Here's a really awesome video showing how western views of science can stifle researches from learning from #AncestralWisdom. When you dismiss ideas before even taking the time to look into them because you look down on indigenous and ancestral cultures, we can miss important discoveries at worst or delay them at best. Dr. Fatima takes a look at three particular cases and gives some good commentary.
"And I'll grant that science does get corrected. But believing it's fully self-correcting is honestly...pretty cute, in its optimism.
"Like I see physics Bros simping for the scientific method and just think, bless their hearts!"
"Nuance won't kill you, I promise."
That said, some nuance on nuance:
Sitting with #ElliotSang's latest video essay. Have thoughts. Namely, that Sang's reading of Healy's paper amounts to an argument against new abstractions in favor of old abstractions. Abstractions being a product of details. What details we focus on, what details we admit to our discussion and which we bar at the door as impurities (cue Mary Douglas), informs the abstraction that is our end product. The abstractions on which good theory depends themselves depend on a process of discernment. Abstractions without discernment are mere stereotypes. This is not to say that nuance ain't consistently used to obfuscate. It most certainly is. Nonetheless, so too is abstraction. The term for abstraction as obfuscation is elision. A strategic leaving out. Which is to say, abstractions don't simply exist in the world. Just as the world is complex _to us_, so too abstractions are simple, _to us_. They have just as much human baggage as nuance does, only packed away neatly and out of sight.
Dr. Abdurrahman has a list video, and of course, like her other videos, it's a banger:
"Science has biases that inform which ideas seem reasonable to entertain."
When Pseudoscience Beat Science: Three Stories About Knowing Things
#DrFatima published an awesome essay on Feyerabend's "against method" and I got thoughts now.
Her talk about heliocentrism vs geocentrism assumes that the two theories were in competition with each other. Which they were. But this "competition between theories" does not need to become a "competition between scientists". Heliocentrism did not have good arguments going for it when Galileo kept defending it, but if the only goal was to keep the theory alive until the data to prove it came along, then it could have existed as a funny thing to speculate about, or a world building exercise, or even just as a less proven theory. Scientists did not need to stake themselves in a theory (or stake each other). We could have kept it going in many ways that were not harmful to any participants.
It might be better if science worked that way, if we kept open to the range of possible theories given the facts we've built about the world, and did not try to snuff out theories that have less support, and treated the scientists saying those theories like people who have valuable things to contribute (even if we don't agree with their favourite explanation)
There is an asterisk with theories of reality that are actually harmful, but I don't have the energy to elaborate on that right now
New vid essay from Dr. Abdurrahman just dropped:
"The boring kind of degeneracy."
Einstein Was a Socialist; Should We Care? - Dr Fatima
https://youtu.be/_mz41x_nc0o?si=YHQETa83boj9VYEa #science #DrFatima #Einstein #socialism
This one is 🤩 too: Astronomy has a colonialism problem, by Dr. Fatima
"my desperate plea for scientists to give a shit about imperialism"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=R7hK5_Rj--8
#ScienceCommunication #Astronomy #Colonialism #Hawaii #Palestine #Imperialism #MaunaKea #telescope #DrFatima
John V🏳️🌈
sport of sacred spherical cows
Ruakueqche
P Gurgel-Segrillo
Caro S.