critiques of science

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
all or even most members of a society does not have to actually subscribe to an ideology for it to be the basic shaping principle of that society.

Rick Santorum, who came close to being the Republican candidate for the next US general election, is promoting the ludicrous fiction that there is "scientific evidence" against Darwinian evolution. Oh, and he thinks man-made global warming is nonsense too, of course.

God created the world and then gave it to us to use as one big farm-cum-mine-cum-oilfield. End of story, God bless America.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
where did she say that or are you making stuff up again?

OK, I've just listened again to what she says and have typed my transcript below. She has quite a strong accent and I can't guarantee every word is right, but I think it's substantially correct. Please tell me what you think I've got wrong.

So I'm going to respond to your submissions, because I wanted to directly respond, because I 've actually been thinking about this coming here because I thought it was gonna be one of the coming [?] questions: how do we even start to decolonise science? "Science is true because it is science" - you know, what can you do - and my response to that was, if I were personally committed to enforcing decolonisation of science - science as a whole is a product of Western modernity...

[OK, that last bit is just flat-out, demonstrably untrue. Ironically, it's exactly what a racist white historian would say. But even if were true, it would still have no bearing whatsoever on the universality of Newton's laws, for example.]

...and the whole thing should be scratched off.

[I think I said "abandon science" - or abolish it, destroy it, whatever. I think that's a fair synonym for "the whole [of science] should be scratched off".]

So if you want a practical solution to how to decolonise science, we have to restart science from, I dunno, an African perspective, from out perspective, of how we've experienced science. For instance, I have a question for all the science people here, there is a place in [----] and they believe that, through the magic, through the black magic - we call it black magic - they call it witchcraft, others.. that you are able to send a lightning, to strike someone.

[This part is, I admit, a bit ambiguous, because at this stage she isn't saying that she believes this is possible. But why bring it up if she doesn't believe it herself? Then finally:]

So, can you explain that scientifically? Because it is something that happens.

[So she *is* saying she believes that it's a real thing.]

Now which bit of that, exactly, have I misrepresented?

Africans have been systematically excluded from the science establishment for ever.

And you think a good way to go about including Africans in the science establishment is to indulge those who say science should be "scratched off" and that magicians can kill people with lightning? Is that going to help African people get educated in science and have careers in research and industry?

So yes i'm saying Science is inherently racist, no i'm not saying apples are racist.

Well, you're wrong. Certainly, scientists can be racist, and scientific institutions can be racist, but neither of those is synonymous with 'science'. An actually progressive, anti-racist approach here would be to encourage black Africans, and black people generally, to get a scientific education if they're so inclined, and pursue a career in science. Which would surely be to the general economic benefit of the continent, wouldn't it?

It's true that science as it currently stands is not primarily a product of African culture. But then neither is postmodern philosophy, which is where this whole anti-science movement comes from. I just don't understand how anyone who claims to be anti-racist can fail to be dismayed by such patently regressive attitudes that can only hold back the cultural and economic advancement of black people. How do you think black faculty staff in the UCT STEM departments feel about this?
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I can't be bothered clicking a Storm Front link, and I double can't be bothered clicking a broken Storm Front link.

I think what's wound me up here, apart from your patronising and condescending tone, my dear, is your unquestioning assumption that you're arguing from an anti-racist position. Whereas actually what you're demonstrating is the insidious crypto-racism of Leftist cultural relativism. I don't know whether you actually agree with every word the women in that clip is saying, but you're defending what she says, and what she's saying is "Science is a solely white Western achievement, and not suitable for Africans, who are more of a witch-doctor sort of crowd." That's like something a cartoon of a white racist would come out with.

If "science is racist", what does that make Neil DeGrasse Tyson? A race traitor? A sort of astrophysical Uncle Tom?
 

sufi

lala
the amount of energy you put into rubbishing this young woman's words demonstrates exactly how science is racist
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So again, the only non-racist response is to meekly agree with what she says, because she is black.

Have you ever heard of 'the racism of low expectations'?
 

sufi

lala
no tea, just because i criticised you for drawing a false equivalence between anti-black and anti-white racisms, doesn't mean that i agree with either of them.

Your "colour blind" approach in this is inherently racist, because it wilfully (by now i s'pose) ignores the context where power and history are factors. We explained this to you kindly and gently, but you writhe and wriggle and seek to avoid the issue.

Stormxfront are with you on that, Cambridge uni seem to be with me!

Check this - it's relevant, and nicely balanced and nuanced: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opin...tion-of-the-academic-project-in-south-africa/
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
no tea, just because i criticised you for drawing a false equivalence between anti-black and anti-white racisms, doesn't mean that i agree with either of them.

For the umpteenth time, that is exactly not what I was doing. Even droid accepts that this isn't the point I was making, and he's always the first person to jump down my throat at the slightest whiff of a fallacy or inconsistency.

Alright, I'll have a look at that link. I just hope you're not doing that thing of thinking "This person is disagreeing with me because they don't know something I know, so I will tell them the thing I know, and then they will agree with me."

Edit: you still haven't said which part of what she said I've misrepresented, or addressed the point I made about scientists, technologists etc. who are themselves black.
 
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sufi

lala
this is what i think you were doing
Oh I see now,
So you decided to post up the 2 videos about racism and science, but you decided to just skip the race bit.

Cool:cool:
this is how baboon read it
I can't help feeling sad that Zhao isn't around for this thread.

@Tea, you can't separate someone's attitude towards a system of knowledge from racial and other politics though, when that system of knowledge has been (and continues to be) used for oppressive purposes, alongside all the good uses to which it is put. They're inseparable, and the lack of acknowledgement of this point is, as I take it, precisely what the woman in the video is trying to bring some attention to in terms of decolonising science - much as I don't think she chooses the most helpful example.

I don't think we have to be literal in thinking that she really means to scrap all science. Rather, it's a rhetorical way of drawing attention to several things, among those the often-contemptuous attitude of the West towards other forms of knowledge - you show contempt for our ancestral knowledge, and we'll show contempt for yours. I don't think she makes the point particularly well, but that doesn't mean it's ridiculous.
i miss zhao too ❌❌❌
 

sufi

lala
Edit: you still haven't said which part of what she said I've misrepresented, or addressed the point I made about scientists, technologists etc. who are themselves black.

This addresses that:
no tea, just because i criticised you for drawing a false equivalence between anti-black and anti-white racisms, doesn't mean that i agree with either of them.

when you are in a hole ...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
OK, so I've read this:


A recent video of a UCT student arguing quite confidently that the way to decolonise the sciences is to abolish them altogether since, as a product of “Western modernity”, they are wholly colonial and hence irredeemable, will come in handy in the next coming weeks to the conservative detractors of Fallism as evidence and vindication of their misgiving about decolonisation as hollow, extremist, lacking in nuance, unscholarly, essentialist and academically unsound.

Needless to say, the student is probably aware by now that her statement was in error; that a larger – and precisely decolonised – history of the sciences would highlight the prominent contribution of non-Western traditions of science to what is today called “modern science” as well as the complicity of the sciences in some of the most devastating acts of terror known to (wo)man.

Alright, agreed with this as far as it goes - although in the last sentence, it's important to note that "the sciences" aren't a person or even a group of people. Sure, scientists have done terrible things, but that's a very different proposition. No-one blames 'music' when a musician does something terrible.

But, quite ironically, her error proves her point: the presentation of knowledge by South African universities as predominantly the product of the West, and the failure to recognise that some of the major scientific disciplines (medicine, physics, astronomy, mathematics, among others) have deep heritages in Africa, China and India, for example, is precisely what generates such serious gaps in students’ knowledge base.

So even when she's wrong, she's right! How about that? But come on, this is just zhao all over again - a man educated in the USA who for some reason thought he had better knowledge of the GCSE History syllabus than I did. I'm aware of the scientific and proto-scientific discoveries made by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Arabs (etc. etc. etc.) and I've hardly made it my life's mission to learn about contributions to science by non-Europeans. It's an argument that's 50 or 100 years out of date.

But really, this leads us to an impasse. Is science Bad, because it's European, or Good, because much of it is not European? Or are only the European bits bad? Is it acceptable to teach algebra, because it's Arabic, but not logarithms, because they were invented by a Scotsman? (Leaving aside the question of whether Arabs have always behaved in a purely benign way towards Africans.)

It is jarring to hear scholars in the sciences claim that unlike the humanities, their disciplines are ideologically neutral and hence not susceptible to decolonisation – despite the wealth of literature to the absolute contrary.

When someone can convincingly describe to me what an "African law of gravity", or "law of African gravity", might look like, I'm just going to have to reject this outright. If you don't know enough science to understand this then I'm afraid I can't really help you on this one. Of course, this applies far more to the physical sciences (to say nothing of mathematics) than it does to the life sciences, which are far more contingent on subjective interpretation and actually have been used - abused or misused, rather - to justify colonialism and other horrors such as the Nazi eugenics programme. But to blame 'science' as a whole for these crimes is ludicrous, not least because all the 'science' (actually pseudoscience, for the most part) used to justify these crimes has since been completely overturned, and not by critical theory, but by science. In fact the racial pseudoscience of Nazi Germany had already begun to be discarded by serious biologists twenty years or more previously.

And to compare science to something as obviously culture-contingent as law is just bizarre.

...one might take issue with features of the Fallist movement that do appear to glorify unschooled opinions and banal speech. I have been dismayed at what I also sense as an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in the student movement, a laziness to read, and a penchant to displace rigorous intellectual debate with moralistic and self-righteous reproaches.
...
Indeed, many of the blind spots in the Fallist movement could symptomatise a failure in political education. And I do worry that the intoxicating gaze of the camera and increasing media attention may shift student protests more in the direction of public spectacles and choreographed theatrics rather than slow contemplation and reflection.

Sure, co-sign that.

Most of the rest of it seems quite reasonable. But seriously, are students actually burning libraries now? Fucking hell.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Stormxfront are with you on that...

Also, Storm Front? Come on man, that's lame. Let's at least talk to each other like adults.

I mean, if I felt being a total dick I'm sure I could find a clip of a Saudi imam with views on the perfidious West not at all far removed from yours, but with opinions on Jews, gays and feminists completely interchangeable with those of your typical Storm Front cretin. But I choose not to, you know, sink.

...Cambridge uni seem to be with me!

I believe this is what our much-missed late colleague hundredmillionlifetimes would have called "an appeal to the imagined authority of a Big Other." :D
 

sufi

lala
I mean, if I felt being a total dick I'm sure I could find a clip of a Saudi imam with views on the perfidious West not at all far removed from yours, but with opinions on Jews, gays and feminists completely interchangeable with those of your typical Storm Front cretin. But I choose not to, you know, sink.
I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to do here, but please go ahead.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to do here, but please go ahead.

The point being, trying to slander me by saying "here is someone at Storm Front saying something similar to what you're saying, ergo your whole argument is basically Nazi-ish"* is ridiculous, and exactly the same game could no doubt be played with some of the positions you hold.

[*and if that's not what you're saying, what are you saying?]
 
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sufi

lala
yes that is what i was saying. you still don't really get this i don't think, so let me lay it out for you. with some simple yes/no answers.

You posted 2 viral videos, both aimed at making fun out of their subjects.

  • 1 was about a white student claiming anti-white racism meant that he was entitled to flounce off
  • 1 was about a black student claiming anti-black racism meant that she was entitled to call for science to be drastically reviewed
you said that you see these as "entirely parallel", do you still think that?
here's a clue: the 2 are not parallel unless you consider anti-white and anti-black racism are equivalent.

or alternatively, do you still feel entitled to ignore the race element in the videos?
 
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