Syrian refugee crisis which resulted in a large number of likely political refugees migrating to EU countries. This is still an abberation: most EU countries generally have immigration systems that favor well-trained economic migrants, and the flow of migrants from the Middle East to Europe will regress to the mean (if it hasn't already). Japan used to explicitly refuse work visas without a college degree, and has generally been very difficult to immimigrate to, but has softened on this because they've ran out of workers. Canada and Australia are similar to the EU in that they favor educated migrants on work visas, though their points system also explicitly favors English and French speaking migrants that can pass strict language tests.
The US is also an abberation: our immigration system favors family reunification ("chain migration") from a diverse pool of emigrant countries over economic migration. Most other countries heavily restrict immigration on the basis of family reunification. Diversity of origins is enforced through both per-country quotas as well as literally handing out green cards to people from countries that don't send us lots of migrants ("the visa lottery"). However, the primary effect of this is to make it very difficult for Mexicans to immigrate. I don't have detailed enough statistics to know if most Middle East emigrants immigrate to the US on work visas or through family sponsorship, but I would suspect that all of the above factors are a wash, as most of our immigrants come from Europe or the Americas.
> There's always the risk that the West might internally reject the scientific revolution.
In the US I am pretty sure we are already on the decline.
I think it has to do with, during the industrial revolution and post-war, huge scientific advancements and tech grew the economy, fed capitalism by means of providing new desirable goods to consumers (e.g. dishwashers, nicer cars, etc.)
I wonder if we've reached a "peak" of consumer comfort where advances in science/ tech/ medicine are no longer frequent/ impactful enough to meaningfully satisfy consumers, (why do we care about exploring Mars?) so it's easy for people to reject it and say "we don't need science."
I feel we're on decline, because "science, bitch" is used to harass people into doing something they don't want or not ready. And people generally don't like to be harassed, they begin to resist no matter how reasonable things you're talking about are.
I wish society could pick its battles more carefully.
As a European who have lived in the US, I have been of the opinion that the US have been in decline for several decades. I think there is a combination of over reliance of capitalism to solve problems which seemingly can’t be solved well that way: universal healthcare, environmental management, education, urban planning, crime (prisons) etc, and the culture buying into the “American way” which in fact doesn’t provide the social mobility it claims nor makes the population better off, if you remove the richest from the equation. If I wasn’t so busy with other stuff I would be interested in doing research around this.
Agree with sentiments of the parent comment. I believe the prestige and social standing of physics (and, in part, the academia as a whole) is founded in the truly transformational technological advances -- say, the transistor -- made in the past decades.
Problematically, to secure funding today, one is essentially expected to frame every condensed-matter experiment as the next transistor. Not only in grant applications, but increasingly also in the abstract and opening paragraphs of research articles. There's a marked contrast with older research articles in physics, which usually go straight to disseminating the results. (Needless to say that I prefer the old style.)
As a result, a great deal of funding and attention is allocated towards projects that simultaneously 1) Will not improve the quality of life of anyone, even in the long term. 2) Are "de-risked" to such extent that no new scientific insights can come out of them.
I studied physics because I liked it and the way it describes our world. I then went for a PhD and slowly realized that physics (except a few areas) is basically dead. Particle physics for instance deal with completely outwordly stuff, akin to planning a family trip to Jupiter. Sure, it may happen someday but there are more present things.
I got my PhD and left academia (because of this and petty politics around photocopier paper costs) and the only part I really miss is the teaching and the bright minds.
The reason for this is that historically most civilizations, or phases of civilizations have lacked two things. One is the strong, persistent social institutions needed to maintain the momentum of scientific progress. The other is a solid socialised understanding of scientific methods. To maintain consistent scientific and engineering development you need both, and possibly a third in the from of the printing press, otherwise advances are at the whim of individual people, their influence and attitude to methods.
Solid rational investigative techniques go back a very long way. Even the Romans had a good understanding of how to prove a theory. Galen's work on the renal system for example involving public demonstrations on live pigs. The Antikethyra mechanism shows how advanced engineering could be in the Greek world at the time. The problem was there was no institutionalisation and formalisation of these methods to enable their systematic and sustained application, so they melted away when the thinkers and artisans, or small groups of them that made these advances died or disbanded. In the Arab world yes there were universities and medical schools, but these were the personal projects of particular rulers and their favourites that lasted a while and then melted away.
There was nothing wrong with the Arab world, or ancient China, or India. It's just that the several necessary ingredients for sustained progress in science happened to come together in Europe first.
And the Mongols destroyed the Islamic empire. All that's in the past, and it feels good to live in the imagined glory of the past - but what's the excuse today for us indians when our idiot Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims that ancient India had nuclear weapons, aeroplanes and spacecraft and did inter-species head transplant by citing religious mythology as the proof for it? Or when his government wants to promote Astrology as Science today??
Reducing the problems to one person/party is disingenuous. In recent history we have data on all major political parties and their work on improving the scientific ecosystem. The problem is much deeper than one person.
Yes exactly, there was just too much social, economic and political volatility that far back to maintain a sustained pace of scientific development. Frankly the pace of advancement was very slow, so more value was placed on understanding and propagating existing knowledge rather than valuing the processes for developing and testing new methods.
It was really the switch over to valuing processes and methods, rather than facts and knowledge, that turbo-charged the rate of development.
More than all of this - the key is political leaders. Visionary political leaders make or break their country or end civilizations. Both India and America are witnessing this currently with their respective elected right-wing "leaders" in Narendra Modi and Donald Trump.
In India Astrology is now being treated as a Science and the Modi government is considering allowing alternate medicine (Ayurveda / Homeopathy / Unani) "doctors" to prescribe allopathic medicines.
This when India's first Prime Minister sought to promote "scientific temper" in independent India:
> "[What is needed] is the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind—all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems." —Jawaharlal Nehru (1946) The Discovery of India
And the constitution of India itself emphasises:
> [It shall be the duty of every citizen of India] To develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.
Political leaders are the key, and the answer to why science and culture flourish and die in any civilization. The west will experience this too.
It's not a recently enacted law - propagating it as scientific was set in force in 2001 by the then BJP HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, who asked the UGC (by then filled with RSS religious fundamentalists) to fund BSc and MSc courses in Astrology. It was challenged legally but the courts refused to overturn the decision of the UGC. It was challenged again in courts in 2011, but it did not succeed.
There is a huge difference between saying a guy from BJP asked some committee to fund Astrology courses and saying that in India Astrology is now being treated as a Science.
I am sure you wont get it as it seems from your posting history that you are extremely biased or worse you are a blogger from a hired private blog network
> BJP asked some committee to fund Astrology courses
Yes, fund Astrology courses and offer it as SCIENCE degrees - that's BSc and MSc degrees on something that is not even a psedu science but total bullshit. What an incredible waste of money and resources! Anf why - because these religious fundamentalists think of it as a "Science" and want to give it some legitimacy.
> I am sure you wont get it as it seems from your posting history that you are extremely biased
Oh yes. I openly admit that I am no admirer of the religious fundamentalists currently in power and ruling my country. Their retrograde ideology is not spreading discontent and polarising communities, they are also slowly destroying India's economy.
Of course rulers can have a huge influence, but I think what differentiates the modern scientific enterprise from past models is that it's not dependent on the whims of individual rulers. It just has so much established momentum and support.
Modi may well promote nonsense, but the institutions of higher education and science in India still exist and have enough prestige and social and economic momentum that I believe they will continue to sustain themselves. Similarly Trump continues to talk utter nonsense about Coronavirus, and even knowingly misled his followers throughout the first 6 months of the outbreak, but still has Dr. Fauci leading the medical response because even Trump can't completely sideline the scientific community.
Oh ok, I understand your point now - you view the scientific establishment as an institution too, similar to the other independent democratic institutions like the legislature, executive, judiciary etc.
I agree that as long as the institution is strong, it will prevail. But I don't agree with you that they can prevail independent of the political leaders in charge.
Perhaps our differing preception is because even though Trump seems to have a similiar retrogade and dictatorial mentality like Modi, western institutions - both democratic and scientific - seem to have withstood an attack on it by the Trump administration. But in India they have been nearly subjugated in the last 20 years or so.
In fact, it was the University Grants Commission - one of the highest body in India that decides on education - then filled with religious fundamentalists, that proposed the funding of BSc and MSc courses in Astrology and treating is as Science, on the urging of the right-wing government in power in 2001.
The period from 1947-2014 didn't really lead to major improvements in scientific ecosystems, apart from creation of few educational institutes (IITs, IISc). The left-wing governments weren't much better. The problem is much deeper than a simplistic left-wing vs right-wing debate.
> The period from 1947-2014 didn't really lead to major improvements in scientific ecosystems, apart from creation of few educational institutes (IITs, IISc).
And I guess institutions like:
Defence Research and Development Organisations (DRDO),
Indian Space Research Organisation,
Baba Atomic Resarch Centre, Hindustan Aeronautical Limited,
Defence Research and Development Laboratories,
Ordnance Factory Board
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research,
Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research,
Central Institute for Cotton Research,
Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants,
Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture,
Central Sheep and Wool Research Institute,
Central Soil Salinity Research Institute,
Centre for Sustainable Agriculture,
Indian Agricultural Research Institute,
Indian Institute of Food Processing Technology,
Indian Institute of Horticultural Research,
Indian Institute of Millets Research,
Indian Institute of Natural Resins and Gums,
Indian Institute of Plantation Management,
Indian Institute of Soil Science,
National Academy of Agricultural Research Management,
National Academy of Agricultural Sciences,
National Dairy Research Institute,
National Sugar Institute,
Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute,
Tamil Nadu Rice Research Institute,
Central Institute of Indian Languages,
All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health,
Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology,
National Centre for Disease Control,
National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health,,
National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis,
National Institute of Biomedical Genomics,
National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases,
National Institute of Epidemiology,
National Institute of Immunology, India,
National Institute of Malaria Research,
National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences,
National Institute of Virology,
National Research Institute for Panchakarma,
National Tuberculosis Institute,
Neurobiology Research Centre,
Homi Bhabha Cancer Hospital & Research Centre,
Indian Veterinary Research Institute,
Advanced Research Centre for Bamboo and Rattan,
Agumbe Rainforest Research Station,
Arid Forest Research Institute,
Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute,
Rain Forest Research Institute,
Tropical Forest Research Institute,
Himalayan Forest Research Institute,
Centre for Forest Based Livelihood and Extension,
Centre for Forestry Research and Human Resource Development,
Centre for Social Forestry and Eco-Rehabilitation,
Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education,
Indian Council of Historical Research,
Indian Council of Social Science Research,
Indian Diamond Institute,
Indian Initiative in Gravitational-wave Observations,
Indian Institute of Science,
Indian Institute of Sindhology,
Indian Social Institute,
Indian Social Institute, Bangalore,
National Academy of Sciences, India,
National Brain Research Centre,
National Centre for Cell Science,
National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research,
National Institute of Ayurveda,
National Institute of Hydrology,
National Institute of Science Education and Research,
National Institutes of Pharmaceutical Education and Research,
Research Design and Standards Organisation,
Xavier Institute of Social Service
emerged after 2014?? /s India didn't even have the technology to manufacture a safety pin when the British left India. Today India is one of the few countries in the world that has mastered medical, nuclear, space, missile, defence and agricultural sciences to be among the few countries that is self-sufficient in these areas. And that is because of the scientific temperement of the past indian government.
You are right. Starting with almost nothing, the first Indian governments had a lot of scope for development. The list of institutions has had some effect on the society, and to the areas around them mainly in South India. Some of the previous governments really led to improvement (specially during Congress' Indira Gandhi's time and BJP's Atal Bihari Vajpayee's time) in certain areas.
But that is not enough. Science is still not a viable career for large percentage of the population, most of the technologies (specially commercial) are still imported, there aren't many companies in the private sector which are innovating.
Unfortunately none of the current political leadership across political parties give any confidence in this area. The current ruling party wants to live in the glory of the past and give comments about imaginary times. The main opposition party doesn't even try to promise anything better. Since Indira Gandhi, none in Congress have even tried to include science in the election manifesto in any major way. The previous UPA government was a big let down in this area. The other marginal national parties and regional parties are even worse. They don't even pretend to improve anything in this area.
> In India Astrology is now being treated as a Science and the Modi government is considering allowing alternate medicine (Ayurveda / Homeopathy / Unani) "doctors" to prescribe allopathic medicines.
I have had Astrologers visit my house when Modi was no where around in the national political scene. And exploring alternative medicine is hardly specific to Modi government. Even WHO is doing it:
Though I agree that pseudo-science like Homeopathy should not be promoted in any way and ancient medical knowledge like Ayurveda should be strictly regulated and rigorously tested.
> I have had Astrologers visit my house when Modi was no where around in the national political scene.
But did you treat these astrologers as scientists? The problem is not with astrology existing as it does in some form or the other in every country - the problem is in trying to promote it and give it some legitimacy by declaring it as a science!
That is what the religious fundamentalists in power are doing in India because they associate their form of astrology with their religion. If it is treated as science, would you like space launches or missile tests, for examples, to be decided based on the "auspicious" time figured through the "science" of astrology, even if the atmospheric conditions or not suitable for the launch at this time?
I am an Arab and I am pretty sure the article is full of misinformation before even reading it, but will read it anyway.
Take the first paragraph
> Contemporary Islam is not known for its engagement in the modern scientific project. But it is heir to a legendary “Golden Age” of Arabic science frequently invoked by commentators hoping to make Muslims and Westerners more respectful and understanding of each other. President Obama, for instance, in his June 4, 2009 speech in Cairo, praised Muslims for their historical scientific and intellectual contributions to civilization.
So first it says Contemporary "Islam" is not known for its engagement in the modern scientific project.
Then it says Golden Age of "Arabic" science.
Funny distinction. If you gonna use 'Arabic', use it everywhere.
Also another funny thing that the "Idealistic" president, Obama, who they say praised muslims for their historical scientific and intellectual contributions to civilization, had no problem working with dictators who are the main reason for the decline of scientific study in the region. And also had no problem supporting Al Sisi coup after the Egyptian revolution.
Edit: Adding that the Obama administration didn't want to admit it is a coup to be able to keep giving aid to the Egyptian military, which is prevented by the American constitution in case of a coup.
Professor Chomsky always said that the US won't allow true democracy in the middle east. He even had a lecture in 2011 just after the revolution started predicting exactly what happened.
So the US uses its power to keep the situation as it is, then the very much honest westerners come and say that we are backward in scientific study. Thanks guys. You are very wise and honest.
Even in the comments here people will bring up countries like japan as a contrast. Why did the Japanese, unlike the Arabs, rise again after their fall?
Could the centuries of direct colonial rule by the Ottomans and Europeans played a role? The Ottomans were by no measure gentle but the Europeans were nothing short of barbaric. Take Palestine. To solidify their hold the British simply rounded up and executed fighting age men the moment rebellion started brewing.
The stakes are high and the Europeans knew this. The Arabs sat on oil. Lots of it. Colonialism is doomed to fail because the uncivilized eventually rise up (imagine that). Enter Sykes-Picot and neo-colonialism. Give them the illusion of being free, back brutal dictators over the people, and divide and conquer along sectarian lines.
Finally enter Israel. To really support for Israel Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote that Israel would “form part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”. And they played their part. They are the wildcard ready to bomb any middle eastern country should they rise up and crawl towards independence. See all the nuclear power plants they bombed while they were still being built.
> Why did the Japanese, unlike the Arabs, rise again after their fall?
Because the ways Japan and Middle East were neo-colonized was different. After the bombs Japan wasn’t allowed to hold any army of significance and was enforced to have democratic institutions, which makes it very difficult for any dictatorial player to emerge, whereas in the middle east dictatorial regimes were not only embraced but even sometimes installed in the hopes that they could be easily controlled.
Authoritarianism wreaks havoc on meritocratic processes such as scientific knowledge production, intellectual property rights and other institutions democracies take for granted to flourish.
Japan had democracy imposed on them and so did Germany, both had them imposed by winning forces. The comment you are responding to complains about demoracy in Arab world being subverted by west.
You don't need to have a democracy to do science. Many great scientists in Europe or Asia were able to work in the context of absolute monarchies, terrible dictators or a context of patronage. None of those were "democratic" at all.
Having a true democracy would be a bless for sure, but don't think that will magically produce scientists, or revolutionary new points of view. You need to seed, nurture, care for and harvest decades later. And this is one of the causes of decline of science. Everybody is now planned, arranged and forced to fit in chunks of 4 years, so the people now in power can take all the credit.
As bad as dictators are, a stable dictatorship could ironically lead to a much more comfortable environment for scientists than a democracy. The first thing that many politicians do after stepping in power is to fire the scientists identified with the previous government (or discredit their work, or remove their funds...).
Israel has good universities and has research output comparable to European/NA countries.
The author is also including in Contemporary Islam, SEA countries like Malaysia.
He also discusses Pakistan and ancient Indian civilizations as separate entities, which have geographical overlap, because Pakistan (and Bangladesh) is far behind India in terms of research productivity.
Israel does not have successful academic institutions because of the US. They built it themselves.
The theory that the US "does not allow" the establishment of academic institutions in Islamic countries is equally wrong.
edit - There is a common attitude among Arabs (evident in this poster's comments in this thread) that everything bad in Arab countries is due to some combination of the US and Israel. One of my teachers, a Jordanian, told me how his father would poke fun at this attitude: when something in the house would break, his father would ironically blame Israel for it.
American foreign policy in the Arab world is complicated. It seems to me that many Arab countries oscillate between Islamist democracies and secular dictatorships. The US prefers the latter to the former. I think it's fair to criticize this stance but my sense is that the US would support a secular democracy, were it possible. The Obama administration supported the secular opposition to Assad...but it has turned out that the biggest faction of the Syrian opposition are Sunnis motivated by Islamism, hence America backing away from Syria.
Jewish culture has always had a deep respect for and encouragement of intellectual development. The Islamic world may have had that in the past but it's been heavily suppressed by the spread and rise to power and influence of more extreme and rigid forms of that belief system. In Israel, if the extreme orthodox were in charge or had as much influence as extreme Islam, you'd probably find suppression of intellectual development.
You missed my point. I am not talking about who built it. I am saying that the US doesn't allow true democracy in the Middle East which should be followed by scientific development.
> There is a common attitude among Arabs (evident in this poster's comments in this thread) that everything bad in Arab countries is due to some combination of the US and Israel. One of my teachers, a Jordanian, told me how his father would poke fun at this attitude: when something in the house would break, his father would ironically blame Israel for it.
To prove that your arrogant comment is wrong: I didn't mention that Israel is responsible for anything, I was mainly talking about the US. And I didn't say that all of the problems caused by them.
If the Arab nations decided to embrace science education and to industrialise their economies there's nothing the USA or Europe could, or would want to do to stop it. In fact the West would gleefully sell them the technical know how and equipment needed to do it. After all, they even did the same for Communist China.
> If the Arab nations decided to embrace science education and to industrialise their economies there's nothing the USA or Europe could, or would want to do to stop it.
Agree. But to be fair, not all is rosy. Israel has been signaled as the responsible of serial killings of scientists "of interest" in other countries.
This means that we have less people in the planet able to find a solution for the problem of managing nuclear residues, for example. Something that would have greatly benefited Israel itself.
And there are more than 300 cases of teachers being kidnapped, tortured and/or assasinated by US army (or other agents).
The idea of a country systematically killing 320 academics in Occident would be clearly seen as something atrocious. This should be treated exactly the same by international organisms.
Even if that would be true (that US supported that coup), would the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi have promoted science education in Egypt? The Muslim Brotherhood's history of science education doesn't seem so rosy.
Will take my time reading this. But will tell you my opinion.
No, I don't think the MBH would accept ALL the results of science. But I do think they would have made what they could to make the education system better.
But again this is not the point, What about after the MBH? Maybe someone else would came to establish a better system. But now it is all gone. No real elections, and no peaceful transfer of power.
The US has no say in the internal politics of Egypt, or any Arab countries. The most the West can do is stand by watching in horror, wringing our hands. When we do get mired in it, as with Iraq, the limits of our actual ability to direct change becomes painfully apparent very quickly.
The west, the most powerful civilization in history, stand by watching in horror. Are you serious?
I don't have links or videos saved with me right now, but I am an Egyptian and followed all of what happened. I can get it if I wanted, but it will take time. But I think you can easily find it. Listen to professor Chomsky's lectures for example.
Even "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" was joking about how Obama didn't admit the coup to keep giving them aid, but I also don't have the link of the episode here.
So I think it is obvious if you wanted to see it. But pick your opinion as you wish. It is a free world, right?
Ive seen that one already, and just listened to some of it again s a quick refresher.
Chomsky does accuse the US government of not wanting a democratic government in Egypt, but doesn't actually blame them for the failure of the Morsi government. Instead he blames his friends in the left Liberal movement of Egypt for supporting the Military coup.
As for Obama fudging the question of whether it was a coup, that's exactly the useless after the fact hand-wringing I'm talking about. At that point the coup was a done deal.
It may even be true that western leaders prefer to deal with Middle Eastern autocrats, but (a) when given the opportunity that's not what they set up in Iraq. And (b) they don't actually get to decide who rules any Arab countries anyway. Even in Iraq which they conquered, because they handed that decision over to the electorate.
I know that there are a lot of people in the west who are honest about their values. But we don't see that at all from the governments. So don't blame us thinking that the US never cared about their values.
I didn't talk about the failure of the Morsi government, that is highly controversial.
I am saying that they supported the coup before it even happens. They communicated with the military before the coup, giving them the green light to do it.
As I said, I didn't save the sources, but I know what I have read. But I can't ask you to believe me in that case.
It goes on to talk about its usage of "Arabic science" at the beginning of the second section.
"A preliminary caution must be taken about both parts of the term “Arabic science.” This is, first, because the scientists discussed here were not all Arab Muslims. Indeed, most of the greatest thinkers of the era were not ethnically Arab. This is not surprising considering that, for several centuries throughout the Middle East, Muslims were a minority (a trend that only began to change at the end of the tenth century). The second caution about “Arabic science” is that it was not science as we are familiar with it today.[...]"
USA's foreign interference is certainly important to talk about. But I would really like to hear your opinion on the meat of the article.
Its main point is that Islam's rules apply to public and personal life so universities and government budgets get controlled by religion. Fundamentalism retards scientific discovery. (I was taught fundamentalism as a child and I confirm this is true.) So when fundamentalism spread through the Islamic world, they stopped discovering new science.
A second point is that Arab culture doesn't value science. The Abbasid empire was controlled by Arabs. The empire translated scientific literature into Arabic for political reasons, not for the pursuit of knowledge. The existence of the large body of accessible scientific literature enabled highly intelligent folks to make scientific progress. The translation was not done in enduring institutions like universities. So the Golden Age of Arabic Science happened by accident, not because Arab culture or the empire valued scientific progress.
I believe that religion should not enforce any rules on scientific study.
That being said, it would require (for me at least) some study to prove some of the claims you made.
Egypt, while has a majority of muslims, is a secular country. Not in the sense that they have some worldview and understanding in political systems, they just don't rule with religion. So, I wasn't taught much about religion in my studying years.
So, claims like "Arab culture doesn't value science" and "translated scientific literature into Arabic for political reasons, not for the pursuit of knowledge", would require me to read a lot in history to make a judgement.
For example, I know that the chemistry that existed in their days was actually alchemy, so I think it was reasonable for them to reject it.
The part of "Translations were for political reasons" needs a lot of research, or maybe I just don't know about it.
I also think that those boundaries between cultures are almost gone by now. While there are some extreme groups (which I believe it does exist everywhere), young people here worship Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and old people have their version of Fox News. It is the same shit everywhere. They don't have a 'culture' or some philosophy to reject science using it as you might think. They know nothing about Islam, and they know nothing about science. That is the majority of people, not all of them of course.
I will exclude from that most of the young people who were active during the revolution. While the revolution changed us and made us more open to the world, it was a huge shock. [You might find this interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tTdlSzIANo]
I realize that the situation was fucked up before the US gets into the picture. But a lot of people realized now that we need a real change and they will accept a lot of western ideas more than you think. But we saw the people getting killed in the streets, and the US supported the killer happily. So I don't really know where the situation goes from here.
I would guess that Islam have no issues with good science, right?
In my opinion, blaming religion for any decline of science is completely accepted even if there's no direct correlation between both, which is very bad because it's creates a false believe that religious people aren't educated.
There's nothing inherently wrong with being religious, I think the major problem is fundamentalism: if you consider your Holy Book (be it the Koran, the Bible or whatever else), or even more commonly a narrow interpretation of it, as the single source of truth and condemn all who deviate from it, that's a recipe for stagnation. That happened in Europe in the Middle Ages, and it's happening in the Arabic world now.
You are right and you are wrong. What’s happening in the Arabic world is far from this. What’s happening in the Arab world is a continuation of existing European and US foreign policy which seeks to maintain the low cost of energy by ensuring that the Middle East remains subjugated. It has to be the entire Middle East to ensure that those Saudis never look up and demand to be free. Instead they keep pumping that oil and selling it on the global market.
This is a common misconception - the church was fundamental to the development of the scientific methods, and a long list of scientific contributors were men(and was almost exclusively men) of faith[1]. To do ground-breaking science, you had to have free time and this meant you had to be independently wealthy, or had benefactor (e.g. church) sponsor your upkeep. I suspect clergy and peerage are overrepresented in science because everyone else had to work the fields (or boats) and upward mobility wasn't yet a thing.
As long as it does not come in form of satiric cartoons, it seems...
Free speech without blasphemy laws, and being able to express new ideas or discuss new points of view without fearing to lose your life by that, is -absolutely- essential for having good science.
Tell me, what do cartoons have to do with good science?
The whole point of Islam being against people in artwork, is to reduce egoism and superficiality. To not put anyone on a pedestal. Sure, it’s quite an extreme take, however...
Would you disagree that this is an issue in modern society? Selfies and social media perception above real life?
Not saying I agree in any absolute fashion with “no people in art” etc, but to argue in bad faith against Islam’s scientific position is just obtuse and argumentative. There is merit there.
And of course, this should go without saying but sadly cannot: extremist Muslims who commit violence in the name of these beliefs are horrible and wrong and guess what - not actually considered to be “good Muslims” by any true good Muslims out there, who value their fellow humans as also prescribed by their faith.
If you mean that some muslims won't accept some scientific results because of their islamic beliefs, then you are very much correct.
I would even say that some Quranic verses don't sound scientific at all, but it is somehow complex to judge it, since it is not intended to be a science book.
Anyway, this is far from my point. My point is the US wants the situation to be like that, period.
Not sure what do you mean by Nonsense, are you saying current state of Iraq and Libya is ok. This is what Australian Traveller Govt site says about Egypt
Kidnapping is a risk for travellers in Egypt.
Violent crime can happen. Take extra care if you're a women and alone.
Terrorists have attacked places popular with tourists in recent years.
You implied that the west keeping the devil dictator is better than having a revolution and for people to chose their own destiny. Even if it looks like a warzone now, assuming those people are left alone to decide their future, they will go back to peace and prosperity instead of having someone millions miles away decide what they eat, think and see.
Do you think democracy and freedom comes out of nothing? Check the french revolution, history of the UK and other democracies. There is always blood before things go back to be better.
So if you were in living in a warzone, would you be ok for you and your family to be killed as a price for freedom. I dont think so, its easy to say that when your life is not on the line.
This article makes for an interesting read. I'm not qualified to evaluate its historical claims but its claims about the current state of science in the Muslim world don't agree with what little knowledge I have in that area. That knowledge comes from having been acquainted with a number of Muslim students and scientists both in the US and in France. I did not at all get the impression that they came from a culture that does not value open rational inquiry, despite several, at least, being devout Muslims. I'm sure Fundamentalists are deeply opposed to anything resembling science but as far as I know they are a minority in most of the Muslim world. I should qualify these statements by noting that most of the Muslims I knew came from the Maghreb rather than say the Persian Gulf area so maybe things are very different there.
There are also some other possible explanations for the relative lack of success of scientific research in Muslim countries today that the article does not consider. First many of these countries are relatively poor and under-developed so if you are born there and have the opportunity to study science you are likely to be encouraged to go into more practical fields, like engineering, rather than pure research, which is very under-funded in these countries, again mostly due to overall lack of resources. Secondly if you really want to go into research your best bet is to emigrate to the west if that is at all possible. Again some of this doesn't apply to the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf, but I think the brain drain effect is at work even there.
I'm from a 3rd world Muslim country, I also agree that the number of people who actively oppose "western education" is extremely small. They are on the fringe even in the rural, comparatively religious society I grew up in.
It's important to remember that most people don't really worry about this kind of ideological questions, like whether studying in university is incompatible with Quran. Hell, most people don't even know what's in Quran. So at least in contemporary world, I think lack of Muslim progress is better explained by poverty and not through those ideological analyses.
I agree. I am and live among white first world people and I often hear the opinion that the problems of muslim immigrants both here and in their home country are caused by their bad character traits, either culturally or genetically.
To me this is bullshit. Most of these problems are caused by poverty. If you're poor you don't have good education, information, nutrition, health systems and all the like. And that causes all sorts of disadvantages people can't imagine. It's not character or genetics.
> your best bet is to emigrate to the west if that is at all possible
And THAT is the problem in any non-western country. The extent of brain drain by more flourishing economies are the prime reasons why certain countries are plagued by lack of education, lack of opportunity, spread of corruption, and spread of gang-like entities.
While your point is well taken, note that the brain drain would not be as rampant if the countries themselves as a matter of policy emphasised investing in research.
Note also that a significant portion of the current problems bogging these nations down stems from conflict along religious and sectarian lines (Shia-Sunni enemity).
> brain drain would not be as rampant if the countries themselves as a matter of policy emphasised investing in research.
That is far from the only reason. If you check metrics on HDI indices, economic and social freedom indices and other institutional performance metrics, you will see those countries having multiple problems. Those who emigrated are not doing so in the name of science but because they happen to have desirable, transferable skills and can leave their homelands.
> Note also that a significant portion of the current problems bogging these nations down stems from conflict along religious and sectarian lines
By the same token this is an oversimplified mischaracterization. Problems are due to authoritarian regimes with corrupt institutions; from higher education to a lack of functioning justice system, which both hamper things internally but also reduces foreign investment in those countries.
> ”Nothing in Europe,” notes Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma, “could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until about 1600.”
Before the portuguese (1498-1974?) and the spanish (1492-1976?) overseas empires, the arab world was in the middle of the prime trade routes between asia and europe. Afterwards, their status as middleman was increasingly cut out (especially once the dutch and then british got into the maritime empire game).
Science happens where there are rich people; rich people happen where there are bottlenecks in trade.
As they say in the asteroid belt: na desh walowda walowda peyeting; imim na xunyam sasating?
For the bottlenecks: I like to think of value chains as a young seasonal river. In season, there are alternations of pools and waterfalls, and exploitable margins are where the topography protrudes, at the waterfalls. In the pools the topography still exists, but doesn't matter. Until it does, because something changes significantly upstream or downstream, and now the waterfalls appear in different places.
Kowltim vedi fong bap unte kuwang. Depelesh imim ge sekrip. (Watch out for bottlenecks and corners. That's where money is made.)
Compare the parts of a program worth optimising...
Kowltim vedi fong bap unte kuwang. Da Dzhin im showxa desh deplesh imim du fashting gut. (Watch out for bottlenecks and corners. Amdahl's Law says that's where to make speedups.)
Too complex metaphor for me. If I've understood you, the flow is not exactly the trade. That's open to a lot of distracting objections. Beautiful anyway :)
Thank you. Maybe it's easier to recover the river from the optimisation case: we profile first, then optimise. This is because the only things that count are what actually eat wall clock time. Similarly, the only places in value chains that accumulate wealth are where there are actually consistent margins. And it doesn't matter if there are rocks in a riverbed (which could potentially make bottlenecks or waterfalls), if they're located in a pool between higher rocks, so the water level is higher than they are.
My point was that trade, in a wide sense, creates wealth. No one would cross the sea or the desert if there wasn't a prize, so I take for granted that there is an inbalance.
"Bottleneck" seems to suggest that commerce is like a natural process. It isn't. There are trade cultures like Phoenicians or Renaissance Venice, but often the powerful don't like commerce. Commerce implies some values that subvert authoritarian regimes, maybe just because different ways of understanding life make contact.
So when I hear bottleneck, I think of trade restrictions, not flow. You mean bottleneck as a funnel where the flow is more intense and thus more susceptible to capture wealth. It makes sense, but it's somehow a twisted metaphor, because it's the inbalance (gravity, or demand + the cheaper production elsewhere) that creates the flow, the bottleneck just make it easier to exploit. But a cascade can be wide or narrow, tall or short. In any case, there's water falling...
Easy: the КПСС was the bottleneck between the oil and natural gas fields of the Union and the fuel importers of the West. They were the funders of the Космическая программа СССР from the 1930s on.
Two things happened in 1985: KSA opened the taps to full production, tanking oil prices, and the Plaza Accord weakened the dollar. Since oil is denominated in USD, this further kneecapped soviet hard currency income. While they were simultaneously attempting to fight a war in afghanistan, the real price of oil had dropped by a factor of 3. Elsewhere, as a result of the Plaza Accord, west germany used its stronger marks to buy out east germany as a fire sale from the Warsaw Pact, but I still have no idea what japan (or perhaps just the LDP selectorate?) got from its stronger yen, other than (averaged across the whole country) stagnation.
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736853 and consider that anyone outside who for whatever reason had been modelling the soviet economy might have been able to show to the actors within it (especially after Gorbi's transparency reforms) that it was worth more in pieces than as a going conglomerate, in which case the implosion of the soviet union would have been the ultimate stakeholder activism geopolitical LBO.
If Mark Felt had been a Belter, he would have said du chesh peyeting instead of "follow the money."
"With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life. While the Mu’tazilites had contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality."
"According to the occasionalist view, tomorrow coldness might follow fire, and satiety might follow lack of food. God wills every single atomic event and God’s will is not bound up with reason. This amounts to a denial of the coherence and comprehensibility of the natural world."
Pretty sure the article was posted to HN to draw parallels to today's rise of constructivism and the decline of positivism as a philosophical reference frame in the West.
"Mohammed was not only a prophet but also a chief magistrate, a political leader who conquered and governed a religious community he founded. Because Islam was born outside of the Roman Empire, it was never subordinate to politics."
"Islam needs a state to enforce its laws, and the state needs a basis in Islam to be legitimate."
> [...] this view sees natural things that appear to be permanent as merely following habit. Heat follows fire and hunger follows lack of food as a matter of habit, not necessity, “just as the king generally rides on horseback through the streets of the city, and is never found departing from this habit; but reason does not find it impossible that he should walk on foot through the place.” [...] tomorrow coldness might follow fire, and satiety might follow lack of food. God wills every single atomic event and God’s will is not bound up with reason. [...] “Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.” [...] “Nothing in nature can act spontaneously and apart from God.” [...] Mohammed Yusuf, the late leader of a group called the Nigerian Taliban, explained why “Western education is a sin” by explaining its view on rain: “We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.” [...] the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano was the result of God’s anger at immodestly dressed women in Europe.
We often overlook in hindsight how unclear it was how the world works at its basics in earlier times.
In other words, it could have turned out that way. It was partially luck that the West got it right. For all they knew, it could have been really God micromanaging everything with no humanly discernible consistency or laws to it. Certainly not ones that are as simple as Newton's laws for example. It was not at all inevitable that, say, the intricate dance of celestial bodies can be reduced to 3 laws of motion plus the inverse square law for gravity.
Unfortunately the following happened according to Wikipedia:
"The epitaph on his tomb initially read "First Muslim Nobel Laureate". The Pakistani government removed "Muslim" and left only his name on the headstone. They are the only nation to officially declare that Ahmadis are non-Muslim."
If not for the invasion by outside forces like (Turks/Mongols) from around 11th century in present day India, the scientific culture would not have been broken. Invaders destroyed Nalanda university in present day Bihar during one such invasion. Destroying knowledge is the goto activity by invaders and this continues to this day under ISIS also.
India's learning tradition destroyed at that point in history is more the destruction of philosophy and philology, not so much the hard sciences as in the case of the Arab world which had made considerable strides in these centuries. Unfortunately, many people on this STEM-focused forum probably are not greatly concerned with e.g. the destruction of fora for debating Mahayana Buddhist metaphysics.
After many paragraphs telling that the reason is not simple, it finally centers in occasionalism.
> At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.
I'll admit to not having read the full article, but would a belief like this make the assumption that God's will could even overrule logic itself. Could God will 2 + 2 = 5? How would you rationalize this? Or perhaps the point is to irradiate rationality.
Yes, Al-Ghazali made that point. I don't remember the specific passage but he made the comment that if he left a book in his library, he has no way to know that god did not turn it into a donkey, which was at that moment pissing on all his other books. I'll search for that quote, because it was pretty exciting for a medieval philosophy class.
The point is not to rationalize. God could 2 + 2 = 5 and stop trying to understand His will as it is arbitrary. And then of course use this narrative to legitimize some autocrat.
Muslim science is not Arab science. Muslim world is not Arab world. In general, Muslim =/= Arab, and Arab =/= Muslim. However, Arabs do spend quite a lot of money in various quarters and apparently are deep into a cultural appropriation program of denuding all other Muslim nations of their substantial claims (more than actual Arab scientists) to “Islam’s Golden Age”.
> Indeed, most of the greatest thinkers of the era were not ethnically Arab.
Yet the author perversely chooses to call it Arab science, and Arab Golden Age.
He then puts forward a completely unsupported theory that this is because “for several centuries throughout the Middle East, Muslims were a minority”.
Let’s follow Hillel’s tortured logic here:
- Most of Muslim thinkers of Muslim Golden Age were not Arabs.
- This is because Muslims were a minority in Middle East.
- Thus we need “caution” before we go ahead and call them Arab Scientists.
It is also necessary to correct Hillel’s implicit that most “Arab Scientists” were non-Muslim non-Arabs. The fact remains that most of these non-Arabs were Muslims.
Hillel is invited to offer a list of non-Muslim “great thinkers” of the era.
Arab money is making a mess in all sort of places. But it will not be permitted to mess with the history and heritage of the Muslim nations.
Having read the article, the suggested root of it seems to be the non-distinction between politics and religion in Islam. Muhammad was a powerful ruler and prophet. In Christian terms, he was both Christ and Constantine in one.
Ha ha - primitive Islamic religionists!! Only we are exactly the same, but are blind to our failings. This narrative plays on our conceited, flabby, unreasoned thinking. But its nice to laugh to others, eh?
Science to me, is the application of the scientific method. This is to say that whatever is being looked at should be repeatable, and consistently provide the same results. Strictly speaking, when we say we know, we should be saying that because we have applied the scientific method personally.
The reality is that science in 'the West' does not provide us the knowledge we think it does. The use of the pronoun 'we' cuts to the chase of the problem - WE assume that our scientists have this. But step back and think about what it is to know - it can't be a case of trusting scientists. I should be able to take whatever is being proposed or claimed and verify it personally.
But no one - NO ONE - is verifying anything personally. No one is testing the claims. We all live in our silos, trusting that others are working in good faith. Trusting that the stories we are told are not just hearsay. We trust the results we are provided, without any verification. We trust that what we are provided are not stories, but are actual verifiable science.
My point is that no one is personally verifying science. On an individual level we cannot be sure that these are not stories and hearsay.
With the virus, has anyone here ever used an electron microscope? Did you see a virus with it? Why do you think it is a virus? Etc etc. The truth is our reason is actually faith too!
Science, as we do it, ie based on trust and without personal verification, is absolutely equivalent to religion. A comforting, explanatory story is provided and we believe we 'know' what is happening. Scientists are our priests and we take their pronouncements as gospel, without questioning them.
You have a fair point^, but instead of attacking science in particular you should attack societies in general. Can you trust the food you buy at the supermarket or at the restaurant is not poisonous? That your doctor or partner isn't going to kill you in your sleep? That policemen will not shoot you? That drivers won't run you over?
It's not about science. Society is impossible without trust.
^ except that scientists do check each other's work and occasionally find mistakes. Scientific progress is real and has provided concrete and undeniable improvements to people's lives, and this should give credibility to science as a whole. But I see your point, outsiders cannot understand nor verify science without the proper training and equipment.
The problem more widely, is that we trust others. Bear with me - I know this sounds bad. The fact is that we trust too much. We should be verifying all the claims that are made to us. We would soon learn discernment over what sources are trustworthy (friend's personal experiences - ie anecdotal evidence) versus evidence presented by those that govern us on the media (politicians + their megaphone the mainstream media).
This in itself is jarring - we know politicians are not trustworthy, but we think they are trying to do their best. But really what we have is a dog and pony show to distract us, and the governance is going on anyway.
The answer, in my opinion, is something like stepping up individually. We should test and present our results to those around. We would soon learn the difference between knowing and believing. And we would also learn to accept that we do not know - and that that's ok. If we don't know, that doesn't mean we have to accept any old story that's presented. We can defer acceptance as and when we have the data, without kidding ourselves. This is skepticism.
> We would soon learn the difference between knowing and believing.
Well said, and it's not always so easy. Skepticism and critical thinking are in very short supply, that is true, and we should all try to verify as much as possible.
But really, most things cannot be verified by you, personally. We do stand on the shoulders of giants, and you will not be able to verify centuries of scientific progress all on your own, from first principles.
And this becomes even harder when you approach the softer parts of human knowledge such as economics or very recent discoveries that aren't fully settled. Most people are easily tricked by politicians and other evil actors simply because most things cannot be known for sure (immigration? interest rates? carbon taxes?), and the best one can do is to have educated guesses. And educated guess require education, which most have not.
So I don't see how you can live without trusting most of what you are said or living partially outside society. I guess a compromise between our point of views is the good old adage "trust, but verify".
> But really, most things cannot be verified by you, personally. We do stand on the shoulders of giants, and you will not be able to verify centuries of scientific progress all on your own, from first principles.
Absolutely. You cannot verify everything. One should try though, at least where possible. Of course we cannot verify everything. We should also get used to saying 'I don't know' rather than presenting hearsay as truth.
When one has not verified a thing, one should be open about the level of knowledge we have. It is absolutely acceptable not to know everything. It is not acceptable to carelessly relay what might be lies.
I don't agree that we stand on the shoulders of giants. I don't have any heroes. I stand by own judgement alone.
The way I see it, if we don't verify a thing, we should not accept it. We simply say we don't know, that we are working on a hypothesis. We should explicitly state our assumptions and gratefully receive correction. We can say that 'such and such is the common consensus but that I have not proven this to myself'. We should let a modicum of doubt be expressed in what we say, if there is a modicum of doubt in what we are stating.
You can even consider this from a spiritual perspective. If you erroneously believe something to be true, but in fact it is a lie, but you repeat it, are you a liar too? Are you stating a case that you shouldn't be stating? I think so. I think not living and breathing truth, you are relaying unverified hearsay. I think is in fact lying. It is careless use of language, and misleads the next person as you were misled yourself.
I love to recommend this video, that I think accurately expresses the problem we have in trying to determine truth:
>The way I see it, if we don't verify a thing, we should not accept it. We simply say we don't know, that we are working on a hypothesis. We should explicitly state our assumptions and gratefully receive correction. We can say that 'such and such is the common consensus but that I have not proven this to myself'. We should let a modicum of doubt be expressed in what we say, if there is a modicum of doubt in what we are stating.
While I appreciate your point of view and, especially in terms of policy and governance, it's a good idea to at least try to verify the veracity of the claims made by those seeking to implement policy, I think you go too far in dumping science and mathematics into that bucket.
For example, do you find it necessary to prove the commutative property of addition, or the existence of rational numbers before you can compute the sales tax due on a purchase?
Do you need to prove General Relativity (one of the most precise theories we've ever come up with) in order to trust your GPS?
You can "verify" this by punching in an address in your phone's directions app and use the GPS receiver to confirm your location as you move. When you arrive at your destination, you'll find that you're within a few meters of where you wanted to go.
That's only possible for GPS because the clocks on GPS devices and the satellites providing GPS signals are synchronized pretty precisely.
Without General Relativity providing a framework for accurately measuring time for objects with vastly different velocities, this would be impossible.
Or Quantum Mechanics, whose predictions have been shown to be more precise than any other scientific theory ever developed.
If we were to take your advice and distrust those theories because we can't personally verify them (whether that be a lack of mathematical knowledge or a lack of equipment and methodologies to do so), then we should reject the idea that GPS devices can give is accurate directions and claim that lasers (or any sort of coherent EM emissions) don't exist.
Which is objectively false.
It's a good idea to question what others assert, but (as another poster put it), having to prove everything from first principles before accepting its validity is a huge waste of time and effort.
That's where critical thinking, assessment of sources and the application of Occam's (and Hanlon's) razor really shines.
I completely agree that we shouldn't trust everything we hear, read or even see.
At the same time, rejecting everything we can't personally verify seems both counterproductive and deeply destructive of our science, our technology and our societies.
I like your approach. You are stating what personally meets your criteria. You are mis-stating my position though.
I'm stating an absolute position - that you don't know a thing until you have proved it to yourself. Its kind of self evident. Its so self-evident that people think they know it. But they don't realise that watching something in a video or on TV is not evidence. Its the illusion of evidence. It kids people into thinking they 'know', but the truth is that they have beliefs.
You are expressing a practical approach. This is interesting too - you want to get as much solid info for the effort. You are taking a pragmatic belief system approach to navigating reality. Your practical approach, doesn't need facts or truth. It is happy to have things that are useful or not - its about utility. At least this is proactive.
I'm stating a fact - that you don't know a thing, until you have verified it personally. Knowledge and what qualifies it as such to any individual - is a point that is missed by most. I'm stating something about truth and how we know it or not.
You also say:
"having to prove everything from first principles before accepting its validity is a huge waste of time and effort."
I agree. I'm not saying that you should do that. I'm saying that people need to recognise when they are believing something on the basis of no evidence that they misunderstand as evidence (ie seeing something on TV), and when they have verified something personally.
I'm fine to say, that I don't know. Many things. The shape of the earth. That viruses exist. I know there are theories (sphere, flat earth, viruses, microsomes) - but I'm not going to mis-represent the state of my knowledge. I simply don't know. I haven't been in space, I haven't verified it myself. I haven't seen a virus. I'm not going to pretend to have knowledge that I don't. I contrast this with others who say they 'know' when they are kidding themselves and others.
>you will not be able to verify centuries of scientific progress all on your own, from first principles. And this becomes even harder when you approach the softer parts of human knowledge such as economics
TBH most of economics is non-empirical ideology that's easy to debunk. More generally pseudo-science is rampant in "western science". That's another reason why this article is so ironic/islamophobic.
The author is critical of Islam, but that is hardly "islamophobic": at no point in the article does the author indicate any fear of Islam, which is what the "-phobic" construction means. "-phobic" does not mean "says negative things about" and especially does not mean "disagrees with", despite the way it's frequently used.
That kind of thing looks good on paper but fails miserably in reality. No individual has the bandwidth to verify everything themselves, and precious few have the numerical and statistical literacy to be able to even verify samples here and there and not get stuck in a local minimum. To me, this whole line of thinking sounds like the dorm-room libertarian bullshit that gets generated from the Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids, but I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong.
In a perfect world, any random person would have the ability to independently verify any scientific claim they cared to. But as you imply, our world is far from perfect. Many scientific facts require heavy training and/or expensive equipment to verify that most people just don't have. But the cool thing is that IF you did have the skills and gear (and patience, free time, assistants, etc.), you absolutely can image a virus particle, or measure the mass of an electron (not all that complicated, it turns out!), or take your own observations of the motion of the planets and re-derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
> My point is that no one is personally verifying science. On an individual level we cannot be sure that these are not stories and hearsay.
You should hang out with more scientists. It turns out they count as "someone"!
> Science, as we do it, ie based on trust and without personal verification, is absolutely equivalent to religion. A comforting, explanatory story is provided and we believe we 'know' what is happening. Scientists are our priests and we take their pronouncements as gospel, without questioning them.
This is a grossly false equivalency. The thing with any scientific claim is that you could independently verify it; in practice, verifying modern scientific claims tends to cost tons of time and money, but nothing in principle prevents you.
"A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments). In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did. Misconducts were reported more frequently by medical researchers than others."
Its not a joke.
Also, there is the question of funding in science. The government, the military and private corporations basically provide all the funding.
Do you think they fund things that are not in their interests? That good food would be more effective than medicine? Stuff like that?
If they fund a study that produces data that is contrary to the general narrative, do you think that will be published?
Do you think they will fund those studies that are against their narrative?
I love science, and the scientific method. But, not the science we have. It really is akin to religion - both are means of governance of the masses by controlling what is acceptable to think about.
The replication crisis is only possible precisely because scientific claims are by definition falsifiable. What's the religious equivalent of the replication crisis? Holy wars?
The replication crisis is an alarming and embarrassing problem, driven largely by the slavish "publish or perish" incentive structure. But I don't think this relates to your original claim that "no one - NO ONE - is verifying anything personally. No one is testing the claims." It's through exactly those attempts at verification and testing that scientists are realizing that standards of statistics, transparency, and integrity are not good enough.
> I love science, and the scientific method. But, not the science we have. It really is akin to religion - both are means of governance of the masses by controlling what is acceptable to think about.
Science is inextricably linked to politics and society, as you rightly point out. Good science indeed can and should guide policy and governance, but calling that "controlling what is acceptable to think about" is wildly pessimistic.
Your argument has evolved into "scientists and science is imperfect due to various sources of bias." That's true, but I disagree that this makes science "absolutely equivalent to religion."
This is flat out not true, every child that studies science in high school, all the way through to degree level in University personally goes through all the logical chains of thought, experimentation and verification of the ideas and principles they learn. We read how Newton derived the laws of motion and measure the periods of swinging weights hanging on strings, we measure the pressure of a gas as it varies with changing temperature. I have personally measured the speed of light in a lab to within a few percent using a set of lasers and worked through the derivation of the relativistic equations. All of this is in the physics text books for anyone to learn and personally verify.
Science education very much rests on teaching and learning scientific methods and showing students how to prove the things they are learning.
I did give examples. My own children are going through high school here in the UK right now, they are 15 and 17 and both study physics and chemistry. They spend a significant portion of their science education performing experiments themselves in labs, that's exactly what lab work is for - to test the things you are being taught. Maybe it's different in the US, if you are American, but did you really not do experiments in science class at school? Did your teachers really not explain how to apply the scientific method practically? Anyone can test the theories of basic mechanics, gases and electricity with household objects and surely must do this at school right?
I happened to go on to do Physics at University, although I transferred and eventually graduated in Computer Science. Of course the work you do there is more advanced, but it builds on the basic principles of investigation, verification and experimentation started at school. About 95,000 students study physical science subjects University level here in the UK every year.
I'm in USA northeast, and we did experiments in (private) highschool & college around chemistry (calories burned, mole weights, etc) and physics (measure a spring's K, speed, light/sound wave refractions, surface tension of water+soap, etc). Not so much in biology but I think I would've hated that kind of wetwork.
You had to perform and write up a practical experiment for the A-Level Physics final exam in the 1980s - I remember it fondly because a friend accidentally set his on fire to everyone’s suppressed amusement!
This is a narrow view of science. If they're taking one or two courses on physical science, what are their other classes? Do they examine the hypotheses and evidence in economics, history, etc.? Or is their course load just 10% physical science and 90% indoctrination?
I verified a _lot_ at school. Simple stuff, sure, but it's the method which matters, not the thing you verify. I guess it may depend on the education systems, but seeing it as an 'indoctrination system' is just dishonest, given that by _definition_ you want to change the minds of the children. There is no --or so little-- spontaneous learning when you reach something more complicated than the basic action/immediate consequence a toddler uses.
To all those that are telling me how much verification is going on, I want to offer this very simple and basic question.
How was water proven to you to be made up of 2 gases?
Please don't refer me to youtube videos where a showman's pop is made, and we see some water droplets from the air condensate on the bottle. I want to see 2 gases being added together and making a liquid, that is water. We are apparently on a planet that is mainly water... surely this isn't too much to ask?
You might think this is basic, and it is. If you review this information, you will recognise just how little you actually know.
It isn't much to ask at all, but what you describe makes little sense.
1) What's the issue with "showman pop and some water droplets"? What's the difference between producing 1 mL or 1 gallon of water in terms of _verification_?
2) You can verify it in various ways, including obtaining back oxygen and hydrogen from water. You can measure the weight of the water you've used (and derive the number of molecules), and the weight of the gases you obtain (and again check that it matches what you've provided).
3) Sure, your sensors (eyes, ears, etc.) are not accurate/fast enough to literally see two H2 molecules and one O2 molecule creating two H2O. If you feel that this in itself is enough to impede verification then we have an issue. You can always go back to a point where your eyes are enough to validate an hypothesis and build from there, so everything holds. But you seem to be asking that for _every_ scientific proof in our modern world, which is just mischievous.
It is extremely simple to do that. But you won't accept it. You would say the gas canister containing oxygen to be "unproved", or the ignition source to be "unproved to be so", or the camera to be "unproved to truly reflect the reality", or the container in which the gases are put in "unproved to be empty".
You do not really care about knowing, you care about being right. And there's nothing I can do for you on this regard.
Seriously, post a video of you doing that. Or someone else's.
If you think I will refute it whatever the case, what can I do? I can only say that I will watch in good faith.
If, as you seem to suggest, I do see issues with the video and evidence, and you don't, what does that tell you about your threshold for the acceptance of what is presented as true to you?
> If, as you seem to suggest, I do see issues with the video and evidence, and you don't, what does that tell you about your threshold for the acceptance of what is presented as true to you?
Of course my threshold of acceptance is lower than yours! This whole discussion, my point was that your "threshold of acceptance" is ridiculously, insanely high.
For instance, I do think that the BBC guy in this video is acting in good faith. Also, given the two following hypothesis:
- Thousands of people around the globe have been putting up complex magic tricks and keep the secret for more than two centuries to make me believe that a gas can burn an produce water;
- Hydrogen and oxygen mixed together and ignited produce water vapor.
The latter is far, far more likely than the former.
Issues I have with the video you provided. I can't believe that this passes muster with you as a scientist.
I can't help but notice the gas he creates at first is white in colour. In the second the gas is clear in colour. Both white and colourless gas are the same apparently. The difference in colour is not explained.
In the second experiment, Brian Cox says he is using hydrogen + AIR (not oxygen). Air is apparently 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and argon + trace gases are the rest. This is to say, this is not mixing oxygen + hydrogen. So this experiment is NOT what I was asking evidence of.
Finally, he creates an explosive pop and some condensation appears on the glass jar. Let's accept that this liquid is water. What's to say that the water isn't simply water that was already in vapour form in the air that condensed against the glass?
And why do we need flame to ignite the gases? Is it really true that fire creates water? Is that a joke?
And do we really think that the ratio of 2 particle of hydrogen to 1 of oxygen was met? It was hardly a rigorous measurement, was it?
Overall, no, I did not see and experiment where pure hydrogen and pure oxygen where combined to make water. Do you think you did? To me, its all inference, hearsay and claim.
If this is all the evidence you need, yes, I think your threshold is too low.
Losing the argument sucks right? Guess you'll have to get use to it. I know I'm right while you do not know, so you're wrong.
It's hard to argue against pure logic like mine... Maybe one day you'll understand.
I recall doing an experiment in high school where I added a drop of HCl to water and then applied an electric current to the water in the vessel - there were two vents and applying a flame to one of the areas near the bubbling electrodes resulted in a clean flame pop, a signature of hydrogen. Edit0: syntax corrections.
Are you deliberately missing the point? You follow a logical chain of building up a roughly coherent view of the world. Not as good as following the kind of thorough reasoning that goes into a research paper (since you always have access to "the right answer") but better than most alternatives that can be mass-produced at that level.
I don't agree with your final conclusion, but I upvoted this regardless, because I think it is an interesting perspective that is worthwhile to philosophize on.
If the Covid-19 situation taught me anything, it would be that it's apparently very, very easy to convince the vast majority of the population they need behave, think and feel in some way, based on 'facts' and figures that are unproven, incomplete, out-of-context, or based on 'science' that is not or only barely amenable to empirical verification. We (the world) are doing so many things at once now to try to handle the pandemic, but my impression of all of it, is that we really have no idea what we are doing, what works and what doesn't, why things seem to be out of control, and (controversially) how bad it actually is in the grand scheme of things.
IMO science is most definitely not comparable to religion, but I will concede that -for most people- its role in their lives is very similar.
If the Covid-19 situation taught me anything, it would be that it's apparently very, very easy to convince the vast majority of the population they need behave, think and feel in some way, based on 'facts' and figures that are unproven, incomplete, out-of-context, or based on 'science' that is not or only barely amenable to empirical verification.
That's not the impression I've got watching it all unfold in the UK. Sure there were a few charlatans at the extremes but the bulk of the messaging has been open about the fact there is a lot we don't know.
Thank you. I always get heavily downvoted as I don't think others are as open minded to hearing a different viewpoint as you.
I agree too. But, I see science as an individual's pursuit. I really mean it when I say that science is something one should verify personally. Whenever you don't do that, you are accepting a story - without testing you cannot know anything, it is all in the realm of belief.
And you are right that most belief whether it is science/magic/religion its all the same thing. They want to naively trust and have faith. It would be endearing if it wasn't also susceptible to meaning that they can be lead as a herd. As an individual, it is very hard to stand against the herd. Whether that is avoiding being drowned as a witch, or being forced to vaccinate oneself for the good of the herd.
Be careful in bringing up "open mindedness". If the most compelling thing you can say about your position is that "it is so weird and obtuse that only true open minds will not reject it", I'm not sure you're making a point here...
> But, I see science as an individual's pursuit. I really mean it when I say that science is something one should verify personally.
Sure. But you can't. You literally can't. And since you can't, it means, given this sentence, that you consider all science to be in the realm of belief. This is really sad.
> Whenever you don't do that, you are accepting a story - without testing you cannot know anything, it is all in the realm of belief.
Surely it is possible, and costs nothing, to listen to another point of view. Surely testing what you know against a contrary opinion can only be a positive experience.
> > But, I see science as an individual's pursuit. I really mean it when I say that science is something one should verify personally.
> Sure. But you can't. You literally can't. And since you can't, it means, given this sentence, that you consider all science to be in the realm of belief. This is really sad.
Yes, but when you haven't verified, you can't say you know. You literally can't. You believe.
> Surely testing what you know against a contrary opinion can only be a positive experience.
Trivial counterexample: if I repeat "you are an [insert your favorite insult here], what you say is false" again and again, which can be considered a "contrary opinion", you will not have a positive experience.
> Yes, but when you haven't verified, you can't say you know. You literally can't. You believe.
How are you sure that your senses provide you with an accurate representation of the world? You can't. So you believe they do. And you thus know nothing at all. See how easy it is to come up with these broad judgments which, while interesting from a philosophical point of view, are totally useless in practice?
That's my point: I have no issue discussing cartesian doubt, for example. But this does not imply at all the science to be invalid, wrong, or the same as a religion: that's the pitfall you're in.
> How are you sure that your senses provide you with an accurate representation of the world?
I agree - you don't even know that your senses are providing you with an accurate representation of the world. But, if I say 'this is a table' you can come and check the truth of it. In the objective world, I can confirm a thing and say 'I know'. I can tell you how I found out, and you can check the veracity of my statement.
If, say, I have a box, and I say 'inside the box is a potato', in the context of what we are talking about you have a couple of options. You can check (verify) whether that's true. Or you can accept it as true without checking.
I'm saying, everyone - EVERYONE - is accepting claims all day long, without any proof. No one is checking.
And this has become the basis of people's reality. A consensus group think determined by what is presented on a screen.
> I'm saying, everyone - EVERYONE - is accepting claims all day long, without any proof.
You included. But saying "no one is checking" is false. For every claim, there are people who do, actually, check. But you ask for _everyone_ to check _every claim_, which, I repeat myself, is, plainly put, impossible. So either you still do not accept that this is impossible, and going further in the discussion without this axiom is just useless, or you accept that this is impossible yet you still hypocritically ask for it. In either case, I do not have much to add.
I'm saying people are relaying information as if it was true and that they had verified it, when they haven't. Its hearsay, gossip. Or even, lying.
I don't say check every case. That's impossible.
I'm saying be a bit clearer about what you know and what you believe. Don't say 'I know' when you haven't verified whatever it is. To say you do, is in fact, a type of lie. You are simply re-stating what you have been told was true. The effect is that you may deceive others. Why should they be deceived because your threshold is to trust whatever is being presented to you as true? You don't know, but you say you do.
If you like, I can deconstruct this a little more. It hinges on the verb 'to be', 'is'.
Contrast these statements:
"The earth is a sphere".
"The evidence that I have seen indicates that the earth is a sphere".
The first statement is not verifiable personally. It is parroting a line, and is a very common linguistic shortcut. The effect is a form of lie, where you are overstating the case of what you know.
The second statement far more accurately reflects what I at least know.
Sure, prepend all your sentences by "The evidence that I have seen indicates" if it makes you happy. It changes nothing about the fact that knowledge exists even if you can personally experience it using solely your senses. I know that we've been to the Moon (do you?) although I wasn't even born when this happened.
Knowledge is certain. If there is a possibility that some claim could be wrong, it is only a hypothesis. And that's perfectly fine. Call that knowledge if you like, but you are over-stating your case. Lying in fact.
The reality is that we have far less knowledge than we think. We may be aware of lots of hypotheses, we can have knowledge of hypotheses. But this is not knowledge of the thing being hypothesised about.
You think you have knowledge when you don't. And I say, if you are unaware of your ignorance, and in fact erroneously believe yourself to be knowledgeable, you are in a state worse than ignorance. You only have beliefs, but you think they are knowledge. This is to say, you are guilty of magical thinking. And that is the essence of religion.
Hence why I say, religion and science are the same thing at core - its all belief. Adherents to each believe they have knowledge, but this belief is without proof. In a way scientists are worse as they are convinced they do have the truth, and are determined to righteously inflict their truths on everyone else! They are far from humble. Its pretty irritating!
Science and religion are belief systems and therefore share some commonalities but the radical difference is that science is based on testable hypothesis, whereas religion is just religion.
To say they are "absolutely equivalent" is a massive stretch.
Worth pointing out that there was an important caveat that the GP included... "Science... BASED ON TRUST AND WITHOUT PERSONAL VERIFICATION is absolutely equivalent to religion."
People don't trust science at random just because a book says trust science.
They trust science because they drive in a car, can video chat across the world, can play games with their friends on a screen, have devices that cook for them, automatically clean for them, etc.
You don't need to verify quantum theory to understand that you have a computer in front of you.
I think you're confusing "trust" with "belief". Trust (and reputation) is the foundation of human society and doesn't have to be related to religion. You get on a plane based on trust in the science and engineering that makes them fly, not because you personally verified every single component. Personal verification simply doesn't scale.
There is a big difference between something being able to be tested to see if it is actually true and something that is impossible to test.
Want to understand and test the veracity of some theories on electricity, gravity, medicine, etc, you can ! And a lot of those can be even tested at home with simple experiment. You can sometimes even find something new, or that one theory is wrong.
Want to test if god exists ? If heaven or hell exists ? If following some rules will grant you access to heaven ? You can't. There is no experiment that you can replicate that will prove any of those claims. You can try to find your own, in many way is is also scientific, but there is many religions and people have been trying to prove many of those theories for eons without any advancement.
Comparing science and the belief in scientific theories as similar to a religious faith is just wrong if you stop and think about it for more than 5 minutes.
Like any student, I did basic chemistry and physics and we tested various claims in the lab.
Nobody personally tests all claims, even professional scientists have to accept some prior claims until they have some reason to believe they're incorrect.
Trust is necessary for science to extend beyond the efforts of an individual, but trust isn't the same thing as faith.
> has anyone here ever used an electron microscope?
I am not a scientist, but yes. It’s not that hard to directly access most scientific tools. Verification takes effort, but random verification should reasonably give you confidence and can be a fun project on it’s own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVbdbVhzcM4
You really cannot trust what is presented on a screen. There really is no equivalent to personally testing science or any thesis personally. You will be illuminated, rather than falsely believing you 'know', when all you know is a story.
That is an example of an experiment. If that experiment reveals some truth then it should be repeatable. If it isn't repeatable it isn't going to be considered always true and has no particular value. Videos like this are made all the time for marketing, media, entertainment purposes. Anti-science propagandists make videos like this all the time - but they aren't accepted because they aren't typically repeatable or filled with flaws.
We trust the process because the process bears fruit - computers, cars, power, electricity, cell phones, cures of disease, antibiotics, etc. We experience all of these things daily. Now black holes and hawking radiation? Perhaps these things are a bit harder and require leaps of faith - but that is reality in a specialized modern society.
You trust the car mechanic to know what's wrong, although sometimes you encounter a fraud who will lie to make more money. That doesn't make all mechanics bad.
That video is making the false claim that individual aspects of a video can’t be independently falsified. A simple example is to track down the original referenced paper. Another is knowing that at the time the video was created, VFX wasn’t good enough to fake the shot. That’s not verification of say the amount of effort involved, as they could be scamming their backers or whatnot. But, it does demonstrate the difference between being skeptical and a conspiracy theorist.
A skeptic looks for individual evidence to support every independent assertion, where a conspiracy theory is based on the assumption that individual truths are linked. Using multiple different takes to make a video is independent of the accuracy of the experiment. A trained crow would be able to fake what a crow learning to solve a puzzle does.
With all respect, I think you missed the point. I am talking about how information is presented to us, and how we are put in a position of having to accept whatever is presented despite not being presented any evidence. This is not a conspiracy, it is logic.
The video is saying that information is presented to us in such a way that it is impossible to know whether it is true or false. When you edit the shots and do not present a single continuous shot, you have disabled the audience's ability to discern for themselves. And even if we were presented with an uncut edit, with CGI technology being as good as it is, we still cannot be sure nowadays.
The effect of being presented with endless streams of information like this, throughout our lives, in school and on TV, is that our ability to be clear about what we know is overwhelmed. And our nature is that we accept it all. We have been trained to sit back and accept whatever we are told. What's irritating to me is that we also have the front to call that 'knowledge'. When we see something like the crow 'science' in that film, we think we know. But we do not. We have the illusion of knowledge, but in reality we are in the dark. Without the deconstruction of that film, I think most would watch this and accept this as true.
This is a state worse than ignorance. At least an ignorant person knows they do not 'know'. Thinking you 'know' when you do not, is actually negative knowledge - its worse than ignorance.
When you reflect on this, you will see that this the default means of receiving information. We sit back and let the news/the scientists/whoever make a bunch of claims. And most will accept all these by default. Simply because its on TV! And everyone thinks they are cleverer that that... whilst having verified nothing!
> with CGI technology being as good as it is, we still cannot be sure nowadays.
CGI is still extremely limited. There is an ever expanding list of things that can be reasonably faked, but high definition turbulent flows for example are not one of them.
Now you personally may simply not know where that line is, but that doesn’t mean nobody does. Which is my point, your personal level of ignorance isn’t universal. Science is still surprisingly accessible, learning and verifying say thermodynamics can give you more confidence about say global warming than simple blind trust.
The same is true of a great many spurious claims from say kickstarts that can’t work as advertised. Which means a slick video on it’s own isn’t enough.
PS: I don’t mean for this as a personal attack, more a suggestion that if you find separating fact from fiction difficult there is a path forward.
You are engaging with my argument - it is not a personal attack, and I don't take it that way.
You say I'm ignorant. My response is that you are over-stating the level of your knowledge.
Do you really know what is possible with CGI? You may be an expert in the field, but can you really say that? Is it possible that the military, google, the Russians, or someone else, has an advance on what you believe to be the cutting edge?
The problem as I see it is that for most people a slick video IS enough. To accept all sorts of things that they have no evidence for. And they say 'they know' and that 'its true'.
I agree that for many people a slick video is enough. I personally devoted a significant chunk of my life to avoid that which simply isn’t tenable for most people. Still looking into the mechanics of say DNA deep doing to encounter chromatin means you can start to reason about what’s actually happening. Keep building a slightly more than superficial understanding of everything from Architecture to Quantum Mechanics and eventually you run out of major fields of study. It’s far from comprehensive and you really need to focus after that, but it’s something.
So sure, I don’t know the exact CGI line, but it’s something I know quite a lot about. Could a ‘deep fake’ style video effectively be good enough to be indistinguishable from someone actually talking? I suspect not yet, but I wouldn’t want to take the bet. But I know enough to realize the specifics around chaotic fluid simulation is a vastly higher hurdle due to the underlying computation involved.
Granted, drawing that line requires an understanding of what Military’s can pull off, which ultimately comes down to physics and economics. Now, I have actually done R&D for them so take of this what you will. It used to be military hardware had a huge leg up, but that’s far less the case today.
Getting to the point where you hear someone say “salt used to be worth as much as gold” and you think “that’s got to be BS” doesn’t take a deep understanding of history, just a supernatural understanding of a few related topics.
'no-one' verifying is too steep. Many people test many results from science all the time. I've personally followed and tested many papers because their claimed results were useful to me. Sometimes they aren't correct, or at least I am not able to verify them as such. More fundamental ideas are put to the test every time I design something, and they have held very strong in my experience. Equivocating religion with science by raising your standards so high they are impossible to meet in practice is disingenious, especially when one stands up to far more testing than the other. I agree that we need more critical thinking in this world, especially from the general public, but when you retreat to deciding nothing is verified because you have not seen or understood it directly and personally, you retreat in another direction which is just as useless and potentially harmful.
Thank you for your comment. Although you think you are arguing against me, I think you are supporting my point.
When you design and it works - that is what I am calling applying the scientific method personally. When you test other's papers you should have a 100% confirmation rate, unless you are making an error in methodology. It seem to me that you did not find that.
I'm not raising my standards high. When I have not personally verified something, I would say - that I haven't verified something. I just wouldn't say 'I know'. This a statement of reality - it is not a standards thing. There is no faith involved.
But most people, it seems to me, would take it all on trust and step out to say 'they know'. I would say their standard are too low. That they are acting on faith - they are believers.
That's the kind of argument that could make sense in a vacuum, but does not apply at all in practice.
Sure, _in theory_, I would be glad to know enough, to have enough time and to have enough money to verify every scientific theory since the dawn of times. In practice, it's been totally not scalable for a single person for about 500 years. _Careful trust_, with verification systems in place, is then the second best choice we can make.
The difference with religion lies in the fact that you do _not_ have to blindly accept everything. If you doubt a specific scientific theory, then by all means, put it to the test! But no, you won't be able to do that for science as a whole, not because "we're whining children who like conformting stories" but simply because of the blunt fact that our time here is limited.
This makes the mistake that science is there to be verified. It's not. It's there to be falsified.
We don't require verification of science above and beyond its contribution to our ability to predict and control the world. As the famous slightly cliched saying goes: all models are wrong, some models are useful.
There are some people who think that the point of science is to move us closer to truth. Some of those people are actual scientists, most of them are not.
When you test, and in one case you find something different to what is presented, what do you do?
Do you, blame yourself? Accept that everything else is true? Accept that nothing else is true?
My position is that I am happy to continue as before, but I won't overstate my case. I won't say 'I know' when I don't. I can accept that what is presented as true, may in fact be true, but I don't know it. I would be lying if I did.
So, when you say viruses, or atoms, or whatever exist, but you have not personally verified that, you should be clear that you do not know. You may think such-and-such is the case, but if you state something without personal verification, you run the risk of repeating a lie, and misleading the next person.
> When you test, and in one case you find something different to what is presented, what do you do?
First, you check for external factors which may have affect the test. If you can confirm you cannot reproduce past results, you may consider discussing with other people about your findings, and publishing if no one can find a reasonable explanation. In any case, you are happy because that's how science progresses.
> My position is that I am happy to continue as before, but I won't overstate my case. I won't say 'I know' when I don't. I can accept that what is presented as true, may in fact be true, but I don't know it. I would be lying if I did.
Sure, and that's the point of science: there is no truth, only better and better models. But we won't stop using the verb "to know" altogether.
Knowledge is not a binary thing (you know or you don't).
We sent Voyager probes through the solar system using Newton laws, although we know that general relativity is more accurate.
Knowledge is a spectrum. If you think that anything has a definitive answer, then I don't know what you are doing, but it is not science.
I did this myself. I took a very long ladder and went in space with the Voyager probes, then threw them very hard out of the solar system. That was quite fun actually.
Many people consider science like a religion. For example, many people don't understand evolution, they think some magic force gradually turned fishes into humans. No wonder it is sometimes put on the same level as creationism. But to be honest, it doesn't really matter. If you are not a scientist, faith is a shortcut that allows you to focus more on what matters more to you.
The difference is that you don't need faith. With enough motivation, you can probably get to see the virus on an election microscope. It is difficult. Just operating an election microscope is an art, and getting the necessary security clearances to work with deadly pathogens can be tricky. Almost no one does it, but sometimes, a crazy enough guy spends way too much time challenging a well established theory. Most of the times, the results are the same as what mainstream science says, but there are a few exceptions. This random poking keeps science in check.
The current pandemic is good at exposing the "non-faith" aspects of science. Covid is not airborne, ah, maybe it is, hydroxychloroquine works, no it doesn't, case fatality rate is 5%, no, 0.5%, no, 1%, it attacks the lungs, the nose, you keep immunity for a long time, no you don't, yes you do, etc... It is constantly changing, and this is science at work. A priest will not change his mind, he will not receive a new revision of the Bible every week. That rarely shown aspect is a bit unsettling to those with a faith-based view of science, but totally normal for those who are practicing.
Modern academia has its problems. We often talk about the "reproducibility crisis", but the simple fact it is widely recognized as a problem sets it apart from religion.
And BTW, while I am an atheist myself, I am not against religion. Religion offers stability and answers that science is unable to provide, and both can coexist.
One of the issues with teaching evolution is the brain-dead treatment that it has in films and television.
No, if you start with cellular life you will not get to humans every time. You can't even be sure you will get to fish or other animals with internal skeletons.
So many random things can be different at each step of the chain and there are so many steps, millions of them.
Have you seen evolution? What proved evolution to you personally?
I would expect that you were presented with Darwin and evolution at school and accepted. With no verification. You were propagandised. Just like creationists.
"With the virus, has anyone here ever used an electron microscope? Did you see a virus with it? Why do you think it is a virus? Etc etc - its all on faith."
> But no one - NO ONE - is verifying anything personally. No one is testing the claims. My point is that no one is personally verifying science
Each science article is extensively reviewed. First when you need to force yourself to read previous articles in the same field. Second by your boss and other members in the team. Third time by a peers system, and is not easy at all to pass. Sometimes must be corrected two or three times more. Often is rejected and sent to other journal, that will require the same process. Journals can ask for your laboratory notes and raw data and repeat the calculus by themselves. Is not unusual.
After an article is published anybody can point to something found incorrect on it.
So the truth is that science, the real science, is extensively reviewed. There are groups specially prone to fraud, and many articles are garbage, but are most the exception than the norm.
Or they are, they may just not be aware of it - the fact that billions of people have had MMR vaccines and we, as a species, have nearly eradicated the measles, mumps, and rubella in a great scientific experiment is downright awe inspiring. This is nothing like a religion and this type of backwards thinking is what holds us, as a species back. And, either way, it doesn’t matter - every scientific practice does not need to be repeated down to the minutia by every human being to be effective. I imagine most people taking HIV/AIDs suppressants have never looked through an electron microscope to verify exactly how they work, but that has nothing to do with anything.
Your analogy is, frankly, awful and way off the mark.
Edit, to add an example: a patient listening to a doctor who has set many broken bones about how the doctor is going to set that particular patient’s bones is nothing like a religious adherent listening to a priest who has never spoken to god about what god says and expects of the adherent... that’s just absurd.
Except science is not static like religion, it changes with new discoveries and explanations.
And, at high school level, basic science is tested and experiments are repeated.
So at the very least, some people learn proper scientific thinking, while others just learn to repeat "facts".
In contrast, everything that religion is, is just memorization of some old ideas, and treating personal anecdotes and made up stories like they are statistically significant data.
As far as viruses are concerned: when washing your hands can keep diseases at bay, that's good enough for me.
Then you study DNA at school, you experiment a bit with drosophila, you read about Mendel and evolution, and it makes sense, doesn't it? It isn't faith, it well calculated trust.
> Science is absolutely equivalent to religion
And that's why we see people smitten by lightning every day.
> Science, as we do it, ie based on trust and without personal verification, is absolutely equivalent to religion.
We call it Social Constructionism. It's the basis of all knowledge in society. Whether a concept exists or whether it's believed to be true does not necessarily have anything connected to an objective reality, all you need is making it believable (different groups of people and different societies have different standards on what qualifies as believable). Demonstrating it by direct observation using the scientific method can achieve this goal, creating a mythology or writing a textbook can do it as well. At the end of the day, you must start from an existing concept and assume it is true. Theoretically, You can start from simple and self-evident concepts and derive everything from first principles. However, in a modern society, the existing body of knowledge is too large for any individual to independently verify and too useful to refuse. Even the verification of the simplest fact can be non-obvious and expensive. Thus, we assume they're true without verification. And often, what we have accepted are not even technically accurate.
Now, I'm not interested in discussing any particular issues in the thread, but I'd like to use this chance to talk about my pet theory on the psychology of conspiracy theories... An interesting thought exercise: Consider the shape of the Earth. Now, design a physics experiment to provide empirical evidence for a spherical Earth, preferably also it's rotation. Requirements: This should be practical within the ability of a single individual, and should be as easy as possible. Only minimum pre-existing concepts should be used. The result should be as obvious and unambiguous as possible without too much interpretation. It should be able to defend itself from any challenge on its technical inaccuracy or alternative models... I think it's actually a non-obvious problem. It's amazing how much domain-specific knowledge it requires. Flat Earth conspiracy theorists have cherry-picked numerous arguments to support their positions, just to name a few...
* Bedford Level Experiment. A number of sticks were placed in an 6-mile uninterrupted straight line. Optical observations were made. Experiment failed to detect any curvature, or that the data showed the curvature was not outward, but inward. Many modern versions by Flat Earthers can be found in YouTube videos, often on lakes or sea - objects and buildings well beyond the horizon can be seen by telescopic lens. Laser beams have been detected 15 kilometers apart, etc. Why? Atmospheric refraction. After atmospheric effects have been corrected, the data will definitely show that the Earth is indeed a sphere. But from now, to interpret the data, you suddenly need a model of atmospheric optics, which is far from obvious and requires many additional concepts. Then, consider the cost and difficulty of this naive experiment - For an individual, it's already high enough and unpractical for a city dweller. Thus, all optical experiments are doomed? Radio based observations are even trickier than optical observations.
* Foucault Pendulum. It's the most famous physics experiment to show the Earth's rotation, but the instability of the original, unpowered pendulum is notorious, even minor imperfection in mechanical construction or startup can create unwanted mode of oscillation, such as an elliptic oscillation which can totally mask the Earth's rotation. For powered pendulum, a careful and complicated mechanical analysis is needed to show that the pendulum has no preferred direction of swing,. Thus, Flat Earth advocates reject Foucault Pendulum as a valid experiment - any expected result is refuted as a coincidence or the result of the experimenter's biases.
* Gyroscope. An accurate and sensitive gyroscope, such as a Laser Ring Gyroscope, can sense the Earth's rotation. But gyroscope observations are rejected by Flat Earthers in general - the raw data output is noisy with random drifts and noise, aquisation of useful data heavily relies on algorithms and data processing. They argue that the algorithms can be biased to show a rotational Earth. Of course, it's not the case, but then you need to justify the entire subject of statistics and digital signal processing, good luck with that.
* Astronomic and Geodesic Measurements. Examples include observing the fixed stars and showing their variation in altitudes, or showing the sum of a triangle on Earth is greater than 180-degree, etc. Many of these experiments require an individual to travel great distances, many geodesic measurements also require accurate navigation, which can be disputed.
Of course, obvious experiments that produces strong evidences do exist, good candidates can be lunar ellipses, sun rise and sun set, timezones. But it's just a rhetorical question, I used the absurd example of Flat Earth to illustrate the point of non-obviousness of personal verification - indeed, many people who believe the Earth is a sphere have proposed these experiments to Flat Earthers, while making the mistake of not realizing their limitations, which in turns strengthens the beliefs of many Flat Earthers that "people are too brainwashed to see the truth". If we move away from Flat Earth and step into more advanced subjects, obviousness completely disappears, and only domain-specific knowledge remains, which are heavily dependent upon preexisting results.
In my opinion, it's how numerous conspiracy theories are created. The conspiracy theorists will simply tell you: why do you assume they're true? It's entirely possible that everything you know is false. And all the gaps in your accepted knowledge can be exploited by them to make this point. And ultimately, you may come to the conclusion that the entire body scientific knowledge is a hoax. Then, one may ask, how can people build anything in engineering? The conspiracy theorist will tell you, the truths are carefully and systematic distorted in a way that appears to be self-consistent, enough for some applications, but it's distorted enough to kill truth. And since any pre-existing results couldn't be trusted and one is unable to derive or verify anything from first principles due to limited time and resources, science is hence rejected.
Conclusion: The theoretical and epistemological foundation of many conspiracy theories are the equivalent of Reflection on Trusting Trust - they claim the vast majority of knowledge is manipulated for malicious purposes, in the same way that the hypothetical attack by Ken Thompson claims one's compiler could be backdoored and no program in one's computer can be trusted.
> We call it Social Constructionism. It's the basis of all knowledge in society.
I object already! Knowledge does not reside in society. A library cannot know, nor can a computer. Knowledge that state that a man or woman over something in the objective world and can be objectively confirmed. You and I can know. It is not a societal exercise.
You raise the flat earth. And you say:
"I used the absurd example of Flat Earth to illustrate the point of non-obviousness of personal verification"
Well, having given a bunch of detailed examples to show why it is not possible to prove a spherical earth, why do you call it an 'absurd' theory? How was the earth being a sphere proven to you? You are supporting my point that people believe they know but are in error. Belief has no part in knowledge.
I wouldn't object to you saying 'I believe the earth is spherical', or 'my hypothesis is that the earth is a sphere', or that 'a sphere is the best theory to explain the movement of the planets'. All good. But to say 'you know', when you were only taught and shown imagery on a TV - that's overstepping things!
Did you 'know' that the film 'Independence Day' was true too, seeing as you saw that on TV? Or did you know it was false, because someone told you it was fiction. Why are you happy to assume film images are false, but news images are true?
> I object already! Knowledge does not reside in society. [...] You and I can know. It is not a societal exercise.
Knowledge may or may not reside in society, but all practical effects and consequences of knowledge reside in society. A concept does not exist in an abstract and metaphysical world where you can go and find. And it's not possible to develop any concept, including scientific concepts, without social interactions. Thus, some (not all) Social Constructionists believe the process of scientific investigation is largely a societal exercise, and I don't find it's an unreasonable argument (I didn't say I agree, I say it's not unreasonable). For example, when one use the language of math to describe the physical phenomenon, some will represent it in terms of vectors, others will show it using complex numbers, or alternatively explaining it by a matrix. In practical, all are valid and useful, but their mental pictures are different. These concepts only exist in a society (an interesting article on this issue is Would Aliens Understand Lambda Calculus? [0]). Of course, if experimental physics is something to be accepted, it must explain observed phenomena and makes predictions. But how you exactly imagine the concept of "force" (or even this concept itself) and how you describe it in language depends on the history and culture of your society. Thus, I think it's fair to say that societal exercises are at least one part of any scientific investigations.
> Well, having given a bunch of detailed examples to show why it is not possible to prove a spherical earth, why do you call it an 'absurd' theory?
First, I didn't show it is impossible to prove a spherical Earth. I simply showed examples that some experiments are not as "obvious" as many have thought, and there exists practical problems. I also showed how these problems can be fixed and a spherical Earth can be demonstrated, by taking additional phenomena or concepts into accounts, which makes the experiment more difficult and non-obvious. But just because you cannot solve a problem for once doesn't mean the problem is impossible to solve. Speaking of atmospheric refraction, you can repeat the experiment in different time of the day, in different seasons, or try adjusting the heights of the objects, and you'll find strong evidences of atmospheric refraction, and how Flat Earth results are experimental errors.
> why do you call it an 'absurd' theory?
As I already mentioned in the original comment, arguments by Flat Earth advocates are 100% cherry-picked. They say the experiments are unable show a spherical Earth, not because they're serious experimenters, but that other experiments or additional concepts that would show a spherical Earth are intentionally ignored. For example, under some conditions, optical observations can show a spherical Earth, but it's not published by Flat Earthers. On the other hand, results show a flat Earth is published as a definite conclusion, and the concept of atmospheric refraction is rejected for being unnecessary and too complicated. However, if I use the same standard, I, too, can publish a single spherical Earth result and call it the definite conclusion, but this time, Flat Earthers will suddenly start rejecting my results on the basis of atmospheric refraction! Also, suggestions of improvement of the experiment that would clarify the problem will be intentionally ignored.
Society doesn't have knowledge. Libraries and universities do not have knowledge. Books do not have knowledge. Those are inanimate objects or concepts. They are not living men and women.
The only place knowledge resides in the minds of individual people.
In my view, you are making a category error to subsume your individual understanding, that no one else can access, into some concept called 'society'. There is no hive mind, no borg, no tangible collective consciousness. There are conceptual artefacts we all interact with, and all interpret in similar ways in our individual consciousness. We all know what a 'tree' is for example. These are common linguistic named 'tokens' that we use to interact with others. I say 'tree' and you understand me. But the concept of 'tree' only exists in our minds.
We discuss things in the objective world with others and that use concepts such as 'society' to describe part of that objective world. Our exchange of concepts does not make those concepts real in themselves. They are only real or animated in the mind of an individual - in you or I. They have no life of their own.
To treat 'society' as a real thing - as a sort of ultra-human - is to mistake the map for the terrain. On a map a group of people may be interpreted as a 'collection' or a 'society'. But that is just a concept to navigate the map at a certain resolution. The 'society' concept only resides in the mind of the individual looking at the map - its not actually a real thing. This can be confirmed as other individuals can use a different mental maps to successfully navigate the terrain - eg they may see a collection of individuals as a collection of individuals.
It's incorrect to say that algebra was from Arabia or middle-east. Mathematics, science, medicine etc travelled from India to Arabia. During their trade with India, Sanskrit works were translated by arabs. And during their european conquest, these arabic works travelled to europe
> At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.
Oof, that's a handicap. I never knew of this strain of thought until now. It's not unreasonable until you accept the failure of theodicy (or observe the long-term consequences).
Being a people of the book can get you far, but at some point you need to stop being a people of the book, and become a people of all books.
I just love facts like this: Although Spain is hardly an intellectual superpower, it translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years.
The links to the UN report seems to check out, but on the other hand I've heart that publishing is not a very lucrative business in Arabia and most translations are fan translations
It also has to do with translations in the Arab world being made into Modern Standard Arabic, a somewhat artificial language that is totally different from the local dialect people actually speak. Arabs don't want to read books in MSA just like younger generations of Greeks don't want to read books in katharevousa.
And in the Maghreb, French has become established as the language of literature and magazines, so those peoples are doubly aloof from MSA.
> Sunnis embraced al-Ghazali as the winner of the debate with the Hellenistic rationalists
Let's assume it is true and Sunnis followed Ghazali and stopped thinking, pondering and doing research work but what about Shias and other factions of it? Why did not they produce something amazing in science? One can't blame Ghazali for all the mess, especially when he was not followed by all Islamic sects. I will not blame Islam or Quran either. It is something else, probably some kind of excuse or laziness. I wanted to say that the "Hunger for Heaven" might have made them not to use brains but then I see non practising and liberal/modernist Muslims, they did not do anything remarkable either.
I guess it is a culture, some kind of viral disease like thought that propagated in entire Muslim world and it affected regardless of someone is practising Muslim or not. Being a Pakistani muslim I observe that people have no interest of asking questions, they never ask questions. They accept things as it is which is quite irritating. They just accept things as a "gift of God" and prefer to move on rather than finding out WHY is it around.
Not disputing you, just wanted to note that Shia Iran is doing far, far better than it's Sunni neighbors, which is even more impressive when you consider the kind of government they have and all those sanctions.
And while we Muslims undoubtedly carry the biggest blame for our demise- lets' not forget the west has real interest in keeping the status quo- a free thinking, rational government is fundamentally at odds with the fundamentalist dictators west has been supporting (e.g. in Saudi arabia) for past few centuries.
The problem with theorizing about such things is that, being untestable, it's very hard to distinguish between our own narrative biases and objectivity.
Maybe the golden age was a byproduct of imperialism. Not many naked imperialists out there anymore, but the arguments are easy enough to make. The US, The USSR... both with some stunning scientific achievements (eg nuclear physics, space travel, physics) achievements during their most imperial, post-war years. The British. The Dutch. The Chinese. The Mongol empire(s) were pretty intellectually advanced.
Maybe it was multiculturalism. Circa 8-13th centuries, most muslim countries were pretty diverse. They had muslim leadership, but the plurality was still Christian, Zoroastrian and such.
Maybe it was capitalism. Muslims were traders, especially relative to medieval Christendom.
Maybe it was societal youth. Ibn Khaldun^, IMO greatest of the arab (and ethnically arab) golden age scholars, had a theories parsimonious with this.
Maybe it was "the flame of western civilization." As the article states, they did inherit the post Byzantine world of Greek culture which passed through roman hands from the Greeks. The Greeks themselves inherited it from the Persians, so maybe it's the flame of Persian civilization, or even back to Sumerians if you like your narratives grand.
Maybe religion. Quranic culture requires literacy, and a theological education was common to nearly all of those great scholars.
Maybe it was conquest. The national confidence of a conquering nation.
I don't see a way to pick one idea from another. History is not deterministic. We can reflect though, that Ibn Khaldun is the most noteworthy originator of the (now very western) idea that history does have a logic of this kind.
^Genuinely a forerunner to Smith, Marx & such. A lot of Scottish enlightenment may have been catalyzed by the translation of his "Muqdima."
So that's a very good point. The 'rise of Arabic Science' was totally consistent with conquest.
It seems there's a lot of hubris in Science, just like Imperialism, Art, etc. - and you need a lot of 'excess wealth' to delve into things that are not 'subsistence'.
The Renaissance probably would not have happened without the concentration of wealth in Venice and nearby areas. I mean who on Earth is going to pay for those weird/crazy instruments to be made and for creators full time to come up with this insane 'symphonic' concoctions. We take it for granted now but what happened was a miracle, and that's just in music.
My point is that any such theory is untestable, and we're good at convincing ourselves of "truths" that appeal to us. A 19th century nationalist would have liked your first sentence. A 19th century marxist would have liked your second and third one.
Any one of them can be challenged with counterexamples. EG, a great modern cognate to Venetian lords and bishops pouring money into prestige projects are the gulf Emirs. Yet...
How would you go about using the historical record to determine that conquest leads to a scientifically advanced culture? How would you formulate the thesis?
I want to point out that the concept of falsifiability, largely came around to distinguish between objective & scientific thought and the above.
The West German Wirtschaftswunder? The rise of South Korea? Finland? None needed war or imperialism, actually it was the opposite - peace and stability. There were these nations and people - and once the barriers like external or internal suppression or conflict were removed, they could make large strides.
Why does the article focus on "Arabic"? I think "Islamic" or "Muslim" would be a better term as large percentage of scientists and philosophers of the time were not Arabs but of Persian, Moore, Turkic origin.
> A preliminary caution must be noted about both parts of the term “Arabic science.” This is, first, because the scientists discussed here were not all Arab Muslims. Indeed, most of the greatest thinkers of the era were not ethnically Arab. This is not surprising considering that, for several centuries throughout the Middle East, Muslims were a minority (a trend that only began to change at the end of the tenth century). The second caution about “Arabic science” is that it was not science as we are familiar with it today. Pre-modern science, while not blind to utility, sought knowledge primarily in order to understand philosophical questions concerned with meaning, being, the good, and so on. Modern science, by contrast, grew out of a revolution in thought that reoriented politics around individual comfort through the mastery of nature. Modern science dismisses ancient metaphysical questions as (to borrow Francis Bacon’s words) the pursuit of pleasure and vanity. Whatever modern science owes to Arabic science, the intellectual activity of the medieval Islamic world was not of the same kind as the European scientific revolution, which came after a radical break from ancient natural philosophy. Indeed, even though we use the term “science” for convenience, it is important to remember that this word was not coined until the nineteenth century; the closest word in Arabic — ilm — means “knowledge,” and not necessarily that of the natural world.
> Still, there are two reasons why it makes sense to refer to scientific activity of the Golden Age as Arabic. The first is that most of the philosophical and scientific work at the time was eventually translated into Arabic, which became the language of most scholars in the region, regardless of ethnicity or religious background. And second, the alternatives — “Middle Eastern science” or “Islamic science” — are even less accurate. This is in part because very little is known about the personal backgrounds of these thinkers. But it is also because of another caution we must keep in mind about this subject, which ought to be footnoted to every broad assertion made about the Golden Age: surprisingly little is known for certain even about the social and historical context of this era. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, a now-retired professor of the history of Arabic science who taught at Harvard, described his field to the New York Times in 2001 as one that “hasn’t even begun yet.”
It's discussed in the article. Look for "A preliminary caution must be noted about both parts of the term “Arabic science.”" (and read the 2 paragraphs after it)
Start with Algorithms named after a persiaan scientist called Alkhawarizmi. He did write in arabic though, so similar to einstein writing in english rather than german.
Short answer to the title: "With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life"
My opinion on the matter is that, in the islamic world, religious careers are more socially rewarding than scientific ones. Thus the best minds seeking a good social position go the religious studies instead. The idea of science is also not really important to a lot of muslims, who views their holy book as a revelation that explained the world already.
I'm from a Muslim country and now living in the West: and I can say that this is incorrect. Generally speaking where I am from, the best minds go to medicine, the next best to engineering and law, and the leftovers go to the military / religious study.
The failure of those best minds to produce results is an artifact of non-reason based education (in my country there was a huge emphasis on rote learning) and a lack of institutional support.
My friends in the West from other Muslim countries have corroborated this. It's always the bottom tier of students or the particularly devout that end up in the clergy.
My parents immigrated from Syria, and I lived there for a few years. What you describe is precisely how the educational system works, apparently by design; oppressive regimes don’t want smart people questioning certain platitudes about the proper relationship between rulers and those over whom they rule.
Ironically, a more “originalist” reading of primary Islamic texts would be more politically liberal than rulings which were issued centuries after the death of Muhammad -- these later rulings severely restricted the conditions under which people could rebel against their rulers.
Later, clergy aligned with the rulers, such as Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, took an even more absolutist position which made any public criticism against rulers a form of rebellion which is punishable by death.
These perversions are, of course, a failure of the clergy. But they have been set up to fail by the political regimes which designed these systems, as well as by their societies which reinforce and legitimize the intellectual caste system.
I suspect many people conflate scholarship with clergy because that was the way things worked in the middle ages in Europe: if you wanted to have enough time for scholarly pursuits the clergy was probably the best place to be. Once it became possible to make a career as a scientist this practice changed but the association between clergy and scholarship still lives in the public perception.
This definitely used to be true, but I don't think it survived colonialism. Nowadays as kids are growing up, there are pretty much two paths: secular (in a manner of speaking) Western style schools, or traditional madrassas (not dissimilar to pre-colonial schools in the region). At least in my middle class socio-economic circles, people who undertook exculsively religious study (as opposed to studying it on the side with western education) were looked at with derision.
The concept definitely lives on in places like Jesuit educational institutions, one of which I attended for 6 years in the Netherlands [1]. These are not religious schools, they are schools started by people from a religious group which had the odd effect of several of my teachers being priests teaching mathematics, classical and modern languages, physics, etc. The only religious aspect of the school was that the school year was opened and closed in church with the French teacher leading the sermon, the Latin teacher playing the organ, etc.
What the article seems to notice is that some parts of a civilization succeed to institutionalize themselves (and gain momentum over others thanks to it) and some don't.
In a very sketchy way:
- you may have excellent scientists and prestige for science, but no institutional structure/ecosystem to support, promote and benefit from it;
- you may have lousy clergy but a well-working institution/structure of religion that helps with its prominence over society.
>My opinion on the matter is that, in the islamic world, religious careers are more socially rewarding than scientific ones. Thus the best minds seeking a good social position go the religious studies instead. The idea of science is also not really important to a lot of muslims, who views their holy book as a revelation that explained the world already.
Not really, Theological studies doesn't take students from the top percentages, but medicine, law and engineering do. Unfortunately pure mathematics and physics are not popular and top students do not pick these subjects. At least in some of the majority Muslim countries I am familiar with.
I'm from an arab country and half of my family studied Math/Physics in university. My aunts (3 of them) either teach physics or have a phd in Maths. Same on my father's side.
In fact, you would be considered a loser if you didn't have a degree or knew maths really well in my family. Which I don't agree with.
The problem in the arab world is more political, with a bunch of people staying in power and using media and force to stay in power. It also doesn't help that the west cry for more democracy but propels and supports those same dictators to stay in power to help their interests.
I recall reading somewhere, the reason the Arab world turned away from science was when a particular Caliph came to power and gave the order to destroy any material that wasn't mentioned in the Quran.
In my opinion such developments have less to do with turning to or turning away from "science" and such, but more with the general economy.
Western Europe developed into an economic powerhouse during that time, both through population growth and later and concurrent the industrial revolution.
That didn't happen in the islamic world (and many third world countries), or only "under the boot" of the Europeans.
So now the lesser developed countries are catching up in terms of population numbers but lagging in terms of wealth. And with that, in their investments in science.
Something to remark on: Abdus Salam (the Pakistani Nobel Physics laureate mentioned near the top) and Steven Weinberg (quoted two sentences later as saying he hasn't read anything worthwhile from a physicist working in a Muslim country) collaborated together on the work that won them that same nobel prize (Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model of electroweak interaction).
Abdus Salam belonged to a school/sect of Islam that encourages open debate and promotes a scientific interpretation of the Quran.
"Salam was an Ahmadi Muslim, who saw his religion as a fundamental part of his scientific work.
...
In 1974, the Pakistan parliament made the Second Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan that declared Ahmadi to be non-Muslim. In protest, Salam left Pakistan for London." [0]
Thanks for that extra info. I'm wondering if Weinberg's comment may in fact have been in support of Salam and his (possibly frustrated) experiences in Pakistan, rather than in contradiction of it. I think it would have been a fruitful avenue for the article to pursue.
"My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading"
Unfortunately the following happened according to Wikipedia:
"The epitaph on his tomb initially read "First Muslim Nobel Laureate". The Pakistani government removed "Muslim" and left only his name on the headstone. They are the only nation to officially declare that Ahmadis are non-Muslim."
> Pre-modern science, while not blind to utility, sought knowledge primarily in order to understand philosophical questions concerned with meaning, being, the good, and so on. Modern science, by contrast, grew out of a revolution in thought that reoriented politics around individual comfort through the mastery of nature. Modern science dismisses ancient metaphysical questions as (to borrow Francis Bacon’s words) the pursuit of pleasure and vanity.
Curious, because I think to a pre-modern philosopher the pursuit of knowledge and mastery is itself the pursuit of vanity & pleasure.
After all, (pace Aubrey de Grey) all men will some day die, no matter how much knowledge they have or what levels of technological control over the natural world they achieve.
Hard to put my finger on why this feels off. The title 'Arabic World' is strange, it's usually the "Arab world" unless they're referring to the regions where Arabic is spoken.
It then gives statistics for Iran and Turkey, neither of which are significantly Arabic speaking countries, by which point you realise they're conflating ethnic-linguistic groups with the most region's most popular religion.
So by the time it's quoting Bernard Lewis this feels like the old Zionist reductionist talking points you periodically hear from right wing conservatives bashing Islam. A quick search of the publication shows why this isn't an accident. "Islam has no tradition of separating politics and religion", well neither did Christianity, until it did.
This is not to say the state of education there is fine, nor can it be said people there are happy about it either. Every one of those countries have had nascent democracy movements crushed by their governments with the help of foreign backed interests and companies. We're supposed to buy that it's just Islam, please don't look at NSO Group and Finfisher cashing in on the strangulation of reform - reform led by, yes, students, academics and other such terrorist armies of the night.
Indeed the article starts off okay, but by the time it gets to the "Why Inquiry Failed in the Islamic World" section it rapidly turns into a dumpster fire.
The usual Western triumphalist brain farts in discussing the Islamic world are present:
* exaggerating the extent of separation of Church and State in Christianity.
* exaggerating the marginalization of non-Muslim minorities in medieval Muslim societies and framing it as unique while completely ignoring the treatment of non-Christian minorities in Christian societies in the same period (hint: not that great)
* implying that Muslim success are a fluke and it's failures reflect the true nature of Islam
You know in 1980 some blowhard could have surveyed the world's Catholic countries and noted how many of them were under authoritarian regimes. Said blowhard could have then wrote a long essay detailing the authoritarian history and nature of the Catholic Church, linking it to present political conditions. He could then contrast it with the nature of Protestantism and success of Protestant nations, explain away France as an outlier to due to lingering Huguenot influence.
"From Latin America to Spain & Portugal to the Philippines the unquestioning obedience to an unaccountable organization in spiritual matters has primed the Catholic world for predisposition to dictatorship" he would solemnly declare. "Contrast this with the marketplace of ideas that exists in the Protestant sphere and the idea of the worshiper having a direct relationship to God rather than an intermediating hierarchy".
You get my point.
From Wikipedia: "In science and philosophy, a just-so story is an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals."
Science flourished in Muslim lands until the devastating invasion of Mongols effectively destroyed the social and political networks that supported the “Golden Age”. Many families dedicated to learning migrated ahead of the Golden Horde to western parts of Muslim lands. The mystic poet Rumi is a famous example, and even got his name “Rumi” because his family migrated from Khurasan to Anatolia.
Based on that background, we know that the cause of the famous decline has little to do with religious doctrine. The Golden Horde of Mongols destroyed the Golden Age of Muslims. Simple enough.
West should count its lucky stars that Muslims took the brunt of the Mongol destruction.
Philosophy is mind hunger, an ambition of knowing that takes individuals to risky results like being depressed, isolated and poor. People content with religion, entertainment (social media, consumerism, etc.), or being pressured by their families/relatives to follow non-phylosophical behaviours of hard-workers and breadwinners won't feel the hunger, or will find a replacement for it.
An opportunity was missed to mention that al-Khwarizmi not only invented algebra but also is the namesake of the algorithm.
Another opportunity was missed to even breathe a word about the Crusades whatsoever.
Finally even I was insulted to hear about "Avicenna, also known as Ibn-Sina." By those who knew him best and first, he was known as Ibn-Sina, but he also later became known to faraway mispronouncers and romanizers as Avicenna.
Well, it is not as if other regions of the world, including Europe, did not have their own massive disasters.
Vikings, Mongol attacks, Turkish attacks, the 30 Year War...
An interesting question why was Baghdad so unique that its loss led to disaster. Could it be that the rest of the Muslim world was, by this point in time, not very interested in science?
European science survived such events probably because of its polycentricity. There was no single point of failure.
Because Egypt was conquered by the Mamluks and Andalusia by the Spanish at the same time. There was no area under Muslim control that was not ruled by barbarians whose idea of hygiene was washing their posterior every time they crossed a river.
The Mongol invasion was a unique event in Eurasian history. They make every other invasion and conquest seem tame by comparison. If you have a choice of facing Macedon, Rome, Napoleon, Nazi Germany, the USSR or the Mongols never choose the Mongols.
It was the first and only time a single power could have destroyed all other civilizations and came very close to it. To the point where they managed to destroy both the Polish, Hungarian and Romanian crusader armies within days of each other, with minimum casualties and would have continued depopulating Europe to the English Channel if the Khan had not died and the majority of the army returned home for a civil war.
The reason Europeans aren't riding horses fighting a rear-guard action against the Aztec conquistadors is because the Mongol court liked silks and perfumes enough to not raze every city they conquered.
Exactly. Surprised this is barely mentioned in the article.
During the siege of Baghdad, the Mongols destroyed the Grand Library of Baghdad which contained countless precious historical documents and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy.[1]
To think these invaders are glorified today makes me sick. In my opinion, not only did only cause the decline of the Arabic world, but they also severely impacted the technological development of the world as a whole. Some of the works in the library were believed to be ancient manuscripts from Greek sources.
But was it medical science when the CDC advised people, very strongly, to not wear masks or that the virus coming out of Wuhan was of no concern to everyday Americans? How are people supposed to believe in capital 'S' science when our scientific institutions make claims based on their guts instead of just admitting they don't know (which is the only acceptable scientific answer when you can't back up a claim with reproducible experiments).
[EDIT]My point is, is the self-inflicted loss of trustworthiness not well earned by the CDC? When the CDC said repeatedly that masks would only make you catch the virus or that Americans shouldn't prepare or panic about the new virus, when that turned out to be either lies or decisions based on nothing approaching the rigor or science, why should people believe things have changed? How does the layperson understand that now the CDC is basing recommendations on 'S'cience?
Serious question, why should we be so concerned that they were wrong the first time?
You say
> admitting they don't know (which is the only acceptable scientific answer when you can't back up a claim with reproducible experiments).
But what kind of response is that really, when there's an infectious disease and the center for disease control tells the public "We have no clue what the appropriate response is, we're going to tell you in a couple months after we've done some reproducible experiments"?
On the contrary, the ONLY ethical way for the CDC to act in the face of an emerging (potential) crisis is recommendations based on the current beliefs of the organization (which may be incorrect as they are, as you say, "based on their guts") and updating them the moment more evidence comes available (Which they did. Repeatedly.)
So in fact, I would not say I've had a loss of trust but a gain of trust by an institution acting in a very rational manner throughout the pandemic.
>Serious question, why should we be so concerned that they were wrong the first time?
To properly calibrate how we treat their recommendations.
I'm most sympathetic to the CDC, because everyone spreading their message are con men. In the most classic of senses, literal con men. They tell me they have the must-be-believed scoop, up until they're found out. Then they have an excuse for why I was wrong for coming away from our interaction with the perception that their preliminary statements should be taken as seriously as I did. But now, this time, today, the have the real must-be-believed scoop that I can trust.
They knew that masks worked from the get go and openly admitted that their statements about masks being ineffective were driven by fears of shortages, not lack of data. This is why their statements were effectively "masks don't work unless you are a healthcare worker". Scientific organizations should not be issuing politically motivated or economically motivated statements; they should be stating the truth to the best of their ability. It's ok to put some spin on information to achieve results, but issuing knowingly false statements immediately shreds your credibility.
> Scientific organizations should not be issuing politically motivated or economically motivated statements
How is this political or economic? It was purely public health.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we thought we could trace and contain anybody with covid, thus ELIMINATING the virus. In this view, only healthcare workers need masks! If healthcare workers go without masks because every ordinary joe stocked up on masks and toilet paper, that means that healthcare workers get infected and become the spreaders, which is the opposite of "containing".
The original PR was something like "masks don't work unless it's an N95 mask and you wear it in a very specific way, and healthcare workers need those anyways so don't buy 'em". Yeah, I can agree it feels misleading now.
But in a world where we're trying to literally ELIMINATE the virus, it makes sense: Wearing a cloth mask near someone with the virus COULD get you infected, so you're better off not being in that situation in the first place.
Once it became clear that we couldn't just have everybody stay at home until the virus is gone, the CDC changed their recommendation to wearing cloth masks. This was about 2 weeks into "lockdowns", at the very very beginning of april.
I fail to see whats so bad about the CDC's recommendations. From the point of view of public health (again, that's what the CDC is. A public health agency), these recommendations make sense in context.
> At the beginning of the pandemic, we thought we could trace and contain anybody with covid, thus ELIMINATING the virus. In this view, only healthcare workers need masks! If healthcare workers go without masks because every ordinary joe stocked up on masks and toilet paper, that means that healthcare workers get infected and become the spreaders, which is the opposite of "containing".
Healthcare workers aren't getting masks through the same supply chains as regular people; they are getting them through hospitals. If it truly was the case that hospitals were being outbid for supplies by private entities, that is a commerce regulatory problem arguably out of scope of the CDC. The government should have bitten the bullet and passed a law to forcibly route material to hospitals and / or eminent domained existing stockpiles for sale by companies or individuals and given them to hospitals. It is not the CDC's job to handle supply chain management in these contexts. If the CDC would like to get involved, it should be encouraging people to give masks to health care workers because they work and because health care workers should take priority. This preserves their credibility and shifts the responsibility to act onto the entities that should be bearing it: the president and congress.
If covid-19 were containable, then average people don't need masks. This isn't new territory: we've contained infectious diseases before, like SARS and ebola, and average Joe didn't need a mask then, either.
The CDC (and frankly every major government in the world) believed that covid-19 could be contained, and that no major outbreak would happen inside their country. This was incorrect. But if you hold this assumption, the CDC made the correct recommendation: N95 masks, properly worn, are the masks that protect against covid-19, and average people don't need them.
If covid-19 were contained why would there be a mask shortage? Transmission in the general population seems necessary to cause a nationwide shortage in first place.
>The CDC (and frankly every major government in the world) believed that covid-19 could be contained
There's plenty of photos from asian countries where mask use was immediate, wide spread, and effective.
We are now inching towards the political reality of the situation, but that is essentially what the CDC and various hospitals tried to do.
New York went to the federal government to get masks and was told to pound sand. They then ordered them from Canada and were once again impeded by the federal government[1]. So now you are in a situation where your the hospital supply chain is now gone, and you are forced to buy masks for medical workers in the marketplace, and you are now facing the real possibility that the general public may buy up all the masks before they can contain and eliminate the virus.
The CDC may have been acting in it's own best interest in the face of a federal branch who refused to believe that the virus was a big issue. If the CDC truly believed they had time to contain and eliminate the virus, I can see how telling people to not stock up on masks may have been a good idea at the time.
If you insist I'm happy to go hunting for studies, but let's remember that the CDC from the start was advocating that people reserve masks for healthcare workers. If they didn't believe that masks worked, why would they do that?
I do insist. You're making the claim that WHO / CDC knew that masks work. So, let's see the evidence that you think they had.
> If they didn't believe that masks worked, why would they do that?
Because a healthcare professional stuck in a room with symptomatic people is a different situation to a member of the public walking around.
Especially because HCPs are trained to use masks, they use them in combination with other PPE and routine handwashing; their PPE is made to standards and tested to make sure it complies with those standards; HCPs are audited on their use of handwashing and PPE.
> On the contrary, the ONLY ethical way for the CDC to act in the face of an emerging (potential) crisis is recommendations based on the current beliefs of the organization
This is debatable, but in any case, is it excusable for the CDC to hold beliefs that are so badly wrong in the first place? Especially in the face of evidence from the rest of the world?
I think this, again, stems from a general misunderstanding of what science is. Science is a method of drawing conclusions about data. Sometimes, those initial conclusions can be misguided by incomplete data. The world discovered this virus less than a year ago. It takes some time to determine the different transmission vectors and risk factors associated with each. The CDC did not make a claim based on their "guts". The initial stance on masks was determined for a few reasons:
1) People often don't use masks properly. They often touch their masks and their faces. The initial thinking was that the virus spread largely through touching contaminated surfaces.
2) Mask mandates are difficult (as we are seeing now) and significant portions of the population refusing to use masks undercuts their efficacy.
3) There was a shortage of PPE when the pandemic started. The CDC and NHS didn't want to find themselves in a situation where hospitals had a hard time procuring masks because scared citizens hoarded the supply.
The anti-science issue in the US appears to have a few prongs to it. There has been a growing distrust of science for quite some time with the anti-vax and flat earth movements. I'm not sure what caused it, but it sadly appears to be a growing trend. Also, as we are seeing with the Coronavirus response, a lot of people seem to misunderstand that scientific consensus can change as new data is collected.
1) sounds like an argument looked for after the fact. Masks were recommended initially especially because they stop you from touching your face and would train you not to do so.
2) doesn't make sense to me: because masks aren't perfect and some people refusing to wear masks makes them less efficient they'd advise to not wear masks at all?
3) is a political stance, not a scientific one.
Would people have reacted differently to masks if they weren't intentionally mislead on so many levels about Covid-19 in general (the WHO losing a lot of credibility) and the efficacy of masks? When you have people who are skeptical of the government, and the government lies to them and gets caught, won't that make them even more skeptical of whatever the government says next?
I don't think there ever was a scientific consensus that masks aren't effective against airborne diseases. There was a political decision, and that can change any time, but it has nothing to do with data collection or the scientific method.
1) No, quite the opposite. It was one of the reasons cited by the CDC as to why they originally did not support widespread face mask use.
2) This ties into the fact that PPE supplies were low when the pandemic started. They did not want to declare a mask ordinance while hospitals were still having a difficult time sourcing PPE themselves. The fact that many people would either be unable to purchase masks or be unwilling to participate made it so that they would just be working against themselves at a time when supply management was critical.
3) Is sociology not a science? It is a matter of public policy. Ensuring that healthcare professionals have access to PPE is the prudent course of action when dealing with a pandemic.
>> I don't think there ever was a scientific consensus that masks aren't effective against airborne diseases. There was a political decision, and that can change any time, but it has nothing to do with data collection or the scientific method.
What are you even talking about? Mask use continues to be studied widely[1]
There's two items at issue: science as a set of methodologies for understanding nature, and "Science" as a cultural totem.
As a set of methodologies, science is inherently skepticism, test, verify, etc. Nothing wrong with being wrong, it just means you gather more data and learn.
As a cultural totem, annoying liberals will say "science says" when they're clearly innumerate, and dumb conservatives will say "I don't trust them experts" when they clearly don't know better. The CDC making a mistake is a political misstep, rather than a step on the way to better understanding.
Western world is built upon modern science and technique, but the people are users, not thinkers.
Very few people understand science, even in tech. You have to play with physics first hand to consider how far we are and are far behind most humans are.
[0] research is funded by companies producing comfort devices or hidden infrastructure to sell to ignorant people. You cannot sell a physical principle or an engineering tool. So the society spreads itself from people with knowledge fueling the lives of a large mass of less knowledgeable.
The battle/alliance between science and religion swaps from one to the other regularly. We remember the alliance ending and the battles starting around people like Darwin and Galileo. I suspect this is more to do with religion, and science also, being used by people who want power. Any time you here someone talking about believing the science or proving something with a holy book, ignore them. Real science needs no belief, and real faith needs no proof.
Sorry you got downvoted, you highlight a real and critical discussion and your voice should be heard but I think framing it a little different may actually elicit discussion rather than downvotes. The reality is, there are soft sciences out there that we should really have the debate as to whether or not they truly qualify as a science. That does not mean that they are not worth pursuing and trying to find truth in, alchemy lead to chemistry, astrology led to astronomy. But along the way, we have had a lot of "science" that in their day where believed to be truths based on a less than scientific rigor. Phenology comes to mind as a shining example, and genetics bore out eugenics. There is a critical issue with mascaraing soft sciences, that have thin veils of rigor as scientific fact when the reality is that they are better relegated to philosophy. Many great philosophies have changed society so it's not like they are not valuable, but what is not valuable is mascaraing what amounts to a philosophy as scientific truth, because what happens is those that do not understand science and rigor throw the baby out with the bath water and assume that there are untruths in all sciences by seeing the examples of these soft sciences claim truths.
For note, I am not implying that gender identification is not an important subject to understand in our current society. Rather lets not pretend that it's research has the rigor of physics as it does damage to the hard sciences to do so. I personally am fine if we redefine gender to a contemporary term that was not traditionally used in the past and I am fine with deciding how we deal with it as a society based on it's identifying it more in the lineage of philosophy. My sole issue, is that calling these items science is leading to the effect we are now seeing.
People are downvoting you but you bring up a point that I see in some fringes. Basically the assertion is that “Science is a sign of white privilege”.
I mean I guess if from a certain perspective you see things and ignore the science going on in Japan, China and other places you might somehow twist interpretation to say that, but that assertion is very problematic when at the SAME TIME we want to get more women and minorities into STEM. This view does this goal a disservice.
I think the common lingo is that gender is what you identify as, and sex is what you biologically are (subject to change through sex-change operations).
Exect that "Gender" in relationship to any animal or conversation is used interchangeably with sex. While Gender-identity is the new age belief that your "Gender-identity" or gender for short, is a preference you can change (With or without sex change operations depending on your political view). The obfuscation of the word itself is a problem in discussions. I find it distastefull how people can 'identify as' male/female black/white. they are immutable characteristics that no one chose for. If you believe that humans can be tribal and racist but should rise above superficial judgement and look at the content of their character then wether or not you personally identify as certain characteristics should be a moot point.
> then wether or not you personally identify as certain characteristics should be a moot point
I quite agree, but the it's indisputable that these characteristics are enshrined in our culture and power structures every step of the way.
Gendered bathrooms, gendered application forms, gendered names, gendered clothing, and so on. If you "personally identify as certain characteristics" it's literally impossible for that to be a "moot point" because of how society is structured.
Which bathroom do you walk into? Will you be fired for wearing a dress when your boss sees you as a man? If you change your name to a feminine one, will people ignore it and continue to call you a masculine name? If get a new job and try to hide that you were "once a man", can you actually or will they force you to put your biological sex on the application form? If you are forced to put your biological sex on the application form, what if your new workplace outs you as "a man" to your coworkers despite you having a feminine name, a feminine appearance, and using the women's bathroom? When coworkers find out you are biologically a man but using the women's bathroom, will they ostracize you, call the police, or exact violence on you because you don't fit in their worldview of acceptable behavior?
These are real questions that matter to real people and you can't wave it away as "a moot point". Answering these questions, and more, is the entry point to gender studies.
>these characteristics are enshrined in our culture and power structures every step of the way.
In a way, yes. Because sex is the largest difference between human beings. Its importance is highlighted by doctors needing to know for better treatment, for social circles not being comfortable around people further away from your group. Bathrooms being a painpoint as it has deep roots in culture and history. Though the interesting thing about which bathroom to go to, it becomes irrelivant the moment you enter someone's home; there is only one or two to choose from and they are "Gender neutral" by design.
>Will you be fired for wearing a dress when your boss sees you as a man?
This is exactly my point, discrimination based on immutable characteristics is wrong. if your boss fires you because you're a man or sees you as a man, or makes judgements because you're a woman pretending to be a man is wrong by design because it is still based on immutable characterstics. Though dress code violation is such a grey area as it is not directly based on strong legal precedent.
>If you are forced to put your biological sex on the application form, what if your new workplace outs you as "a man"
"IF" you are forced to do so. I've never seen it be mandatory. unless you talk about exeptions to the rule. Like how some women's shelters only hire women. or gynecologists.
>will they ostracize you, call the police, or exact violence on you because you don't fit in their worldview of acceptable behavior?
Nonetheless, anti-discrimination laws aren't there to stop discrimination or stop people from breaking the law. They are there to put them on trial. Lots of people fall out of a certain worldview and have lost jobs and friends because of that. talk to any clean heroin addict and they'll tell you. These things certainly matter and should be discussed as you are so kind to do.
I guess my approach is more conservative when it comes to enacting change in how people are treating each other. I consider no solution better than a bad solution. as no solution at least lets people have the freedom to treat eachother with the respect that they might deserve.
I can buy toy car or lego technic for my daughter, both of which is me mismatching sex and gender. Sex is that she does not have penis. Gender is that lego technic and toy car are boy toys.
In contrast, my dog is getting dog toys as opposed to pink she-dog balls and black he-dog toys.
Gender studies is a very new thing, so I doubt you'd be hard pressed to find many who claimed it's been figured out. Though, I think what most gender researchers will agree on is there are more than two genders, and more variation in sex than a simplistic view of biology would make one think.
I struggle with the concept of gender because it appears to be akin to a ‘racialised theory of sex‘.
I’m male. My appearance, sense of dress, interests and attractions are my unique personality - I don’t think they come from a biologically inherent gender, nor do I think it’s socially progressive to promote the idea that they do or should.
Edit: Are you sure you didn’t downvote for ‘heretical opinion’ rather than actual content? Please explain, if not.
I think many gender studies point to how inherently difficult it is to separate biology, physiology and culture. And much of the issues come when those three things don't seem to line up. So much of the vitriol from all sides of the cultural debate seem to extend from, not necessarily the science of it, but how that should affect our policies and interactions with each other.
“Culture isn’t determined biologically (that’s a racist belief), nor does biology determine someone’s gender (and that’s a sexist one) - and any specific culture shouldn’t require individuals to conform to gendered roles in its service (that’s a human rights violation regarding basic individual freedom)” would be my response.
Sure, these things are hard to separate - the mistake is to think that means they’re mutually determined.
Perhaps one of the biggest risks to science is that it ceases to actually be "science" i.e the scientific method and way of thinking and body knowledge and instead becomes a political tool or excuse for various forms of social control or a dressed up pretense of science a person can get degrees in, possibly even calling itself a science, but isn't actually science at all in the traditional sense of the word.
Yes it disappointing to see so many Americans panicking over the disease when medical science tells us the infection fatality rate is likely under 0.35%.
And the NYE party I host is also made up of billionaires on average if Bezos shows up.
Also, 0.35% means that if everyone in the US contracts it that's a million dead people. And that's only from the disease.
Millions more will die because of the medical resources tied up with taking care of the sick and those who don't die. Arguably, more people will die because of the one person who takes up 20 days of ER resources and survives COVID than the person who shows up and dies of COVID on the first day.
Which is exactly what happened in the hotspots which were hit first and hard in Europe and North America.
An infection fatality rate of 0.35% means 500,000 deaths if half of Americans are infected. Not the end of civilization, but certainly something to take seriously.
The single worst aspect to America's Covid response was that what should have been a medical or scientific debate became politicized.
Yes that would be terrible, but the death rate is trending down in most areas (even those with minimal pandemic control measures) so I predict the final death toll will be under 500,000. For comparison purposes we lose about 600,000 per year to each of cancer and heart disease. The pandemic is bad and needs to be taken seriously but it's certainly not the end of our civilization.
The politicization of anything to do with public health is inevitable. Science can provide useful inputs, but ultimately the decisions have to be made by elected politicians. We live in a republic, not a technocracy.
Because there's going to be long-term harmful effects of the lockdowns too, that will be worse the longer they go on for. The real question is, why do people ignore that while making such a big deal of the long-term effects of the virus on survivors?
One is easier to grasp. Someone coughing the rest of their life is easier to visually see than someone fresh out of college who is now getting a job as a delivery driver and may never recover economically.
How many is many? What does the science tell us about the percentage of recovered patients who suffer long-term impairment?
Pandemic control measures such as mask wearing and social distancing can be helpful to "flatten the curve" on a temporary basis but are obviously not sustainable and won't be sufficient to eradicate the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic and will be with us essentially forever, even after a vaccine is developed. People need to think about what can work over longer time frames while objectively weighing both costs and benefits.
The link you cite is a very rough estimate of CFR as described in the paper. CFR varies tremendously based on the underlying demographics of the population and the treatment available - it's unclear why you focus on this metric. COVID-19 in the United States and other countries as well will be (if it isn't already) the 3rd leading cause of death. This is something that many people will change their behavior around, whether that is "panicking" or not is unclear from your original post.
However, if folks are willing to wear seat belts (although in the vast majority of trips they are useless) for a less likely cause of death, many will put on masks, avoided crowded indoor spaces and practice better hygiene for the 3rd leading cause of death. This will occur whether legally mandated or not.
It's not disappointing to see humans caring for others. There's a difference between "panicking over the disease" and wanting our elder people (for which the IFR is way over 0.35%) to be safe.
Notwithstanding the fact that this 0.35% cannot possibly be achieved if the health system collapses.
If "we" wanted our elder people to be safe we would take steps to actively protect them. So far that isn't happening, which is very disappointing. Look how New York governor Cuomo sent COVID-19 patients to nursing homes even though he knew it was risky. That caused the worst cluster of deaths in the US so far.
I think you can do some basic math yourself and calculate yourself how many deaths that will be in the US if say 70% of the population gets it. And then we haven’t even taken into account that the fatality rate would be much higher without proper hospital care for all that need it because all the hospitals are overwhelmed and there ain’t any ICU left.
Imagine trying to derail the discussion with unscientific appeals to emotion. Obviously no one is okay with extra deaths, so you're arguing against a strawman.
So far there have been about 218,000 American deaths. There is no scientific basis for your 1,148,700 number. The only way we could have prevented all of the American deaths would have been by completely sealing our borders back in December, but at the time no one realized how serious it was. We now know there was already widespread community transmission by January and at that point a high death toll became inevitable.
You quote a 0.35% death rate. Google says there are 328.2 million Americans. Do the math.
It's amusing for someone arguing "science" to be unable to multiple two fucking numbers.
You are saying 1,148,700 deaths is okay, that people are "panicking" for no reason. A 40% increase in death rate (the CDC says there were 2,813,503 deaths in 2019) seems like a pretty reasonable reason to "panic".
Trying to save a sixth of a Holocaust seems like decent public policy.
I didn't quote a 0.35% death rate. That represents a possible upper bound on IFR based on data so far. Even in a worst case scenario it is impossible for 100% of Americans to be infected. Your simplistic estimate is missing critical variables.
I never claimed that any number of deaths is "okay" so stop arguing in bad faith and putting words in my mouth. Panicking is irrational and never helpful. We need rational, science-based policies now more than ever.
Certainly we should save as many lives as possible, but we can't get tunnel vision and focus on COVID-19 to the exclusion of all else. The lockdowns also kill people. They die slowly from lack of medical care, depression, substance abuse, and suicide but in the end they're dead all the same. It's like trying to run a business by focusing entirely on revenue and ignoring costs.
Under 0.35% which is several times greater than the next comparable (the flu), and greater for more than 30% of the population due to age and pre-existing condition. Very few people dont have a personal stake in keeping the people they love alive (parents, spouses, children, siblings, friends, lovers, etc.)
The panic makes more sense if you consider the overwhelming majority of people are looking not just at their own age and pre existing condition but also realizing the people who enrich their lives are also at risk.
The "panic" framing is manipulative itself. It is an attempt to stigmatize people who consider the disease to be serious issue as emotional and scared as opposed to arguing with them.
Not sure about the United States but in my parts of the world (Eastern Europe) it has also transformed into a social- and political-differentiating issue, i.e. people of a certain social status and of certain political views tend to over-emphasise the seriousness of the virus and to paint the other side in all sorts of unflattering colours because, supposedly, this latter side doesn't take the virus as serious as they do.
I happen to share the social- and political-views of the first part of people I talked about, but I've started to very largely diverge when it came to how the virus should be handled. In late January - early February this year I certainly thought that the fatality rate would be around 3-4% (especially after the first images coming out of Wuhan), but as the disaster in Northern Italy and then Spain was unfolding and we were starting to learn more about it I started to think that that number would be more close to 1-2%.
Most of the summer I thought that the fatality rate would be 1%, and then in early August I saw a recent study carried out in Sweden bringing that number down to 0.4%-0.6%. In the last couple of weeks I've started seeing even lower numbers (between 0.3% - 0.4%), which, if I'm not mistaken, would make this virus 3 or 4 times more deadly compared to the normal flu (which afaik has a 0.1% death rate) which is not great, but which is also not catastrophic.
Now, I've tried having this exact conversation with a couple of my friends just yesterday and it did not go well at all, they were accusing me of being anti-mask and of not taking the virus seriously enough. Apparently the bare numbers don't work even on educated people.
It sounds like me that you are taking exception to the abundance of caution displayed by public health officials which resulted in this agonizing economic downturn.
However, in the face of incomplete information, isn't erring on the side of caution the right way to proceed? If they had underplayed this, and had the mortality rate really been 3-4%, then you would have both millions dead AND economic devastation.
The scientific consensus is by definition a dynamic thing, ever changing in the face of increasing evidence. And thankfully so.
There may be some facts we don't know yet. The economist has done some research that suggests that the number of deaths have been significantly under-reported.
The panic was never over the case or infection fatality rates. The panic is because of asymptomatic spreaders.
If a strain of influenza suddenly spiked to higher fatality rates, less drastic measures could contain it because it's usually obvious when you are contagious with influenza.
Also, as someone who had SARS-COV-2 and didn't die, it was fucking awful and I fully blame the complete failure of US leadership for the current fiasco.
That is not scientifically accurate. A significant fraction of influenza cases are also asymptomatic, and they are capable of spreading the disease to others.
You could have already killed someone without even knowing it by transmitting the flu to them. There's no way to know for sure.
US federal and state handling of the pandemic has been mostly terrible. But even if we had competent, honest leaders I doubt the long-term death toll would be much different. Community transmission was already widespread by the time anyone realized there was a serious problem, and by that point it was too late to contain the pandemic.
Funny how places like Taiwan reacted far earlier and have near zero fatalities then.
I sometime forget to not bother commenting on overly politicized things on HN. Your own links show 20% potential asymptomatic influenza infections, which is only a tiny bit different from the estimated 80-95% on SARS-COV-2.
That is not scientifically accurate. During the USS Theodore Roosevelt outbreak only 19% of cases were asymptomatic. Those sailors were generally younger and healthier than the general population so if anything we would expect the overall rate of asymptomatic cases to be lower.
This term is being so over used that it's essentially meaningless. Calling everything white supremacist actually hurts whatever cause you think you are fighting.
I've been saying this for years. At the risk of hyperbole, it's not an accepted explanation bc teaching such in school would be tantamount to saying something other than Western culture has value.
Can down voters please explain why you disagree? (Unless hn is just overrun with deluded brainwashed lunatics.)
1) Because it is not a widely accepted POV, although there is overwhelming evidence for it.
2) Because Classic Islamic philosophy is often seen as mistaken by Scholastic philosophers (even if Scholastic philosophy would not exist without Averroism) and those philosophers are the precursors of modern philosophers.
3) Because Ancient Greeks are considered Western but Islamic caliphates are not.
4) Because the Crusades were associated with significant revisionism, including book burning of Arabic books, which makes it harder but not impossible to susbstantiate this POV.
5) Because some people (usually the far right people that listen to historically inaccurate podcasts and radio shows) believe that the West civilized the world and a POV that sounds opposite to that and credits their religious/ideological adversaries cause them to become very, very upset.
The printing press becomes a practical invention only once:
1) You have something to print on
2) You have content worth printing
The introduction of paper to Europe and the Latin translations in Toledo and Sicily (cities in former Islamic territories) are the answer to 1 and 2.
Paper is cheap, scalable, durable and portable. Pre-paper technology such as papyrus, parchments, tablets and carvings have issues in those regards.
Greek literature from Archimedes, Aristotle, Apollonius, Euclid, Diocles, Galen, Hippocrates, Ptolomy, and many others, was reintroduced to the West through those translations.
What an elaborate piece of nonsense ! Modern science needs money, human capital and democracy.
Some Arab countries have money but have to use it to buy western consumer goods rather than invest it in knowledge or their own production capacity -- otherwise a coup might happen.
Autocratic Arab rulers are also understandably reluctant to invest in human capital. Knowledge and critical thinking are the basis of any scientific endeavor, but will also undermine their rule.
Finally sustained progress in science needs democracy to ensure technology is used in the interest of the many and not against them by the few.
To get things right, the Arab street needs "only" to get rid of their inept ruling class and cut the influence of their Western overlords. Islam is not the problem and will adapt to the new political rule, much better than Christianity could ever do.
The Islamic world has no exclusive monopoly on inept, corrupt, undemocratic overlords.
Notable examples of regions afflicted by the same problem are the entire Soviet bloc. And China. And yet these are typically at the vanguard of scientific and technological development.
The Soviets beat the Americans to space under exactly that class of autocratic ruling elite.
Do you know where the words algorithm, algebra, arithmetic come from?
"Born into a Persian family in Khuwarizm (present-day Xorazm Province, Uzbekistan), Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (also known by the Latin form of his name, Algoritmi, circa 780–850 AD, 164–236 AH) was a Muslim mathematician, astronomer, and geographer, and a scholar in the famed House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Al-Khwarazmi wrote Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala (The compendious book on calculation by completion and balancing) around 830 AD, with the encouragement of Caliph Al-Maamoun, the reigning Abbasid caliph of Baghdad in 813–33 AD. It is meant to be a useful work, with examples and applications for everyday life, in areas such as trade, legal inheritance, and surveying. The mathematical term algebra is derived from al-jabr, one of the two operations he used to solve quadratic equations. Also, the words algorism, algorithm, and arithmetic stem from Algoritmi. Similarly, his name is the origin of the Spanish term guarismo and of the Portuguese algarismo, both meaning digit."
.. so far, so good. There's always the risk that the West might internally reject the scientific revolution. This paragraph is a useful reminder that historical "progress" isn't linear or monotonic.
This article is very good on the background in the era of the Caliphate and early scientific progress in medieval Europe. Where it falls down is the past century. We can draw comparison with the Meiji restoration; Japan went from insular agrarianism to a world power to collapse to continued scientific development through to the 21st century. As did much of the Far East. Why not the Middle east?
Anyway, excellent longread.