Pranayama is a science that's thousands of years old. It's much better to go directly to the source than some bastardised commercialised western version:
The important difference between “ancients knew a true thing” and “science” is that ancients also believed a lot of things that were not true and didn’t even have a way to find out which was which.
Sometimes, and non-scientists everywhere do this, the truth is intermixed with the false so deeply that the truth is even used as evidence for the false.
> nothing is true until Western science has proven it as such
That’s not even remotely what I said.
First, true things are true even if no human has learned them.
Second, science is not just western. China, India, Japan, both Koreas all have their own space programs, for example.
Third, the west was nothing special until it started applying (proto-) scientific methods. Miasma, spontaneous generation, demonology, etc. were all common false beliefs that scientific investigation disabused.
Fouth, science doesn’t even try to prove anything true, all it tries to filter out falsehoods to a reasonable likelihood — “Does substance X have an effect?” a non-scientist may imagine a scientist doing some tests and “proving” it works, but the reality is closer to “Null hypothesis means it is indistinguishable from the absence, alternative hypothesis is that it is different from the absence, can we reasonably reject the null hypothesis with this quantity of evidence?”
This last one is key, and why the west isn’t e.g. trying to conquer literal Hell in the name of Jehova etc.
Most ancient cosmology is wrong, for example we know absolutely that the sun is not a chariot pulled across the sky despite that being part of Hindu, Norse, Baltic, Chinese, and Greek theology. This despite Eratosthenes figuring out it was 93 million miles away. Why didn’t they ditch the untrue beliefs?
While the West had four elements, the East had five, because nobody had the tools to look for roughly a hundred, not that it stopped people trying to turn lead into gold (which we can in fact do now, but the ancients didn’t have nuclear reactors).
No microscopes to look for germs to suggest that misama wasn’t how disease spread. Aztec blood sacrifice doesn’t really help maize crops grow or the sun travelling across the sky. Pork and shellfish goes off quickly in hot deserts like the Middle East, but we’ve got refrigerators and health inspectors now.
The story of Noah’s Ark was taken seriously for a very long time, because nobody had any idea how many species existed and how that number was so large it could not possibly fit into a boat that small.
Some ancient Greeks argued that we could see due to light coming out of our eyes, a belief which is (IMO surprisingly) common today: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12094435/
False beliefs are the default. How do you go about eliminating them when they don’t feel any different to true beliefs?
Science is the best answer to that question that we’ve got so far, and when we find a better one we will use that instead, just like we switched from “verification” to “falsification” when we realised verification wasn’t actually possible.
Oh, I will clarify that even today, we believe things that we have no way of proving. We are different from the ancients, but perhaps less different than you might think.
On the contrary, trial and error is a process that relies on thousands of years and many subjects to yield reliable repeatable results. Unless you are implying that Wim Hoff studied pranayama deeply and learned for himself the aspects of the practice which are relevant to him (which he now extols), I don't understand how you think that the trial and error of one man is better than that of generations of men - is it just because the first is a Westerner?
I really can't speak about Pranayama practice, but in general, just because something has been around for 1000s of years doesn't mean it has been improving. Ideas and practices associated with religion tend to be quite static, of the "do this ritual 3 times, not 2, not 4, the number shall be 3 times" variety. With a few exceptions, religions do not tend to encourage trial and error. And yes, I know Buddhism is one of the rare exceptions, at least as taught by the Gautama Buddha... even so, many Buddhist sects today are quite calcified and full of extraneous ritual; the main exception is Zen.
Win Hof claims he spent decades intensely practicing Yoga and refining his techniques. I don't know if that's true, but I absolutely can believe that in principle someone can improve on thousands of years old religious practices doing that.
Yes, there is a similar expression in the Bible to the one you attributed to the buddha 'But test everything. Keep what is good, and stay away from everything that is evil.'. Though in practice, you are right, such advice is often overlooked. My personal encounters with pranayama e.g. reading Iyengar's 'Light of Pranayama' are that the ritual aspects are not strongly emphasised but there is a cultural message designed to keep alive aspects of the tradition which are beneficial - in a way which could be compared to the learning of Kung Fu, where anger is the main emotional enemy of successful practice.
On a side note, I wonder what the general reception amongst the tech community is to Tesla's eccentricities e.g. opening and closing a door thrice before entering a room. Of course, these are mostly seen as expressions of OCD and ignored but I wonder if there isn't any connection between these impulses of Tesla's and his particular genius? I worry that in the process of stripping away superstitions we might accidentally take away more than we desired and lose the authentic character of progress.
Thanks to that "bastardized commercial" version I'd actually learned about Pranayama, which I probably would have never discovered if there wasn't Wim Hof.
Also, Pranayama has always been a general concept with differing interpretations rather than a single thing. For some it's a set of exercises, for others it's intended to slowly stop you from breathing. Some of it literally is just snorting water.
Sometimes, and non-scientists everywhere do this, the truth is intermixed with the false so deeply that the truth is even used as evidence for the false.