Double-Blind Trials Are a Sign of Respect

On "Ways of Knowing" #discourse

On the Web, this “Career Feature” by Oscar Allan in Nature is titled “How researchers can work fairly with Indigenous and local knowledge”, but I first encountered it via a bunch of angry dunks on ex-Twitter and (to a lesser extent) Bluesky, under the title “The Value of Indigenous and Local Knowledge.” Which is what it’s called in the downloadable PDF from the actual journal, so I guess it counts as a neat example of inverting the usual accusation: they went with the more click-baity title in the print edition, where you can’t really benefit from hate-clicks.

Of course, the thing that really drove ire toward the piece was the subhead, which is the same in both: “Scientists around the world are recognizing that their research method isn’t the only way.” Which seems to place the piece pretty firmly in a particular lineage of “Ways of Knowing” #discourse that all too frequently tips into complete twaddle.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

In this case, I think the piece is much better served by the calmer online title than the print one or the subhead. At least, if you go into it primed by the more subdued headline you can read it as providing earnest advice: the basic thrust is that the traditional practices of various pre-industrial societies often have a rational basis, even though they’re rarely framed in terms we recognize as such in the modern sense. It’s foolish and arrogant to simply dismiss them as “primitive” because of their origin without first investigating to see what’s really going on. And when researchers follow up on hints from traditional folkways and find something worthwhile, they should make an effort to give credit to the people who were the original source, and share the benefits of any breakthroughs with them. (This is wrapped in a bunch of jargon about “co-production” and the like, to make everyone involved seem Super Smart, but that’s the essence.)

Of course, if you go in primed by the combination of the more dramatic print headline and the subhead, it’s not that hard to read the piece as fitting more solidly in the tradition of anti-scientific nonsense. Which leads directly to this kind of response, which I think is a little excessive— yeah, the evidence in the piece isn’t terribly compelling, but I don’t think it’s all that virulently goofy, either.

I’m pretty lukewarm on the whole thing, to be honest, in large part because I think the reaction to the piece is almost perfectly correlated with the expectations raised by the framing. (I opened it via a link in a dunk tweet expecting to hate-read it, but then had to do something else for a while and forgot where it had come from, so went into actually reading it with the web headline.) But also because I think the intended message is completely unsurprising: of course the traditional practices of pre-industrial society can offer useful hints to modern science. That’s because they’re based on exactly the same thing.

Modern science and traditional folkways are both making use of the same fundamental process, which is the cornerstone of basically all of human civilization. I’ve made this argument at book length (and also various blogs and podcast and videos linked from here), where I called the steps “Look, Think, Test, and Tell.” You look at the world around you, and observe some phenomenon or collection of phenomena that you want to explain or exploit. You think about how that happens and make a model of why it works the way it does. You test the model by making further observations and conducting experiments. Then you tell other people the results of your tests, so they can benefit from what you’ve learned. This is an iterative process— once you’ve gone through it, you have some new information about the world that can help refine your model and extend it to other phenomena, and telling others about it lets them share in the benefits.

Photo by Kentaro Komada on Unsplash

This process is formalized in the practices and institutions of modern science, but the same thing is at work in basically every human activity. The Sámi people cited in the article who herd reindeer in northern Sweden know fine details about the behavior of Rangifer tarandus through this process: they look at the behavior of the reindeer herds (some years they go to one location, some years another), they think about why that might be (their preferred food is more accessible in some places than others), they test that model with further observations (the particular lichen is, in fact, more plentiful in certain landscapes and weather conditions), and they tell each other and their descendants the results (which is how you get all the lichen-connected words cited in the article). “Look, think, test, tell,” iterated over generations— that’s the process of science.

This is the fundamental problem with a lot of the “ways of knowing” #discourse: it’s setting up a disconnect between “science” (Western, industrial, inherently suspect) and “knowledge” (Indigenous, traditional, inherently noble) that’s completely false. The Sámi aren’t the Noldor out of Tolkien, with deeper knowledge of and access to the world because of where they come from. They’re standard-issue humans, building and sharing models of the world in the same way as everybody else. Their knowledge isn’t framed in the language of modern institutional science, but it’s developed through the same fundamental process for investigating and understanding the world.

Recognizing the universality of the look-think-test-tell process of science has two big implications for the contentious and misguided debates connected to this article, one directed at each side. The first, as noted above, is that traditional practices should be accorded some degree of respect and not dismissed without further investigation. Any practice— agricultural, medical, craft-oriented, whatever— that has survived long enough to become widespread and embedded in culture and language almost certainly has an origin in something that works. That should be taken seriously, at least initially, and studied to see what can be learned from it.

The key qualifier here, which leads into the other point, is “without further investigation.” That is, traditional practices should be taken seriously enough to investigate, but if more careful study doesn’t turn up anything useful, it’s perfectly fine to drop it as a thing to be taken seriously. That doesn’t mean it needs to be actively disparaged or gratuitously disrespected— “Don’t be a dick” remains a good general principle— but as the disclaimer goes, past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.

This requires, however, accepting the perspective alluded to in the title of this post: that subjecting traditional practices to modern investigation is not an affront. Quite the contrary, it means the underlying ideas and practices are being taken seriously enough to be studied, potentially incorporated into the broader store of scientific knowledge. If some bit of folks wisdom cures diseases conventional pharmaceuticals won’t touch, get some trials set up and let’s figure out how and why, and use it for the benefit of all humanity. There’s no greater sign of respect than that.

This cuts somewhat against the thrust of a lot of the “Ways of Knowing” #discourse, though, the dippier versions of which like to bracket off “Indigenous Knowledge” and “Traditional Medicine” and the like as their own things, not to be polluted by exposure to excessively Western modes of thought. They’re above criticism because of their origin, and attempts to investigate them scientifically are suspect at best, if not actively insulting.

To my mind, though, that attitude is, in fact, the worst sort of disrespect. It’s setting “Indigenous” people off as a separate category, some sort of Elves whose experience of the world is fundamentally different than those of ordinary humans. That’s not respect, that’s patronization.

(I should maybe note that I feel a little similarly about attempts to set scientists off as special in the opposite direction. It’s superficially flattering but actually kind of alienating— we’re not that smart.)

So, as I said, I end up pretty lukewarm about this piece and the #discourse of which it is a part. On the one hand, I absolutely agree that traditional practices deserve respect at least to the degree of subjecting them to careful and systematic investigation. But at the same time, they don’t deserve anything beyond that— if there’s nothing to them, I don’t have to treat them as viable alternatives to things that do work.

Both of those conclusions border on trite and obvious, though, to me at least, because they follow directly from the recognition that the fundamental look-think-test-tell process of science is one of the few genuinely universal human practices.

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So, yeah, there’s a few more whacks on that dead horse. If you want to see more of this kind of thing, here’s a button:

And if you want to take issue with any of my characterizations, the comments will be open: