A mindfulness consultant forced onto a workforce sounds about as effective as forcing all your employees to run five miles every week. But that doesn't mean that running is bad for you.
Interleaving quotes from various semi-related conversations plumps up the word count, grab that quote from a conversation about a shoe marketing campaign and segue it into a quote from a blogger who thinks barefoot running cures cancer.
Boom, there's your content production done for the day. Sweet. You can get a head start of reading the wikipedia entries on "incels" and "crypto" as you will be solving those questions tomorrow, so you should probably find out what those words mean.
The general position here seems to be that because the ancient herbalist didn't have a notion of acetylsalicylic acid, the willow bark he dispensed for pain wasn't even "wrong", despite its being the correct treatment from the tools he had available.
Huh?
Exactly. Its correctness is.
The "general position" I'm seeing is that if a piece of knowledge wasn't premised on a contemporary understanding of the world (which is itself, with a probability that approaches unity, also wrong in critical and meaningful ways), it can't have been "right".
Even when it turns out it was, when examined through the lens of that understanding. Hence the mention of willow bark: we didn't even understand aspirin's mechanism of action until the last ~half century. Does that make every doctor who prescribed it before that point wrong, or even just "not right", for having done so?
EDIT: Phrasing
Ancient people and people 50 years ago were both wrong about a lot of things, as we no doubt are today, but there is a very different sort of wrong between the pre-scientific world of mythology and the self-correcting methodology we have today.
That said, I'm not the one painting the hard and bright distinction between "right" and "wrong". I know the dude who thinks the earth is flat is "more wrong" than the person who thinks it's spherical.
I'm instead trying to point out the presumption structurally inherent in "we know more than those benighted, unenlightened sods that came before us did" being not merely a reason, but a requirement to dismiss anything said sods might have to offer.
Consider: all of the out-of-hand dismissal of meditation, or mindfulness in general, in this thread. As far as I can tell, the dismissal boils down to taking "We didn't invent it", "The evidence is generally at best weakly supportive, and doesn't conclusively refute the thesis", and, "But unscrupulous people do unscrupulous things and hide their misdeeds behind these concepts" as sufficient cause to nope right on past with prejudice.
The thing is, if you're properly playing "science", you don't get to "nope" out like that. Replicate it or refute it, sure, but not repudiate it. Empirically demonstrated results that run counter to our intuitions, and are at all replicable, are the things we should be paying the most attention to, because that's where we're most likely to learn something new. (Even if it's just about our intuitions...)
We've instead somehow made a more-or-less collective, and as far as I can tell unexamined choice somewhere along the way to interpret skepticism not as, "I will neither believe nor disbelieve without evidence" but rather as, "If something doesn't comport with my [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of our [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of reality, it should be mocked and dismissed."
And, no matter how hard I try, I can not wrap my head around how the latter follows from anything except yet another case of over-privileging our own perspective, and patting ourselves on the back for being so clever as to have inherited the trials-and-errors of aeons of ancestors, without crediting more than a token named few of them for any of that work (and often in some backhanded way that undercuts them as much as credits them. "That Newton. He sure was smart. Too bad he drank so much mercury...").
So, yes, Asimov was right. Of course our knowledge improves and is refined over time — assuming we're pursuing correct-enough theories that we don't get stuck in various local minima of understanding. But I wasn't disagreeing with him in the first place.
Regarding leeches and bloodletting, of course it helps in some cases, in the same way that executing random actions sometimes helps: by chance. To get from anecdata to systematic application, you need scientific inquiry to form a model of why it helps.
This doesn't follow, you can be smart and also wrong. It's also possible to be smart and not have good enough tools. The randomized controlled trial (RCT), for instance, is a marvelous tool that might sound obvious to you, but that's only because you received the kind of education which wasn't possible for most of history. Those ancestors from a millenia ago, however smart they were, didn't have RCTs and didn't have the world-view which would make them value RCTs and even if they did their peers certainly didn't have the right world-view to value things learned from RCTs and as a result, through no fault of their own, those ancestors had a much harder time understanding reality than we do.
Religion doesn't even have to be based in fact to have merit. The fact that it has been around forever indicates that it is quite beneficial for it's adherants.
Why was everyone doing burnt offerings? The Old Testament mentions them and ancient peoples in many geographically isolated parts of the world were doing them.
It's really weird, there must be something in the human psyche that resonates with the idea of burnt offerings. Or maybe burning offerings produced effects from the gods, but I'm guessing it didn't do anything but be a ceremony or totem. It's still weird and has me puzzled but I'm pretty sure objectively it wasn't all that great of an idea and certainly don't think we should take up doing burnt offerings now even though it was pretty common practice in ancient times.
Though of course there have always been ephemeral fads surrounding Buddhism, which have come and gone. Employer-provided mindfulness consulting is likely one of them.
The "baby" is the ability to recognize the tens of thousands of thoughts you are thinking every day without knowing that you are. This can offer tremendous insight into your mood and personality (and how to change them if you wish).