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STEM Naming Double Standard (Short)
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Care to elaborate on your criticism?
I don't think I really need to, but go search around.
Big difference between an insular culture not sharing their technology of the time and just hoarding it libraries because of religion, having no scientific process, and poor documentation between generations VS the goal of an entire culture disseminating scientific information with documentation and peer review. One will be more widely known than the other.
Just because Anthropology has been able to define that one culture or another knew about something at one point in time or another doesn't change what the current definitions or well-known terms used to define it are.
The poster in the video (sorry if that's you) also doesn't mention the fact that Mesolithic societies knew a number of these things, they just didn't document much. Mesopotamian writings were some of the first to do so, and the poster even flashes some Cuneiform tablets in his video, which proves that point, I just don't think he realized what they were 🤣
This video is attempting to make it seem like there is some nefarious means behind hiding all of this or whatever due to some culture washing which is dumb as hell.
Good example: "Why don't we call Band-Aids by their original name, HUH????? The Egyptians did bandages first durrrrrrr"
Band aids don’t have the implication that whoever invented them was band-aid.
Naming a mathematical theorem after someone has the implication that they were the inventor. Obviously if it happens in some cases it’s not too problematic. But if there’s a general trend of removing certain groups from mathematics it does become one.
For example the myth that mathematics was mainly invented by greeks in commonly taught in schools around the european and anglophone world.
There’s a real phenomenon of eurocentrism and erasure of mathematical contributions from outside the west. This is a well documented problematic which has had dozens of books and papers written about it. So I don’t think your dismissal as idiotic is warranted. Obviously that was just some random guy in a 30 second video which was made to be engaging as much as informative, but it raises an interesting subject.
If you want to delve further this is an interesting paper to enter into the subject. I enjoyed reading it for the history of mathematical analysis course I took for my masters. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249740664_Eurocentrism_in_the_History_of_Mathematics_the_Case_of_the_Kerala_School
Anyways, I didn’t make that video, and it is obviously far from perfect. But your dismissal of it as “idiotic” strikes me to be oddly closed minded.
Then you're missing the point. Naming or bragging rights about who came up with what first is pretty ridiculous, and has no benefit to society anyway. I think the better question is "Who actually cares?".
Nobody is going run around to various cultures to correct the historic record now that we know different. If that were the case, then even at your own insistence, we'd have to REALLY find out who had the concept of what first, and chances are the majority of those things wouldn't be coming from who you thought.
Nobody is going to waste the energy and effort of doing that. That's insane. The popular terminology is what it is because of the propagation of it as such, and that's all their is to it. There's no sinister task at hand to ensure it doesn't change, and thinking so, yes, is idiotic. It's like being a child and throwing a tantrum because someone else at your kickball game got some claps for a play and nobody gave you any.
Also found this for you. Interesting read: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
But did you even read my full comment. Aside from the general trend in names, it brings up the bigger subject of erasure of non-western thinkers from mathematics.
If nobody cared there wouldn’t be an entire adacemic subfield pertaining to this.
Also what does a random historical essay about the end of the golden age of science in the arabic world pertain to erasure of non-western contributions in mathematics?