this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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You've disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it's justified in your eyes and you'd do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them "the worst" in some way.
What tradition are you talking about?
For example funeral rites help prevent disease from corpses. Without knowing anything about germs.
Or the taboo of incest can avoid genetic defects, without knowing anything about genes.
Traditions formed for a reason. And that reason is way more ancient and more natural than modern logic. It is simply survival.
The people with traditions that helped them survived more often.
Well seal clubbing is pretty bad for one. But the point isn't whenever there are bad traditions, but whenever tradition is a good or bad reason to do something. Rites themselves do nothing, burying or burning the body does. Understanding why you're doing something is vastly better than doing it because of some (possibly reasonable but unknown) ancient reason no one is able to point out. Taboo of incest is less related to traditions, and more to biology which causes people not to be attracted to their siblings in most cases. There is no ceremony or ritual to prohibition of incest, so I'd say it's not a tradition. The tradition that have existed, however, was inbreeding of royal families, that wanted to keep their blood pure, which led to copious amount of incest and genetic defects. Many traditions rose from the dominance of one group over another and existed to legitimize this dominance further. Tradition of women being unable to vote, earn money or chose their spouse was born from the many generations of oppression. Tradition of black people being segregated away from white in USA was born out of dehumanization of slaves. There are many cases of traditional honor suicides (like seppuku) or honor killing (like stoning of women accused of adultery) in different traditions as well.
I could keep listing "bad traditions with bad reasons" but that's not the point I've originally made, more of a reply to your point about traditions being born out of useful or natural/survival reasons, which I believe those examples should disprove. The point is still that doing something solely because of tradition is bad, you need knowledge to do that well and in current age there is absolutely no reason not to seek that knowledge. In the past, when people were illiterate an easily digestible oral tradition was useful thing, but we're way past times when we have no good way to ensure the complicated reasons for doing things are preserved. What if some tradition results in oppression of some people and it's source is unknown or so ancient it's no longer applicable, should it be upkept? Conversely, should the ritual blood sacrifice be kept in the celebration of plentiful harvest to appease the gods, or should you only keep the parts like dancing around the bonfire and socializing, because those things are fun and healthy for the community?
If there is wisdom hidden in the tradition, then you want to figure it out, but if it's kept cryptic, unknown and attempts to research it are met with disdain because someone tries to compromise your tradition, then it's probably better to fuck around and find out what would happen if you didn't perform the tradition. And if something bad happens, then at least you can write it down and pass to the next generation as the actual reason for doing things. I seriously doubt there is anything left in human traditions that was figured out in the past, and is currently impossible to decipher or comprehend just by analysis, without even doing empirical tests. And if for some reason something isn't, then do those tests and find out. If you're worried about some arcane knowledge of the ancients that is too enigmatic for us to understand just by looking, you can try doing something differently in isolated environment, with various precautions and on limited sample. No reason to keep it as "tradition" instead of "reason", especially since the underlying reason could have been good, but due to no one knowing what it was, the method could have degenerated over the generations to the point of being ineffective.
Knowledge comes from practice. Humans always did things first before they gained the knowledge. Think of apprenticeship and the natural sciences for example.
What I have a big issue with is today's notion that application follows knowledge. A top down approach where academia is isolated from the feedback of the real world. What the hell do I mean by that?
A business or an artist goes bust if they do not perform well, they have direct risks attached to their work. While we can produce 'knowledge' (institutional knowledge), new (made up) economic theories, new (un-replicable) psychological explanations and so on, without any apparent problem. The natural selective feedback is missing. Academia is gamified, most researchers know they could be doing more useful research, yet their grants and prospects of publications don't let them.
So when I hear reason and understanding casually thrown around, I smell scientism (the marketing of science, science bullshit if you will) and not actual science. Because no peer review will be able to overrule what time has proven in the real world. And traditions are such things that endured. Usually someone realizes and writes another paper, disproving the previous one, advancing science.
Don't get me wrong, there are and were many unambiguously bad traditions by modern standards, and I'm sure there will be more. But we, the people are the evolutionary filter of traditions. We decide which ones are the fit ones, which ones of the ones we inherited will we pass down and which to banish into history.
Traditions also make it harder to change problematic practices despite sufficient knowledge.
Who the fuck downvoted this.
Go back to the dark ages ya dumb fuck.
Tradition is the lowest common denominator, and relying on our collective filter for social evolution is the least efficient metric by which to evaluate productive change; tradition is the worst reason.
Just give me one example where tradition is not the worst reason for doing anything (I know you did already but I am convinced tradition is still a worse reason that sadistic pleasure, both as a valid justification and in terms of net-negative suffering outcomes).
"Because I can"
I'm not convinced this is a valid reason. It's really just another way of saying "because I want to", which is still a better than tradition.
Subjective. I think it is way worse. Or "to see the world burn", "to make humanity extinct".
Be it a moral or technical angle, there is many worse than "because our ancestors did it this way and we still came about".
As another commenter replied to you, you're conflating bad outcomes with good reasons.
"To watch the world burn" is still a better reason, even if the outcome is the same, or worse.
A 'good reason' is a useless illusion if it doesn't lead to good outcomes.
A good reason is not something that follows the form A->B.
Last I checked people don't live in Plato's abstract plane of perfection, but in the imperfect and chaotic reality. A 'good reason' is a terrible one if it leads you or me to ruin, period.
I think the problem here is you've assumed my usage of "good" and "bad" are referring to the net reduction / increase of suffering.
I've been using the term "worst" as synonymous with "least valid". So yes, within my context, good reason implicitly follows the form A->B.
Seriously, think about it for a moment. without knowing whether the OUTCOME is good or bad, what is a good REASON?
If you found your friend bleeding out, slipping in and out of consciousness, life and death situation, and a cop chases you all the way to the hospital, do you think the cop is going to think you have a good REASON for speeding?
Tradition is the least valid reason (in terms of epistemology) for doing anything.
Saying "because" is just straight up invalid.
alternatively:
You understood nothing of the meaning. You argue on a textbook definition. Do you understand what tradition is?
Can you not see the difference of evolutionary and arbitrary?
Just because != tradition.
You underestimate how much is (successfully) driven by heuristics at every moment.
And please, keep the formal logic where it belongs, the paper. I studied enough logic to know how infexible of a tool it is to deal with the problems of the real world.
We're arguing about semantics, of course I'm going to argue about the textbook definition.
I'm not denying tradition has often had a deeper meaning behind it which has resulted in good outcomes.
All I've been saying this entire time is that as far as REASONS go, tradition IS the least valid.
If you choose to conflate "good reason" with "good outcome", go argue with a dictionary.
Typical predictionist world view. "Trying to lecture birds how to fly, because we have the Navier-Stokes equations."
This is the same logical error that collapses the economy (eg. in 2008). Trying to predict the world, trying our damnedest to shoehorn it into a reductionist model. And then we act surprised, "nobody could have seen that coming", when a black swan event happens. 99% days were 'following' the rule, one day it crashed erasing all preceding. So how correct is a prediction like that, not 99% in my view. (In face of unpredictability, risk reduction and resiliency is the solution, not more prediction.)
If we want to engage in mental exercises that have no relation to the real world, then sure let's turn to the textbook. Just make sure you don't forget to look up when crossing the road, traffic rules can't overwrite physical ones. In the same vein as outcomes are real, reasons are made up.
(Just as you can find an infinite number of mathematical functions that fit a set of points. You can create an unlimited supply of models that explain an event, yet fail when a new data point is collected. Is the real world at fault then or the model?)
You're literally too stupid to argue with, I'm not wasting my time even reading this shit.
Your unreasonable bias against any attempts to understand the world instead of relying on traditions of unknown origin does not substitute an argument against it. Neither empirical or analitical method of scientific research is limited to some sort of elitist and corrupt academia, so your view of academia being elitist and corrupt doesn't disprove the efficiency of those methods. And no, the knowledge doesn't come from practice at all, if it did then ritually practiced traditions would lead to understanding of their roots and their purpose, and humans didn't learn about spreading of diseases from burial rites, but rather from events when those rites weren't practiced. Furthermore, we didn't learn how to deal with those diseases from the traditions, but rather from breaking away from them and studying bodies instead of getting rid of them - which faced much backlash from the church, which wanted to uphold tradition no matter what.
The knowledge comes not from practice, but from study, from testing different approaches and writing down what worked, until you get testing sample high enough to figure out why it worked. And then, people who figured it out probably taught others what to do without sharing in enough details why it works, and puff you have a tradition. And if people do share why stuff works and publish their research data and methodology, then we have knowledge, based on which other researchers can conduct their own research, check if they get similar results and whatnot. Peer review is a rather robust standard for truth, as far as human capabilities go.
Academia being gamified in a way that only approved research gets funding or spotlight has nothing to do with traditions themselves being any good either. Most often power is legitimized via tradition, and many scientific institutes were muzzled because power following tradition found their pursuit of knowledge undesireable. The fact that many research topics are taboo is direct result of that.
Lastly, your idea that the academia is isolated from the "feedback" of the "real world" is completely nonsensical. Nothing that's not peer reviewed isn't treated as particulary valuable, and you peer review the research by repeating the tests with the same methodology. That's specifically the feedback from the real world. Any sort of feedback that shows some parts of tradition should be changed is commonly met with resistance however, so it stands to reason that the opposite of what you claimed is actually the truth, and it's tradition that suffers from lack of the "feedback from the real world".
I guess you are unfamiliar with iatrogenics. A good example is the case of Semmelweis, who discovered that pregnant women were dying at higher rates IN THE HOSPOTAL compared to births at home.
The reason wasn't known before. But turned out the doctors didn't wash their hands between autopsy and delivering babies.
Oops!
And now, the risk of the child dying during childbirth is twice as likely if the birth happens in homes instead of happening in hospitals. Almost like discovery of germs and development of antiseptics had consequences. Those pesky doctors must be tracking those homeborn children down and eliminating them in the name of science! Oops!
Science is good but most often incorrect or incomplete. Otherwise our current science wouldnt have disproved the old.
If you are unvilling to admit that human hubris is just as well capable of much harm through science like of which we had 200 years ago or just 100 then drink from lead pipes, paint with radium and do some bloodletting. Those were perfectly 'safe' at the time, right?
What will we think of todays acceptables tomorrow?
There was no "science" done to prove that washing hands had effect on mortality, until someone tested that and found that to be the case. So it's not "old science" vs "new science" but rather "no science" vs "science". Lead was used because it was available. Radium was used because it was pretty. Bloodletting was considered helpful strictly because of tradition of bloodletting and because no one done the rigorous testing with valid methodology to check if it actually works, or if it's just a folk belief that it does.
You keep presenting cases where people just didn't know something and didn't care to figure it out, and call it "science" because someone baselessly believed in it. It's irrational. And before you start anew with ignoring my arguments and listing more cases of people not knowing something as a proof that scientific process is harmful, I seriously don't care. I originally commented about traditions being bad reasons for doing anything with the assumption we have some common ground in our understanding of how science work, and trying to convice someone that science does work is a fair bit too tall of a task to engage with. I'm not interested in that, sorry.
That's curiously a lot of text for someone not caring.
The scientific process is not harmful. If that's your conclusion then welp.
What's harmful is the blind belief in science. It is skepticism and exploration that brings new understanding.
But just because we label something science it can still be quack.
And it's easy for you to dismiss old science because you have the current age's perspective.
Evaluate each era on its own terms.
And once again science does work, otherwise we wouldnt pursue it. But the zelous blind faith in science is unscientific to say the least.
So in the cases where I burn corpses, and wear a condom while fucking my sister, wouldn't it be better if my reasons were to stop disease and genetic defect?
If someone asked why I was wearing a condom I could say "so she doesn't get pregnant, also, you want in on this Dad?", and that's better than "because"
Reasons are a human invention to help make sense of the world. If you want to base everything on logical grounds you will run into two things mainly:
Limits of knowledge. Knowledge is always incomplete, as more of it opens up more questions. There are things you intuitively know are good, but can't prove why they are.
Systemic limits of logical reasoning. A sufficiently powerful and consistent formal system (such as formal logic) is incomplete, it cannot prove its own correctness. (Gödel's incompleteness theorems)
Yeah, but it is better to give a valid reason, as opposed to "because", right?
Can you give a reason though? I guess a child haven't asked you an endless chain of whys yet. By the end of which you can't say 'why' just that 'that's how it is', you've reached the limit of knowledge.
Of course when available knowledge is preferable.
Epistemologically, "that's how it is" is too declarative for that which we don't know.
Being asked an endless series of questions for me is going to end with "I don't know".
Why don't you know?
I don't know.
Why don't you don't know why you don't know?
...
if you really want to play this game:
You're in the same boat.