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Tradition is Smarter (2018)

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Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#131

Post by uoaei »

throwaway202022 wrote: post #35
criley2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can develop a days worth of vitamin D in 15 minutes (or simply supplement it for the same benefits), meanwhile excessive sun exposure is correlated with all manner of health problems, not the least of which is cancer. People who spend more time outdoors tend to die younger. Again, progress trumps tradition.

> People who spend more time outdoors tend to die younger. Source for this? Searching for the claim only turned up results saying more time outdoors is associated with better long-term health outcomes. Also: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heres-something-unexpect...

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.

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#132

Post by vagrantJin »

m4nu3l wrote: post #82

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 ev…

> 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.

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#133

Post by ajuc »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #95
ajuc wrote: post #34

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 wis…

> 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).

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#134

Post by midoridensha »

II2II wrote: post #118
convolvatron wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cons…

> 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 wa…

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).

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#135

Post by drekipus »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #112
drekipus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Think of it like ML at the human level. 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 pr…

That's a good way of putting it. A sort of black box process that has gone through something to end up the way it is.

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#136

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

criley2 wrote: post #72
nehal3m wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alt…

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 r…

> just some skin

You could use chemical or thermal burns to remove all the skin, preserving a numb nub of mechanical structure.

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#137

Post by TheUndead96 »

afpx wrote: post #115
jpitz wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#138

Post by betwixthewires »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #49

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 documen…

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.

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#139

Post by betwixthewires »

criley2 wrote: post #72
nehal3m wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alt…

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 r…

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.

Re: Tradition is Smarter (2018)

#140

Post by betwixthewires »

xani_ wrote: post #31

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.

I don't think it's that simple.

Human beings evolved while spreading culture, for far, far longer than we have been writing, longer than we have been homo sapiens even. It is a core part of what we are, so understanding it and accepting it and examining it without bias is important.

I'm not entirely convinced that we can preserve information for generations. We can't even preserve web sites for 2 decades, link rot online is a real problem. That's modern technology with solid state drives and worldwide communication. Language evolution makes this problem even worse. We can't even agree on what the founding fathers of the US meant with some parts of the constitution (granted, there are and have been deliberate efforts on that front but there are legitimate questions stil) and that's with the same government still operating under it while it's people still speak the same language! I don't think information propagation across generations is a solved problem now that we have writing and solid state drives, and beyond that tradition is not going away because it's as much a part of who we are as language and fire.

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