I'm always cautious about pieces like this, but still thought some of what they wrote to be interesting to think about, whether or not it's likely to be true. This is an area that we still know very little about.
With that said, I find the author’s argument for epistemological anarchism overly simplistic.
Yes, many big breakthroughs came from discarding mainstream schools of thought. But the era in which those discoveries occurred was an era where many of our ideas about the world were fundamentally wrong. As knowledge increases and our models of the world improve, such anarchism becomes harder and harder to distinguish from quackery.
I suspect the author would point out that we might still be fundamentally wrong, but there is plenty of evidence to show that at least in some categories, we’re getting more things right than we used to. Whether the subject at hand is one of those areas is certainly debatable.
The point I can concede is that we still know so little about mental health and the impact of biology on mental health, that this may still be a discipline that needs some of that anarchism.
Recent studies linking gut bacteria to wellbeing at least hint at some potential legitimacy.
With that said, I find the author’s argument for epistemological anarchism overly simplistic.
Yes, many big breakthroughs came from discarding mainstream schools of thought. But the era in which those discoveries occurred was an era where many of our ideas about the world were fundamentally wrong. As knowledge increases and our models of the world improve, such anarchism becomes harder and harder to distinguish from quackery.
I suspect the author would point out that we might still be fundamentally wrong, but there is plenty of evidence to show that at least in some categories, we’re getting more things right than we used to. Whether the subject at hand is one of those areas is certainly debatable.
The point I can concede is that we still know so little about mental health and the impact of biology on mental health, that this may still be a discipline that needs some of that anarchism.
Recent studies linking gut bacteria to wellbeing at least hint at some potential legitimacy.