Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com