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Reply to @lain@lain.com
Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-08-03 16:55:26)
@lain it's fascinating that you won't get thrown out for suggesting that african magic is comparable to western science, it's just a different knowledge paradigm
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(eval 'Toast)@toast@donotsta.re (2026-08-03 17:01:51)
@sun @lain the argument for that is pretty controversial, but well-established

in short, various knowledge paradigms require long-term commitment with worse results to get out of the local maximum, which is the only way it's really worked historically
Feyerabend wrote Against Method which is a case-study of how that worked out with Galileo (alongside the argument)

put differently, it's not that they're "comparable" it's that without putting as much effort into the former as you do into the latter, you can't truly know if it's a better baseline approach, unless you can get there through logic that does not require evidence (e.g. it is internally inconsistent); it's why in epistemic circles you'll more often hear "it's (un)interesting" than other things, because it's frankly a better metric

the generally proposed approach is to simply allow the sickos interested in african magic or any other alternate approach to push its state of the art (so long as it doesn't harm others in the process) and eventually everyone will see if it was a good idea or not

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Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-08-03 17:03:54)
@toast @lain the people promoting this in western universities definitely are doing it out of an inferiority complex and can't articulate the in-universe reason why it might have worked in africa a hundred years ago