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Since this is freshman-level "think, don't believe", here's an equally valid counterargument at roughly the same level. In Heinrich's book "The Secret of our S

Since this is freshman-level "think, don't believe", here's an equally valid counterargument at roughly the same level. In Heinrich's book "The Secret of our Success" on cumulative cultural evolution, he gives an example of pre-Columbus American cultures whose diet was based on bitter manioc (a.k.a. cassava). Like the name suggests, in its raw form it's too bitter to eat, but these cultures evolved a set of traditions around the correct way to prepare it, and any deviation was taboo. The traditions involved pounding, scraping, straining and boiling the manioc over several days, most of the steps could only be performed by women (at least in the studied Tukanoa culture) and the women seem to have spend half their waking lives processing manioc. So let's say you decide all the traditions are obviously bogus, do an experiment and find that just boling the thing for a couple of hours removes the bitter taste just as well. The problem is the bitterness comes from cyanide, and boiling removes the taste but not the cyanide itself - something which the traditional process is really good at (Heinrich has studies and graphs to support this claim). Ten years later, you and the small pre-modern rationalist community you've founded are all in an advanced state of degeneration from cyanide poisoning. The general principle here is called Chesterton's Fence (see the obvious wiki page for details), which is that if you come across a fence in a field and think it's stupid, make sure you really understand why it's there before you tear it down. There are more examples like this in the book, such as a taboo in Polynesia on pregnant women consuming porpoises. It turns out that they do in fact contain chemical compounds that increase the risk of birth defects. To quote a review in the now-deleted Slate Star Codex blog by Scott Alexander Ocasio-Cortez: "For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed." My own view is that "don't take anything on faith ever" is as bad a life plan as "always follow traditions without question", and it's easy to think of lots of freshman philosophy level arguments why (your 5-year old is too young to properly understand electricity, would you want them to question your house rule against poking things in power sockets). _P.S. it's become a kind of in-joke among SSC followers to invent a surname when they mention him now._

atarian 6y ago
Never heard about Chesterton's Fence, thanks for sharing that. Definitely applicable to legacy code.
omreaderhn 6y ago
Nassim Taleb's "Lindy Effect" I think is an interesting take on how to mediate between these two modes. The general idea is that the older a (still followed) tradition is the more likely it is to contain some eternal truths that should be respected even if you yourself can't understand them directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
- dsizzle 6y ago
  As the Wikipedia link shows, it's not actually Taleb's coinage.
blfr 6y ago
It's not that weird that people pick the first buffet option, or browse Facebook, or whatever the default easy option is. What I do find weird is that they stop there. You don't need some paradigm shifting insight or a leap in the dark to do a little random walk and find something else you like a little more. I used to read PC magazines, the kind that were available in grocery stores (because I'm old), then I discovered USENET, then RSS, then Reddit, then HN, and a bunch of other more and more esoteric infotainment sources more aligned with my tastes. But so many people get on Facebook and just stay there. I used to watch news networks. Then I started reading political blogs. Then I got onto Twitter and started following people with best leaks, insider info, and wittiest comments. Finally, I realized it's pointless and stopped following it at all. But so many people stay watching the news networks which just launder all that other stuff you can so easily get directly. Worse, they allow the media to capture their minds. Sure, not everyone can be a groundbreaking innovator but, in this age of massive choice, why do people choose anything other than hyper hipsterdom?
- smackay 6y ago
  This might be a simple explanation to the buffet problem. After you've taken your random walk to see what's on offer you now decide that one of the first three items was what you wanted after all. Now you have the difficult social problem (and logistical too if there are plates with food) of navigating against the tide of people who arrived after you. UPDATE: I see this explanation is covered more thoroughly in other comments.
guscost 6y ago
This is an excellent counterargument. Here is another one: You will never be a completely rational being, no matter how hard you try. You are very good at tricking yourself, and it happens all the time. If you attempt to "think, don't believe", you will fail, and along the way yield all control over what you believe.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  That's not an argument, just a sequence of assertions.
  - guscost 6y ago
    Each assertion is true. The last one is the argument, the first two are just context.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      I don't know what to tell you. This is not how logic works.
      - guscost 6y ago
        Indeed it is not!!!
      - stagas 6y ago
        We don't run on logic, trust me. I've spent the week writing a text editor. I can trash logic completely. If you want to know, all absolutely logical pieces of first-pass code failed terribly at edge cases that were completely invisible and counter-intuitive. Not because the code was wrong, but because it was right. I had to re-examine what I held to be true and came to realize that we make sense of the world by assumptions that are only loosely based on reality. I highly recommend writing a text editor to everyone, as a hard course on "logic", at least. It's the adaptation of monkey brain expectations on a purely logical machine.
user234683 6y ago
> "For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed." Relevant to this is the analogy by Phil Goetz of reason as a memetic immune disorder [1]: > The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it. > A little reason can be a dangerous thing. The landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it. Sometimes, reason lets us see the dangerous aspects of our memes, but not the blind spots that protect us from them. Sometimes, it lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conclusions. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-...
- xtiansimon 6y ago
  Thank you `user234683` for the link to 'Reason as memetic immune disorder'. I think more needs to be said about 'dangerous' memes.
stagas 6y ago
"Think for yourself" is humanity's adaptation of forager ants[0]. Sure, many will be lost, but we need those people that hunt for novelty because it eventually benefits everyone else. You could even think of historical figures that advanced society as the forager ants of our culture. I'm not sure what the benefit would be if everyone chose to be one, though. The hive mind is an interesting phenomenon, it seems that there isn't a right or wrong way to do things. Anything we do is a behavior which ripples its effects way beyond our understanding. One thing seems certain though; if a behavior is there, it's been selected by evolution. So, there has to have some advantage at some level even if it isn't obvious at all. Regarding Chesterton's Fence, it's something I've been noticing myself as my understanding grows. Though I didn't know the term, I do see it more and more around me. I have the feeling that one example of this behavior can be spotted in today's strict Muslim society, where women are covered head to toe. As westerners, we see it as a very absurd thing to do for the sake of a religion. But do we really understand the whole story? Seeing how we ourselves quickly rushed to cover our faces to avoid catching a contagious disease, I'm speculating that something similar might have been the initiative for such a cultural artifact. Which are the most vulnerable and most valuable people in a society? Women, obviously, we have to protect them. Perhaps in similar disease outbreaks in the Middle East, people figured out that by reducing contact with your environment actually reduces the possibility for illness and death. It perhaps then, eventually creeped its way into religion, because you had to make sure people would follow the advice even if they didn't understand it, and that was the institution people listened to at those times and was more likely to be passed on to next generations. Survival supersedes freedom, so, there you have it. [0]: https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/stanford-biologist-and-computer-scientist-discover-anternet https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/stanford-b...
- red_admiral 6y ago
  I recently watched a lecture series on Machine Learning and the speaker talked about how one of the deeper principles is balancing exploration and exploitation. Spend all your time doing one or the other and you'll never get anywhere, but the optimal balance depends on the problem and the environment (no free lunch etc.) Forager ants, Galileos and people who just boil their cassava are the explorers I guess, and probably humanity needs a proportion of them because every now and then one of them will find a herb with amazing medicinal properties or something. That may be an evolutionary advantage even if 90% of explorers die eating something poisonous before they've found anything useful. Maybe startups are today's explorers? Being very generous to VC-backed startups, possibly 90% of them fail, but on average they're still a good investment - just ask Paul Graham. I'm less sure about the full veil as an example because there's a lot of debate about what exactly the Prophet's instruction for women to cover their head meant; it's certainly interpreted differently across different Islamic cultures (a hijab is not an abaya is not a burqa etc.); and covering of the face as opposed to the hair is definitely not universal in Islam (the headscarf/hijab leaves the face free for example).
JKCalhoun 6y ago
Also put off by the examples, "Titanic" newspaper headline, etc. Of course you can cherry-pick history to find major gaffs. The majority of the time you hear the truth.
l0b0 6y ago
How could you distinguish between pointless or even damaging customs and advantageous ones? Spending vast resources looking for basically anything at all which gives the in-group a statistical advantage is not going to be cost-effective – researchers could probably come up with millions of different reasons which would all have to be tested. My expectation would be that the vast majority of weird customs are not useful, and that we are interested in examples like manioc processing because they are the rare exception rather than the rule.

atarian 6y ago

Never heard about Chesterton's Fence, thanks for sharing that. Definitely applicable to legacy code.

omreaderhn 6y ago

Nassim Taleb's "Lindy Effect" I think is an interesting take on how to mediate between these two modes. The general idea is that the older a (still followed) tradition is the more likely it is to contain some eternal truths that should be respected even if you yourself can't understand them directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

dsizzle 6y ago
As the Wikipedia link shows, it's not actually Taleb's coinage.

blfr 6y ago

It's not that weird that people pick the first buffet option, or browse Facebook, or whatever the default easy option is. What I do find weird is that they stop there. You don't need some paradigm shifting insight or a leap in the dark to do a little random walk and find something else you like a little more. I used to read PC magazines, the kind that were available in grocery stores (because I'm old), then I discovered USENET, then RSS, then Reddit, then HN, and a bunch of other more and more esoteric infotainment sources more aligned with my tastes. But so many people get on Facebook and just stay there. I used to watch news networks. Then I started reading political blogs. Then I got onto Twitter and started following people with best leaks, insider info, and wittiest comments. Finally, I realized it's pointless and stopped following it at all. But so many people stay watching the news networks which just launder all that other stuff you can so easily get directly. Worse, they allow the media to capture their minds. Sure, not everyone can be a groundbreaking innovator but, in this age of massive choice, why do people choose anything other than hyper hipsterdom?

smackay 6y ago
This might be a simple explanation to the buffet problem. After you've taken your random walk to see what's on offer you now decide that one of the first three items was what you wanted after all. Now you have the difficult social problem (and logistical too if there are plates with food) of navigating against the tide of people who arrived after you. UPDATE: I see this explanation is covered more thoroughly in other comments.

guscost 6y ago

This is an excellent counterargument. Here is another one: You will never be a completely rational being, no matter how hard you try. You are very good at tricking yourself, and it happens all the time. If you attempt to "think, don't believe", you will fail, and along the way yield all control over what you believe.

FeepingCreature 6y ago
That's not an argument, just a sequence of assertions.
- guscost 6y ago
  Each assertion is true. The last one is the argument, the first two are just context.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    I don't know what to tell you. This is not how logic works.
    - guscost 6y ago
      Indeed it is not!!!
    - stagas 6y ago
      We don't run on logic, trust me. I've spent the week writing a text editor. I can trash logic completely. If you want to know, all absolutely logical pieces of first-pass code failed terribly at edge cases that were completely invisible and counter-intuitive. Not because the code was wrong, but because it was right. I had to re-examine what I held to be true and came to realize that we make sense of the world by assumptions that are only loosely based on reality. I highly recommend writing a text editor to everyone, as a hard course on "logic", at least. It's the adaptation of monkey brain expectations on a purely logical machine.

user234683 6y ago

> "For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed." Relevant to this is the analogy by Phil Goetz of reason as a memetic immune disorder [1]: > The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it. > A little reason can be a dangerous thing. The landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it. Sometimes, reason lets us see the dangerous aspects of our memes, but not the blind spots that protect us from them. Sometimes, it lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conclusions. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-...

xtiansimon 6y ago
Thank you `user234683` for the link to 'Reason as memetic immune disorder'. I think more needs to be said about 'dangerous' memes.

stagas 6y ago

"Think for yourself" is humanity's adaptation of forager ants[0]. Sure, many will be lost, but we need those people that hunt for novelty because it eventually benefits everyone else. You could even think of historical figures that advanced society as the forager ants of our culture. I'm not sure what the benefit would be if everyone chose to be one, though. The hive mind is an interesting phenomenon, it seems that there isn't a right or wrong way to do things. Anything we do is a behavior which ripples its effects way beyond our understanding. One thing seems certain though; if a behavior is there, it's been selected by evolution. So, there has to have some advantage at some level even if it isn't obvious at all. Regarding Chesterton's Fence, it's something I've been noticing myself as my understanding grows. Though I didn't know the term, I do see it more and more around me. I have the feeling that one example of this behavior can be spotted in today's strict Muslim society, where women are covered head to toe. As westerners, we see it as a very absurd thing to do for the sake of a religion. But do we really understand the whole story? Seeing how we ourselves quickly rushed to cover our faces to avoid catching a contagious disease, I'm speculating that something similar might have been the initiative for such a cultural artifact. Which are the most vulnerable and most valuable people in a society? Women, obviously, we have to protect them. Perhaps in similar disease outbreaks in the Middle East, people figured out that by reducing contact with your environment actually reduces the possibility for illness and death. It perhaps then, eventually creeped its way into religion, because you had to make sure people would follow the advice even if they didn't understand it, and that was the institution people listened to at those times and was more likely to be passed on to next generations. Survival supersedes freedom, so, there you have it. [0]: https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/stanford-biologist-and-computer-scientist-discover-anternet https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/stanford-b...

red_admiral 6y ago
I recently watched a lecture series on Machine Learning and the speaker talked about how one of the deeper principles is balancing exploration and exploitation. Spend all your time doing one or the other and you'll never get anywhere, but the optimal balance depends on the problem and the environment (no free lunch etc.) Forager ants, Galileos and people who just boil their cassava are the explorers I guess, and probably humanity needs a proportion of them because every now and then one of them will find a herb with amazing medicinal properties or something. That may be an evolutionary advantage even if 90% of explorers die eating something poisonous before they've found anything useful. Maybe startups are today's explorers? Being very generous to VC-backed startups, possibly 90% of them fail, but on average they're still a good investment - just ask Paul Graham. I'm less sure about the full veil as an example because there's a lot of debate about what exactly the Prophet's instruction for women to cover their head meant; it's certainly interpreted differently across different Islamic cultures (a hijab is not an abaya is not a burqa etc.); and covering of the face as opposed to the hair is definitely not universal in Islam (the headscarf/hijab leaves the face free for example).

JKCalhoun 6y ago

Also put off by the examples, "Titanic" newspaper headline, etc. Of course you can cherry-pick history to find major gaffs. The majority of the time you hear the truth.

l0b0 6y ago

How could you distinguish between pointless or even damaging customs and advantageous ones? Spending vast resources looking for basically anything at all which gives the in-group a statistical advantage is not going to be cost-effective – researchers could probably come up with millions of different reasons which would all have to be tested. My expectation would be that the vast majority of weird customs are not useful, and that we are interested in examples like manioc processing because they are the rare exception rather than the rule.