In retrospect, the paper Optimization Is Easy and Learning Is Hard In the Typical Function explains why it’s so easy for cultures to evolve/pass down nearly optimal methods for doing something without any ability to learn how the process actually works, and why the ability to reason can often matter less than one thinks when your goal is to optimize for something, rather than learn something:
This cannot be the whole explanation, because of it’s generality and insensitivity to local factors, but this probably is a non-trivial explanation of the phenomenon where rationally learning something is way harder than just using intuition to optimize something.
In retrospect, the paper Optimization Is Easy and Learning Is Hard In the Typical Function explains why it’s so easy for cultures to evolve/pass down nearly optimal methods for doing something without any ability to learn how the process actually works, and why the ability to reason can often matter less than one thinks when your goal is to optimize for something, rather than learn something:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/870741
This cannot be the whole explanation, because of it’s generality and insensitivity to local factors, but this probably is a non-trivial explanation of the phenomenon where rationally learning something is way harder than just using intuition to optimize something.