seconded. tradition as a computational shortcut is a very important insight that I have tried (and mostly failed) to communicate to others.
more generally, memes take advantage of consistent vulnerabilities in human reasoning to transmit themselves. the fact that they use this propagation method says nothing about the value of their memetic payload.
we should pay attention to successful memes if we want to generate new successful memes.
Your first and second paragraph somewhat contradict each other—I agree that some traditions may be undervalued by people who’d prefer to reinvent things from whole cloth (from a software engineering perspective: rewriting a complex system you don’t understand is risky), but as you say, traditions may have been selected for self-relication more than for their actual value to humans.
If you consider selection at the family, village or tribe/nation level, maybe tradition’s “fitness” is how much they help the people that follow them, but many traditions are either quite recent, or evolved in a pretty different environment. So I don’t know how much value to attribute to tradition in general.
More than a teenage atheist typing in all caps, less than an evangelical :p
But seriously, I think us geeky types tend toward the a priori solution in far too many circumstances. We like things neat and tidy. Untangling traditional social hierarchies and looking for lessons seems to appeal to very few.
Nick Szabo has a good essay about why we should expect (religious) traditions to contain valuable insights.
seconded. tradition as a computational shortcut is a very important insight that I have tried (and mostly failed) to communicate to others.
more generally, memes take advantage of consistent vulnerabilities in human reasoning to transmit themselves. the fact that they use this propagation method says nothing about the value of their memetic payload.
we should pay attention to successful memes if we want to generate new successful memes.
Your first and second paragraph somewhat contradict each other—I agree that some traditions may be undervalued by people who’d prefer to reinvent things from whole cloth (from a software engineering perspective: rewriting a complex system you don’t understand is risky), but as you say, traditions may have been selected for self-relication more than for their actual value to humans.
If you consider selection at the family, village or tribe/nation level, maybe tradition’s “fitness” is how much they help the people that follow them, but many traditions are either quite recent, or evolved in a pretty different environment. So I don’t know how much value to attribute to tradition in general.
More than a teenage atheist typing in all caps, less than an evangelical :p
But seriously, I think us geeky types tend toward the a priori solution in far too many circumstances. We like things neat and tidy. Untangling traditional social hierarchies and looking for lessons seems to appeal to very few.