Tradition is Smarter (2018)

if you don't have regression testing there's a chance you don't find out until something disastrous 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.

"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.

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.

We don't know what we would be throwing out.

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?

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]

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-004-0239-6

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5934467/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TzM1TO2pb4

He's also English while I'm not.

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?

This is not the case. The monarchy is extremely wealthy, and a large landowner over what should be public land.

Powerwise, the queen had plenty of involvement in a coup in Australia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

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.

Question Everything, Even This (but not too much because that's overthinking).

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.

Again, progress trumps tradition.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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?