How Valuable are Traditions?

Traditions might seem irrational, but according to LessWrong, they often encode generations of hard-won wisdom. The cassava root is a classic example: it's toxic without elaborate preparation methods that indigenous South Americans developed over centuries. When explorers spread the plant to Europe and Africa without that knowledge, people got poisoned. But traditions can also calcify into arbitrary rules or perpetuate bad thinking. The Aztecs escalated human sacrifice to appease a rain god, and the Fore people's funerary practice of consuming deceased relatives spread a devastating prion disease. The author argues that traditions merit critical examination—some encode irreplaceable survival knowledge, while others are just cultural cargo cult.

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