The Modern-Day Mind-Killer
Since this is freshman-level &quot;think, don&#x27;t believe&quot;, here&#x27;s an equally valid counterargument at roughly the same level.<p>In Heinrich&#x27;s book &quot;The Secret of our Success&quot; on cumulative cultural evolution, he gives an example of pre-Columbus American cultures whose diet was based on bitter manioc (a.k.a. cassava).<p>Like the name suggests, in its raw form it&#x27;s too bitter to eat, but these cultures evolved a set of traditions around the correct way to prepare it, and any deviation was taboo. The traditions involved pounding, scraping, straining and boiling the manioc over several days, most of the steps could only be performed by women (at least in the studied Tukanoa culture) and the women seem to have spend half their waking lives processing manioc.<p>So let&#x27;s say you decide all the traditions are obviously bogus, do an experiment and find that just boling the thing for a couple of hours removes the bitter taste just as well.<p>The problem is the bitterness comes from cyanide, and boiling removes the taste but not the cyanide itself - something which the traditional process is really good at (Heinrich has studies and graphs to support this claim). Ten years later, you and the small pre-modern rationalist community you&#x27;ve founded are all in an advanced state of degeneration from cyanide poisoning.<p>The general principle here is called Chesterton&#x27;s Fence (see the obvious wiki page for details), which is that if you come across a fence in a field and think it&#x27;s stupid, make sure you really understand why it&#x27;s there before you tear it down.<p>There are more examples like this in the book, such as a taboo in Polynesia on pregnant women consuming porpoises. It turns out that they do in fact contain chemical compounds that increase the risk of birth defects.<p>To quote a review in the now-deleted Slate Star Codex blog by Scott Alexander Ocasio-Cortez: &quot;For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed.&quot;<p>My own view is that &quot;don&#x27;t take anything on faith ever&quot; is as bad a life plan as &quot;always follow traditions without question&quot;, and it&#x27;s easy to think of lots of freshman philosophy level arguments why (your 5-year old is too young to properly understand electricity, would you want them to question your house rule against poking things in power sockets).<p>_P.S. it&#x27;s become a kind of in-joke among SSC followers to invent a surname when they mention him now._