12 ms·

Tradition Is Smarter (2018)

155 points by andrenth 7y ago

asdf21 7y ago
Until it isn't... and there are many, many cases of that too. That being said, the funniest example aligning with the article to me personally, is how nearly all atheists "believe" in natural selection, but almost no atheists have more than 2-3 children. In fact, most seem to have zero or one. And many Conservative Christians don't "believe" in evolution, but yet trend towards having many more children / larger families. It's just such a clear example of how a likely incorrect belief (AKA, "God wants me to have as many children as possible") can still result in a massive evolutionary advantage.
- AQuantized 7y ago
  I'm uncertain if that rationale is the driving force behind their procreation so much as the correlation with religiosity and low levels of education, which is in turn correlated with greater fertility.
  - skinkestek 7y ago
    I recommend you reread the post you replied to as it seems you agree without being aware of it.
    - brlewis 7y ago
      No, the comment by asdf21 says religiosity results in fertility (causation), while the comment by AQuantized says it's just correlation. Please don't start comments with "I recommend you reread the post you replied to". Be more specific, e.g. "It seems your comment and the one you're replying to are both saying X".
- wwweston 7y ago
  To take this further... is this belief incorrect? If you articulate it in a form that invokes literal theism, then I suppose that makes it a question of whether literal theism is correct, which obviously excludes atheists. But you could articulate it as "children are almost always a blessing" vs "children are a burden, especially after a certain number." Either of these are debatable (and truth for most people is probably a balance of the two propositions), but in this formulation, theism could be orthogonal, or it could take on an auxiliary role in supporting one over the other. And most of all, the question of whether theism is literal or whether it's a symbolic distillation of human observations about values and meaning gets factored out of practical considerations.
  - scubbo 7y ago
    I really enjoy instances where a tradition/belief/superstition results in a beneficial outcome for scientifically-verifiable reasons - especially when they're a shortcut or heuristic for that reasoning. My go-to example - I have heard it said (I'm no expert!) that Feng Shui teaches that one should arrange a room such that a dragon could flow through it comfortably. Even if a dragon never materializes in my room, visualizing that occurrence helps to sub-conciously prompt for clear walkways, sightlines, and other aesthetically pleasing properties.
- zbyte64 7y ago
  Or maybe atheists want to concentrate more resources on the upbringing of the child so that they have a competitive advantage. Then also consider that in 3,000 years I'll probably be ancestor to all (this holds true for others, I am by no means special). Don't really need to go through the hassle of rearing 6 more kids to secure my genetic future.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    > Or maybe atheists want to concentrate more resources on the upbringing of the child so that they have a competitive advantage. If you have less than 3 children, investing more resources in each child doesn't matter. 2 children is break even from the standpoint of procreation. So purposefully limiting yourself to that many or fewer children is a losing procreation strategy.
  - 0134340 7y ago
    True, quality over quantity, investing more in few is a valid evolutionary advantage, both short and long. OP should've used the term "evolutionarily advantageous on the short term in some conditions" instead of "massive evolutionary advantage" if correctness is valued.
  - shadofx 7y ago
    Historical observations of the logarithmic expansion of one's descendant-set are based off historical procreation rates. If your ideology is to have one child, and all your descendants adopt that ideology too, then you won't experience the same rate of proliferation.
- api 7y ago
  The correlation with wealth is much more consistent. Human beings have less children as they and their societies become wealthier (up to a certain point). In any case to make this argument work one must also argue that increased fertility is always good for fitness. If we all had children like we did in the 1800s today we probably would face some kind of Malthusian catastrophe fairly soon, an event that could easily lead to the deaths of far more people than the current more restricted population and the extinction of far more genetic lineages. It may be extremely adaptive to reduce population growth during times of abundance so as to escape the Malthusian treadmill and instead leverage that abundance for longer term investments in the future. If we're indulging in evolutionary psychology just so stories it seems reasonable to hypothesize that human beings might have some kind of built in population regulation valve. When abundance is high we have less children and invest more in them and when abundance is low we have more to try to brute force our genes into the future. All evolutionary lineages have suffered multiple bottleneck events, so it seems logical to at least consider that such mechanisms may have evolved to cushion and dampen out these fluctuations. But of course that may not be true. Correlation does not equal causation. The difference between pop evolutionary psychologizing and actual evolutionary biology is that the latter is built on physical evidence in the form of the fossil record and genomics. The former can only look at the present and concoct stories that might perhaps explain it if true.
  - bordercases 7y ago
    Children and wealth form a U-curve in the USA. Poor people: lots. Rich people: lots. Middle class: few to none. The middle class is in the unique position of craving upward mobility while being given the majority of the tax pressure and increasingly narrow means of differentiating a child among other children in a global market for an educated class. They also form the bulwark of conspicuous consumption dollars even if tastes have become more refined over time to not plainly state it as such. These are all factors which may correlate overall with societal wealth but are nonetheless not necessary to it, nor may it be necessary to abide to these incentives. I can see a conservative middle class producing many children but mitigating these expenses through greater social cohesion – which could mean more connected networks to take advantage of for labor placement rather than costly degrees to signal to HR departments that can't afford to put faces to names; or maybe having more people to rely on if you need to alleviate the time-pressures of raising a child – as well a different sense of what makes life worth living beyond one's toys or "experiences" which are passive engagements with scenery or momentary exhilarations.
- leoc 7y ago
  > nearly all atheists "believe" in natural selection, but almost no atheists have more than 2-3 children To go back to Chesterton by more or less paraphrasing what he says about the "German pessimist mouse" in Orthodoxy, you can't get a moral out of nature that you don't bring to nature in the first place. So that decision can be quite consistent if these atheists don't feel that they have some kind of "duty to the race" or something that should come well before their own well-being or that of their loved ones. (In reality the situation is more complicated, but that's by the by.)
- shadofx 7y ago
  Ideologies aren't genetic traits though. Ever-increasing numbers of atheists in America signal that those Conservative Christians aren't all giving birth to Conservative Christians.
  - pmichaud 7y ago
    They aren't literally encoded by genes, but they do follow evolutionary patterns. That's what a meme is. Just going the by the birth numbers, the tide will likely turn: conservative Christians have the adaptive "mutation" of believing they should make lots of babies. It's competing with a different mutation called "science" or whatever, but some proportion of those conservative christian memes are going to be passed to children, and it seems that those children will have more babies, and so on. Over time, those numbers overwhelm.
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      Your prediction is in die contradiction of the trend of the past 50 years, we are on track to have fully atheistic societies in the west withing decades. There is no empirical evidence that your rationalisation is correct.
      - pmichaud 7y ago
        I mean, memetic evolution is faster than genetic evolution because generations take longer and are most constrained. So the genetic trend is always lagging. I expect the trade off between these things to be cyclical and that we're in the part of the cycle where the tide is turning in favor of the baby-makers.
        ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        If 'genetic' component is weak, it will be overwhelmed by the social function. If you look at the data, there is no evidence of a cyclical pattern, only a consistent fall in theism. In Czech republic is already approaching at 80%, i think there is no coming back from that.
skybrian 7y ago
Scott Alexander reviewed the same book a year later: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
- asdfman123 7y ago
  Fascinating. > Historically, Reason has been the villain of the human narrative, a corrosive force that tempts people away from adaptive behavior towards choices that “sounded good at the time”. Reason and the desire to question things is part of cultural evolution as well, perhaps adapted for an age when things change incredibly quickly.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
jariel 7y ago
This issue should be talked about more, because I believe it lies at the foundation of so many issues; not only do we face this daily in tech, but daily in politics with respect to 'progress'. Though 'tradition' can often be wrong, we definitely do not consider the value of 'what is' because often there are no advocates for it. Change has tons of creative, intellectual advocation. We all want to think, create, adapt, and it's always this are that is the most creatively dynamic. Advocates for consistency often don't have the same degree of dynamism, rather, the arguments are often indirect i.e. 'the rules are there for a reason' instead of advocating the reasoning rules themselves.
Avshalom 7y ago
Did anyone ever bother asking the Tukanoans why they process the manioc like that? I wash my hands, I can't see bacteria or germs, I've certainly never seen a anyone die directly because of unwashed hands, and it's just a slow statistical increase in sickness if a whole bunch of people stop... but I don't wash my hands because I observed my elders, or because some cultural figure told me it was merely the way of our people. Some just told at some point to wash my hands cause otherwise people get sick, and if I had had questions they'd have mentioned germs and stuff. Like did any one check if the Tukanoans know manioc will slowly poison them otherwise? I know it's a bit of a fuzzy line but is that process "tradition" or is it "technology"
- idclip 7y ago
  I think part of the why to your question is that Its deceiving to view the human as a singular entity. There isnt a you, practically, there is infact an Us, and as an organism, the rule of large numbers wins everytime, we select for what we think is right as a social collective/organism. That kind of thinking is accepted in science, but not wide spread amongst the singular individuals. Older cultures didnt need to check for anything, decisions probably evolved through intra generational symbolism and stories about ghosts and evil spirits. Life wont answer the why, it just is, and if we push itll just eat us. In the same breadth, science is nature too. So whatever works, really.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    Woah, this sentiment nails it. Please recommend reading.
    - tekproxy 7y ago
      You didn't ask me but I have a similar outlook and would appreciate reading suggestions. Jordan Peterson talks about the diversity of opinion being important because there is no single or constant fitness function. His lectures on personality get into this a bit. His 12 rules book does not. I believe he's informed a lot by the work of Jonathan Haidt. His book The Righteous Mind is good.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
One problem of radical ideas is selection bias. The radical ideas that were true and useful are widely known. However, there are a lot of radical ideas that did not work out. One example, I see is in psychology. Pretty much every time I see an article published that goes against "conventional wisdom", I find that some time later that there is an issue with statistics or sample or the article is otherwise not reproducible. Basically, humans are generally smart and over time figure out what works.
- api 7y ago
  The same problem exists from the other end. How many traditional ideas are useful and true vs. how many have been clearly shown to be useless or destructive nonsense? If you need examples of the latter the most fruitful area to search is probably traditional medicine. Pre-enlightenment medicine provides an abundance of things that don't work or are downright harmful. Producing such tallies would be extremely difficult. It's hard to even classify complex ideas as traditional or radical/rational. Is communism traditional or radical? At first glance it's quite novel but it's full of ideas and sentiments that closely resemble those found in many religions and more tribal or family oriented cultures. The idea of collective ownership wouldn't be that foreign to a nomadic culture, and those are among the most traditional and oldest societies on Earth. One could argue it's a mere modern repackaging of a lot of extremely old ideas.
- seventhtiger 7y ago
  If you assume humans have not evolved significantly over the past 20,000 years, you have to wonder what all the geniuses were doing. Perhaps genius is a function of childhood nutrition and medicine, but if a genius is 1 in 1000, then every village must have had one at some point. What did people just as intelligent as us but without knowledge do for their entire lives? They build on tradition.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
    >If you assume humans have not evolved significantly over the past 20,000 years, you have to wonder what all the geniuses were doing. They were mostly preoccupied trying to stay alive. Also, any physical defect could be a death sentence. Have poor vision, you get eaten by a lion that you didn’t see. Unable to keep up with the tribe, you get left behind.
CalChris 7y ago
> I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away. BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, an urban rail system) uses non-standard rail gauge, 5 feet 6 inches. US standard rail gauge, 4 feet, 8.5 inches, would be much cheaper to use as there is a large market in standard equipment. Non standard BART equipment must instead be built custom, greatly increasing its cost. With that example in mind, the reformer wants to clear away this dumb design decision and indeed the East Bay Antioch extension uses standard gauge. The more intelligent type of reformer may ask If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. The trouble is that no one can remember why the non-standard gauge was chosen. Sometimes design decisions aren't smarter. They're just old.
- hyperion2010 7y ago
  Yes, but you really have to make sure that it is indeed just and accident of history with no other side effects. I can imagine a case where some of the BART tunnels are too short for some trains that run on standard gauge rails, and you don't want someone to accidentally run a standard train over those tracks and get stuck. There is no way to know this without looking. We cannot imagine all contingencies, but we should probably at least look for the ones that we can imagine.
  - CalChris 7y ago
    My point was that the conservative approach puts the burden of proof on the new after setting up a bit of a straw man with the reformer. I like the marketplace of ideas instead which favors neither the new nor the old.
    - invalidOrTaken 7y ago
      Oh it's very much still the marketplace of ideas. It's simply advising buyers in such marketplaces to appreciate track record and acknowledge their own possible ignorance when making "purchases."
    - throwawaybbb 7y ago
      As it should be. Doing things as have they always been done means we haven't killed everyone yet. That is quite an achievement when you consider just how hostile to life nature is.
leoc 7y ago
See also https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/eating-way-too-much-rice-almost-doomed-japans-imperial-navy-59542 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/eating-way-too-much-r... and https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm . Science Is Hard™.
tribune 7y ago
If divination by bird augury is so wise, why don't we still use that to plan agricultural layouts? /s But that sort of underscores the main argument against this stuff. Is it possible that many traditions, while once adaptive and beneficial, are no longer so? In other words, has the human situation departed so significantly from ancestral conditions that much of tradition is somewhere between irrelevant and harmful? Of course not all tradition should be thrown out just for being old. But the tools of rationality have come a long way.
- cjsawyer 7y ago
  My favorite example is some religions still forbidding pork even though our understanding of food safety has changed so dramatically.
  - lqet 7y ago
    You have to be careful with such an argumentation. It may very well be that forbidding pork is the result of century-long observations that people who eat much pork will on average die earlier than the general population. It may even be that the only kinds of meat eaten in the culture that originally invented this rule were fish, chicken and pork, which would mean that forbidding pork was equal to the modern damnation of "red meat". Arguments like "pigs are unclean and live in the dirt" may have been used to explain this effect and to rationalize the rule, but just because the rationalization of a rule has been proven incorrect, its original intention is not automatically wrong.
    - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
      It may also be that the rule was never the "shadow" of some empirico-rational observation at all.
      - jzvxkxbxjx 7y ago
        :D Maybe that’s just the way the Divine wanted it.
      - 7y ago
empath75 7y ago
I love the idea of divination as a random number generator. That’s something that’s going to stick with me for a long time.
- CMCDragonkai 7y ago
  It's something that astounded me as cultural technology.
lhiouyreowiu 7y ago
This is one of the favorites subjects of Nassim Taleb. > Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later > Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can only be judged by evolutionary considerations. https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality-432e96dd4d1a https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rational...
pressurefree 7y ago
And yesterday's newspaper wraps today's fish n' chips
Barrin92 7y ago
I think the problem with this perspective and the examples picked is that tradition is particularly beneficial when the environment is largely stable. Two of the examples being given are explorers in the desert or ice who die when indigenous people's survive, or the processing of poisonous fruit. The long term cultural adaptation really does provide benefits for these problems because they never change, so you have a long time to work and improve on them. The desert is more or less the same as is the ice, as is the fruit. But it's very easy to come up with counter-examples. The so-called cargo-cult was a group of indigenous people conflating modern planes with deities because they were still guided by their religious worldview. The middle-east faced a very rude awakening when confronted with the military and technological superiority of modern European states. In a static environment, tradition can produce long term benefits, but in a dynamic, novel environment tradition imposes costs by slowing down the speed at which reforms can be executed. Arguably the world is becoming more and more dynamic and complex with large scale problems that are entirely novel propping up every other decade. It's hard to think of the slowness of tradition as a virtue in this case.
sriku 7y ago
In southern India, the "pongal" harvest festival (14/15/16 of Jan) has a component called "bhogi" that had traditionally involved burning old stuff .. which some have implied had the metaphorical role of pointing to dropping old baggage to welcome a new year. Ironically, this is itself old baggage today (in Chennai) where the air quality just today is horrible due to the practice of "bhogi" burning.

155 points by andrenth 7y ago

Until it isn't... and there are many, many cases of that too. That being said, the funniest example aligning with the article to me personally, is how nearly all atheists "believe" in natural selection, but almost no atheists have more than 2-3 children. In fact, most seem to have zero or one. And many Conservative Christians don't "believe" in evolution, but yet trend towards having many more children / larger families. It's just such a clear example of how a likely incorrect belief (AKA, "God wants me to have as many children as possible") can still result in a massive evolutionary advantage.

AQuantized 7y ago
I'm uncertain if that rationale is the driving force behind their procreation so much as the correlation with religiosity and low levels of education, which is in turn correlated with greater fertility.
- skinkestek 7y ago
  I recommend you reread the post you replied to as it seems you agree without being aware of it.
  - brlewis 7y ago
    No, the comment by asdf21 says religiosity results in fertility (causation), while the comment by AQuantized says it's just correlation. Please don't start comments with "I recommend you reread the post you replied to". Be more specific, e.g. "It seems your comment and the one you're replying to are both saying X".
wwweston 7y ago
To take this further... is this belief incorrect? If you articulate it in a form that invokes literal theism, then I suppose that makes it a question of whether literal theism is correct, which obviously excludes atheists. But you could articulate it as "children are almost always a blessing" vs "children are a burden, especially after a certain number." Either of these are debatable (and truth for most people is probably a balance of the two propositions), but in this formulation, theism could be orthogonal, or it could take on an auxiliary role in supporting one over the other. And most of all, the question of whether theism is literal or whether it's a symbolic distillation of human observations about values and meaning gets factored out of practical considerations.
- scubbo 7y ago
  I really enjoy instances where a tradition/belief/superstition results in a beneficial outcome for scientifically-verifiable reasons - especially when they're a shortcut or heuristic for that reasoning. My go-to example - I have heard it said (I'm no expert!) that Feng Shui teaches that one should arrange a room such that a dragon could flow through it comfortably. Even if a dragon never materializes in my room, visualizing that occurrence helps to sub-conciously prompt for clear walkways, sightlines, and other aesthetically pleasing properties.
zbyte64 7y ago
Or maybe atheists want to concentrate more resources on the upbringing of the child so that they have a competitive advantage. Then also consider that in 3,000 years I'll probably be ancestor to all (this holds true for others, I am by no means special). Don't really need to go through the hassle of rearing 6 more kids to secure my genetic future.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  > Or maybe atheists want to concentrate more resources on the upbringing of the child so that they have a competitive advantage. If you have less than 3 children, investing more resources in each child doesn't matter. 2 children is break even from the standpoint of procreation. So purposefully limiting yourself to that many or fewer children is a losing procreation strategy.
- 0134340 7y ago
  True, quality over quantity, investing more in few is a valid evolutionary advantage, both short and long. OP should've used the term "evolutionarily advantageous on the short term in some conditions" instead of "massive evolutionary advantage" if correctness is valued.
- shadofx 7y ago
  Historical observations of the logarithmic expansion of one's descendant-set are based off historical procreation rates. If your ideology is to have one child, and all your descendants adopt that ideology too, then you won't experience the same rate of proliferation.
api 7y ago
The correlation with wealth is much more consistent. Human beings have less children as they and their societies become wealthier (up to a certain point). In any case to make this argument work one must also argue that increased fertility is always good for fitness. If we all had children like we did in the 1800s today we probably would face some kind of Malthusian catastrophe fairly soon, an event that could easily lead to the deaths of far more people than the current more restricted population and the extinction of far more genetic lineages. It may be extremely adaptive to reduce population growth during times of abundance so as to escape the Malthusian treadmill and instead leverage that abundance for longer term investments in the future. If we're indulging in evolutionary psychology just so stories it seems reasonable to hypothesize that human beings might have some kind of built in population regulation valve. When abundance is high we have less children and invest more in them and when abundance is low we have more to try to brute force our genes into the future. All evolutionary lineages have suffered multiple bottleneck events, so it seems logical to at least consider that such mechanisms may have evolved to cushion and dampen out these fluctuations. But of course that may not be true. Correlation does not equal causation. The difference between pop evolutionary psychologizing and actual evolutionary biology is that the latter is built on physical evidence in the form of the fossil record and genomics. The former can only look at the present and concoct stories that might perhaps explain it if true.
- bordercases 7y ago
  Children and wealth form a U-curve in the USA. Poor people: lots. Rich people: lots. Middle class: few to none. The middle class is in the unique position of craving upward mobility while being given the majority of the tax pressure and increasingly narrow means of differentiating a child among other children in a global market for an educated class. They also form the bulwark of conspicuous consumption dollars even if tastes have become more refined over time to not plainly state it as such. These are all factors which may correlate overall with societal wealth but are nonetheless not necessary to it, nor may it be necessary to abide to these incentives. I can see a conservative middle class producing many children but mitigating these expenses through greater social cohesion – which could mean more connected networks to take advantage of for labor placement rather than costly degrees to signal to HR departments that can't afford to put faces to names; or maybe having more people to rely on if you need to alleviate the time-pressures of raising a child – as well a different sense of what makes life worth living beyond one's toys or "experiences" which are passive engagements with scenery or momentary exhilarations.
leoc 7y ago
> nearly all atheists "believe" in natural selection, but almost no atheists have more than 2-3 children To go back to Chesterton by more or less paraphrasing what he says about the "German pessimist mouse" in Orthodoxy, you can't get a moral out of nature that you don't bring to nature in the first place. So that decision can be quite consistent if these atheists don't feel that they have some kind of "duty to the race" or something that should come well before their own well-being or that of their loved ones. (In reality the situation is more complicated, but that's by the by.)
shadofx 7y ago
Ideologies aren't genetic traits though. Ever-increasing numbers of atheists in America signal that those Conservative Christians aren't all giving birth to Conservative Christians.
- pmichaud 7y ago
  They aren't literally encoded by genes, but they do follow evolutionary patterns. That's what a meme is. Just going the by the birth numbers, the tide will likely turn: conservative Christians have the adaptive "mutation" of believing they should make lots of babies. It's competing with a different mutation called "science" or whatever, but some proportion of those conservative christian memes are going to be passed to children, and it seems that those children will have more babies, and so on. Over time, those numbers overwhelm.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Your prediction is in die contradiction of the trend of the past 50 years, we are on track to have fully atheistic societies in the west withing decades. There is no empirical evidence that your rationalisation is correct.
    - pmichaud 7y ago
      I mean, memetic evolution is faster than genetic evolution because generations take longer and are most constrained. So the genetic trend is always lagging. I expect the trade off between these things to be cyclical and that we're in the part of the cycle where the tide is turning in favor of the baby-makers.
      - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        If 'genetic' component is weak, it will be overwhelmed by the social function. If you look at the data, there is no evidence of a cyclical pattern, only a consistent fall in theism. In Czech republic is already approaching at 80%, i think there is no coming back from that.

skybrian 7y ago

Scott Alexander reviewed the same book a year later: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

asdfman123 7y ago
Fascinating. > Historically, Reason has been the villain of the human narrative, a corrosive force that tempts people away from adaptive behavior towards choices that “sounded good at the time”. Reason and the desire to question things is part of cultural evolution as well, perhaps adapted for an age when things change incredibly quickly.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

jariel 7y ago

This issue should be talked about more, because I believe it lies at the foundation of so many issues; not only do we face this daily in tech, but daily in politics with respect to 'progress'. Though 'tradition' can often be wrong, we definitely do not consider the value of 'what is' because often there are no advocates for it. Change has tons of creative, intellectual advocation. We all want to think, create, adapt, and it's always this are that is the most creatively dynamic. Advocates for consistency often don't have the same degree of dynamism, rather, the arguments are often indirect i.e. 'the rules are there for a reason' instead of advocating the reasoning rules themselves.

Avshalom 7y ago

Did anyone ever bother asking the Tukanoans why they process the manioc like that? I wash my hands, I can't see bacteria or germs, I've certainly never seen a anyone die directly because of unwashed hands, and it's just a slow statistical increase in sickness if a whole bunch of people stop... but I don't wash my hands because I observed my elders, or because some cultural figure told me it was merely the way of our people. Some just told at some point to wash my hands cause otherwise people get sick, and if I had had questions they'd have mentioned germs and stuff. Like did any one check if the Tukanoans know manioc will slowly poison them otherwise? I know it's a bit of a fuzzy line but is that process "tradition" or is it "technology"

idclip 7y ago
I think part of the why to your question is that Its deceiving to view the human as a singular entity. There isnt a you, practically, there is infact an Us, and as an organism, the rule of large numbers wins everytime, we select for what we think is right as a social collective/organism. That kind of thinking is accepted in science, but not wide spread amongst the singular individuals. Older cultures didnt need to check for anything, decisions probably evolved through intra generational symbolism and stories about ghosts and evil spirits. Life wont answer the why, it just is, and if we push itll just eat us. In the same breadth, science is nature too. So whatever works, really.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  Woah, this sentiment nails it. Please recommend reading.
  - tekproxy 7y ago
    You didn't ask me but I have a similar outlook and would appreciate reading suggestions. Jordan Peterson talks about the diversity of opinion being important because there is no single or constant fitness function. His lectures on personality get into this a bit. His 12 rules book does not. I believe he's informed a lot by the work of Jonathan Haidt. His book The Righteous Mind is good.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

One problem of radical ideas is selection bias. The radical ideas that were true and useful are widely known. However, there are a lot of radical ideas that did not work out. One example, I see is in psychology. Pretty much every time I see an article published that goes against "conventional wisdom", I find that some time later that there is an issue with statistics or sample or the article is otherwise not reproducible. Basically, humans are generally smart and over time figure out what works.

api 7y ago
The same problem exists from the other end. How many traditional ideas are useful and true vs. how many have been clearly shown to be useless or destructive nonsense? If you need examples of the latter the most fruitful area to search is probably traditional medicine. Pre-enlightenment medicine provides an abundance of things that don't work or are downright harmful. Producing such tallies would be extremely difficult. It's hard to even classify complex ideas as traditional or radical/rational. Is communism traditional or radical? At first glance it's quite novel but it's full of ideas and sentiments that closely resemble those found in many religions and more tribal or family oriented cultures. The idea of collective ownership wouldn't be that foreign to a nomadic culture, and those are among the most traditional and oldest societies on Earth. One could argue it's a mere modern repackaging of a lot of extremely old ideas.
seventhtiger 7y ago
If you assume humans have not evolved significantly over the past 20,000 years, you have to wonder what all the geniuses were doing. Perhaps genius is a function of childhood nutrition and medicine, but if a genius is 1 in 1000, then every village must have had one at some point. What did people just as intelligent as us but without knowledge do for their entire lives? They build on tradition.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  >If you assume humans have not evolved significantly over the past 20,000 years, you have to wonder what all the geniuses were doing. They were mostly preoccupied trying to stay alive. Also, any physical defect could be a death sentence. Have poor vision, you get eaten by a lion that you didn’t see. Unable to keep up with the tribe, you get left behind.

CalChris 7y ago

> I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away. BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, an urban rail system) uses non-standard rail gauge, 5 feet 6 inches. US standard rail gauge, 4 feet, 8.5 inches, would be much cheaper to use as there is a large market in standard equipment. Non standard BART equipment must instead be built custom, greatly increasing its cost. With that example in mind, the reformer wants to clear away this dumb design decision and indeed the East Bay Antioch extension uses standard gauge. The more intelligent type of reformer may ask If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. The trouble is that no one can remember why the non-standard gauge was chosen. Sometimes design decisions aren't smarter. They're just old.

hyperion2010 7y ago
Yes, but you really have to make sure that it is indeed just and accident of history with no other side effects. I can imagine a case where some of the BART tunnels are too short for some trains that run on standard gauge rails, and you don't want someone to accidentally run a standard train over those tracks and get stuck. There is no way to know this without looking. We cannot imagine all contingencies, but we should probably at least look for the ones that we can imagine.
- CalChris 7y ago
  My point was that the conservative approach puts the burden of proof on the new after setting up a bit of a straw man with the reformer. I like the marketplace of ideas instead which favors neither the new nor the old.
  - invalidOrTaken 7y ago
    Oh it's very much still the marketplace of ideas. It's simply advising buyers in such marketplaces to appreciate track record and acknowledge their own possible ignorance when making "purchases."
  - throwawaybbb 7y ago
    As it should be. Doing things as have they always been done means we haven't killed everyone yet. That is quite an achievement when you consider just how hostile to life nature is.

leoc 7y ago

See also https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/eating-way-too-much-rice-almost-doomed-japans-imperial-navy-59542 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/eating-way-too-much-r... and https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm . Science Is Hard™.

tribune 7y ago

If divination by bird augury is so wise, why don't we still use that to plan agricultural layouts? /s But that sort of underscores the main argument against this stuff. Is it possible that many traditions, while once adaptive and beneficial, are no longer so? In other words, has the human situation departed so significantly from ancestral conditions that much of tradition is somewhere between irrelevant and harmful? Of course not all tradition should be thrown out just for being old. But the tools of rationality have come a long way.

cjsawyer 7y ago
My favorite example is some religions still forbidding pork even though our understanding of food safety has changed so dramatically.
- lqet 7y ago
  You have to be careful with such an argumentation. It may very well be that forbidding pork is the result of century-long observations that people who eat much pork will on average die earlier than the general population. It may even be that the only kinds of meat eaten in the culture that originally invented this rule were fish, chicken and pork, which would mean that forbidding pork was equal to the modern damnation of "red meat". Arguments like "pigs are unclean and live in the dirt" may have been used to explain this effect and to rationalize the rule, but just because the rationalization of a rule has been proven incorrect, its original intention is not automatically wrong.
  - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
    It may also be that the rule was never the "shadow" of some empirico-rational observation at all.
    - jzvxkxbxjx 7y ago
      :D Maybe that’s just the way the Divine wanted it.
    - 7y ago

empath75 7y ago

I love the idea of divination as a random number generator. That’s something that’s going to stick with me for a long time.

CMCDragonkai 7y ago
It's something that astounded me as cultural technology.

lhiouyreowiu 7y ago

This is one of the favorites subjects of Nassim Taleb. > Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later > Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as “rationality” of a belief, there is rationality of action. The rationality of an action can only be judged by evolutionary considerations. https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rationality-432e96dd4d1a https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-be-rational-about-rational...

pressurefree 7y ago

And yesterday's newspaper wraps today's fish n' chips

Barrin92 7y ago

I think the problem with this perspective and the examples picked is that tradition is particularly beneficial when the environment is largely stable. Two of the examples being given are explorers in the desert or ice who die when indigenous people's survive, or the processing of poisonous fruit. The long term cultural adaptation really does provide benefits for these problems because they never change, so you have a long time to work and improve on them. The desert is more or less the same as is the ice, as is the fruit. But it's very easy to come up with counter-examples. The so-called cargo-cult was a group of indigenous people conflating modern planes with deities because they were still guided by their religious worldview. The middle-east faced a very rude awakening when confronted with the military and technological superiority of modern European states. In a static environment, tradition can produce long term benefits, but in a dynamic, novel environment tradition imposes costs by slowing down the speed at which reforms can be executed. Arguably the world is becoming more and more dynamic and complex with large scale problems that are entirely novel propping up every other decade. It's hard to think of the slowness of tradition as a virtue in this case.

sriku 7y ago

In southern India, the "pongal" harvest festival (14/15/16 of Jan) has a component called "bhogi" that had traditionally involved burning old stuff .. which some have implied had the metaphorical role of pointing to dropping old baggage to welcome a new year. Ironically, this is itself old baggage today (in Chennai) where the air quality just today is horrible due to the practice of "bhogi" burning.