It persisted until 1453. Rome wasn’t the center of the Roman Empire since around 330.
Either way you want to count, from the first Roman conquests to the fall of the West or from the fall of the West to the fall of the East. Both get you periods comparable to or longer than the entire history of the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions so far.
The big idea that allows modern civilization is that you don’t worship the knowledge, you go out and test it… that’s the main thing, and that would persist easily.
I don’t think ‘testing things’ is as easy or trivial as you think. It’s very easy to ‘test’ something and get exactly the result you want. Or get a result which means nothing. Cargo cult science & thinking is the default, not the aberration. When science goes bad, it doesn’t look like ‘we’ve decided we aren’t going to do Science anymore’, it looks like this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfb/open_thread_30_june_2014_6_july_2014/b1u3 (To use an example from yesterday.) It looks like science, everyone involved thinks it’s science, it passes all the traditional rituals like peer review and statistical tests, but it means next to nothing. The same way millennia of theologians or magicians or alchemists think they’re doing something useful and acquiring knowledge.
Once the culture of real science is lost, I’m not sure it has a good chance of surviving. How well did the spirit of Greek philosophy survive the Roman Empire? Yes, eventually it came back, but there’s anthropic bias there (we probably wouldn’t be discussing science if Greek philosophy & logic hadn’t survived somehow), and consider the chancy transmission of a lot of it from Greek to Arabic back to Europe.
Knowing about germs is another biggie.
Will degenerate almost immediately into classic taboos and miasmas and evil spirits. How well does folk understanding of antibiotics accord with reality? When people routinely discontinue antibiotic treatment because they feel better, are they exhibiting an understanding of germ theory? Or consider the popularity of anti-vax among the most highly educated as we speak...
but getting stuck with needles does help with pain
RIght. But real science is widespread. There are research universities in Lesotho, and I’ve met professors from there and they know how science works. They’ve done it, and continue to do it.
I was under the impression that sham acupuncture generally performed comparable to ‘real’ acupuncture
Exactly. The sham acupuncture still involves poking people with needles! It’s just not aligned.
There are research universities in Lesotho, and I’ve met professors from there and they know how science works.
And how much of the culture of science has spread through Lesotho? Or would survive the university being shut down? Or survive a single charismatic professor leaving and being replaced by a corrupt leader who demands publishable results? The question isn’t whether Science exists in the world, but to what extent it’s a delicate flower that lives in a greenhouse and will quickly die or become a shambling parody of itself when conditions change, and whether it can survive something like the collapse of civilization.
Exactly. The sham acupuncture still involves poking people with needles! It’s just not aligned.
It does? I thought sham acupuncture involved either needle-less approaches or trick needles where it pokes the patient but retracts rather than breaks the skin.
Pt 1: I don’t know. The core of science is not so very complicated. Empiricism plus skepticism plus math. The hardest part of that is math, and of the three that is the most easily transmitted by book. Of the rest, that’s a bit of sociology I can’t judge. Lesotho isn’t what I’m holding up as ‘the most likely source of a rebound in the event of nuclear war’ - it’s an example of the spread of real science.
Pt 2: Sometimes… but even if acupuncture is a really reliable way of inducing a strong placebo effect on people even if they know it ‘does nothing’, that’s useful.
The hardest part of that is math, and of the three that is the most easily transmitted by book.
The tradition of math is the most ancient & universal of the 3 parts you mention. Most regions of the world develop math, sometimes to fairly high levels like in India or China. Is that consistent with it being ‘the hardest part’? In contrast, empiricism and skepticism are typically marginal and unpopular on the rare occasions they show up; the Greek Skeptics were one of the more minor traditions, the Carvaka of India were some heretics known from like one surviving text from the early BCs and were never a viable force, and offhand I don’t even know of any Chinese philosophical tradition which could reasonably be described as either ‘empirical’ or ‘skeptical’.
that’s useful.
It’s also not what they think they’re measuring. Still diseased.
Because it’s psychologically hard and unintuitive, not because it’s complicated. Math is complicated and difficult, but it’s not psychologically challenging like ‘do your best to destroy your own clever explanations and cheer if someone else does’.
Acupuncture makes a great example. Here we have folks who are on to something that works. Yay! Case closed. … except, not. Because they don’t have the idea of science, the hard and unintuitive thing that says you should try to find all the times that that thing you rely on doesn’t work, they can’t find those boundaries.
Because it’s psychologically hard and unintuitive, not because it’s complicated.
...and if science is psychologically hard & unintuitive, all the easier for it to be substituted for something superficially similar but ineffective.
Math is complicated and difficult, but it’s not psychologically challenging like ‘do your best to destroy your own clever explanations and cheer if someone else does’.
And how does that not make science harder than math?
Skepticism and empiricism are robust ideas, by which I mean there’s nothing particularly similar to them. They are also very compact. You can fit them on a post-card. On the other hand, math is this enormous edifice.
The ‘getting it wrong’ that you see all over modern science is a failure, yes, but most of these scientist-failures are failing due to contingent local factors like conflicts of interest and grant proposals and muddy results and competition pressures… they’re failing to fulfill the scientific ideal for sure, but it’s not because they lack the scientific ideal. They can correctly teach science. If bad scientists were all we had, then science would have bad habits and that would be bad, but it could be solved much more easily than having to redesign the thing without knowing that it was possible, like we did the first time.
This is still the case even if all the scientists are under the thumbs of warlords who make them do stupid stuff. The idea is there, the light can spread. Not right away, likely, but we won’t need to wait thousands of years for it to re-emerge.
Either way you want to count, from the first Roman conquests to the fall of the West or from the fall of the West to the fall of the East. Both get you periods comparable to or longer than the entire history of the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions so far.
I don’t think ‘testing things’ is as easy or trivial as you think. It’s very easy to ‘test’ something and get exactly the result you want. Or get a result which means nothing. Cargo cult science & thinking is the default, not the aberration. When science goes bad, it doesn’t look like ‘we’ve decided we aren’t going to do Science anymore’, it looks like this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfb/open_thread_30_june_2014_6_july_2014/b1u3 (To use an example from yesterday.) It looks like science, everyone involved thinks it’s science, it passes all the traditional rituals like peer review and statistical tests, but it means next to nothing. The same way millennia of theologians or magicians or alchemists think they’re doing something useful and acquiring knowledge.
Once the culture of real science is lost, I’m not sure it has a good chance of surviving. How well did the spirit of Greek philosophy survive the Roman Empire? Yes, eventually it came back, but there’s anthropic bias there (we probably wouldn’t be discussing science if Greek philosophy & logic hadn’t survived somehow), and consider the chancy transmission of a lot of it from Greek to Arabic back to Europe.
Will degenerate almost immediately into classic taboos and miasmas and evil spirits. How well does folk understanding of antibiotics accord with reality? When people routinely discontinue antibiotic treatment because they feel better, are they exhibiting an understanding of germ theory? Or consider the popularity of anti-vax among the most highly educated as we speak...
I was under the impression that sham acupuncture generally performed comparable to ‘real’ acupuncture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture
RIght. But real science is widespread. There are research universities in Lesotho, and I’ve met professors from there and they know how science works. They’ve done it, and continue to do it.
Exactly. The sham acupuncture still involves poking people with needles! It’s just not aligned.
And how much of the culture of science has spread through Lesotho? Or would survive the university being shut down? Or survive a single charismatic professor leaving and being replaced by a corrupt leader who demands publishable results? The question isn’t whether Science exists in the world, but to what extent it’s a delicate flower that lives in a greenhouse and will quickly die or become a shambling parody of itself when conditions change, and whether it can survive something like the collapse of civilization.
It does? I thought sham acupuncture involved either needle-less approaches or trick needles where it pokes the patient but retracts rather than breaks the skin.
Pt 1: I don’t know. The core of science is not so very complicated. Empiricism plus skepticism plus math. The hardest part of that is math, and of the three that is the most easily transmitted by book. Of the rest, that’s a bit of sociology I can’t judge. Lesotho isn’t what I’m holding up as ‘the most likely source of a rebound in the event of nuclear war’ - it’s an example of the spread of real science.
Pt 2: Sometimes… but even if acupuncture is a really reliable way of inducing a strong placebo effect on people even if they know it ‘does nothing’, that’s useful.
Then why did it take so long?
The tradition of math is the most ancient & universal of the 3 parts you mention. Most regions of the world develop math, sometimes to fairly high levels like in India or China. Is that consistent with it being ‘the hardest part’? In contrast, empiricism and skepticism are typically marginal and unpopular on the rare occasions they show up; the Greek Skeptics were one of the more minor traditions, the Carvaka of India were some heretics known from like one surviving text from the early BCs and were never a viable force, and offhand I don’t even know of any Chinese philosophical tradition which could reasonably be described as either ‘empirical’ or ‘skeptical’.
It’s also not what they think they’re measuring. Still diseased.
Because it’s psychologically hard and unintuitive, not because it’s complicated. Math is complicated and difficult, but it’s not psychologically challenging like ‘do your best to destroy your own clever explanations and cheer if someone else does’.
Acupuncture makes a great example. Here we have folks who are on to something that works. Yay! Case closed. … except, not. Because they don’t have the idea of science, the hard and unintuitive thing that says you should try to find all the times that that thing you rely on doesn’t work, they can’t find those boundaries.
...and if science is psychologically hard & unintuitive, all the easier for it to be substituted for something superficially similar but ineffective.
And how does that not make science harder than math?
Skepticism and empiricism are robust ideas, by which I mean there’s nothing particularly similar to them. They are also very compact. You can fit them on a post-card. On the other hand, math is this enormous edifice.
The ‘getting it wrong’ that you see all over modern science is a failure, yes, but most of these scientist-failures are failing due to contingent local factors like conflicts of interest and grant proposals and muddy results and competition pressures… they’re failing to fulfill the scientific ideal for sure, but it’s not because they lack the scientific ideal. They can correctly teach science. If bad scientists were all we had, then science would have bad habits and that would be bad, but it could be solved much more easily than having to redesign the thing without knowing that it was possible, like we did the first time.
This is still the case even if all the scientists are under the thumbs of warlords who make them do stupid stuff. The idea is there, the light can spread. Not right away, likely, but we won’t need to wait thousands of years for it to re-emerge.