Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

It is said that traditions are answers to enduring questions, and so dispensing with them because we do not understand them (or "see the point of them") is an unfortunate way to squander this inheritance.

The most direct method for comprehending a world in which not all human beings are homo economicus would therefore appear to involve a return to some version of the older tradition. However, why did the older tradition fail in the first place? After all, it seemed to ask some obvious and important questions. How could these questions simply be aban... See more

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to surviv

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