Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that scientists don't just do science, they're people. They have ideological biases of their own, and they're often not corrected because they're systemic and entrenched. And because of these biases they often don't listen to evidence or voices that doesn't fit pre-existing concerns. Especially in "softer" or social sciences like archaeology / anthropology.

Example: "Clovis first" settlement of the North America vigorously drowned out other voices, sometimes with aggressive nasty personal politics (read about how how Tom Dillehay was treated personally about his discoveries at Monte Verde sometime, got pretty nasty). All the while indigenous Americans were insisting in various capacities that they had been much longer. And lo and behold, archaeology is finally starting to 'discover' these facts, but in reality much of the evidence has been here all along (though a lot of it is probably underwater), it just required looking for it and not immediately discounting its possibility.

And yes, this doesn't mean that "science" is wrong or the scientific method intrinsically flawed. And usually these things shake out eventually. But I don't think there's anything wrong with shaking people a bit and asking them to open their eyes and ears and accept that what they think they're doing as a pure empirical method needs to be scrutinized carefully and part of that is accepting that there are stories and knowledge out there that have all too easily been discounted with the same kind of attitude the author of this article is presenting.

I believe the author explicitly did the opposite of what you accuse him of doing. He even criticized the original letter from the seven because of its sweeping dismissal of Maori knowledge, and the likelihood that some of it is scientific in nature. His point is that science is a process, and one shouldn’t confuse traditional myth with this process. I think he’s right, even if in some cases the process, and its flawed instantiation, leads to incorrect conclusions in cases where the traditional story is correct.

He only seems to defend Maori knowledge insofar as that knowledge was derived from informal scientific experiments.

> I do take issue with one sentence in original letter by the seven scientists: “Indigenous knowledge may indeed help advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it is not science.” As a blanket statement this is not strictly correct. Some indigenous knowledge is scientific in nature. Surely indigenous people’s survival depended on empirical examination and trial and error testing associated with a variety of natural phenomena, including: which plants were beneficial or harmful to eat, which might provide useful medicines; how the detailed migratory behavior of animals that might serve as prey would impact on hunting success, tidal variations and annual weather cycles, to name just a few.

"Clovis first" suppressing contrary evidence was people abusing academic processes against science.

We speak in the past tense, but there are plenty of other such abuses, ongoing.

Lawrence Krauss is calling out just such an abuse. It is not the only one. Each has to be fought, in detail, on its own ground; this one, on this ground.

Sure but part of the way that the faults in said academic processes were rectified has been through bringing indigenous voices into the process. So I get a bristly when I see the tone used here.

Throughout the author keeps dodging the relationship between science and scientists, insisting on the purity of science itself. But that's precisely the point. It's an ideal. Not a bad ideal, but a process to get to. And it means scientific organizations and science as an academic and so on have to take responsibility for the history and their roles in it.

Sometimes attempts at rectifying abuses create other abuses. Science is about verifiable facts, and how to verify them. Science can't defend itself against abuses. That is on each of us.

If the indigenous voices happened to be correct in this case, it was coincidence. Fifteen thousand years is much too long a time span for oral traditions to carry any factual historical information.

That has not been demonstrated. We know of oral traditions carrying facts over seven thousand years.

What has been demonstrated is that these particular oral traditions do not carry factual information about geology. Treating them as factual information about geology would be abuse.

They are legitimate facts about Pacific anthropology.

Oral history of Mount Mazama in Oregon recounts an eruption that happened 7700 years ago. Don't be so quick to discount oral history.

BTW, the oldest tradition I'm familiar with says that the world is not more than 6000 years old. So there might be something fishy about these claims either way.

The whole point is that saying mythsticism is equivalent to science is attacking the process not the people.

I always get bristly when this sort of idealisation of indigenous knowledge/systems/religion etc is used. The consequences of religion/mythsticism were/are almost always worse than science. In case of the Maori, they were used to justify genocide (the first thing tribes from the north island did when they acquired guns was to go south and wipe out other tribes for some perceived offence from the far past).

Only two weeks after Maori first heard from the British there were people on Chatham Island, 600 mi to the east, they sailed out and exterminated them.

It seems likely the same thing happened to the Marquesans who first discovered Hawai'i, once people from Fiji or Samoa or someplace arrived. The latter's descendants still talk about "menehunes", small people who come out only at night.

Brits, not long after, hunted Tasmanians for sport.

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