It obviously has ‘any’ validity. If an instance of ‘ancient wisdom’ killed off or weakened the followers enough, it wouldn’t be around. Also, said thing has been optimized for a lot of time by a lot of people, and the version we receive probably isn’t the best, but still one of the better versions.
While some will weaken the people a bit and stick around for sounding good, they generally are just ideas that worked well enough. The best argument for ‘ancient wisdom’ is that you can actually just check how it has effected the people using it. If it has good effects on them, it is likely a good idea. If it has negative effects, it is probably bad.
‘Ancient wisdom’ also includes a lot of ideas we really don’t think of that way. Including math, science, language, etc. We start calling it things like ‘ancient wisdom’ (or tradition, or culture) if only certain traditions use it, which would mean it was less successful at convincing people, and less likely to be a truly good idea, but a lot of it will still be very good ideas.
By default, you should probably think that the reasons given are often wrong, but that the idea itself is in some way useful. (This can just be ‘socially useful’ though.) ‘Alternative medicine’ includes a lot of things that kind of work for specific problems, but people didn’t figure out how to use in an incontrovertible manner. Some alternative medicines don’t work for any likely problem, some are more likely to poison than help, but in general they solve real problems. In many cases, ‘ancient wisdom’ medicine is normal medicine. They had a lot of bad ideas over the millenia medically, but many aso clearly worked. ‘Religion’ includes a lot of things that are shown scientifically to improve the health, happiness, and wellbeing of adherents, but some strains of religion make them do crazy / evil things. You can’t really make a blatant statement by the category.
It obviously has ‘any’ validity. If an instance of ‘ancient wisdom’ killed off or weakened the followers enough, it wouldn’t be around. Also, said thing has been optimized for a lot of time by a lot of people, and the version we receive probably isn’t the best, but still one of the better versions.
While some will weaken the people a bit and stick around for sounding good, they generally are just ideas that worked well enough. The best argument for ‘ancient wisdom’ is that you can actually just check how it has effected the people using it. If it has good effects on them, it is likely a good idea. If it has negative effects, it is probably bad.
‘Ancient wisdom’ also includes a lot of ideas we really don’t think of that way. Including math, science, language, etc. We start calling it things like ‘ancient wisdom’ (or tradition, or culture) if only certain traditions use it, which would mean it was less successful at convincing people, and less likely to be a truly good idea, but a lot of it will still be very good ideas.
By default, you should probably think that the reasons given are often wrong, but that the idea itself is in some way useful. (This can just be ‘socially useful’ though.) ‘Alternative medicine’ includes a lot of things that kind of work for specific problems, but people didn’t figure out how to use in an incontrovertible manner. Some alternative medicines don’t work for any likely problem, some are more likely to poison than help, but in general they solve real problems. In many cases, ‘ancient wisdom’ medicine is normal medicine. They had a lot of bad ideas over the millenia medically, but many aso clearly worked. ‘Religion’ includes a lot of things that are shown scientifically to improve the health, happiness, and wellbeing of adherents, but some strains of religion make them do crazy / evil things. You can’t really make a blatant statement by the category.