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.
Except few people ask why. And, that's frustrating.
It reminds me one of my daughter's science shows. In an experiment, they hire an actor to repeat a nonsensical ritual in a waiting room. When new people come in, without being asked, they copy the ritual. The ritual continues indefinitely well after the actor leaves the room.
In another experiment (I think referenced by Sapolsky), an animal (primate) watches a human perform a ritual that produces a reward (treat). When the animal is given the same challenge, they dispose of all of the ritualistic steps and only do the relevant steps. But, when a young Human watches, they will repeat the entire ritual.
Interesting. Presumably over time the evolutionary selection of rituals the article talks about would weed out the ones that are useless though.
I wonder if the act of closely following a ritual even if we do not know its purpose is a form of human meta-ritual? That makes it easier to learn from previous generations without having to understand the potentially harsh lessons that lead to the creation of the ritual in the first place?
> That makes it easier to learn from previous generations without having to understand the potentially harsh lessons that lead to the creation of the ritual in the first place?
This I suspect is very much a part of it. Humans have more complex things to learn, learning to do a bit extra may be better than learning to do to little. I.e. erring on the side of caution.
As an example of a ritual, you have the train conductors in Japan that point at stuff and say it out loud. [1] This is a ritual which on the surface level has no use. But this ritual does have a purpose. It's really hard to get things right every time, especially with routine inspections. It was found that by pointing and calling the thing you inspect, even with routine, fewer errors happen.
> In another experiment (I think referenced by Sapolsky), an animal (primate) watches a human perform a ritual that produces a reward (treat). When the animal is given the same challenge, they dispose of all of the ritualistic steps and only do the relevant steps. But, when a young Human watches, they will repeat the entire ritual
I was initially sceptical of this but some googling led me to [0]. Quite fascinating. For a more general survey of how primates learn by observation have a look at [1]
I am purely speculating, but the ritualistic behaviour in humans might be an attribute which allows complex multi-step instructions to propagate over generations. Pattern identification is similar in this way, in that a small amount dramatically increases problem-solving within individuals/populations but at the extreme creates dogmatism.
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.
The recourse when nobody can be found who knows or remembers why the fence is there, is to figure it out based on first principles. It's fine to do "tear it down and see what happens" as a consciously chosen trade-off for expediency. But in my experience people often act like there's just no way of knowing if you can't find someone to ask, and that's very rarely the case.
In software, sure, reasoning from first principles is likely to work. With older traditions, it could just as easily lead you to just-so stories and other false explanations, such as the endless number of false etymologies which make all seasoned linguists deeply suspicious of any cute etymology, especially one which could be used to make a point.
> at what point do we tear it down to see what happens?
Without knowing the purpose of something, we cannot know the cost of removing it.
A few weeks someone commented to me on how they thought that some chain link fencing along a railing should be removed because it was unsightly, until they saw a toddler playing near the railing and realized that the toddler could easily squeeze through if the chain link fencing wasn't there. If they never saw the toddler, they would have thought the fencing pointless. If the people they asked failed to think of the size or behaviour of toddlers, their conclusion would remain unchanged. Yet, had that chain link fencing been removed, the results have been tragic. Because of the nature of my work, I can think of many other circumstances where safety measures have been put into place where only a few people would understand their purpose. In most cases the reason is less obvious than that bit of fencing. Unfortunately, few of them have the element where someone realizes the purpose out of chance before the damage was done.
Much the same can be said of software. It may seem like it is fine to pull out a piece of code, test it outside of a production environment, and give it the okay when everything works. Yet it may not be fine. That code may have been inserted to deal with a problem that client X was having to deal with one of their requirements or to deal with a peculiarity of their production environment. Because it is particular to a particular client, the development team may not know of it (e.g. the developer who did the work is long gone) or it may have simply been forgotten. Just because the purpose is unknown in the present doesn't mean that removing it is devoid of consequence. Those consequences may range from impacting their procedures, to financial loss, to safety.
At the end of the day, you need to understand why something exists to determine if it is still relevant. It should be removed only once you know that it is no longer relevant.
This reminds me of the story of Muntz TVs. Mr. Muntz was a self-taught engineer who made a company that produced TVs at significantly lower prices than everyone else, and there's stories of how he'd work with his engineers and just randomly remove parts he didn't think were necessary, to cut costs. Many times, it worked, so the production design adopted these changes.
The problem was, while these minimalist-component TVs seemed to work OK in the lab, or in most customers' homes, they didn't work very well in edge cases (like people in locations with poorer signal strength).
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
i'm sorry I was unclear. yes - I strongly recommend removing the fence and seeing what happens. climbing over it every day and giving it a glare just leaves you in the dark.
One of the most important lessons and pieces of wisdom I've learned in life so far is to always thoroughly understand something before proposing any changes to it.
Why is something the way it is? There's always a reason, both justifiable and unjustifiable.
Change for the sake of change, that is changing something without understanding why it's like that in the first place, is the epitome of stupidity.
Beware the Courtier's Response, which is using "You just don't understand" as a thought-terminating cliché on yourself and a rhetorical bludgeon on others. If nobody can cogently explain why the tradition matters, without falling back on muddled thinking or mere appeals to tradition, take it out and see what happens.
Is that acceptable for a potential death of millions? (Let's say)
To use a cliche or overly simple examples, if no one can understand the importance of governance and economic coupling, then why not just try to make a Soviet union and see what happens?
I'm not making a farce, I think that just removing things to see what happens can potentially be more negative than it is positive.
We should be looking to tweak and change some traditions slowly but surely to make sure that whatever spinning plates happening at a super meta level - is still spinning at the end of it.
With government, we have heuristics honed over millennia for detecting things which are likely to end extremely badly, and we can explain them in logical terms. For example, resurrecting the USSR is bad because the USSR was an empire lead by a succession of dictators and oligarchies, and we have good, logical reasons founded on plenty of history telling us why empires, dictators, and oligarchies are all bad.
The illogical reasons are the ones which reduce to "It's bad because it's new" and "It's good because it's old" with no further content, just rhetorical smoke bombs and hand-waving.
Most, if not all forms of government end up extremely badly. Society is just difficult to manage. The reasoning why it's bad is usually after the fact, no one willingly chooses the bad option.
But yes, I agree with you that saying "it's good because it's old, bad because it's new" is illogical.
I don't think many people are saying that though. If people are convinced that a new thing is good, the change happens. I think people are much more likely to suggest that change is good simply because it is new, which is also dangerously illogical.
People were convinced that the new USSR was good, so it happened. Dictators will undoubtedly happen again, and they don't get there by keeping things the same.
Responding to my own comment because I'm just thinking about this a little more.
I think it's very much the reason why God/tradition "appoints the king/queen". - The age old tradition is larger than any individual's life, and theoretically keeps the "dictator" in line (as long as we all respect that tradition).
If there is a new period of change with a new leader then anything is possible, subject to human motivations.
In the Art of Manliness podcast, there was an episode recently on how athletes with traditions and rituals tend to perform better than those without, even if they are tiny. Its something inside our monkey brains that helps us with our confidence and performance. Weird stuff, but interesting
And you can just as well use it to vouch for change. If you don't understand why a change is being pushed for, maybe try to understand it first before trying to tear it down so therefore 'change is smarter'. Hopefully that now makes clear the ignorance and clickbaitiness of the title. Pretentious titles and articles never fail to show their faces on the daily here.
This is pretty strawman. You've got to broaden the mind a bit.
"We need change to have silly hat day and every one needs to scream at noon., if you don't understand the need for this change, maybe try to understand it first before trying to tear it down."
- you can't understand it because I made it up, just then, nonsensically. It is a valid change that me and my supporters are pushing for.
The difference with tradition is that there is a time bound element to it. Tradition is made up over time by rituals and force.
Your parents make you wash your hands before dinner and it becomes a ritual. By the time you're 18 years and become sufficiently atheistic to question everything to do with rituals and mysticism, you forgo washing your hands without fully understanding why that ritual was there to begin with.
Sure, now that we have understanding about germs and diseases, we know why this tradition is a good thing.
But we don't know everything about the mind and about humans evolution, we've got hundreds of thousands of years to catch up on with our new scientific method, so to throw everything out without understanding it would be naive.
If you want to call it strawmanning then I was mirroring the tactic of the author in the article. I thought it ignorant and pretentious to call tradition "smarter" as if changes, in general, are dumber; that's a strawman. And of course it's obvious, some things that are in place are in place because they're good, you should understand it first. And then you should likewise understand the need for changes; both are valid. Nowhere in my reply did I invalidate tradition, more defending the need for changes sometimes and pointing out the folly of the title.
So is your comment boiling down to "change is good and so is keeping things unchanged" ?
That are you trying to say? I'm not being facetious I'm just trying to get at what you responding to unless you are just responding to the clickbait title.
We do have the saying of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" for a reason. Change isn't inherently good. But obviously if something is broken it needs to be fixed which is a process of change.
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.
> 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.
There's three layers to the power the British monarch has:
1. They wield huge amounts of power. They can kill laws by withholding royal assent, they can dismiss Parliament, they can appoint the Prime Minister, and they can do anything else within the royal prerogative. They are sovereign.
2. They wield little power. They only act within the bounds of tradition, and on the advice of a Prime Minister selected by the House of Commons. The last one who tried to press the matter ended up shorter by a head.
3. They wield power incommensurate with the United Kingdom being a polity run by a responsible government. They're immensely wealthy, they have the ear of every politician in the United Kingdom and beyond, and they generally wield soft power far beyond what an unelected position ought to have.
Everyone here knows 1 is wrong, although I have met some silly buggers... Pretending we're at 2 when most people realize the import of 3 is similarly not going to work.
I assume you are talking about the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam?
The Queen's involvement seems to have been little or none. They is some suggestion that her advisors might have know that the Govenor General was contemplating it, but not much beyond that.
Certainly she wasn't pulling this strings behind it.
This is my understanding as well, and that this was likely the American & Australian intelligence (Kerr's communications with the CIA about the internal politics of his party, revealed by Chelsea Manning/Cablegate, provides circumstantial evidence which corroborates this, but of course we may never know for sure), but I do think it should be a sobering reminder that when people say, "don't worry about that power structure, it's merely ceremonial," we shouldn't take comfort in that. It is ceremonial until it isn't. Recall that recently in the United States, the Trump administration attempted to abuse the "ceremonial" role of Vice President to preside over the certification of the election in order to perpetrate a coup. If you leave power structures and veto rules hanging around, that no longer serve a functional purpose, it's a hazard; they're handles that a bad actor can grasp for.
Imagine leaving a backdoor lying around in a piece of software because it's been there for so long that it's nostalgic, and everyone pinky promises not to abuse it.
Returning to the royal family, it seems to me that even if they were "ceremonial", royal families are a monarchy hazard; letting them hold onto their status as a "royal family" invites the possibility of a monarchist revolution to reinstate them. You say they're just ordinary citizens who happen to be billionaires with gorgeous hats? Fine, let's make it official.
You might say that's ridiculous, that there is no monarchist revolution on the horizon; I don't see any reason to believe there is either. But if we let them stay royalty for the next hundred years - what probability would you assign it? It's not zero, right? Personally I'd say between 1% and 5% (that's of course a number I made up based on my intuition), and I don't see that as a good risk/reward.
As I understand it, the monarchy doesn't own otherwise public lands, in fact it's exactly the opposite - they lease their private lands to the government to be used as public lands[0]. In other words: this is entirely private land that has been granted to the public.
"Historically, Crown Estate properties were administered by the reigning monarch to help fund the business of governing the country. However, in 1760, George III surrendered control over the Estate's revenues to the Treasury,[5] thus relieving him of the responsibility of paying for the costs of the civil service, defence costs, the national debt, and his own personal debts. In return, he received an annual grant known as the Civil List."
> and a large landowner over what should be public land.
That's really true in name only. I have about as much power over "Crown Lands" as the monarch does. Even when it comes to the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall, these are essentially perpetual trusts used to pay the monarch and his/her heir for their jobs and maintenance of their offices.
I mean, I know a bunch of rich people that have set up huge trusts for their children. They also have a significant power I don't have either, so what.
Obviously with royalty and nobility it is difficult to separate the personal from the public, but honestly I think the UK royal family probably does that separation better than most. And to be honest, you have lots of rich families in the US who are of the "born on third base and think they hit a home run" type. At least with the monarchy in the UK, they know that 100% of their position is due to pure hereditary luck, so at least they throw in some concept of "duty" to make the bargain palatable.
> 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).
The British monarchy can preview laws that impact them, holds enormous quantities of wealth & land, and multiple people were arrested the past few weeks for protesting them - what are you talking about?
At the beginning of this video, though, he makes the argument (one which I think is quite common these days) that all the news around QEII, and all of the tributes to her, are imposed from on high by media-elite overlords.
My argument is that it's just as probable that the media is feeding into a desire that a large portion of the population holds. The line to see QEII's coffin was 5 miles long, with a wait time of 13 hours. Clearly some people really were interested in the queen.
My point is that I see the attitude professed by the author of that video a lot "Why would anyone be interested in the monarchy? It's just stupid propaganda, I should be about as interested in them in the Kardashians." There is always a subtext of that opinion along the lines of "If you're interested in the monarchy, you're just a stupid sheeple." And the weird thing for me is that, while I kinda agree with that assessment, I think I would be the stupid one if I were so clearly dismissive of an institution that is held in such regard by a huge portion of the populace.
> At the beginning of this video, though, he makes the argument (one which I think is quite common these days) that all the news around QEII, and all of the tributes to her, are imposed from on high by media-elite overlords.
I think he was just criticizing the tradition as a whole because of the effects it has. But I might be mistaken.
> And the weird thing for me is that, while I kinda agree with that assessment, I think I would be the stupid one if I were so clearly dismissive of an institution that is held in such regard by a huge portion of the populace.
I don't think so. I was raised Catholic and I think the religion is stupid. It might have had a purpose in the past as a tradition, but that doesn't change that I think it really is stupid. Saying something shouldn't the dismissed because many people believe in it is a logical fallacy (Argumentum ad Populum).
> The line to see QEII's coffin was 5 miles long, with a wait time of 13 hours. Clearly some people really were interested in the queen
I'm not a monarchist but I queued (11.5 hours). I wanted to pay my respects to her as a person who had been a central figure in Britain for my entire life. I also believed that many other people would feel the same, and it was a chance to be a part of this large ad-hoc community.
I also believe that for all the faults of the monarchy, and considering as an example the massively polarising debate around Brexit, that the British would not be able to easily create a better system without setting off some intense and destructive national tensions.
I'd say that people coming together for something isn't necessarily good. If they come together for something wrong it is worse than everyone just minding their own businesses.
> in short the Monarchy serve no real purpose in modern societies.
Id give it a bit more thought. Wierdly,monarchs seem to be the default in human societies throughout the ages.
Even our current system of government is modelled after monarchs. Supreme leader at the top, his second, close circle below, ministers below, bureaucrats below them, and finally us plebs.
Maybe our times make sense for cold, efficient technocracy. But monarchs were very human. Thats why we write stories about them in wonder and awe thousands of years later.
> Wierdly,monarchs seem to be the default in human societies throughout the ages.
The Roman Republic lasted about as much the Roman Empire. There have been a lot of Republic and Monarchies and I don't know which one more often that the other, but I wouldn't call it a default.
> Even our current system of government is modelled after monarchs. Supreme leader at the top, his second, close circle below, ministers below, bureaucrats below them, and finally us plebs.
This doesn't justify keeping the monarchy, actually it is an argument that we can have something that works similarly without the issues of the inherited rights.
>the Monarchy serve no real purpose in modern societies
There may be a bit of a Chesterton's fence thing going on. You say these idiots have no function but one underrated function is preventing other idiots taking the ruler for life role. See eg:
Germany - got rid of the monarchy in 1918, got Hitler as ruler for life
Russia - got rid of theirs early C20th, got Stalin, Putin
France - got Napoleon. etc
on the other hand
Thailand - kept the monarchy - only Asian country that was never colonized/occupied by the West partly because the people would object to the kind being dissed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> Maybe your traditions are blinding you to the fact that male circumcision falls in the same category.
No, they are not. Perhaps this is "oversharing", but I (male) was circumcised when I was 11 years old, and it was my choice - I wasn't circumcised at birth because I had jaundice when I was born. I had "tight foreskin", making it difficult to follow my doctor's instructions to clean under the foreskin when bathing, which is why I opted to undergo circumcision as a pre-teen. The process itself was pretty brutal (took a couple weeks for everything to heal), but in retrospect I'm very glad that I did it, and only wish I could have done it as an infant so I would have no memory of the surgery.
Plus, circumcision has been definitively proven to greatly reduce the chance of HIV transmission from females to males.
They're not equivalent in most cases (not all female genital mutilation is performed the same way and I cannot fathom a medical reason for any sort).
But that doesn't mean they aren't in the same general category when defined as surgical alterations of people's genitalia performed for religious or cultural reasons without any medical necessity.
A medically required circumcision when reasoned and self-chosen is an altogether different story.
Except, ironically enough, male circumcision is the perfect example of something that was done for "traditional" religious reasons, but for which now there is ample medical support for it.
For example, circumcision is extremely common in the US, despite the fact that it is relatively very rare for it to be done for religious reasons (only about 2-3% of the US population is Muslim or Jewish). It is done because the medical community broadly recommends it due to its health benefits: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/cdc-encourages-circum...
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 traditional 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.
Considering how much of the mind is an enigma it's arms race to find out positive reasons of why we do certain traditions before we get rid of them completely from not understanding them.
ML's entire thing is statistical correlations that aren't obvious.
Tradition is probably operating like that as well. Is all tradition like this and useful? Of course not. But I bet a lot of it is very subtle and nuanced.
It's also worth considering that there are other pressures. For example, women typically find circumstanced penises more appealing. It's very possible that pressure, coupled with the benefits, helped society land on it more than not.
> Except, ironically enough, male circumcision is the perfect example of something that was done for "traditional" religious reasons, but for which now there is ample medical support for it.
There is no medical support for it; all the "medical" support that was published in the past was never replicable and was only a thin veneer over superstition.
IOW, you've already made you mind up that male circumcision is a positive. You'll look for evidence to support your conclusions after establishing your conclusions, just like all the other "traditions" do.
It's horrifying that these are even compared. The foreskin is just some skin and absolutely not required to experience sexual pleasure or climax. But for women, they cut their clitoris out, fundamentally altering their ability to have sex forever.
You cannot compare this. There is no equivalence here. IMO, female genital mutilation is comparable to male gelding --- removal of the entire penis. Both are designed to ruin sexual pleasure
Always weirds me out when a dude compares a circumcision to FGM, like someone is intentionally conflating a much lesser evil with a far greater one.
One, how do you know I am a dude? I am, but you're assuming. Two, I did not compare them, I explicitly said they are NOT equivalent, even accounting for the type of female genital mutilation where the clitoris is merely nicked.
In context of this discussion, it's classic Whataboutism, and it does implicitly offer an opinion that is heard loud and clear. Whenever we talk about FGM, there's always an army of men ready to Whatabout! the discussion to death.
I don't even think an imagination is required to understand why.
FGM refers broadly to a multitude of traditions related to modification of female genitalia, not only to that one specific kind. And generally speaking, they're all illegal in the west, even ones where the damage is comparable to male circumcision.
You can compare this, fundamentally and in principle. Both involve the irreversible mutilation of an infant's sexual organs. One might not be quite impactful as another later in life, but on principle they're equally abhorrent in a society that believes in bodily autonomy and values its children.
Definitively proven? I can’t wait to see that randomized controlled clinical trial. FWIW the language I see used is compelling evidence, where are you getting definitively proven from?
From the introduction: "Three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in sub-Saharan Africa have shown that adult male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV acquisition in men by about 60% [1-3]."
Which by the way would invalidate the CDC's encouragement of circumcision since that advice is based on the three studies your article a few comments up quotes:
"The guidelines point to research, much of it done in sub-Saharan Africa, showing that circumcision reduces the transmission of STDs, including HIV and the human papillomavirus, which can cause cancer."
Wow, talk about cherry-picking, and apparently you picked all the rotten cherries.
First, the comment I was responding to specifically requested randomized, controlled studies, which is what I responded with. I just looked at the first 3 of your links, and these are just observational/questionnaire studies, a decidedly less definitive source of evidence.
Most hilarious to me is that your second link, titled "Male circumcision may not make much difference to overall male HIV incidence in Caribbean context" and from 2012, even has a big box at the top stating "This article is more than 10 years old. Click here for more recent articles on this topic". Clicking that link brings up a page with loads of articles, and a summary header: "Voluntary male medical circumcision (VMMC) lowers the risk of female-to-male sexual HIV transmission by about 60%. VMMC is an important part of public health programmes in African countries with a high prevalence of HIV and a low rate of male circumcision."
I don't think the age of an article invalidates it's findings by default, but of course I'd expect new insights with the passage of time.
I'm doubting myself as ever in light of your comment, but the fact that there are studies, with any credibility at all, with a conclusion contrary to your earlier point namely that it is "definitively proven to greatly reduce the chance of HIV transmission from females to males" shows that that's pushing it at the very least.
And even if you're right, that doesn't excuse genital mutilation.
Not arguing your point, but ending a comment with "... Full stop." doesn't make you somehow more right, it just broadcasts that you are uninterested in hearing any arguments or data that are contrary to your opinion. Which is good, I guess, to let us know that we shouldn't waste our time.
I think it's just an open minded anthropological exploration of culture and tradition, and the beginning sentence hints at there being some long term computation occurring with cultures similar to evolution, i.e "doing things that work benefit a culture selectively whether they understand how they work or not." I don't think the author wants us to "lose the documentation", only to not throw the procedure out just because we don't have the documentation.
Foot binding and other negatively associated traditional cultural artifacts are selection bias and not representative of cultural artifacts broadly speaking. They did propogate because they did serve the societies, just not necessarily the individuals in those societies. All of them had reasons, ones that aren't good enough for us here and now, and your culture probably has some cultural artifacts that you don't equation that uponnskwptical analysis might not be viewed in a positive light. I saw a conversation you had down this thread about circumcision, that seems to me like a good example, it is my opinion you have a blind spot there caused by cultural bias you refuse to accept, just like a Han Chinese person might bestow the medicinal value of bear bile.
And that's a good segway into something more interesting: in the west, our adherence to rationality is a cultural artifact. And a good one at that, and quite a bit meta (it's only rational to be rational, after all) and it has served us well. You're exhibiting it without even having to think about whether you should, you take it as a given that it is the right way to approach these things. As do I, rationality is core to understanding. All traditions should be skeptically inspected, but I do think that following the lessons others learned the hard way is a strength, our greatest strength, and so at least a little bit of respect for traditions is warranted. Don't destroy the fence just because you don't know what it's for, figure out what it's for first and then consider whether you should destroy it. It's good advice.
>They did propogate because they did serve the societies, just not necessarily the individuals in those societies.
The article didn't dive into this implication, but it also comes up with bird divination (i.e. random selection) to pick crop locations. It made sure the society as a whole wouldn't collapse because of a disaster in the most productive fields. But there had to be unlucky rice farmers who were trying to grow rice in crappy fields. They might not have prospered and raised a large family, despite doing the exact same thing as the people with good fields. Traditions can be overall good while punishing individuals.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
Generally you should assume that tradition/status quo is always right until proven otherwise (=a logically compelling argument against, backed empirically).
That is a pretty bold statement and sufficiently generic that examples can be offered to prove it wrong. Common sense sense says to not just run into a speeding car. Are there experiments proving that wrong? I am trying to be reasonable, but it starts with OP presenting an idea that is not so easily countered.
Tradition and common sense are so fundamental that you're really going to have a hard time with this statement, and what does "wrong" mean exactly?
Brushing your teeth 2x a day is a tradition and common sense. You do it not because you've studied the literature and know for sure it's the most optimal way to maintain dental health, but because you we're taught to do it that way, it seems to work well enough, and everyone else does it too.
Does that make it wrong? Does that mean the vast majority of your daily life, as riddled with tradition and common sense as it is, is wrong? I don't think so.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Considering in that world said child, with or without circumcising, often only had 50:50 odds of making it to adult hood, but if they were an adult, these things would matter?
Risk of death or permanent tissue damage due to poor medical practice long before a boy had any chance to reproduce isn't necessarily less significant than possible moderate transmission risk reduction for sexually transmitted diseases later in life [if they flouted strong social conventions against extra-marital sex]. Traditional societies hadn't figured out that cleaning tools between procedures reduced infections immediately afterwards obviously didn't know about the links between circumcisions and mildly reduced risk of certain rare ailments decades later.
You'd likely have others overrule you regardless, but the same applied when it came to unambiguously harmful quasi-medical procedures like FGM blood-letting.
If circumcision as a tradition gave cultures an evolutionary advantage due to medical benefit you'd expect that it would've spread farther, yet we see basically 1 small insular group and another much more recent, semi insular group adopt it. The vast majority of men on this earth are uncircumcised.
Foot binding probably led to reduced STD tranission as well, due to women being unable to leave the house and become sexually active (which was part of the reason for it), I don't think medical benefit is a good defense of violating a human beingst agency and bodily autonomy.
There are other cultures that have other circumcision traditions that are much more brutal, I don't see any arguments for their medical benefit, and I think this argument about medical benefit is a rationalization for defense of a cultural tradition after the fact.
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.
> 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".
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Boy. :) a) Yes, I understand you are a specific person, not a statistical average. b) I'm sorry you didn't find the bit of flavor I added to the thread interesting and wish you hadn't felt attacked by it.
… 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.
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-v...
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.
With that argument, you might hope to convince me to spend more time in the sun. Not worship it.
But no, as somebody with usually-moderate, sometimes-acute photosensitivity, even your usually-correct conventional wisdom isn't what the doctor orders in my case.
Tradition operates on statistical averages, not special cases. You are ignored by tradition. If that is a personal offense to you, you may benefit from discerning exactly why that is, and whether that reaction is an expression of tradition subverting your animalistic impulses for greater aims.
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.
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.
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
