Posts by Keir Leslie
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Because in fact particle physics was not characterised by insights followed by confirmation at all; it was characterised by insights followed by both confirmation and disproof.
And I can't see how this suggests the limits of empiricism.
(Well, actually, not confirmation because you know, science never really confirms theories, merely fails to deny them, and especially with particle physics that's something to bear in mind.)
Unless you mean to contrast to a science that develops purely based on theories drawn from pre-existing data, which seems really rather a strange idea to me (and of course as any AI type will tell, just asking for trouble.)
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Hobsbawm and Ranger were (historians) co-responsible for The Invention of Tradition which looked at a collection of western `immemorial traditions' and found out that a great many of them weren't in fact; I should assume based on the fact that people are the same everywhere it's roughly the same everywhere. (yes dodgy extrapolation yes western-centric yes,)
Isn't the history of particle physics based on insights that are followed sometimes a great deal later (if at all) by actual empirical data, and does it not in fact remind us constantly of the ultimate limits of empiricism?
No. It really really really isn't. Michelson Morley. Yes insights followed by confirmation but also insights followed by proof that they were utterly wrong.
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Eh, if we must have '80s revivalism, Ladyhawke is actually good '80s revivalism.
(As part of the bring back the '80s movement, Ladyhawke's really quite good, and I think worthy of the awards, maybe not unarguably and utterly so, but isn't at all as horrible as mr litterick seems to think.)
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Um, that's not what modern medicine is. If you go back to the turn of the century, modern doctors were very very wary of drugs, because there weren't many that worked. Nowadays drugs work, so they are seen as intrinsically part of modern medicine, but that's something that's happened comparatively recently.
The point being that modern medicine is, like science, and philosophy, not a body of facts but an activity.
Drugs and surgery really aren't what would have defined modern scientific medicine a century ago; back then it would have been `prevention, diagnosis, outlook'. But the method, the idea of checking against empirical reality, would have been the same, which is what is seen as definably `modern'.
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The inference seems to be that if a "medicinal caste" has been operating continuously for a long period of time, they must have been doing something right or they'd have been run out of town.
Of course, this also applies to pre mid 19th century European medicine, but oddly enough, nobody ever wants to go back to miasmas and humours and dying because we don't know about antibiotics.
(Actually I'm sure there's a pagan healing type of thing that no doubt makes great bones about going back to Glastonbury Tor etc etc while ignoring the fact that there exists a perfectly healthy ancient British tradition of healing & it's called `doctors using medical science'.)
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you know, there's a book to be written about stereotypes of the unchanging Orient and alternative medicine.
i mean, seriously, how does it make sense to say that tibetan medicine is even older that chinese medicine; these things change and i would be utterly astonished if there's any useful sense in which one can talk about the `age' of a medicinal tradition* and there's no sensible reason to correlate age with correctness & in fact if you start saying that humours beat the germ theory based on age you will get laughed at.
also, isn't it interesting there's lots of popular interest in the medicine of yer eastern courtly cultures, but comparatively little interest** in how people in the Amazon deal with illness, despite the fact that the Amazon is proverbially fruitful in terms of drugs?
* Hobsbaum and Ranger are I think the authorities here but in particular if you look at British hedgewitchery, the traditional medicinal system I am most familiar with, you will find that it is mostly made up as people go along and things are traditional if they go back 20 years or so.
** except of course amongst pharmaceutical companies, who are utterly uninterested in bits of tiger but really rather keen on funny little plants from the Amazon basin. The fact big pharma has to answer to shareholders and the FDA etc may be of note here.
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Lucy, it's not unreasonable to say that scientific understanding of electricity in human bodies is highly incomplete. You don't need to invoke woo ("vitalism" here) to agree with that point.
But that's clearly not what Sacha's after here. I mean, we know that electricity is involved in animals and have done since Galvani; it's a pretty accepted part of biology. Yes, we don't know it all yet, but that's true about everything.
It's totally true to say that our understanding of gravity itself is highly incomplete but it is still a hugely useful tool, and people talking about intelligent falling can be safely dismissed as daft, even though, you know, dark matter and the higgs boson and all that are pretty debatable.
The problem is not `woo' it is that Sacha is basically saying that
western medicine doesn't work when in fact it does, and, by the
way, western biological science really does work too.(Where,by `works' I mean makes testable predictions that tend to be true.)
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Again, immune system is an idea that only exists within a western medical framework; hell, the idea of medicines that reliably work only really exists within a very modern western medical framework.
And if you had, say, gout, I doubt you'd call rheumatology quackery.
(Also, it is possible that the best answer western medicine has is both pretty shit and still better that anything else on offer; there's a proverb from I think either the LSB or the LSE that says `often there is no solution', and it is basically right. And of course western science gets stuff wrong, but it does so far less and for a far shorter time than any other way of finding out
stuff about the natural world; that's why western medicine has the germ theory of disease and antibiotics and vitamins and traditional chinese medicine has funky ideas about tigers.) -
Get back to me when western medicine has a clue about arthritis and most other auto-immune or chronic conditions, will you good chap.
You are taking the piss, right? Because if it weren't for western medicine, the word `auto-immune' would be utterly meaningless, let alone being able to say that arthritis is related to it.
(Also, of course, merely because western medicine doesn't have all the answers doesn't mean that it isn't far and away the best bet. Testing things against reality is really really quite useful.)
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Lucy- Chinese medicine has been around many centuries longer than modern western
isn't actually true; modern western medicine can be considered a tradition back to Hippocrates and etc, which matches if not beats Chinese medicine.
Also, there is a decent argument against ye olde randomised double blind clinical trial as a gold standard, but that's an internal squabble in scientific medicine, not an argument against it. (Or, yes, medicine is a rather totalising rigid non-dissent allowing system, and I rather like that.)