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So what behaviors do humans do without being aware there is no reason for it? (It doesn't count if the human knows there might not be a purpose, and they are j
by ars 5y ago
So what behaviors do humans do without being aware there is no reason for it?
(It doesn't count if the human knows there might not be a purpose, and they are just doing it be like others.)
I guess it would have to be something only some humans do, because if everyone does it unaware, then there's no one available to tell them that :)
- mattparcens 5y agomicroservices
- mellosouls 5y ago"It doesn't count if the human knows there might not be a purpose, and they are just doing it to be like others."
- Infernal 5y agoThere are so many meanings of the word reason. I suspect you mean the sense that is like “justification”. Consider, the only reason I have for looking at hacker news right now, is because I know lots of my peers are as well, though I don’t consider this consciously/rationally. But if my peers (along some dimension) weren’t here, I surely wouldn’t be.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y agocircumcision
- magneticnorth 5y agoParticular hairstyles, other types of fashion. Slang and other communication norms - waving or handshaking or hugging, laughing together.
- jamiek88 5y agoThere’s social reasons for all those things.
- codefreeordie 5y agoPresumably, there are social reasons for sweet potato washing as well. But, I think the idea here is that the practice had a non-social-cultural purpose at first (washing the hot sweet potato that came out of the fire) but now is widely retained for only a social-cultural purpose (washing fresh sweet potatoes, apples, and other things that are not hot)
- magneticnorth 5y agoA lot of religious norms seem like things that made sense in context at the time, but not necessarily today. E.g. don't eat pork or shellfish, don't wear mixed fibers, don't get tattoos, cover your hair in public.
- ars 5y agoThat doesn't count. People are well aware they are doing it for religious reasons. And, on top of that, there are reasons for the the religious actions that are still valid right now, that you are not even aware of.
- magneticnorth 5y ago> still valid right now, that you are not even aware of. I'm here to learn and engage in good-faith discussion - I didn't mean to offend you about your religion and I apologize if I did. I'd be interested to hear what you think these are, especially if I am genuinely ignorant about them.
- ars 5y agoSee this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176549 and feel free to ask me any others. Tattoos are because your body does not belong to you, it belongs to God, and you are just borrowing it, so it's not right to damage it that way. Same for the prohibition against ripping out hair in mourning. You are expected to remember at all times that God gave you a body to do good things with. This also applies to the prohibition against suicide, or taking unnecessary risk (that last one is obviously very subjective). Additionally you are required to take good care of your body, and go to a Dr. when needed. All the above are different aspects of the same thing. Another example is you are not allowed to give up your life to save someone else, with exceptions made for your children. (You are allowed to risk it though.)
- waste_monk 5y agoI get that the pork and shellfish thing is about avoiding trichinosis and other food-borne nastiness, and the tattoo thing to avoid infection and sepsis, but what's the context for the other ones? assuming you mean "there's a good real-life reason for this" rather than "in the religious context of the time". Covering your hair maybe makes sense if there was a lice problem, but I can't think of a decent reason to prohibit wearing of mixed fibers.
- mhb 5y agoWear masks outdoors.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dham 5y agoWashing chicken
- markdown 5y agoI used to think this about rice. When I first started cooking rice, I washed it because I'd seen my parents and grandparents do so. But one day I thought about it and came to the conclusion that it was silly, and probably a habit passed down from decades ago before modern food mills and factories. I decided that it there's no way that rice bought in a supermarket today could be dirty. We don't wash flour, sugar or salt, and we don't get sick. So I stopped washing rice. I did that for a couple of years until someone saw me doing it and pointed out that the reason to wash rice was to rid it of its starchy coating. I went back to washing my rice.
- tbran 5y agoOkay, but did you notice a difference? Sometimes I wash, sometimes I don't.
- markdown 5y agoYeah, in the stickyness. Unwashed rice is more clumpy.
- ncmncm 5y agoYou never looked at the water that came off it? There is often a lot of actual dirt on brown rice. On white rice they add talcum powder to keep it from sticking, which at least used to tend to have asbestos particles in it.
- ncmncm 5y agoMost of them, we don't even notice they are a thing we are doing. We might notice if somebody didn't do it.
- firephonestival 5y agoWhen you get down to it, what behaviors don't we do without being aware there is no reason for it?