This isn't new. Lysenko was Joe Stalin's boy. His bullshit theories caused millions of Russians to starve. Why? Because he decreed that reality didn't comport with good Communist thought. He therefore decreed that reality wasn't real, or at least that reality had nothing to do with growing crops. Start with
If interested, download the article to which the second link refers. [reference 1 in the nature article] If these guys represent Chinese agricultural thought, they're in deeper weeds than I imagined.
That's what decolonizing STEM means: Who needs reality as long as you have dogma and a megaphone? And maybe little Greta Thunberg--to make you feel warm, fuzzy, and self-righteous?
How many children in the west know the non-white origins of math and science?
How many know of Indian mathematicians like Aryabhata (0, place value), Baudayana (precursor to Pythagoras), Pingala (whom Fibonacci himself credits for his series), Kanada (who postulated atoms before the turn of the common era) I am sure Chinese and Middle East would have their list.
I am not woke, but in no text book in the US is there a nod to non -white scientists. Science seems to begin in the medieval west.
Hey, I mostly agree with that. Thus the (brief, hey, its a single essay) explicit acknowledgement of some bigtime non-European scholars here. But the solution, imho, is not "decolonization" which is a mostly silly political ax-grinding propaganda effort. The solution is *historical accuracy.* When there are biases and omissions in what is taught or known or believed, the solution is accuracy, not some faux grand political project or concocted revolutionary narrative.
Oh, you are so right. But accuracy has been coded white and racist, as has been objectivity and everything else that does not respond with "amen" to articles of faith.
The problem with pushing accuracy through the wall of dogma is that, to reach a level of accuracy one has to first take stock of the state of things in an objective manner, then listen to the rationales behind the various interpretations of the available data (and what data and how collected) to reach to a potential accuracy which can always be revised on the ground of more data. This process itself is questioned and dismissed by the faithful. Also because inevitably, accuracy would force us to acknowledge the objectively huge contribution of Western culture to science as we know it today and the scientific method in specific: because while ideas and theories have popped up all over the globe for millennia, it has been in the West, with the Industrial Revolution, that science has divorced theology and wedded itself to technology, with immense consequences for the power of humans to transform their environment and their own bodies. This happened in the West. It took pieces from more or less everywhere, because with the circulation of people the circulation of ideas also increased, but it happened in Europe and in the countries of mostly European culture, who became bent on creating this new world where through a massive increase in objective knowledge immense potentials for wealth and welfare (and equally great dangers) suddenly were in reach. It happened in the West, through the help of everybody who was enthused enough by that cultural drive to take part in it, and through the minds of a host of thinkers who were surely for the hegemony of the scientific method but were surely not very white supremacist, being that more than half of them were Jews.
But this cannot be accepted by those who see the West as the Great Satan and demand constant repentance and penance from it. Facts, truth and balanced assessments have no place in their Holy Book of Grievances. Nor have they any real interest in making things better for those who have been or may be wronged, because it is not an actual political project they have, nor a revolutionary spirit: what they are talking of is SIN. And sin needs to be original and indelible in order for faith to save.
This is where we are at, and it goes far further than academia, unfortunately.
I am considering posting that comment as a stand-alone (with some surrounding context, like this guest post by Helen P.). Do I have your permission? Also, I might post the whole exchange (your 1st comment, my reply, your reply to my reply). Also, do you want this attributed to you? If U.O. is a pseudonym, should I go with that or your real name?
Do feel free to do whatever you wish with my comments, and you do me an honour. Attribute, do not, whatever works best, it is the idea that matters if it has any validity, not the person who says it. Yes, my Substack handle is a pseudonym -- one of my ways to refuse to accept that the personal should be political.
In the west we don't study the origins of math, at least, we didn't when I was in school (80's through early 00's to get engineering degree). Sure, the "laws" of math were almost entirely named after white people but it's not like any time was ever devoted to their backstories.
As a kid I had no idea where L'Hospital was from or what he looked like. We simply learned math and how to apply it to solve problems. (Same for physics, Chemistry, Mechanics, Programming, etc - no backstory, all problem solving and how to apply the concepts to real world situations).
Is this not what they do in India, China, Saudi Arabia? Or do they spend time learning the stories about the pioneers of math?
Personally I've always been fascinated by the history of math and physics so I would have loved to have this combined with the sterile problems solving and rote memorization that dominated my education, but that always seemed like something you would have to do on you own. It's why Larson's Calculus book was by far my favorite math book - it's filled with small background stories every time a new theorem is introduced, you learn a little about them. It's how I discovered Srinivasan Ramanujan brilliance. But Larson's Calculus book was the exception not the rule.
Seriously. And what has giving credit where credit is due to do with dismantling science as a white/colonialist enterprise? My friend, the US has suffered from solipsistic ignorance of the outside world and history since its foundation. As someone educated in the UK and Europe (and MANY years ago) I was taught about the origins of mathematics and other sciences as well. But that is besides the point. There is no doubt that we should -- worldwide -- give more acknowledgement to the contributions of non-European cultures to science in the past. It is also hard to deny that it has been in Europe that science has developed twined with technology as a means to understand and harness nature and change the world, and from there it has spread out again. And today it is a global endeavour, to which humanity as a whole contributes.
The discourse of "decolonization" is not about giving credit for science's research and discoveries to cultures outside of European descent. It is about negating the validity of scientific principles and of the commitment to objectivity by coding them as "white", "colonialist", "imperialist", "male", etc -- and therefore foundationally invalid according to a specific ideology.
An ideology which, by the way, uses the oppressed categories to forward a ploy of power in which the followers and true believers hold all sway and summon mobs to bring about their "justice". It is a struggle for power, no less than the one on the opposite side that strives to silence and erase all diversity. These people should truly have read Foucault, not just cherry-picked his writings
I'm jealous - in the US there was never any history on the origins on mathematics which always fascinated me. Pythagoras could have been born on Easter Island for all we knew, without any knowledge of etymology we wouldn't have known who was Greek, French, Italian, Czech, Indian, etc. They were just names attached to theorems and rules.
Maybe that's changed, been 20 years since I finished my degree.
I doubt it has changed, my wife is American and has nephews and nieces who are now in early secondary school, and the quality of schooling seems abysmal.
It's a long topic. I am not at all for woke reparations for past.
However, remember, children of our heritage (in the west but sadly even in India/China etc) are growing up believing there was no science or math to speak of before the British gave it to us. And they are left believing all we have caste and sati :)
Now, modern children whose only source of knowledge is social media can't be blamed for thinking even yoga is a white creation!
Let alone science - even philosophy which was very evolved even before greek philosophers in india/china doesn't get mention. Daughter did high school philosophy course which had a para for Buddha and Confucius.
But overall, would be lovely to study history of all math/science. I loved reading books on Darwin, Galileo's sister, Tesla but none in school.
Much of school is restricted in time and space. Science classes tend to want to teach about science, sort of naturally, rather than about the history of science. It would be nice if there was more education about the history of science, in history classes... but each country tends very much to focus on national history, and there is never enough time.
This conversation strays far from the subject of the article, which again has nothing to do with acknowledging the contributions of other cultures.
I am not so sure that the youth who live on social media grow up thinking that everything is a "white" creation (I have severe issues with the entire concept of skin colour to define people -- it is an American thing, which has become common language because of the American hegemony in media, but nobody in Europe defined as white until a couple decades ago, and the category does not exist in census, at most it is Caucasian if race has to be defined, and there are countries, like France, that refuse to contemplate race altogether... culture is something else, but race, no: they are French. Like for me, Rishi Sunak or Kwasi Kwarteng are Brits: their skin tone is irrelevant; some of their cultural heritage is not Anglo-Saxon and that could give them an advantage in that they may see some subjects from more angles, in some respects, than their former pal Boris Johnson). I tend to think that the youth that grow up on social media tend to think that everything is a YouTube hodge podge.
And I do not know about India -- I will have to go and ask my Sikh neighbours -- but my niece is a Chinese and Japanese interpreter and has had for several years a Chinese boyfriend who lived in China (and who has now unfortunately gone missing), and I can assure you that in the schools of today's China, just like in the schools of the USSR of old, they teach that everything was invented and discovered in their country (which in the case of China is admittedly true in part... except that they completely downplay the contributions of every other culture).
National pride is a force that always went and will always go against objective truth.
“As an astrophysicist, I'm a product of institutions that are steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,” Gosnell says. “The tenets of white supremacy that show up [in physics] of individualism and exceptionalism and perfectionism… it’s either-or thinking, and there's no subtlety, there's no gray area. All of this manifests in the way that we think about our research, and what counts as good research, what counts as important research?”
"it’s either-or thinking, and there's no subtlety, there's no gray area..." Oh yeah, Social Justice is never guilty of any of this!
I'm a firm believer in Ecclesiastes and "there's no new thing under the sun," but sometimes the modern world surprises me: We might just have the first ruling class in history, the first class of people leading safe and prosperous lives, who spend all their waking hours whining about how victimized they are.
Academia has become group therapy for the world's most emotionally fragile narcissists.
From what I found on google, that Dostoevsky quote is misattributed.
Thanks! You are right, but it is just soo fitting, that I kept it but pointed out that he never said it! (which is kinda fitting for the whole essay).
Postmodernism is about deconstructing systems of power to discern how they change or continue over time, It's easy! See, I'll use it right now:
>> Everyone who benefits from the scheme of "trans" is either male or a "man." therefore it is a male supremacy movement. <<
Done, someone give me a PhD
This isn't new. Lysenko was Joe Stalin's boy. His bullshit theories caused millions of Russians to starve. Why? Because he decreed that reality didn't comport with good Communist thought. He therefore decreed that reality wasn't real, or at least that reality had nothing to do with growing crops. Start with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
and next read
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41431-019-0422-5
If interested, download the article to which the second link refers. [reference 1 in the nature article] If these guys represent Chinese agricultural thought, they're in deeper weeds than I imagined.
That's what decolonizing STEM means: Who needs reality as long as you have dogma and a megaphone? And maybe little Greta Thunberg--to make you feel warm, fuzzy, and self-righteous?
Heh. https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/lysenkoism-then-and-now
That one is for paid subscribers though...
Seriously?
How many children in the west know the non-white origins of math and science?
How many know of Indian mathematicians like Aryabhata (0, place value), Baudayana (precursor to Pythagoras), Pingala (whom Fibonacci himself credits for his series), Kanada (who postulated atoms before the turn of the common era) I am sure Chinese and Middle East would have their list.
I am not woke, but in no text book in the US is there a nod to non -white scientists. Science seems to begin in the medieval west.
Hey, I mostly agree with that. Thus the (brief, hey, its a single essay) explicit acknowledgement of some bigtime non-European scholars here. But the solution, imho, is not "decolonization" which is a mostly silly political ax-grinding propaganda effort. The solution is *historical accuracy.* When there are biases and omissions in what is taught or known or believed, the solution is accuracy, not some faux grand political project or concocted revolutionary narrative.
Oh, you are so right. But accuracy has been coded white and racist, as has been objectivity and everything else that does not respond with "amen" to articles of faith.
The problem with pushing accuracy through the wall of dogma is that, to reach a level of accuracy one has to first take stock of the state of things in an objective manner, then listen to the rationales behind the various interpretations of the available data (and what data and how collected) to reach to a potential accuracy which can always be revised on the ground of more data. This process itself is questioned and dismissed by the faithful. Also because inevitably, accuracy would force us to acknowledge the objectively huge contribution of Western culture to science as we know it today and the scientific method in specific: because while ideas and theories have popped up all over the globe for millennia, it has been in the West, with the Industrial Revolution, that science has divorced theology and wedded itself to technology, with immense consequences for the power of humans to transform their environment and their own bodies. This happened in the West. It took pieces from more or less everywhere, because with the circulation of people the circulation of ideas also increased, but it happened in Europe and in the countries of mostly European culture, who became bent on creating this new world where through a massive increase in objective knowledge immense potentials for wealth and welfare (and equally great dangers) suddenly were in reach. It happened in the West, through the help of everybody who was enthused enough by that cultural drive to take part in it, and through the minds of a host of thinkers who were surely for the hegemony of the scientific method but were surely not very white supremacist, being that more than half of them were Jews.
But this cannot be accepted by those who see the West as the Great Satan and demand constant repentance and penance from it. Facts, truth and balanced assessments have no place in their Holy Book of Grievances. Nor have they any real interest in making things better for those who have been or may be wronged, because it is not an actual political project they have, nor a revolutionary spirit: what they are talking of is SIN. And sin needs to be original and indelible in order for faith to save.
This is where we are at, and it goes far further than academia, unfortunately.
I am considering posting that comment as a stand-alone (with some surrounding context, like this guest post by Helen P.). Do I have your permission? Also, I might post the whole exchange (your 1st comment, my reply, your reply to my reply). Also, do you want this attributed to you? If U.O. is a pseudonym, should I go with that or your real name?
Do feel free to do whatever you wish with my comments, and you do me an honour. Attribute, do not, whatever works best, it is the idea that matters if it has any validity, not the person who says it. Yes, my Substack handle is a pseudonym -- one of my ways to refuse to accept that the personal should be political.
In the west we don't study the origins of math, at least, we didn't when I was in school (80's through early 00's to get engineering degree). Sure, the "laws" of math were almost entirely named after white people but it's not like any time was ever devoted to their backstories.
As a kid I had no idea where L'Hospital was from or what he looked like. We simply learned math and how to apply it to solve problems. (Same for physics, Chemistry, Mechanics, Programming, etc - no backstory, all problem solving and how to apply the concepts to real world situations).
Is this not what they do in India, China, Saudi Arabia? Or do they spend time learning the stories about the pioneers of math?
Personally I've always been fascinated by the history of math and physics so I would have loved to have this combined with the sterile problems solving and rote memorization that dominated my education, but that always seemed like something you would have to do on you own. It's why Larson's Calculus book was by far my favorite math book - it's filled with small background stories every time a new theorem is introduced, you learn a little about them. It's how I discovered Srinivasan Ramanujan brilliance. But Larson's Calculus book was the exception not the rule.
Seriously. And what has giving credit where credit is due to do with dismantling science as a white/colonialist enterprise? My friend, the US has suffered from solipsistic ignorance of the outside world and history since its foundation. As someone educated in the UK and Europe (and MANY years ago) I was taught about the origins of mathematics and other sciences as well. But that is besides the point. There is no doubt that we should -- worldwide -- give more acknowledgement to the contributions of non-European cultures to science in the past. It is also hard to deny that it has been in Europe that science has developed twined with technology as a means to understand and harness nature and change the world, and from there it has spread out again. And today it is a global endeavour, to which humanity as a whole contributes.
The discourse of "decolonization" is not about giving credit for science's research and discoveries to cultures outside of European descent. It is about negating the validity of scientific principles and of the commitment to objectivity by coding them as "white", "colonialist", "imperialist", "male", etc -- and therefore foundationally invalid according to a specific ideology.
An ideology which, by the way, uses the oppressed categories to forward a ploy of power in which the followers and true believers hold all sway and summon mobs to bring about their "justice". It is a struggle for power, no less than the one on the opposite side that strives to silence and erase all diversity. These people should truly have read Foucault, not just cherry-picked his writings
I'm jealous - in the US there was never any history on the origins on mathematics which always fascinated me. Pythagoras could have been born on Easter Island for all we knew, without any knowledge of etymology we wouldn't have known who was Greek, French, Italian, Czech, Indian, etc. They were just names attached to theorems and rules.
Maybe that's changed, been 20 years since I finished my degree.
I doubt it has changed, my wife is American and has nephews and nieces who are now in early secondary school, and the quality of schooling seems abysmal.
It's a long topic. I am not at all for woke reparations for past.
However, remember, children of our heritage (in the west but sadly even in India/China etc) are growing up believing there was no science or math to speak of before the British gave it to us. And they are left believing all we have caste and sati :)
Now, modern children whose only source of knowledge is social media can't be blamed for thinking even yoga is a white creation!
Let alone science - even philosophy which was very evolved even before greek philosophers in india/china doesn't get mention. Daughter did high school philosophy course which had a para for Buddha and Confucius.
But overall, would be lovely to study history of all math/science. I loved reading books on Darwin, Galileo's sister, Tesla but none in school.
Much of school is restricted in time and space. Science classes tend to want to teach about science, sort of naturally, rather than about the history of science. It would be nice if there was more education about the history of science, in history classes... but each country tends very much to focus on national history, and there is never enough time.
This conversation strays far from the subject of the article, which again has nothing to do with acknowledging the contributions of other cultures.
I am not so sure that the youth who live on social media grow up thinking that everything is a "white" creation (I have severe issues with the entire concept of skin colour to define people -- it is an American thing, which has become common language because of the American hegemony in media, but nobody in Europe defined as white until a couple decades ago, and the category does not exist in census, at most it is Caucasian if race has to be defined, and there are countries, like France, that refuse to contemplate race altogether... culture is something else, but race, no: they are French. Like for me, Rishi Sunak or Kwasi Kwarteng are Brits: their skin tone is irrelevant; some of their cultural heritage is not Anglo-Saxon and that could give them an advantage in that they may see some subjects from more angles, in some respects, than their former pal Boris Johnson). I tend to think that the youth that grow up on social media tend to think that everything is a YouTube hodge podge.
And I do not know about India -- I will have to go and ask my Sikh neighbours -- but my niece is a Chinese and Japanese interpreter and has had for several years a Chinese boyfriend who lived in China (and who has now unfortunately gone missing), and I can assure you that in the schools of today's China, just like in the schools of the USSR of old, they teach that everything was invented and discovered in their country (which in the case of China is admittedly true in part... except that they completely downplay the contributions of every other culture).
National pride is a force that always went and will always go against objective truth.
This might be the funniest article I've read in 2023:
https://www.coloradocollege.edu/newsevents/newsroom/2023/professor-gosnell-combines-art-and-science-in-immersive-art-piece.html#.Y8dURkHMK3_
“As an astrophysicist, I'm a product of institutions that are steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy,” Gosnell says. “The tenets of white supremacy that show up [in physics] of individualism and exceptionalism and perfectionism… it’s either-or thinking, and there's no subtlety, there's no gray area. All of this manifests in the way that we think about our research, and what counts as good research, what counts as important research?”
**cosmic facepalm**
LOLOL! Why'd you make me read that!?!?
"it’s either-or thinking, and there's no subtlety, there's no gray area..." Oh yeah, Social Justice is never guilty of any of this!
I'm a firm believer in Ecclesiastes and "there's no new thing under the sun," but sometimes the modern world surprises me: We might just have the first ruling class in history, the first class of people leading safe and prosperous lives, who spend all their waking hours whining about how victimized they are.
Academia has become group therapy for the world's most emotionally fragile narcissists.