Dance is superior to repetitive physical exercise for brain plasticity (2018)

TL;DR: it seems trivially true that non-scientific, traditional knowledge can be a powerful source of understanding, especially when combined judiciously with science.

> That doesn't mean traditions and beliefs are necessarily true, but they didn't evolve randomly either. Successful memes serve a purpose, and that can be rational outside of cultural rationality.

The belief that no knowledge exists outside of the scientific establishment is one of the biggest weaknesses of the center-left technocratic memeplex (of which I'm proudly a part). It leads not only to the myopia of believing that your opponents don't deserve a hearing because they're "anti-science" (for ever more creative interpretations of science..), but also to unforced errors from the ability to reason about uncertainty, like .

I believe that the scientific method is the greatest engine for rapid, high-quality knowledge generation in human history, and consider its manifestation in the scientific establishment to be one of the crowning achievements of humanity. But this doesn't make its manifestation perfect: as with all human systems, it's composed of people who are not immune to pettiness, narrow-minded, selfishness, and even occasionally stupidity. And as with all institutions, the human flaws of its constituents are magnified 1000-fold due to the challenges of incentive design and modeling large systems. Please note, this is decidedly _not_ a criticism of scientists beyond "they're human"; I wouldn't be surprised if the average scientist was well below the median for all of the negative qualities I described. It's just an acknowledgement that they're human, they have flaws, and those flaws affect how science is produced.

Proper science is vastly superior in efficiency and confidence to many other forms of epistemology, but the imperfection of the scientific establishment means that it occasionally mishandles or abdicates responsibility for certain whole sections of knowledge-space. In these situations, reasoning under uncertainty requires cautiously looking at other sources of knowledge; they may be "lower-quality" in many ways than the scientific method, but they're better than simply assuming that absence of evidence = evidence of absence.

When I was younger, I had this insight in the context of ayahuasca rituals while in Peru (I had the insight _before_ the ritual, to be clear haha). The scientific community had abdicated its responsibility to study the potential of psychedelics for improving mental health; how else to interpret shaman guiding an ayahuasca ritual than as an analogue of a therapist[1] trained in psychedelic therapy, whose expertise is shaped not through RCTs but centuries of trial and error? The fact that the West is taking slow, halting steps towards studying psychedelic therapy 70 years after its popularization here is pretty damning, IMO: as somebody who treated science as a valuable but flawed source of knowledge, I've been a happy user of LSD for years, and consider it an immensely helpful tool for mental health.

There are a million examples of this if you stop and think about it. Fifty years ago, yoga and meditation made you a kook; the scientific establishment started studying it and now, it's weird among some circles not to regularly do yoga and meditate. This is again something you can learn easily through examining "unscientific" tradition + self-experimentation, with an appropriate model of the downside risks.

[1] I'm using intentionally clinical language here to make the comparison clear, though I'm aware that it's a little reductive to ignore the spiritual dimension most shamans would describe their work as having.

absolutely. Physical therapists often prescribe gymnastics for kids after they “graduate” from more intense PT.

Samzdat has an absolutely excellent article on the distinctions between state-level (often technocratic) knowledge and on-the-ground knowledge, and the difficulties of communicating between the two and acting on them. It's part of a discussion of the book Seeing Like A State. I think you'd find it stimulating.

https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/

Depends how you sport. In London, my daily 15km cycle to work would have me constantly starting and stopping, sprinting small hills, dodging tourists, racing fellow bikers, brushing cars, and basically being alert at all times for any and all dangers (this was before the mass cycle lanes). There was a weird adrenaline induced rhythm to it that would grant me both physical and mental relief everyday that I had somehow made it to work without dying.

Since I've moved to the countryside; boring endless gentle hills, breathtakingly stunning scenery that offers no challenges, and my brain basically goes into autopilot. I get to work feeling physically fulfilled but mentally drained.

If we are looking at brain effects, the advantages must outweigh the risk of brain injury inherent to the activity. Playing football might help brain plasticity but at considerable risk of brain injuries. Most all the team sports (soccer, lacrosse, hockey etc) have varying degrees of associated brain injury risks, but not dance or other non-competitive sports. At lease when dance (or rock climbing) is competitive the competitors do not share a movement space and so don't knock heads.