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Vaniver comments on Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions - Less Wrong
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What would you have had these biologists use instead? Would you prefer they had no model? It seems clear to me, though I may be wrong, that these scientists had a model (elan vital), and when later evidence came along (modern biology?), they discarded it in favor of a different model. Would you have them instead have picked a different model in the first place? Or have no model at all?
Well, if by "no model" you mean something like the contemporary folk model of biology ("Blood is what keeps you alive, we're not quite sure how though, but in general try not to lose your blood"), then elan vital is definitely worse, in that it (a) adds no new information but (b) sounds wiser, and therefore harder to unseat.
This sounds sensible, though it should be mentioned that bloodletting (hm, there's clearly too much blood here) seems like a candidate for folk biology as well.
(I once had a small, dark bruise underneath a partially healed cut- so it looked like there was this black thing inside my finger, though I was reasonably confident it was just a pool of blood. The urge to cut it open and drain it was unbelievably strong, and I had to put a bandaid on it just so that I couldn't look at it. After that I had a lot more sympathy for people who thought bloodletting was a sensible treatment. I suspect that particular incident was an anti-parasite impulse which mistakenly pattern-matched the pool, and I imagine most bloodletting was inspired by "you're way redder than is healthy- let's fix that!".)