It's exactly like you said: It seems like a lot of these people, in countering racist narratives about non-Western-European peoples (and even then, not all Western Europeans, the Celts being the main exception), end up simply slapping a minus sign onto the narrative and calling it a day, when any nonzero value on the "white people are better than other people" axis still means you're racist. I feel like they even often mention how the exoticization of other races is a bad thing done by many people in centuries past, so the fact that they couldn't notice themselves doing it is a really glaring blind spot.
At least I'm pleasantly surprised "all the lichen-connected words" isn't a rehash of the "Inuit having 5 trillion words for snow" trope. For anyone unaware of why that's incorrect, the Inuit speak (Eskaleut) languages which use many case forms for each word, so it'd be like saying Latin has 12 words for house (domus, domús, domuí, domum, domó, domí; domús, domórum, domibus, domós, domibus, domibus), even before counting synonyms. The Saami speak languages related to Finnish (and Hungarian), which infamously has a lot of cases, all of which can stack on top of each other. Wiktionary has 192 cases for a Finnish word, for example. Relevant comic: https://www.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/211ogu/conjugation/
It's straightforward to imagine that many indigenous practices for agriculture and medicine evolved in a way that can be modeled in the look-think-test-tell framework--although I'm curious what the anthropological literature says about non-WIERD societies. Although Western science needs a set of nested cycles to evaluate each small experimental loop in terms of theories and frameworks that have been built up and which are themselves evaluated, allowing us to eventually e.g. drop phlogiston but keep entropy. And that's where the analogy between science and indigenous knowledge starts to break down, for example in the case of dieback of Kauri trees in New Zealand, which western scientists think has to do with a fungus-like organism but in which Maori tradition focuses more on a lost connection with whales: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/09/03/more-scientific-mishigass-based-on-indigenous-ways-of-knowing-in-new-zealand/
Yeah, I don't want to oversell the validity of folk traditions, of whatever origin. There are a lot of beliefs all over the world that are relatively old but completely dopey; I spent a while last summer reading Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer stories, which are chock full of odd superstitions from Appalachia (most of which actually work in the context of the stories, of course...). Taking something seriously enough to look into whether it has merit won't necessarily be a LONG process, for some of the odder beliefs out there.
I might also think about making a distinction between stuff that emerged very recently and stuff that has some real depth of history to it. The whale song treatment for the Kauri tree dieback seems (from skim-reading that post) to be a recent attempt at a spiritual solution to a recent problem, which means it hasn't gone through much iteration. I don't know that it needs to be given all that much credence.
If, on the other hand, the fungal infection problem was something with a long-established history, and there was a tradition of treating it by spreading whale oil on trees to prevent infection (which does not seem to be the case), that would be worth a bit more time. It would at least be worth throwing some of the whale oil into a series of spectrometers to see if it contains something with anti-fungal properties.
It's exactly like you said: It seems like a lot of these people, in countering racist narratives about non-Western-European peoples (and even then, not all Western Europeans, the Celts being the main exception), end up simply slapping a minus sign onto the narrative and calling it a day, when any nonzero value on the "white people are better than other people" axis still means you're racist. I feel like they even often mention how the exoticization of other races is a bad thing done by many people in centuries past, so the fact that they couldn't notice themselves doing it is a really glaring blind spot.
At least I'm pleasantly surprised "all the lichen-connected words" isn't a rehash of the "Inuit having 5 trillion words for snow" trope. For anyone unaware of why that's incorrect, the Inuit speak (Eskaleut) languages which use many case forms for each word, so it'd be like saying Latin has 12 words for house (domus, domús, domuí, domum, domó, domí; domús, domórum, domibus, domós, domibus, domibus), even before counting synonyms. The Saami speak languages related to Finnish (and Hungarian), which infamously has a lot of cases, all of which can stack on top of each other. Wiktionary has 192 cases for a Finnish word, for example. Relevant comic: https://www.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/211ogu/conjugation/
It's straightforward to imagine that many indigenous practices for agriculture and medicine evolved in a way that can be modeled in the look-think-test-tell framework--although I'm curious what the anthropological literature says about non-WIERD societies. Although Western science needs a set of nested cycles to evaluate each small experimental loop in terms of theories and frameworks that have been built up and which are themselves evaluated, allowing us to eventually e.g. drop phlogiston but keep entropy. And that's where the analogy between science and indigenous knowledge starts to break down, for example in the case of dieback of Kauri trees in New Zealand, which western scientists think has to do with a fungus-like organism but in which Maori tradition focuses more on a lost connection with whales: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/09/03/more-scientific-mishigass-based-on-indigenous-ways-of-knowing-in-new-zealand/
Yeah, I don't want to oversell the validity of folk traditions, of whatever origin. There are a lot of beliefs all over the world that are relatively old but completely dopey; I spent a while last summer reading Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer stories, which are chock full of odd superstitions from Appalachia (most of which actually work in the context of the stories, of course...). Taking something seriously enough to look into whether it has merit won't necessarily be a LONG process, for some of the odder beliefs out there.
I might also think about making a distinction between stuff that emerged very recently and stuff that has some real depth of history to it. The whale song treatment for the Kauri tree dieback seems (from skim-reading that post) to be a recent attempt at a spiritual solution to a recent problem, which means it hasn't gone through much iteration. I don't know that it needs to be given all that much credence.
If, on the other hand, the fungal infection problem was something with a long-established history, and there was a tradition of treating it by spreading whale oil on trees to prevent infection (which does not seem to be the case), that would be worth a bit more time. It would at least be worth throwing some of the whale oil into a series of spectrometers to see if it contains something with anti-fungal properties.