‘Decolonizing’ Math and Science | Hacker News Reader

‘Decolonizing’ Math and Science

nationalreview.com

30 pointsfortran7726 comments

As the article hints, the irony is that many postcolonialists have a caricatured understanding of history. There are proper intellectual histories that establish abundantly that pre-15th century science, engineering and mathematics have been built by multiple cultures/nations and Western Europe was relatively a backwater of this international activity.

Civilizations have come and gone -- all we have in their wake is some of their pottery and some of their knowledge.

Come 15th c. AD and things change dramatically. Science & technology can barely happen if you're in poverty due to subjugation, so comparisons of colonized nations with their colonizers from the 15th to the 20th centuries are simply not apples to apples. Today you can already witness China and India getting started on their own scientific & technological journeys (with China obviously way ahead). In another 5 centuries, maybe we'll all be wondering about the Chinese miracle, astonished at how they accelerated science & technology so dramatically way beyond what some north-west Eurasian nation-states cobbled together during and shortly after the so-called Enlightenment.

China and India were wealthier and more advanced than the West prior to the industrial revolution. Colonization was a comparatively minor factor historically (with obvious exceptions in the Americas) ; polities have always engaged in conquest and oppression throughout history. Industrialization is what actually propelled the West to its current prominence.

Surely colonization was not a "minor factor historically", comparatively or not.

Polities have engaged in conquest and oppression for sure, and the subjugated have always paid the price. Baghdad for example lost its glory after conquest too. But the scale at which Western colonialism happened after the 15th c. is commensurate with the scale of scientific progress that took place there.

Industrialisation, I would submit, was something that accelerated the process via radically higher efficiencies, not what enabled the development of science and technology in the first place.

Let's also remember that industrialisation itself was also used as a weapon of colonization and was hardly a morally neutral value addition to Western society.

Direct link to the curriculum that is the subject of this article: https://ncea.education.govt.nz/science/chemistry-and-biology

If this wasn't from an official government website, I would have sworn it was parody.

What garbage. Just lost all respect for NZ.

"All living things contain genetic material that informs whakapapa and provides for continuity and diversity of life" WTAF

Replace whakapapa with genealogy and it kind of makes sense.

Caveat: there can be deep ecological insight in how locals conceptualize their environment, eg.

To be honest, I find the Maori example a bit strange, but it isn't like people do not impute their own religious beliefs or more blandly, their culture into science or what they learn. The only thing that may make it slightly distinct is this is a directive from a government.

I once had an acquaintance in grad school who was studying string theory, and he connected what he studied to his fundie christian beliefs, for example, he talked about how multiple dimensions required by string theory explained how God worked in ways we could not see. Again, I found it odd, but I respected his work regardless, which was not that bad merely looking at the research.

As an Asian, decolonize scientific subjects is one of the funniest thing I have ever heard. What does it even mean?

Ohm's law you called resistance law, Maxwell's equations you called electromagnetic equations, Planck's constant you called the quantum constant...

-- The Three Body Problem

Yeah sure, if it's just renaming of the functions and variables in the code base that's harmless I guess.

But why would you do that if it's indeed from certain person (provided by that it's not stolen credit)? Are we going to getting rid all of the human names from the heaven's objects? We are still naming those things with ppl's names afaik

Also, aside from credit, it just makes it harder to research the history. I mean did someone else discover Maxwell’s equations, and Plank’s constant who we are overlooking?

Do we need to stop using the word algorithm, and replace it with say, “procedural recipe”?

Doesn't seem to make it easier. The name is Planck

I see. So it seems like a good reason to change the names is so people don't lose marks over spelling mistakes.

It's a quote from a novel, the passage goes on with "all scientific accomplishments resulted from the wisdom of the working masses, and those capitalist academic authorities only stole these fruits and put their names on them"

Compared to that, the example in the OP linked article is funny indeed

Maybe read about the topic before immediately discrediting it entirely?

One example of decolonizing science is simply giving proper attribution for scientific discoveries that come from the global south, but are in the textbooks as being discovered by europeans. Of which there are numerous examples.

If that's only thing they are doing, how about just call it giving the right credit?

Because that's completely sanitizing the reasons attribution wasn't given in the first place, which were often either explicitly racially motivated, or deeply involved in the logistics of settler colonialism. Calling it what it is seems like a good idea.

Fairly attributing blame for the non-attribution of credit is not going to be easy.

Sure but there are subjects and places to discuss that. Do you think biology, physics, maths all need to come with their own disclaimer each time.

That gets into what we even mean by calling someone the "inventor" of someone. Plenty of people made flying contraptions of one sort or another, such as Clément Ader, Gustave Whitehead, Richard Pearse, and Karl Jatho

But the Wright Bros caused the world to start flying, finding errors in the prior equations for lift and making practical planes capable of sustained flight as well as the means to control them.

The others on that list contributed in their own ways, but did not have the same impact.

Perhaps it’s best to avoid attribution at all when presenting scientific and mathematical ideas themselves? There are many contexts when priority claims are messy (colonialism and not) and are fundamentally an oversimplification of an incremental process that involves many people. I do think there is an important place for describing the people who did the work, perhaps in the context of history of science and math.

Using the same awfull terminology, a 're-collonization' of the humanities is well overdue.

Instead of reading crap on the internet, I recommend this classic book on colonialism in Africa:

https://www.amazon.com/Things-Fall-Apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/03...

Call National Review crap, get downvoted. Noted.

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