11 ms·

Tradition is Smarter (2018)

124 points by 4gotunameagain 4y ago

klyrs 4y ago
Well, let's go back to worshipping the sun, then. Who knows, if we don't, it might not rise tomorrow... Or, just maybe, progress itself is a tradition that deserves its own reverence. Sometimes, Chesterson's fence was erected by a shepherd who no longer uses the field that you'd rather play soccer on. It was useful in its day, but no longer.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Sometimes tradition is smarter than you are. Sometimes tradition is brain-dead. But we are very prone to assume that tradition is always brain-dead. That's a very dangerous assumption...
- PsySecGroup 4y ago
- Judgmentality 4y ago
  I feel like this comment points out the tradition of being contrarian on HN, and it would be foolish of me to question it.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    To the contrary, it would be foolish of you to not question me. Question Everything, Even This (but not too much because that's overthinking).
  - topaz0 4y ago
    Only if you don't know its purpose, which is self-aggrandizement.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  Progress itself is a tradition, but a relatively recent one, and not one deserving reverence. At least, not any more.
  - api 4y ago
    … says someone who if they are posting on HN has very likely never known actual hunger or true poverty and has all humanity’s history and knowledge at their fingertips instantly. The problem with progress is that it makes people so comfortable and privileged that they dream up inane fantasy ideologies that question progress and harken back to the imaginary golden ages from which their ancestors painfully crawled.
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      No one is fetishizing the past. It's simply a fact that progress is not a inevitable, not a law of nature. We live in a time when one generation is objectively less well off than their parents. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/14/economics-viewpoint-baby-boomers-generation-x-generation-rent-gig-economy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/14/economics-v...
  - klyrs 4y ago
    How recent is relatively recent in your mind?
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      No earlier than the Age of Enlightenment and at least by the Industrial Revolution.
  - stirfish 4y ago
    Don't tear down progress until you can say why we make progress in the first place.
- codemonkey-zeta 4y ago
  Maybe you should be worshipping the sun. Morning sunlight exposure is associated with all kinds of health benefits, not least of which producing Vitamin D, an essential vitamin that, among other things, provides vital protection against certain circulating diseases... Maybe you should also live everyday as though the possibility of the sun never rising again were real, then maybe you might get busy doing those important things in your life. Again, tradition is smarter than you.
  - criley2 4y ago
    You can develop a days worth of vitamin D in 15 minutes (or simply supplement it for the same benefits), meanwhile excessive sun exposure is correlated with all manner of health problems, not the least of which is cancer. People who spend more time outdoors tend to die younger. Again, progress trumps tradition.
    - codemonkey-zeta 4y ago
      Imagining a life of merely 15 minutes outside sounds miserable. It's also about the psychological benefits of sunlight exposure.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - throwaway202022 4y ago
      > People who spend more time outdoors tend to die younger. Source for this? Searching for the claim only turned up results saying more time outdoors is associated with better long-term health outcomes. Also: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heres-something-unexpected-sunbathers-live-longer-201606069738 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heres-something-unexpect...
      - uoaei 4y ago
        People who spend all their time indoors (in front of screens) will seek to justify their lifestyles, just as those who spend their time outdoors will seek to justify theirs. There is nothing rational about pre-supposing that your personal habits represent some sort of optimium: it is only through careful study that benefits and costs may be determined.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  > Sometimes, Chesterson's fence was erected by a shepherd who no longer uses the field that you'd rather play soccer on. It was useful in its day, but no longer. I mean, that's the point of the metaphor: before knocking down the fence, figure out what purpose it served in the first place. It's not a question of "don't ever knock down a fence" or "always knock down fences".
  - klyrs 4y ago
    > It's not a question of "don't ever knock down a fence" or "always knock down fences". Exactly my point. "Tradition is smarter than you" implies that I won't be able to out-think it. When, in fact, tradition is overturned quite regularly and quite often with extremely good reasoning. Always doing the same thing is dumb -- be that holding or throwing out tradition. Mindless adherence to tradition is just as stupid as mindlessly discarding tradition. Tradition is not smarter than me, tradition is mindless. Critical thinking wins.
    - karaterobot 4y ago
      Your upstream comment made me think you were interpreting the linked article as saying "if something is traditional, it must be wise, thus we should follow it." But it is not saying that, by my reading. It is saying: because the pace of generational change is increasing, applying the Chesterton's Fence rule to traditions is increasingly difficult, thus many people abandon it and try to work from first principles."
- PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  > let's go back to worshipping the sun Did we ever stop? Praise the sun! solaire pose
- 1123581321 4y ago
  You most likely did not descend from people who worshipped the sun, just people who used the sun in art and recognized its benefits to them. There were deities associated with the sun. Sol Invictus is the most commonly known, but was a relatively late addition to the Roman pantheon, intentionally appropriated from traditions from Syria and elevated by the empire for what they perceived to be civic benefit. Hardly traditional, but perhaps an early example of bureaucrats recognizing the value of a tradition they did not personally respect.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    The idea of Sol as a Syrian god has been challenged recently: It was long thought that Sol Invictus was a Syrian sun-god, and that Aurelian imported his cult into Rome after he had vanquished Zenobia and captured Palmyra. This sun-god, it was postulated, differed fundamentally from the old Roman sungod Sol Indiges, whose cult had long since disappeared from Rome. Scholars thus tended to postulate a hiatus in the first centuries of imperial rule during which there was little or no cult of the sun in Rome. Recent studies, however, have shown that Aurelian’s Sol Invictus was neither new nor foreign, and that the cult of the sun was maintained in Rome without interruption from the city’s earliest history until the demise of Roman religion(s). This continuity of the Roman cult of Sol sheds a new light on the evidence for priests and temples of Sol in Rome. http://romanrepublic.org/roma/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Temples%20of%20Sol%20in%20Rome.pdf http://romanrepublic.org/roma/wp-content/uploads/attachments...
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      Interesting! Thank you.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    > You most likely did not descend from people who worshipped the sun, just people who used the sun in art and recognized its benefits to them. a. You don't know my parents, don't be so sure. b. You're right, I should have gone with "washing hands before surgery" to avoid these low-effort rebuttals.
- celsopitta 4y ago
  The soccer player knows why he can do it, the fence is no longer useful. That was exactly Chesterton's point.
  - 8note 4y ago
    If you don't know why the fence was there, how do you know that it's not still useful for that original purpose, outside of you playing soccer. The point is to never tear down fences, because you can never quite know why it was put up. You can know that a fence isn't useful to what you want to do, but Chesterton's fence just doesn't apply
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Well, let's go back to worshipping the sun, then. Who knows, if we don't, it might not rise tomorrow... I think we'd be much better off being un-ironic sun-worshipers than hollowed-out atomised atheists. And I see that as someone who is sadly in the latter category.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    > I think we'd be much better off being un-ironic sun-worshipers... Better off worshipping unintelligent and non-existent beings, and all the foolish memes that inevitably accrete with magical thinking? > hollowed-out atomised atheists. Hollowed of what? Mostly harmful traditions many of which were designed to entrench unearned power and influence?
    - LAC-Tech 4y ago
      Yeah, exactly! Imagine of instead of typing all that negative conspiracy theory rubbish on HN, you were outside intermingling at your local sun temple.
      - paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Atheism is a conspiracy theory? Or is there something in my comment history that strikes you as 'rubbish'?
    - uoaei 4y ago
      Hollowed of mystical modes of reasoning that provide unreasonably useful answers to our most pressing questions in a quasi-random fashion. You don't have to dig deep to find examples where this path outperforms "rationalist" approaches.
trention 4y ago
Generally you should assume that tradition/status quo is always right until proven otherwise (=a logically compelling argument against, backed empirically).
- 77pt77 4y ago
  Experimental evidence shows that tradition and common sense are almost invariably wrong.
  - a_shovel 4y ago
    Now that's some strong (dis)confirmation bias.
  - _corvo_ 4y ago
    May I ask for links to the research that shows this? Not arguing, just curious.
    - 77pt77 4y ago
      Pick up any book on Quantum Mechanics.
      - _corvo_ 4y ago
        I don’t think that’ll be relevant to what the article is discussing. It’s about group vs individual traditions. We can’t refute those points by waving quantum mechanics.
      - prophetjack 4y ago
        That's probably the only (if not most) unintuitive experimental knowledge we've come across, and we still don't have a good explanation for it today. No idea how that makes tradition "invariably wrong".
      - trention 4y ago
        Using this as an example of "tradition being wrong" in the context of the linked article is literally peak autism on top of the fact that our "common sense" understanding of physical processes being wrong (is it even wrong at the level of abstraction we work on?) says nothing about our understanding of social phenomena.
uoaei 4y ago
Cultural knowledge vs individual knowledge is an interesting dichotomy to explore. Cultural knowledge has a way of distilling information into very parsimonious and digestible forms for individuals then to propagate. The knowledge is in some sense only stored in the hyper-individual, ie, the society, while the individuals are following their own rules (and using their own models) to interact with and make use of it. One metaphor could be the ant colony: the colony's interest is to collect food and feed its young to perpetuate itself, while the ants only know they are following pheromone trails, exploring new regions, and reacting to nutritional signals when they arrive at a source. Traditional medicine systems (Chinese, Indian/Ayurveda, etc.) work in much the same way: the mental models of its participants and practitioners do not necessarily sync up with the precise methods of action that actually "do the work" as we understand it in the Western scientific context. But the system as a whole, enacted through the collection of people who implement it, does demonstrate effective outcomes re: community health.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "But the system as a whole, enacted through the collection of people who implement it, does demonstrate effective outcomes re: community health." What india and what china are you refering to, when you say "good community health"? I am not a historian and have not been to both countries, but my general picture of the times where those medicine traditions were at its height, is not really of a healthy one. There were certainly healthy individuals, but the community health probably has to be described as, survival of the fittest. Via martial arts, I did study a bit of chinese medicine and I can say I like the general idea of keeping the body in balance. And that sickness is rather a symptom (of imbalance) than the root cause. But the concrete steps they have to do, well, I'd say it is probably 99% placebo.
isomorph 4y ago
What about circumcision? Is it all about forming group bonds?
- stirfish 4y ago
  Yeah, the Cool Penis Club.
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    Mushrooms > anteaters.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  Probably increases male aggression as well.
- lazide 4y ago
  Not being circumcised meaningfully increases the odds of transmitting and contracting certain diseases, by around 50%ish (though reduces some, interestingly enough) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2907642/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2907642/] and increases the risk of UTIs significantly (by about 75%, albeit still not super common). [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6119846/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6119846/] Consider a world without antibiotics, and a UTI can become life threatening. Most STDs would be similarly restrictive to reproductive potential, as men are much less at risk than women, and many women would be taking quite a gamble having sex with someone known to have an STD. Even today, PID can cause sterility in women and is not uncommon.
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    >Consider a world without antibiotics In a world without antibiotics I’d rather not want anyone getting within 10 feet of my son’s penis with an unsterilized blade, thank you. Not to mention the whole “direct oral suctioning” tradition of some religious groups [1], which sounds like a recipe for spreading herpes and other goodies. [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/safe-bris.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/safe-bris...
blamestross 4y ago
I think the real "cultural singularity" has been the transition to this being false after spending the overwhelming portion of human history and development being true.
jpitz 4y ago
Chesterson's fence is about understanding: tradition may be smarter than you, maybe not, but it would serve well to understand the reasons why it's a tradition before disposing with it.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  well and good. the issue I have is that when no one can be found that knows anything about why it was put there in the first place. every day I have to climb over that damn fence to get groceries. at what point do we tear it down to see what happens? in software, I would rather tear it down and find out what it was there for. most developers I've worked with in the past couple decades operate in an atmosphere of constant fear and would never consider doing that. even if the cost of putting it back is zero. better to climb over it every day than risk introducing some unknown inconsistency. maybe we'd be better engineers if we actually learned about the systems we're using.
  - TopYemen 4y ago
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    If you have good tests, the reason is often much more clear.
  - friedman23 4y ago
    > in software, I would rather tear it down and find out what it was there for. if you don't have regression testing there's a chance you don't find out until something disastrous happens
    - 8note 4y ago
      There's a reason it's called a scream test. You take out the fence, then watch closely for the disaster. Likely the fence was unnecessary because most fences are built to accomodate for somebody's personal tastes and aesthetics
  - 4y ago
he0001 4y ago
Someone said: traditions are solutions of forgotten problems.
dang 4y ago
Related: Tradition Is Smarter (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749 - Jan 2020 (101 comments) Also: Chesterton's Fence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553665 - May 2022 (13 comments) Chesterton’s Fence (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 - Jan 2022 (142 comments) Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 - March 2020 (85 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 - Nov 2016 (26 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 - May 2016 (2 comments) Taking a Fence Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149 - June 2015 (42 comments) Others?
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, why has the original article title been edited ?
  - dang 4y ago
    Because of the linkbait "you" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22linkbait%20you%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). The site guidelines ask to remove linkbait: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We like to do minimal edits to titles, so taking a substring is often best. I was feeling proud of myself for figuring out how to do that in this case, until I noticed that the previous submission had figured out the same thing.
ralusek 4y ago
The thing that progressivism has gotten wrong is that tradition isn't completely arbitrary and lacking in utility. The thing that conservatism has gotten wrong is that tradition isn't simply defensible for its own sake. Modern progressivism feels like going into a house to remodel, with a sledgehammer, without bothering to give any consideration to which walls might be load bearing. Conservatism feels like keeping a claustrophobic ugly kitchen in lieu of an open floorplan, simply because the walls should be assumed to be load bearing.
- ralusek 4y ago
  To bring this out of the abstract, take something like feminism. First wave had it right, in my opinion, by focusing on liberation. Women weren't free to choose their own paths, and conservatism was the over bearing force in creating this problem. The aim of liberation was to free what arbitrary constraints were put on women simply due to tradition or presumption. Modern feminism, however, focuses on equality rather than liberation. It feels comfortable to assert that if women were truly liberated, they would be equal, and would be equally represented as software engineers, and plumbers, and truck drivers, etc. This is, in contrast, a failure of progressivism. It assumes that no traditions or gender roles had any basis in preferences that need not be equally distributed between sexes. TL;DR Virtue of the Mean every time
  - orwin 4y ago
    Modern feminism (philosophical, postmodern) focus on emancipation. That political feminism (liberal, capitalist) chose to focus on equality isn't for progressive reasons, but for growth.
xani_ 4y ago
Tradition was a mean to preserve knowledge over decades, I don't think it's relevant now where we can actually do that directly and also attach the research about whether it works, how it works, and how to employ a given technique directly. Nowadays it's just a convenient method to make people do something without questioning it or asking why.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  I don't think it's that simple. Human beings evolved while spreading culture, for far, far longer than we have been writing, longer than we have been homo sapiens even. It is a core part of what we are, so understanding it and accepting it and examining it without bias is important. I'm not entirely convinced that we can preserve information for generations. We can't even preserve web sites for 2 decades, link rot online is a real problem. That's modern technology with solid state drives and worldwide communication. Language evolution makes this problem even worse. We can't even agree on what the founding fathers of the US meant with some parts of the constitution (granted, there are and have been deliberate efforts on that front but there are legitimate questions stil) and that's with the same government still operating under it while it's people still speak the same language! I don't think information propagation across generations is a solved problem now that we have writing and solid state drives, and beyond that tradition is not going away because it's as much a part of who we are as language and fire.
- tjs8rj 4y ago
  “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.” ― Donald Kingsbury Maybe you take a very narrow view of what constitutes a tradition as you rely on so many in your daily life that you couldn't possibly believe this view. Why do you brush 2x a day, once in the morning and evening? You didn't learn that yourself or read any academic literature, it's because someone told you to. Why do you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner - 3 separate meals, and all at a consistent time? You didn't learn that yourself or read any academic literature, there's a good chance you're not even all that hungry when you grab a meal sometimes, it's because someone told you to. Why do you say please and thank you? Or hold the door? Or tip? You didn't learn that yourself, and they're pretty arbitrary generosities in the big picture, it's because someone told you to. Why do you wish others luck? Why do you wear socks with your shoes? Why tie those shoes with the same bunny ears knot everyone else does? Why do you take a date to dinner? Why get married at all? Why don't you do drugs? Why don't you eat cat meat? All of these and so much of your existence is following rituals you didn't invent and don't even question - that's one of the most significant values of traditions in all their forms: removing problems others have already solved from your attention. You don't need to reinvent shoe-tying, or what constitutes a good date, or when to eat meals or how many or what is reasonable to eat, or how to maintain your teeth and hygiene, and so on. Instead, you can just learn how to live by copying the mundane rituals others do and focus your attention on more interesting things. Preserving knowledge doesn't just mean folk stories, it's more fundamental things like taking care of yourself, how to find a partner, and so on that if you stopped to try and build from the ground up yourself (or by reading all the research) you'd just be completely lost and miserable.
ajuc 4y ago
Smart is how fast you think not how much you know. Tradition isn't smarter than you, it's the exact opposite - it's main feature is that it's VERY slow to adapt, to the point that some people still don't eat pigs millenia after we discovered how to do it safely, and other still bathe in "saint rivers" full of pollution and germs millenia after it ceased to be a net health benefit. Tradition might in some cases be wiser than you, because it gathered the wisdom over a much longer period, no matter how inefficiently it did so. But the obvious solution is to do science to take the things that work, and throw the other things out. You need to challenge the traditions to do so. Some conservatives admit that there are harmful traditions at least, but very few acknowledge the opportunity cost of not figuring out why the traditions that are beneficial - developed in the first place. For example maybe the knowledge of the substances that manioc processing removes would be beneficial for drug development or some other uses? By keeping the tradition sacred we will likely never discover that, even if we save a few lives initially. Or maybe there's a way to grow manioc that doesn't need all the processing steps?
- d0gsg0w00f 4y ago
  > But the obvious solution is to do science to take the things that work Science only gives you gives you facts. It doesn't tell you what to do with those facts to help you and your descendants live full and meaningful lives. Only Culture can handle that complexity.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    Both "optimal way to achieve X given Y is Z" and "setting P as your goal leads to Q" are facts. So in fact science also gives you ways to achieve your goals and even to evaluate and change them to better suit you. You can see this in very simple model that is chess. The only thing chess engines do is estimate how good a position is. But that's plenty enough to win against any human player. As for "meaningful" lives - culture can be a source of meaning, and it can be a cause of lack of meaning (for example if you happen to have a calling to become a pilot but your culture forces you to become a housewife instead).
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Rarely have I had such a negative reaction to a blog post, for 2 main reasons: 1. The author seems to "mysticize" tradition, basically taking the approach "sometimes you just have to take things on faith". Which I think is complete nonsense. If you look at the traditions that "work", like the manioc processing given in the article, this is basically just the scientific method at work, but where we've lost the documentation. That is, people in the past surely did do trial and error to find out what processing works best, e.g. someone likely boiled the tapioca first to see that it lost its bitter taste, and then later others probably determined if they further processed it that it had fewer side effects (e.g. less bloating) that had long term benefits. But the important point is we should be glorifying the scientific method of trial and error here, not the "losing the documentation" part that the author wants us to do. As a close analogy, many many flight rules and regulations are born out of past tragedies, where something went wrong, we analyzed the root cause, and then came up with rules to prevent those causes. If we suddenly lost all the documentation and history as to why we built those rules in the first place, we would call it "tradition", but we would still be worse off compared to when we had a deeper, rational understanding of why we created those rules. 2. As others have pointed out, if "tradition is smarter", we'd also still be foot-binding in China, female circumcision wouldn't be questioned as the mutilation that it is, and slavery would be an acceptable form of division of labor. There are tons of traditions that are total shit, and were just propagated because they served to reinforce the power structures that existed at the time. Traditions deserved to be questioned. Those that are worth keeping should stand up to rational inquiry.
- nehal3m 4y ago
  To your point, assuming you're a Westerner, I quote you: "female circumcision wouldn't be questioned as the mutilation that it is" Maybe your traditions are blinding you to the fact that male circumcision falls in the same category. I agree with the sentiment though, and the italicized part of your comment is quite an elegant way to put it.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - 4y ago
nixnax 4y ago
m4nu3l 4y ago
Coincidentally I had debates recently about traditions. In particular about Monarchies. While traditions can be there for reasons and it's OK to follow some traditions, all traditions should be questioned. The amount of knowledge we have today is not comparable with what we had in any previous time in history. The article actually proves that. We now know about chronic cyanide poisoning to a level that was unknown even to the population that developed traditions to avoid it. Also traditions can: - Have lost the original problem they were developed to address. - Always been the wrong choice (but probably without giving a significant disadvantage to a population). - Be irrelevant as better methods are now available. In short the Monarchy serve no real purpose in modern societies. Even as a symbol, it's a very bad symbol.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > In short the Monarchy serve no real purpose in modern societies. Even as a symbol, it's a very bad symbol. TBH I'm sort of baffled by this stance given the events around Queen Elizabeth II's passing. To be clear, I'm not a monarchist, and I share the opinion that their continuation in modern society is, well, weird, to say the least. A modern constitutional monarch holds no real power, and often times holds less power than normal people (e.g. not being able to express any political opinion). For example, I wouldn't wish being a member of the UK Royal Family on my worst enemy - yes, you are rich and nominally "famous", but you essentially have no freedom: your job in life is pre-ordained, and your life is basically constantly under the microscope of an adversarial press. But, while I may not fully understand it, it's clear to me that a monarch can serve a real purpose in modern societies. Many, many millions of people felt an affinity and dare I say a love for QEII, and I think these traditions serve a unifying force in the UK, or at least in England. The UK monarch and royal family are essentially the ultimate "branding" exercise. Plus, since the UK has basically separated any real power from the monarch, it means that the monarchy's sole purpose is to serve as a "neutral" symbol of the state, something that pure democracies often lack. To give a good analogy: I don't really understand rooting for professional sports teams either (George Carlin has a great bit about this "The players change, the coaches change - you're basically rooting for laundry"), but clearly tons of people have a deep, strong emotional bond to their "favorite team". It's also clear to me that, even if I don't understand it that well, many people can feel the same way about their monarch, and that can serve an important purpose.
drekipus 4y ago
I posted this in a comment thread but I feel like it's worthy of its own. The biggest misconception about traditions is that "people just randomly decided to do it and punish those who don't follow." The most probable case is that traditions, such as male circumcision, were done for a particular purpose and ritualised into a tradition to share and continue that process. It's only in more modern ages where we said that "rituals aren't enough" and we need to think of medical reasons for it as well. (Cue, studies in Africa, etc) Considering how much of the mind is an enigma, it's an arms race to find out positive reasons of why we do certain traditions before we get rid of them completely without understanding them. 50 years (?) of the scientific method up against 50,000 years of human stories and primal survival.
TopYemen 4y ago
lvxferre 4y ago
Relevant detail about yucca/cassava/manioc: there are two varieties of the crop, "sweet" and "bitter". The bitter variety is mostly eaten in the Amazon, the Brazilian Northeast, and a chunk of the Gran Chaco; elsewhere - including the rest of South America - people stick mostly to the sweet variety. Why? Because the sweet variety can be safely eaten after boiled, just like that hypothetical Tukanoan mother wanted. (You can even deep-fry it, cover with Parmesan cheese, bacon and chives. It's a great bar snack.) Odds are that the sweet variety was bred this way, through artificial selection; I'm not sure who did it, if the Amerindians or the Iberians. Either way, it's only there because someone actively questioned the tradition, and was willing to break with it. I'm saying this to highlight that tradition does not think on its own, because it's solely the replication of past knowledge. Tradition is not smart - what is smart, however, is to know when to follow it or when to ditch it. I do think that tradition has a role, but the author's article is misled on how and why to present it. At the end of the day, tradition is what makes us part of a community; it gives us a sense of belonging, be it as random or as predictable as it might be.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Maybe the bitter variety has better resistance to parasites, keeps longer, etc?
  - lvxferre 4y ago
    The bitter variety is a bit more drought-resistant. That's actually relevant in the Gran Chaco and the Brazilian Northeast, as both regions are rather arid and prone to drought. In the Amazon though? Not really - and yet most recipes that I've seen using bitter yucca (some using the leaves, that are heavy on cyanogens) are from the Amazon. So the cultivation of the bitter variety itself is a tradition in all three places. In one of them, the tradition already lost the meaning to exist, but it's still there.

Well, let's go back to worshipping the sun, then. Who knows, if we don't, it might not rise tomorrow... Or, just maybe, progress itself is a tradition that deserves its own reverence. Sometimes, Chesterson's fence was erected by a shepherd who no longer uses the field that you'd rather play soccer on. It was useful in its day, but no longer.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Sometimes tradition is smarter than you are. Sometimes tradition is brain-dead. But we are very prone to assume that tradition is always brain-dead. That's a very dangerous assumption...
PsySecGroup 4y ago
Judgmentality 4y ago
I feel like this comment points out the tradition of being contrarian on HN, and it would be foolish of me to question it.
- klyrs 4y ago
  To the contrary, it would be foolish of you to not question me. Question Everything, Even This (but not too much because that's overthinking).
- topaz0 4y ago
  Only if you don't know its purpose, which is self-aggrandizement.
cratermoon 4y ago
Progress itself is a tradition, but a relatively recent one, and not one deserving reverence. At least, not any more.
- api 4y ago
  … says someone who if they are posting on HN has very likely never known actual hunger or true poverty and has all humanity’s history and knowledge at their fingertips instantly. The problem with progress is that it makes people so comfortable and privileged that they dream up inane fantasy ideologies that question progress and harken back to the imaginary golden ages from which their ancestors painfully crawled.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    No one is fetishizing the past. It's simply a fact that progress is not a inevitable, not a law of nature. We live in a time when one generation is objectively less well off than their parents. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/14/economics-viewpoint-baby-boomers-generation-x-generation-rent-gig-economy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/14/economics-v...
- klyrs 4y ago
  How recent is relatively recent in your mind?
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    No earlier than the Age of Enlightenment and at least by the Industrial Revolution.
- stirfish 4y ago
  Don't tear down progress until you can say why we make progress in the first place.
codemonkey-zeta 4y ago
Maybe you should be worshipping the sun. Morning sunlight exposure is associated with all kinds of health benefits, not least of which producing Vitamin D, an essential vitamin that, among other things, provides vital protection against certain circulating diseases... Maybe you should also live everyday as though the possibility of the sun never rising again were real, then maybe you might get busy doing those important things in your life. Again, tradition is smarter than you.
- criley2 4y ago
  You can develop a days worth of vitamin D in 15 minutes (or simply supplement it for the same benefits), meanwhile excessive sun exposure is correlated with all manner of health problems, not the least of which is cancer. People who spend more time outdoors tend to die younger. Again, progress trumps tradition.
  - codemonkey-zeta 4y ago
    Imagining a life of merely 15 minutes outside sounds miserable. It's also about the psychological benefits of sunlight exposure.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway202022 4y ago
    > People who spend more time outdoors tend to die younger. Source for this? Searching for the claim only turned up results saying more time outdoors is associated with better long-term health outcomes. Also: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heres-something-unexpected-sunbathers-live-longer-201606069738 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heres-something-unexpect...
    - uoaei 4y ago
      People who spend all their time indoors (in front of screens) will seek to justify their lifestyles, just as those who spend their time outdoors will seek to justify theirs. There is nothing rational about pre-supposing that your personal habits represent some sort of optimium: it is only through careful study that benefits and costs may be determined.
karaterobot 4y ago
> Sometimes, Chesterson's fence was erected by a shepherd who no longer uses the field that you'd rather play soccer on. It was useful in its day, but no longer. I mean, that's the point of the metaphor: before knocking down the fence, figure out what purpose it served in the first place. It's not a question of "don't ever knock down a fence" or "always knock down fences".
- klyrs 4y ago
  > It's not a question of "don't ever knock down a fence" or "always knock down fences". Exactly my point. "Tradition is smarter than you" implies that I won't be able to out-think it. When, in fact, tradition is overturned quite regularly and quite often with extremely good reasoning. Always doing the same thing is dumb -- be that holding or throwing out tradition. Mindless adherence to tradition is just as stupid as mindlessly discarding tradition. Tradition is not smarter than me, tradition is mindless. Critical thinking wins.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    Your upstream comment made me think you were interpreting the linked article as saying "if something is traditional, it must be wise, thus we should follow it." But it is not saying that, by my reading. It is saying: because the pace of generational change is increasing, applying the Chesterton's Fence rule to traditions is increasingly difficult, thus many people abandon it and try to work from first principles."
PainfullyNormal 4y ago
> let's go back to worshipping the sun Did we ever stop? Praise the sun! solaire pose
1123581321 4y ago
You most likely did not descend from people who worshipped the sun, just people who used the sun in art and recognized its benefits to them. There were deities associated with the sun. Sol Invictus is the most commonly known, but was a relatively late addition to the Roman pantheon, intentionally appropriated from traditions from Syria and elevated by the empire for what they perceived to be civic benefit. Hardly traditional, but perhaps an early example of bureaucrats recognizing the value of a tradition they did not personally respect.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  The idea of Sol as a Syrian god has been challenged recently: It was long thought that Sol Invictus was a Syrian sun-god, and that Aurelian imported his cult into Rome after he had vanquished Zenobia and captured Palmyra. This sun-god, it was postulated, differed fundamentally from the old Roman sungod Sol Indiges, whose cult had long since disappeared from Rome. Scholars thus tended to postulate a hiatus in the first centuries of imperial rule during which there was little or no cult of the sun in Rome. Recent studies, however, have shown that Aurelian’s Sol Invictus was neither new nor foreign, and that the cult of the sun was maintained in Rome without interruption from the city’s earliest history until the demise of Roman religion(s). This continuity of the Roman cult of Sol sheds a new light on the evidence for priests and temples of Sol in Rome. http://romanrepublic.org/roma/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Temples%20of%20Sol%20in%20Rome.pdf http://romanrepublic.org/roma/wp-content/uploads/attachments...
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    Interesting! Thank you.
- klyrs 4y ago
  > You most likely did not descend from people who worshipped the sun, just people who used the sun in art and recognized its benefits to them. a. You don't know my parents, don't be so sure. b. You're right, I should have gone with "washing hands before surgery" to avoid these low-effort rebuttals.
celsopitta 4y ago
The soccer player knows why he can do it, the fence is no longer useful. That was exactly Chesterton's point.
- 8note 4y ago
  If you don't know why the fence was there, how do you know that it's not still useful for that original purpose, outside of you playing soccer. The point is to never tear down fences, because you can never quite know why it was put up. You can know that a fence isn't useful to what you want to do, but Chesterton's fence just doesn't apply
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Well, let's go back to worshipping the sun, then. Who knows, if we don't, it might not rise tomorrow... I think we'd be much better off being un-ironic sun-worshipers than hollowed-out atomised atheists. And I see that as someone who is sadly in the latter category.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  > I think we'd be much better off being un-ironic sun-worshipers... Better off worshipping unintelligent and non-existent beings, and all the foolish memes that inevitably accrete with magical thinking? > hollowed-out atomised atheists. Hollowed of what? Mostly harmful traditions many of which were designed to entrench unearned power and influence?
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Yeah, exactly! Imagine of instead of typing all that negative conspiracy theory rubbish on HN, you were outside intermingling at your local sun temple.
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Atheism is a conspiracy theory? Or is there something in my comment history that strikes you as 'rubbish'?
  - uoaei 4y ago
    Hollowed of mystical modes of reasoning that provide unreasonably useful answers to our most pressing questions in a quasi-random fashion. You don't have to dig deep to find examples where this path outperforms "rationalist" approaches.

trention 4y ago

Generally you should assume that tradition/status quo is always right until proven otherwise (=a logically compelling argument against, backed empirically).

77pt77 4y ago
Experimental evidence shows that tradition and common sense are almost invariably wrong.
- a_shovel 4y ago
  Now that's some strong (dis)confirmation bias.
- _corvo_ 4y ago
  May I ask for links to the research that shows this? Not arguing, just curious.
  - 77pt77 4y ago
    Pick up any book on Quantum Mechanics.
    - _corvo_ 4y ago
      I don’t think that’ll be relevant to what the article is discussing. It’s about group vs individual traditions. We can’t refute those points by waving quantum mechanics.
    - prophetjack 4y ago
      That's probably the only (if not most) unintuitive experimental knowledge we've come across, and we still don't have a good explanation for it today. No idea how that makes tradition "invariably wrong".
    - trention 4y ago
      Using this as an example of "tradition being wrong" in the context of the linked article is literally peak autism on top of the fact that our "common sense" understanding of physical processes being wrong (is it even wrong at the level of abstraction we work on?) says nothing about our understanding of social phenomena.

uoaei 4y ago

Cultural knowledge vs individual knowledge is an interesting dichotomy to explore. Cultural knowledge has a way of distilling information into very parsimonious and digestible forms for individuals then to propagate. The knowledge is in some sense only stored in the hyper-individual, ie, the society, while the individuals are following their own rules (and using their own models) to interact with and make use of it. One metaphor could be the ant colony: the colony's interest is to collect food and feed its young to perpetuate itself, while the ants only know they are following pheromone trails, exploring new regions, and reacting to nutritional signals when they arrive at a source. Traditional medicine systems (Chinese, Indian/Ayurveda, etc.) work in much the same way: the mental models of its participants and practitioners do not necessarily sync up with the precise methods of action that actually "do the work" as we understand it in the Western scientific context. But the system as a whole, enacted through the collection of people who implement it, does demonstrate effective outcomes re: community health.

hutzlibu 4y ago
"But the system as a whole, enacted through the collection of people who implement it, does demonstrate effective outcomes re: community health." What india and what china are you refering to, when you say "good community health"? I am not a historian and have not been to both countries, but my general picture of the times where those medicine traditions were at its height, is not really of a healthy one. There were certainly healthy individuals, but the community health probably has to be described as, survival of the fittest. Via martial arts, I did study a bit of chinese medicine and I can say I like the general idea of keeping the body in balance. And that sickness is rather a symptom (of imbalance) than the root cause. But the concrete steps they have to do, well, I'd say it is probably 99% placebo.

isomorph 4y ago

What about circumcision? Is it all about forming group bonds?

stirfish 4y ago
Yeah, the Cool Penis Club.
- SyzygistSix 4y ago
  Mushrooms > anteaters.
77pt77 4y ago
Probably increases male aggression as well.
lazide 4y ago
Not being circumcised meaningfully increases the odds of transmitting and contracting certain diseases, by around 50%ish (though reduces some, interestingly enough) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2907642/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2907642/] and increases the risk of UTIs significantly (by about 75%, albeit still not super common). [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6119846/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6119846/] Consider a world without antibiotics, and a UTI can become life threatening. Most STDs would be similarly restrictive to reproductive potential, as men are much less at risk than women, and many women would be taking quite a gamble having sex with someone known to have an STD. Even today, PID can cause sterility in women and is not uncommon.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  >Consider a world without antibiotics In a world without antibiotics I’d rather not want anyone getting within 10 feet of my son’s penis with an unsterilized blade, thank you. Not to mention the whole “direct oral suctioning” tradition of some religious groups [1], which sounds like a recipe for spreading herpes and other goodies. [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/safe-bris.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/safe-bris...

blamestross 4y ago

I think the real "cultural singularity" has been the transition to this being false after spending the overwhelming portion of human history and development being true.

jpitz 4y ago

Chesterson's fence is about understanding: tradition may be smarter than you, maybe not, but it would serve well to understand the reasons why it's a tradition before disposing with it.

convolvatron 4y ago
well and good. the issue I have is that when no one can be found that knows anything about why it was put there in the first place. every day I have to climb over that damn fence to get groceries. at what point do we tear it down to see what happens? in software, I would rather tear it down and find out what it was there for. most developers I've worked with in the past couple decades operate in an atmosphere of constant fear and would never consider doing that. even if the cost of putting it back is zero. better to climb over it every day than risk introducing some unknown inconsistency. maybe we'd be better engineers if we actually learned about the systems we're using.
- TopYemen 4y ago
- osigurdson 4y ago
  If you have good tests, the reason is often much more clear.
- friedman23 4y ago
  > in software, I would rather tear it down and find out what it was there for. if you don't have regression testing there's a chance you don't find out until something disastrous happens
  - 8note 4y ago
    There's a reason it's called a scream test. You take out the fence, then watch closely for the disaster. Likely the fence was unnecessary because most fences are built to accomodate for somebody's personal tastes and aesthetics
- 4y ago

he0001 4y ago

Someone said: traditions are solutions of forgotten problems.

dang 4y ago

Related: Tradition Is Smarter (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749 - Jan 2020 (101 comments) Also: Chesterton's Fence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553665 - May 2022 (13 comments) Chesterton’s Fence (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 - Jan 2022 (142 comments) Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484 - March 2020 (85 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246 - Nov 2016 (26 comments) The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11743965 - May 2016 (2 comments) Taking a Fence Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9745149 - June 2015 (42 comments) Others?

4gotunameagain 4y ago
Out of curiosity, why has the original article title been edited ?
- dang 4y ago
  Because of the linkbait "you" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22linkbait%20you%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). The site guidelines ask to remove linkbait: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We like to do minimal edits to titles, so taking a substring is often best. I was feeling proud of myself for figuring out how to do that in this case, until I noticed that the previous submission had figured out the same thing.

ralusek 4y ago

The thing that progressivism has gotten wrong is that tradition isn't completely arbitrary and lacking in utility. The thing that conservatism has gotten wrong is that tradition isn't simply defensible for its own sake. Modern progressivism feels like going into a house to remodel, with a sledgehammer, without bothering to give any consideration to which walls might be load bearing. Conservatism feels like keeping a claustrophobic ugly kitchen in lieu of an open floorplan, simply because the walls should be assumed to be load bearing.

ralusek 4y ago
To bring this out of the abstract, take something like feminism. First wave had it right, in my opinion, by focusing on liberation. Women weren't free to choose their own paths, and conservatism was the over bearing force in creating this problem. The aim of liberation was to free what arbitrary constraints were put on women simply due to tradition or presumption. Modern feminism, however, focuses on equality rather than liberation. It feels comfortable to assert that if women were truly liberated, they would be equal, and would be equally represented as software engineers, and plumbers, and truck drivers, etc. This is, in contrast, a failure of progressivism. It assumes that no traditions or gender roles had any basis in preferences that need not be equally distributed between sexes. TL;DR Virtue of the Mean every time
- orwin 4y ago
  Modern feminism (philosophical, postmodern) focus on emancipation. That political feminism (liberal, capitalist) chose to focus on equality isn't for progressive reasons, but for growth.

xani_ 4y ago

Tradition was a mean to preserve knowledge over decades, I don't think it's relevant now where we can actually do that directly and also attach the research about whether it works, how it works, and how to employ a given technique directly. Nowadays it's just a convenient method to make people do something without questioning it or asking why.

betwixthewires 4y ago
I don't think it's that simple. Human beings evolved while spreading culture, for far, far longer than we have been writing, longer than we have been homo sapiens even. It is a core part of what we are, so understanding it and accepting it and examining it without bias is important. I'm not entirely convinced that we can preserve information for generations. We can't even preserve web sites for 2 decades, link rot online is a real problem. That's modern technology with solid state drives and worldwide communication. Language evolution makes this problem even worse. We can't even agree on what the founding fathers of the US meant with some parts of the constitution (granted, there are and have been deliberate efforts on that front but there are legitimate questions stil) and that's with the same government still operating under it while it's people still speak the same language! I don't think information propagation across generations is a solved problem now that we have writing and solid state drives, and beyond that tradition is not going away because it's as much a part of who we are as language and fire.
tjs8rj 4y ago
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.” ― Donald Kingsbury Maybe you take a very narrow view of what constitutes a tradition as you rely on so many in your daily life that you couldn't possibly believe this view. Why do you brush 2x a day, once in the morning and evening? You didn't learn that yourself or read any academic literature, it's because someone told you to. Why do you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner - 3 separate meals, and all at a consistent time? You didn't learn that yourself or read any academic literature, there's a good chance you're not even all that hungry when you grab a meal sometimes, it's because someone told you to. Why do you say please and thank you? Or hold the door? Or tip? You didn't learn that yourself, and they're pretty arbitrary generosities in the big picture, it's because someone told you to. Why do you wish others luck? Why do you wear socks with your shoes? Why tie those shoes with the same bunny ears knot everyone else does? Why do you take a date to dinner? Why get married at all? Why don't you do drugs? Why don't you eat cat meat? All of these and so much of your existence is following rituals you didn't invent and don't even question - that's one of the most significant values of traditions in all their forms: removing problems others have already solved from your attention. You don't need to reinvent shoe-tying, or what constitutes a good date, or when to eat meals or how many or what is reasonable to eat, or how to maintain your teeth and hygiene, and so on. Instead, you can just learn how to live by copying the mundane rituals others do and focus your attention on more interesting things. Preserving knowledge doesn't just mean folk stories, it's more fundamental things like taking care of yourself, how to find a partner, and so on that if you stopped to try and build from the ground up yourself (or by reading all the research) you'd just be completely lost and miserable.

ajuc 4y ago

Smart is how fast you think not how much you know. Tradition isn't smarter than you, it's the exact opposite - it's main feature is that it's VERY slow to adapt, to the point that some people still don't eat pigs millenia after we discovered how to do it safely, and other still bathe in "saint rivers" full of pollution and germs millenia after it ceased to be a net health benefit. Tradition might in some cases be wiser than you, because it gathered the wisdom over a much longer period, no matter how inefficiently it did so. But the obvious solution is to do science to take the things that work, and throw the other things out. You need to challenge the traditions to do so. Some conservatives admit that there are harmful traditions at least, but very few acknowledge the opportunity cost of not figuring out why the traditions that are beneficial - developed in the first place. For example maybe the knowledge of the substances that manioc processing removes would be beneficial for drug development or some other uses? By keeping the tradition sacred we will likely never discover that, even if we save a few lives initially. Or maybe there's a way to grow manioc that doesn't need all the processing steps?

d0gsg0w00f 4y ago
> But the obvious solution is to do science to take the things that work Science only gives you gives you facts. It doesn't tell you what to do with those facts to help you and your descendants live full and meaningful lives. Only Culture can handle that complexity.
- ajuc 4y ago
  Both "optimal way to achieve X given Y is Z" and "setting P as your goal leads to Q" are facts. So in fact science also gives you ways to achieve your goals and even to evaluate and change them to better suit you. You can see this in very simple model that is chess. The only thing chess engines do is estimate how good a position is. But that's plenty enough to win against any human player. As for "meaningful" lives - culture can be a source of meaning, and it can be a cause of lack of meaning (for example if you happen to have a calling to become a pilot but your culture forces you to become a housewife instead).

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Rarely have I had such a negative reaction to a blog post, for 2 main reasons: 1. The author seems to "mysticize" tradition, basically taking the approach "sometimes you just have to take things on faith". Which I think is complete nonsense. If you look at the traditions that "work", like the manioc processing given in the article, this is basically just the scientific method at work, but where we've lost the documentation. That is, people in the past surely did do trial and error to find out what processing works best, e.g. someone likely boiled the tapioca first to see that it lost its bitter taste, and then later others probably determined if they further processed it that it had fewer side effects (e.g. less bloating) that had long term benefits. But the important point is we should be glorifying the scientific method of trial and error here, not the "losing the documentation" part that the author wants us to do. As a close analogy, many many flight rules and regulations are born out of past tragedies, where something went wrong, we analyzed the root cause, and then came up with rules to prevent those causes. If we suddenly lost all the documentation and history as to why we built those rules in the first place, we would call it "tradition", but we would still be worse off compared to when we had a deeper, rational understanding of why we created those rules. 2. As others have pointed out, if "tradition is smarter", we'd also still be foot-binding in China, female circumcision wouldn't be questioned as the mutilation that it is, and slavery would be an acceptable form of division of labor. There are tons of traditions that are total shit, and were just propagated because they served to reinforce the power structures that existed at the time. Traditions deserved to be questioned. Those that are worth keeping should stand up to rational inquiry.

nehal3m 4y ago
To your point, assuming you're a Westerner, I quote you: "female circumcision wouldn't be questioned as the mutilation that it is" Maybe your traditions are blinding you to the fact that male circumcision falls in the same category. I agree with the sentiment though, and the italicized part of your comment is quite an elegant way to put it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago

nixnax 4y ago

m4nu3l 4y ago

Coincidentally I had debates recently about traditions. In particular about Monarchies. While traditions can be there for reasons and it's OK to follow some traditions, all traditions should be questioned. The amount of knowledge we have today is not comparable with what we had in any previous time in history. The article actually proves that. We now know about chronic cyanide poisoning to a level that was unknown even to the population that developed traditions to avoid it. Also traditions can: - Have lost the original problem they were developed to address. - Always been the wrong choice (but probably without giving a significant disadvantage to a population). - Be irrelevant as better methods are now available. In short the Monarchy serve no real purpose in modern societies. Even as a symbol, it's a very bad symbol.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> In short the Monarchy serve no real purpose in modern societies. Even as a symbol, it's a very bad symbol. TBH I'm sort of baffled by this stance given the events around Queen Elizabeth II's passing. To be clear, I'm not a monarchist, and I share the opinion that their continuation in modern society is, well, weird, to say the least. A modern constitutional monarch holds no real power, and often times holds less power than normal people (e.g. not being able to express any political opinion). For example, I wouldn't wish being a member of the UK Royal Family on my worst enemy - yes, you are rich and nominally "famous", but you essentially have no freedom: your job in life is pre-ordained, and your life is basically constantly under the microscope of an adversarial press. But, while I may not fully understand it, it's clear to me that a monarch can serve a real purpose in modern societies. Many, many millions of people felt an affinity and dare I say a love for QEII, and I think these traditions serve a unifying force in the UK, or at least in England. The UK monarch and royal family are essentially the ultimate "branding" exercise. Plus, since the UK has basically separated any real power from the monarch, it means that the monarchy's sole purpose is to serve as a "neutral" symbol of the state, something that pure democracies often lack. To give a good analogy: I don't really understand rooting for professional sports teams either (George Carlin has a great bit about this "The players change, the coaches change - you're basically rooting for laundry"), but clearly tons of people have a deep, strong emotional bond to their "favorite team". It's also clear to me that, even if I don't understand it that well, many people can feel the same way about their monarch, and that can serve an important purpose.

drekipus 4y ago

I posted this in a comment thread but I feel like it's worthy of its own. The biggest misconception about traditions is that "people just randomly decided to do it and punish those who don't follow." The most probable case is that traditions, such as male circumcision, were done for a particular purpose and ritualised into a tradition to share and continue that process. It's only in more modern ages where we said that "rituals aren't enough" and we need to think of medical reasons for it as well. (Cue, studies in Africa, etc) Considering how much of the mind is an enigma, it's an arms race to find out positive reasons of why we do certain traditions before we get rid of them completely without understanding them. 50 years (?) of the scientific method up against 50,000 years of human stories and primal survival.

TopYemen 4y ago

lvxferre 4y ago

Relevant detail about yucca/cassava/manioc: there are two varieties of the crop, "sweet" and "bitter". The bitter variety is mostly eaten in the Amazon, the Brazilian Northeast, and a chunk of the Gran Chaco; elsewhere - including the rest of South America - people stick mostly to the sweet variety. Why? Because the sweet variety can be safely eaten after boiled, just like that hypothetical Tukanoan mother wanted. (You can even deep-fry it, cover with Parmesan cheese, bacon and chives. It's a great bar snack.) Odds are that the sweet variety was bred this way, through artificial selection; I'm not sure who did it, if the Amerindians or the Iberians. Either way, it's only there because someone actively questioned the tradition, and was willing to break with it. I'm saying this to highlight that tradition does not think on its own, because it's solely the replication of past knowledge. Tradition is not smart - what is smart, however, is to know when to follow it or when to ditch it. I do think that tradition has a role, but the author's article is misled on how and why to present it. At the end of the day, tradition is what makes us part of a community; it gives us a sense of belonging, be it as random or as predictable as it might be.

hoseja 4y ago
Maybe the bitter variety has better resistance to parasites, keeps longer, etc?
- lvxferre 4y ago
  The bitter variety is a bit more drought-resistant. That's actually relevant in the Gran Chaco and the Brazilian Northeast, as both regions are rather arid and prone to drought. In the Amazon though? Not really - and yet most recipes that I've seen using bitter yucca (some using the leaves, that are heavy on cyanogens) are from the Amazon. So the cultivation of the bitter variety itself is a tradition in all three places. In one of them, the tradition already lost the meaning to exist, but it's still there.