i know about caledonian in real life

Doubtful. Perhaps you’re operating under the belief that I’m someone you’ve met or spoken to.

Which is why they should be paid attention to. Forgetting what was developed before and why it didn’t work will simply lead to their ideas being reinvented and the lessons of why it doesn’t work learned all over again.

I really don’t think so. Rather than thinking about every possible arrangement of ideas that doesn’t work, it’s faster to learn what does – and so discard entire categories of error immediately.

There are very few times when it’s better to study error as a system instead of simply discarding it.

empiricism is considered a philosophy by modern philosophers

And homeopathy is considered a medical discipline by modern homeopaths.

So?

Which is why they should be paid attention to. Forgetting what was developed before and why it didn’t work will simply lead to their ideas being reinvented and the lessons of why it doesn’t work learned all over again.

One reason why the whole ‘different ways of knowing’ is so irritating is that many of them have already been tried and found to be useless.

diamond’s vision is a touch thin and not contingent enough for my taste. partial vision.

to use an evolutionary analogy some people have an almost ‘flat’ cultural adaptive topography. everything happens almost randomly and singularly as societies random-walk uniquely through culture space. in contrast, some people perceive a topography characterized by sharp and stark ‘peaks’ which all societies converge toward. a vulgar marxism with its conception of inevitability toward some socialist utopia is one vision.

i think the reality is that the topography is not quite flat, there are multiple peaks, and channels. but it isn’t quite so stark and reliefed so as to eliminate some historical contingency and stochasticity.

but that’s the big picture. the other point is that many scholars operate across narrow culture and temporal time frames, accurately characterized a specific progression, and then jump to a general universal conclusion. a lot of this is clearly false with even a marginal amount of cross cultural or historical knowledge.

Too many people think ideas or institutions were invented once, usually ex nihilo, mostly in current form if not fully evolved, at a discrete and identifiable time and place, by discrete and identifiable persons. [ Let's call this error "Athenaian genesis" after the goddess Athena, born fully formed. ] There are 2 versions of AG : historical-Whiggish and geographical-occidentalist.

Except for the scientific method. That was indeed invented just once in the West in the 17th century.

1/ If the summary is accurate, can we not call it, in essence, Jared-Diamondian ? If you don’t like that phrase, what’s not Jared-Diamondian about it ?

2/ I think modern assumptions about the “Athenaian” genesis of ideas are just as likely Romantic as Whiggish. In many domains, whether it be arts criticism, history, history of science, etc., there is always a romantic school which emphasises the role of great leaders/artists/scientists/cultures who are more reponsible than anyone else for accomplishing truly revolutionary leaps. So a Romantic historian of science might emphasise the individual genius of Newton as the crucial link in accounting for the birth of physics but a less idealist one might take Newton’s modesty about standing on the shoulders of giants seriously and point to the felicitous confluence of social, economic and historical conditions that also produced a galaxy of important contributors in the 17th century. While scholarship is generally non-Romantic, the popular imagination runs toward a Romantic pop-historiography.

However, I have to take issue with the tone of your response, for the following reasons:
1) in citing Meryt’s comments and then replying in what I saw as a sarcastic tone that he should either help out, “if not, don’t ever comment here again,” you are effectively setting a rule that people are only allowed to comment if they aren’t critical of you.
2) When Meryt responded to your two posts and accused you of arrogance, you counter-accused him of arrogance, writing, “you don’t think it’s fucking arrogant to make patronizing suggestions of the nature of content production from people who provide content freely to you?” If you are given the opportunity to have a platform to express yourself, and you expect to receive comments that are only adulatory, then I think you are fooling yourself. In one of your other comments in response to another person, you write, “though i was probably like him [i.e. Caledonian] when i was 17ish, i’ve ripened a bit”. I would argue that you need to ripen a bit more, and develop a thicker skin.
3) I intend to screen snapshots of this exchange, and email them to Discover magazine and ask them if this is the behaviour they wish to endorse of a blogger who publishes under their imprimateur.

Bottom line, Meryt was not polite in calling your writing turgid or convoluted. He certainly didn’t provide any examples to substantiate his opinion. However, if you cannot withstand unsubstantiated criticisms such as this, you are certainly going to alienate readers. You’ve certainly alienated me.

You’ve had some fascinating posts, and it’s a pity, but I don’t think you need to reply to my post. I won’t be back to read it.

Good day, sir.

I certainly agree that the concept of “nature” versus other causes of patterns goes back to the Greeks at least, for whom it was a central and controversial theme in philosophy and science. And of course it is almost a cliché to say that early Greek philosophy may have been influenced by Middle Eastern and Egyptian precedents we know little about. (The Greeks themselves thought so.)

As to whether we can take it MUCH further I am myself certain but I would raise cautions about assuming this is just a matter of ignorance about other cultures. The caution I would raise is that the idea that studying natural causes is really different in kind from, for example, being wise about folk ideas, interpretation of laws and traditions, and myths was quite hard to handle even for the Greeks. It seems so obvious to most of us today, but apparently it is not.

This distinction means science and philosophy are different in kind from religion and legal wisdom for example, and I do not know of any strong argument that this distinction is found outside the Western tradition, but I would be interested to know of any. I do note that Asian traditions such as Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism etc are sometimes described as philosophies, but also sometimes as religions.

However when you look beyond the narrow search for those historical roots, you quickly enter a very tangled picture. The people who said things that turned out to be true often held a wild grab-bag of notions in addition. Some of those things turned out to be true at least in some measure. Other things turned out to be way off base. Often you’ll find beliefs that even their contemporaries held to be odd and are in modern terms outright bizarre.

Our ancestors weren’t stupid. They suffered from a lack of knowledge. Many were also held back by social, political and economic systems that imposed constraints on them. Many times this was not recognized at the time.

I had a friend quite some years ago. He wondered aloud what Leonardo Da Vinci could have accomplished, had he had access to a computer. My response was that he was held back by the technology of his time, as we are held back by what we have. What matters is not so much what constrains you, but what you accomplish in spite of that.

Perhaps even this is too dark an interpretation. It can equally be restated as, we achieve what we do, in part because of the hard work of our predecessors and those who surround us. Then add in our energy and creativity.

The Whig view of science is founded in progressive propaganda, a lot of it fundamentally anti-religious. The fact is that priests were doing real science centuries before the “Enlightenment”.

arrogant? you don’t think it’s fucking arrogant to make patronizing suggestions of the nature of content production from people who provide content freely to you? yes, discover pays me, but on a per hour basis it isn’t that much.

Introspection isn’t inquiry into the self? Making a painting isn’t an inquiry into form and shape? Writing a novel isn’t an inquiry into human experience and emotion?

Razib: There was a time when I was 17 that I would have swapped the ability to be funny and improvisational for 200 extra points on my SAT. Now, I realize I should have dreamed of swapping my humor and improvisational ability for Ebay stock options. They would have have paid off better than 200 SAT points.

That is one way to scare off objective criticism, sure. It isn’t as if he told you how to run your blog by pointing that out. (Nor am I doing it by pointing this out, I haste to add.)

We vote with our feet, ultimately. I hope we all can see and use that as needed. (Another needed disclaimer: This isn’t meant as threat, but as the obvious context of criticism. If anyone *really* dislikes a blog, she/he will probably disappear. But I realize there is a problematic boundary in between.)