Comment by neither_color | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neither_color | Hacker News Reader

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There’s an explosion of new movements and techniques to fight procrastination, from Pomodoro (which gives you timed breaks when your tomato-shaped kitchen timer runs out) to self-help books and subreddits...

The highlight of my early 20s was embracing the hedonism treadmill as a rejection of "imposed morals", only to spend countless hours trying tons of self help books and listening to podcasts about discipline and grit and motivation and positive thinking, etc.

At some point, no matter which path you take, you'll find good secular justification for limiting your exposure to toxic people in life and limiting your swearing to improve your vocabulary and avoiding processed food, short term hookups, sleeping well, helping others, meditating, saying affirmations, thinking positively(using faith to counteract "rational evidence" that something will fail or wont work) and so on.

You're following so many rules (self developed through experience and knowledge) that it gives you more appreciation for how the different religions were themselves using heuristics developed over thousands of years of trial and error to give you an optimal set of rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life, given the environmental constraints and lack of scientific knowledge at the time. It was not simply "sky daddy made rulebook"

Your response reminds me of the quote: “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

Watching our politics speed-run the 60s-80s again reminds me of this every day. Hopefully we hit the 90s soon, those were pretty rad.

This draws on Chesterton's perspective on tradition. He's most famous around here for his Fence. Past the part that is commonly cited, he says this [0]:

> The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable.

> ...

> If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

[0] https://archive.org/stream/G.K.ChestertonTheThing/G.K.Cheste...

Often those traditions may have important, forgotten reasons, but just as often traditions were created to say "we are our people, we're not those other folk."

See: dietary laws, circumcision, restrictions on what materials your clothes may be made out of, rules for what hair you're allowed to cut, and when you should or shouldn't cover your head, etc. etc.

(And before people jump in with "maybe there was a specific reason for the dietary laws, e.g. pork was unhealthy," that doesn't explain why you'd have peoples living side-by-side with opposing dietary laws.)

I agree, and Chesterton agrees. He's very explicit in saying that if you can accurately identify the reason a fence is there and that reason is no longer applicable or was never a very good one, you are justified in removing it. The point isn't to never tear down a fence, it's to question your impulse to tear down every fence the instant you see one.

It's very much the same idea as "don't start ripping out and refactoring 'legacy' code on your first day on the job." You may actually have inherited a completely garbage code base, but you may also simply not understand the constraints that dictated the architecture you've been given. Once you understand those constraints, refactor away!

With regards to your example: Dietary laws may well be outdated, but modern Jews may also argue that setting themselves apart is still a very worthwhile reason to avoid pork—it's probably part of the reason why they managed to remain a separate culture even without a proper homeland, and remaining a distinct culture is valuable to them.

It does explain how you would have people living side by side, if you look at how people tend to work.

Take cigarettes for instance. We know they’re unhealthy. There are also still millions (hundreds?) smoking them every day.

People give up and fall into habits unless there is strong reinforcement. If you get a parasite and have no way to get rid of it (because of lack of modern medicine) because you ate pork, not like you’re going to stop eating pork necessarily any more. Especially if it’s cheap in your area.

If there is another group of people who manages to not have those issues because they don’t eat pork - they’re going to keep not eating it after seeing that too!

What kind of fence is it when you think you know why the fence is there but you're obviously wrong?

Very applicable to programming as well.

Indeed, reminded me of this article from a few years back, which left quite the impression: https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are...

Another interesting read with some ideological bends I can't completely buy into is Rob Henderson & his writing on "Luxury Beliefs".

Basically the concept you may notice if you are in HCOL blue urban elite circles..

Well to do left of center people who espouse discouragement of / being against many traditional concepts (monogamy, two parent households, kids after marriage, strict discipline, follow the law, being drug-free, going to college for a career, etc) .. but largely actually follow it and is how they / their parents got where they are.

And either way they have the means to not be effected by the negative effects of this non-traditionalism.

However if you are middle/lower class and follow the same non-traditional path, the personal costs to you & your offspring of frequent drug use, being a single parent, etc are almost insurmountable and are some of the leading causes of generational poverty.

That is - it is easy to say "hard work doesn't pay off, do drugs, break the law, and free love" when you are going from an elite (fully paid for by parents) university campus to start your career & live in NYC/SF/LA/Boston (with college & parents helping you with job connections, and parents helping underwrite your housing until you get on your feet). For them the worst cost of failure is moving back with mom&dad to their comfortable leafy suburb.

> discouragement of / being against...

I know lots of liberal elites, and don't know any who are actually against two parent households, kids after marriage, following the law, being drug-free, going to college for a career, etc

This is a ridiculous assertion.

But I know many of these same people who believe in not judging those who do not follow all of these ideals, and want systems in place that support, say, single mothers or whatever.

This is very different.

A fair critique I would probably rephrase it as "questioning the value of" rather than "discouraging / being against" x traditional values.

And yes, as these people age/mature it usually morphs more into - we should be much more supportive with systems in place to help single mothers, etc.

Unfortunately there's limits to what the state can do to replace family, and there are good reasons to encourage people to not fall for the same pitfalls that trap them into cycles of poverty, no matter how much the state does to make that poverty less painful.

Fantastic article. Thanks for sharing.

Reminds me of another quote: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." -- Jaroslav Pelikan (per the web)

In the same way, N. N. Taleb talks of the wisdom of grandmothers. All the old sayings represent hard earned knowledge.

Some traditions are based on superstition, but certainly not all of them.

However, the environmental constraints change and the amount of scientific knowledge also changes(and hopefully improves) over time.

Therefore the heuristics turned into rule book will inevitably become harmful eventually.

Also keep in mind that the rulebooks did not produce anything close to any ideal personal outcome. They always produced the ideal societal outcome that would preserve the existing structure of society. If said structure meant you were inherently harmed, your personal ideal was subordinated to that.

Beautifully said. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant and condescending that so-called rational, educated people today will gleefully throw out centuries (if not millennia) of knowledge because they (justifiably) take issues with some of it. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater comes to mind. I'm not particularly religious, but there have always been aspects of religion that I've admired and aspects that I've disliked.

Your local Crossfit gym and book club, I promise you, are not adequate replacements for traditional recurring weekly gatherings, where it's normal (and expected!) to share what's on your mind, what's troubling you, what you are grieving over, what you are celebrating, etc. I've found that the quality of discourse here is much higher than the standard, "Did you watch Succession last week?", surface-level discourse at many of these alleged replacements.

And then, like you mentioned, they embark on a decades-long quest, only to end up at more or less the place they would've ended up otherwise. Or they find themselves completely lost and wayward.

I don't have a prescription here, but complete rejection of something seems almost as dull and narrow-minded as total dogmatic acceptance of it.

You're looking at weekly religious gatherings through rose-colored lenses. A crossfit gym membership and book club could very well produce a far healthier local community than a church. Religion does not have a monopoly on the variables that attract healthy, thoughtful, intelligent people (in fact, trends in the US suggest quite the opposite).

> heuristics developed over thousands of years of trial and error to give you an optimal set of rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life

Unless you're cherry picking rules from the set, the outcome would be far from best.

My point is that thousands of years of trial and error may include some valuable insight but also some pretty outdated approaches.

The question isn't if we've reached a global maximum (we obviously haven't) it's if we can do better than thousands of years of trial and error?

I can see the rationale for taking tradition as a baseline and tweaking it to better fit modern times. That's what every generation has done. The direction many of us are heading, however, is to assume that tradition is all bogus and we can do better today with just the scientific method.

I hope if the replication crisis in psychology has taught us anything it's that science applied to people is still in its infancy and we are not yet at a place where we can entirely discard the wisdom of our ancestors.

> The question isn't if we've reached a global maximum

On the contrary; top level comment said "rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life". I disagreed.

"The best outcome" doesn't mean the best life theoretically possible, it means the best life you can achieve for yourself in the life that you have. You do not have access to infinite information about how to live a good life. You have access to a limited amount of knowledge gained scientifically, an even more limited amount of your personal lived experience, and a vast trove of traditional wisdom. Given that limited knowledge, OP asserts that the best outcomes are achieved by paying heed to traditional wisdom.

There are certainly better ways to live than the ones handed down to us over millennia, and I think we ought to fine-tune what we've been given and learn from other cultures' traditions. But discarding everything our ancestors have given us because we think we know better is sheer arrogance.

> There are certainly better ways to live than the ones handed down to us over millennia, and I think we ought to fine-tune what we've been given and learn from other cultures' traditions.

Looks like we agree that the top level comment is wrong about "optimal set of rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life", i.e. looks like you're also saying that these rules are not optimal and you're open to improving them.

I'm not sure why are you mentioning "discarding everything" in this context.

People should not say “processed food” when they mean “a specific kind of bad for you processed foods”. Running society off “unprocessed food” would mean returning to the hunter-gatherer state where having twins means killing one of them so your family doesn’t starve. (Kind of like “plant-based diet”, which actually means “plants but not, like, unhealthy plants”)

Encouraging people to try meditation with no other qualifications is a bit dangerous too - the original purpose of meditation is to become a monk, which is the opposite of having a family.

The original purpose of meditation is to become a monk? That's a bizarre hot take; how did you come to that conclusion?

Monks become monks first and then they perfect their meditations. Monks become monks because the community recognizes someone who can be formed and taught, not because a man has perfected his meditative chops and now the monks all want him.

Meditation, for as long as I can trace back, is for everyone: who speaks in Psalms 63, a monk? Only King David? Every faithful and observant Jew ponders the works and laws of the LORD while he lies in bed, so thus do Christians.

The Church often encourages devotions for the laity which facilitate meditation. The Rosary and Eucharistic Adoration are 100% meditative, contemplative activities; no monks are required. In fact the Rosary is a "poor man's Breviary" where meditation upon a few fixed concepts replace active recitation of many, many words and disparate prayers.

The next time you see someone praying a Rosary with their family, are you going to tell them to stop, because they're not a monk? That's the height of weird - it's every Catholic father's duty to lead their family in a daily Rosary, and everybody meditates.

> The original purpose of meditation is to become a monk? That's a bizarre hot take; how did you come to that conclusion?

https://vividness.live/theravada-reinvents-meditation

It was invented to disconnect you from your desires and sense pleasures - not just in a therapy way but so you won't accidentally enjoy food or sex or any of those non-monk things.

Milder forms and "mindfulness" are modern inventions and it's actually rather surprising they turned out to be beneficial.

If you just sit there and do vipassana cold for days it can easily make you depressed or in some people leads to psychotic breaks.

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