GraceAnneLove44

Welcome!

Hello, GraceAnneLove44! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! Peaceray (talk) 18:02, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

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Peaceray (talk) 18:02, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

Discretionary sanctions

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

To opt out of receiving messages like this one, place {{Ds/aware}} on your user talk page and specify in the template the topic areas that you would like to opt out of alerts about. For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:52, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in pseudoscience and fringe science. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

To opt out of receiving messages like this one, place {{Ds/aware}} on your user talk page and specify in the template the topic areas that you would like to opt out of alerts about. For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor. tgeorgescu (talk) 18:52, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

• I noticed your comment. If you object to the use of the term "pseudoscience" to refer to the practice of Ayurveda, there is not much you can do about it unless you have reasons based in Wikipedia policies to remove "pseudoscience" from the article. Please review the policies linked to at the top of Talk:Ayurveda carefully. You aren't the first person to bring this up and won't be the last, but the term is not going anywhere without a consensus that its use violates policy. 331dot (talk) 19:12, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

To debunk a myth, evidence-based medicine is equally merciless with superstition in general, including Western superstitions (Christian, Druid, Greek-Roman, or whatever). We're not anti-Eastern, we're anti-superstition. We're not patronizing Hindus or bashing their religion, but speaking the universal language of empirical science. tgeorgescu (talk) 20:19, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

@331dot thanks for responding. I’m not seeing anything on the Talk:Ayurveda page besides active discussions. Can you please point me towards the policies section? Thank you. GraceAnneLove44 (talk) 20:51, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

Under the yellow "active arbitration remedies" box at the top of the talk page is a list of policies, but I will copy them here: WP:RS, WP:MEDRS, WP:PSCI and WP:FRINGE. 331dot (talk) 21:16, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi GraceAnneLove44, you can find a number of policy & guideline links in the "Policies and Guidelines" section of the welcome message at the start of this talk page. In addition,Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) (WP:MEDRS for short) is the content guideline for medical articles. Peaceray (talk) 20:59, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

@tgeorgescu Thanks for elaborating on how I’m this space, we’re speaking the universal language of empirical science.

Since we’re all explorers of knowledge here, I wonder if you’d be open to zooming out a bit? And considering who made the rules of empirical science, when, and how they may have benefited?

If you’ll indulge me with an example: In the book “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest”, Canadian ecologist Susan Simard did decades of empirically-backed research to eventually show that whole forests are connected through mycorrhizal networks, starting as an effort to get the old guard of Canada’s timber industry to stop clear cutting and mono cropping. When they finally listened, the ecological conditions improved AND they made a higher profit margin. At the end of the book, Ms. Simard admits that decades of empirical science just used different methods to ‘discover’ what indigenous peoples have known for millennia. Furthermore, their knowledge does follow the scientific method, they had millennia to do a/b testing controlled experiments. Much of that knowledge is retained despite centuries of attempted genocides. It’s only accepted in our current paradigm if western scientists choose to devote funds to studying it. Here’s to shifting the paradigm.

My intended tone of this response is friendly and conversational. I hope the impact as similar and am looking forward to your good faith response. GraceAnneLove44 (talk) 21:10, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

This is not the turf for waging culture wars. Wikipedia is 100% pro-mainstream-science and 100% pro-evidence-based-medicine, and you can't change that. Neither can I, if I wished that. tgeorgescu (talk) 21:15, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

Tgeorgescu is correct; you need to go out in society and fight that battle first, and once your views win, then you can come here and say things have changed. Wikipedia does not lead, it follows, documenting what has already occurred. Only you can decide what you believe, and Wikipedia does not claim to be the truth, but we document what mainstream sources report. If that is not your cup of tea, there is nothing wrong with that- but it's the way we are. 331dot (talk) 21:20, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

Understood, thanks both. I’m learning that Wikipedia isn’t a creative space, just an upholder of modern harmful paradigms, apologies for the blasphemous subjectivity. This makes me wanna understand more about who has the most power behind the scenes at Wiki, maybe I can find an article in it? Thanks for the advice, I plan on going out into society. Now to stop procrastinating preparing a presentation on Ayurveda! :p GraceAnneLove44 (talk) 01:00, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

It's not really a behind the scenes cabal. The idea is simple: Wikipedia is a serious encyclopedia, one like Britannica and Larousse, i.e. a WP:MAINSTREAM one, that is based upon mainstream science and mainstream WP:SCHOLARSHIP. It takes the idea that sometimes there are scientific truths seriously, without bothering too much about quarrels of Popper vs. Kuhn vs. Feyerabend.

And, frankly, I don't think that indigenous people planted forests. That's something for modern intensive agriculture. So: how would they know what it takes to plant a good forest? Maybe they planted a few fruitful trees, but not entire forests to be chopped for wood.

I mean: in modern Ayurveda it is proclaimed that cow dung mixed with cow urine heals Covid, and that oiling your nose with coconut oil makes you immune from Covid. Well, like how many times did Ancient Hindus had to do with Covid? And how would one recognize their Covid pandemics as contemporary Covid pandemics. They had no microscope, no DNA sequencing, no printing press, and so on. tgeorgescu (talk) 02:02, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for making your bias abundantly obvious. This wiki article on one of the main texts of ayurveda enumerates some very 'western' sounding knowledge and techniques, it's worth a peek. Also from the history section of the main article in the history section under further development and spread, it states how the first rhinoplasty performed in the West was done by a doctor who studied in India for 20 years. In fact, for thirteen years, there was a school that where both indigenous and European medicine were taught. After the English Education Act 1835, their policy changed to champion European medicine and disparage local practices. That suppression, distortion, and misinformation exists till today. Thanks for giving me good material for my presentation :) Please work on your biases, we all continue to suffer when we refuse to look at our shadows of how we feel superior to others in an effort to hide our own insecurities. Lol damn the life of a wiki admin... GraceAnneLove44 (talk) 02:50, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

The great lesson of postmodernism is that all people are biased. Believing that you could become "unbiased" is folly. And Wikipedia works on the basis of WP:GOODBIAS. I'm not saying that everything from Ayurveda is bunk. Same as I am not saying that everything from the Western medical tradition up to the 19th century is bunk. All I say is that these things have to be considered critically, and that the instrument of criticism is evidence-based medicine. We cannot WP:CHERRYPICK a couple of examples and declare that that's all the truth.

If a MD would ask me to believe or have faith in their medicines, I would find it deeply insulting: medicines to the job or do not do the job, objectively seen, and this has nothing to do with faith or belief. Faith and belief are for religious preachers, not for MDs.

So ethno-nationalist arguments and arguments of theological orthodoxy are absolutely retarded in respect to judging the effectiveness of medicines. None of the misdeeds of the British in India has any bearing on the effectiveness of Ayurvedic medicines.

So, if you decide that you don't like the WP:RULES of Wikipedia, that's your own right. But sabotaging our articles isn't. tgeorgescu (talk) 04:15, 28 November 2022 (UTC)