I suspect that a lot of traditional things do double-duty, being instrumentally valuable and encouraging mutual information. Material example: the decorations on otherwise mundane items, like weapons or cauldrons.
It occurs to me that any given practice will probably be selected for resilience more than it will be for efficiency—efficiency is a threshold that must be met, but beyond that maximizing the likelihood that the minimum will be met seems more likely to propagate.
If people have an intrinsic desire to share information, then it seems likely that a practice for which sharing information is more common is more likely to persist. Hence the prevalence of so many multi-step processes; every additional step is another opportunity to share information (teach, tell where resources are, etc).
I suspect that a lot of traditional things do double-duty, being instrumentally valuable and encouraging mutual information. Material example: the decorations on otherwise mundane items, like weapons or cauldrons.
It occurs to me that any given practice will probably be selected for resilience more than it will be for efficiency—efficiency is a threshold that must be met, but beyond that maximizing the likelihood that the minimum will be met seems more likely to propagate.
If people have an intrinsic desire to share information, then it seems likely that a practice for which sharing information is more common is more likely to persist. Hence the prevalence of so many multi-step processes; every additional step is another opportunity to share information (teach, tell where resources are, etc).