[ben_w]

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.

[darkerside]

The ego of thinking nothing is true until Western science has proven it as such. This reeks of Columbus discovering America.

[ben_w]

> 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.

[darkerside]

> ancients also believed a lot of things that were not true and didn’t even have a way to find out which was which

> science doesn’t even try to prove anything true

I agree with the second statement and not the first.

[ben_w]

Why not the first?

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.

[darkerside]

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.

[darkerside]

> ancients also believed a lot of things that were not true and didn’t even have a way to find out which was which

I thought you were talking about all beliefs, but it sounds like you are talking about a subset. Everything you said makes sense.