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Comment by ungreased0675 | Hacker News Reader

Why do the Swiss people continue to make timepieces in the difficult mechanical form, when making quartz movements would be easier and cheaper?

Must be religious reasons. Maybe they serve a purpose in rituals by Swiss shaman.

Anthropologists have no creativity.

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> may have had symbolic or ritual significance.

I think is a fair description of Swiss mechanical watches.

They are certainly not of practical significance.

That's the point of the comment, humans do things all the time that aren't part of some larger cultural-ritual-religious aspect. We spend a lot of time and resources doing things that seem cool at the time and only seem cool to a few people.

Someone spends a few hours doing a large tag mural under a freeway and it's not a painting to honor the gods because that spot on the freeway gets sun at a certain time of day.

There's often practical reasons people do things that anthropologists can incorrectly attribute to something larger.

A deep curiosity is a behavior many people have (but not all). We try all kinds of things and some of them 'catch' socially. Many bird species have behaviors like this. Birds (especially things like corvidae) will pick up a new behavior in an area, and you can track the spread of the behavior radiating outward to new areas as more members of the species pick it up from each other.

The sentence "Survival of the fittest" isn't exactly true, the more accurate description would be "Survival of the fit enough". Curiosity itself is a means to explore the problem space of reality. If you're not curious then changes in your environment may leave you unable to adapt. If you're too curious then you can end up in situations where it removes members of your species faster than they can breed. Even after the point of the individual learning something new it doesn't do much for the existing members of your species. The most optimal outcome seems like some sort of cautious mimesis transfer. In the same idea as "monkey see, monkey do", there doesn't have to be a why, other than it doesn't harm the prime directive of stay alive, get more food, breed.

That is, these quartz arrowheads are a very early version of a meme.

It may not be a painting to honor the gods, but if you ask the artist about it, I bet you’ll find a great deal of cultural significance.

Swiss watches are absolutely steeped in cultural significance. The phrase “Swiss watch” immediately conjures a whole bunch of related meaning beyond the literal meaning of a wrist-worn timepiece made in a certain Alpine country.

If you see somebody wearing a Rolex, is your only thought “that guy likes overspending on inaccurate timepieces” or “that guy enjoys old fashioned timekeeping technology”?

Your example is cultural.

> it's not a painting to honor the gods

Cultural considerations aside, “ritual” also does not mean religious.

Someone pointed out that Americans ritually go to ballparks to consume hot dogs and the distinction between ritual and religion finally clicked for me.

Yeah I’d much rather have the opinion of a condescending layman on social media who’s ego was inflated by learning how to program

Yeah, those arrowheads look unusual and nice, very nice. It may be just that, a lot of people prefer form rather than function, there is no reason to believe our past ancestors had precisely 0 aesthetics. Or something else, who knows.

Swiss make both kinds. It's (mostly) non-Swiss who decide what kind to buy.

Arrow/spear points are different than watches. You dont throw your watch at squirrles when you are hungry. You dont risk your watch smashing into bits when you miss the squirrel and hit a rock. The fact these points were dimensionally similar to other materials means they were less objects of reverance and more likely actual weapon points and thus somewhat disposable.

You're being sarcastic, but aren't you accidentally right? Swiss watchmaking started because local bible-thumpers banned jewelry but made an exception for watches, thus creating demand for watches that fill the role of jewelry. Once established, the industry maintains itself.

Except mechanical watches were very high-tech at the time and were very practical devices.

By the time they became mainly an accessory/status symbol sumptuary laws weren’t a thing.

Mechanical watches were always very expensive, and thus were a status symbol from the beginning.

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