The article <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/05/indigenous-knowledge-is-inferior-to-science.html" author="Thomas R. Wells" source="3QuarksDaily">‘Indigenous Knowledge’ Is Inferior To Science</a> has two main thrusts: the primacy of scientific thinking and the degeneracy of preferring something for nonscientific reasons. On second that, those are two sides of the same coin. <h>Science is knowledge that deserves to be believed</h> The following citations illustrate the point as Wells put it, <bq>[...] <b>knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed.</b> The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry – together with specialist methodologies appropriate to different domains (such as mathematical modeling, taxonomy, statistical analysis, and experimental manipulation and measurement). It is irrelevant that this approach first appeared in North-Western Europe and that many of the domain specific techniques were first developed and refined by white men from the ‘west’. What is relevant is that <b>modern science allows a degree of confidence in factual and theoretical claims that has never been warranted before</b>, and made this capability equally available to everyone around the world as the new standard for objective knowledge, i.e. <b>knowledge that is reliably true no matter from what perspective you look at it.</b> If indigenous peoples have observational data and successful technologies to contribute to this kind of systematic inquiry into what makes an ecosystem resilient, or what plants might contain molecules with pain-relieving properties, or the history of climactic events, then that should be welcomed. But <b>the test of whether these are an actual contribution must come from whether they survive scientific scrutiny</b>, not the authenticity of their indigenous origins.</bq> <bq>Even when we suppose that indigenous knowledge claims might well be worth believing, we first subject them to systematic scrutiny – i.e. science – to evaluate their epistemic status. <b>If they pass the test then they will be refined into a form that could be incorporated within the body of scientific knowledge</b>, to become available to anyone who might find it interesting or useful.</bq> Believing indigenous medicine has value without proof is denigrating to those cultures, suggesting that they are incapable of achieving the level of proof that western society has set for itself. <img src="{att_link}scientific_evidence.png" align="none"> <h>Science absorbs all knowledge</h> This immediately reminded me of Timothy Minchin's 10-minute beat poem <i>Storm</i>, which includes the lyrics, <bq>And try as I like A small crack appears in my diplomacy-dike "By definition", I begin "Alternative Medicine", I continue "Has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work <b>Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proved to work? Medicine."</b> "So you don't believe in any natural remedies?" "On the contrary Storm, actually Before we came to tea, <b>I took a natural remedy derived from the bark of a willow tree</b> A painkiller, virtually side-effect free It's got a weird name, darling, what was it again? M-masprin? Basprin? <b>Oh yeah! Asprin!</b></bq> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrgFIlnmrGk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/rrgFIlnmrGk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Timothy Minchin" caption="Storm"> <h>The West's track record</h> The west used to believe in a whole bunch of things that it now "knows" is mumbo-jumbo, like "bodily humours" or the "four elements." None of those ideas had any predictive capacity better than luck. So they fell by the wayside because they just as often caused more harm than good. For a long time, we had no metric for "cures", so we remained fooled by their proponents' claims of efficacy but, once we figured it out, we realized that removing most of the blood from the body <i>wasn't helping you get better</i>. <h level="3">Viruses</h> Nowadays we believe in invisible---to the human eye---creatures that attack our bodies until more invisible creatures can be rallied to fight them off, like a microscopic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Helm%27s_Deep">Helm's Deep</a> taking place all over you. This sounds f&@king batshit, of course! But we also made microscopes so that we can <i>see them</i> and we made medicines that help our Ents win against those damned Orcs and <i>it works.</i> We <i>proved</i> that thinking about the world with this model---unverifiable though it may be with unaided human senses---is <i>largely beneficial</i>. <h level="3">Homepathy</h> The west also still largely believes that eating tiny balls made of sugar that have been infused with an essence whose power is inversely proportional to the amount of the essence remaining after preparation is also super-good and beneficial. So nobody's perfect. <h>Science describes value and cost</h> Wells is writing about how to come up with efficacious and valuable knowledge. We're trying to come up with materials and practices that do more good than harm. We are interested in estimating their <i>value</i> to society, usually with respect to other proposed solutions. How else would you determine how much of your energy and effort to invest in something? Like, if someone says that you should go for a ten-mile walk to heal your pulled muscle and someone else says to put heat on it and someone else says to put ice on it, who do you believe? Do you figure out how to make heat that you can apply to it when walking ten miles would be even better? Do you waste time trying to make ice? Do you waste time walking ten miles, when it might make it even worse? That is what science is for. Science is not woke. Science is not culturally specific. It can be practiced that way, but then <i>it's not science</i>. Anyone who's not following the rules is automatically not playing that game---they are playing a different game. Usually that game is <i>scamming</i>, i.e., they are trying to get you to listen to them in order to extract more value from their idea than it intrinsically has, usually for personal gain.