”Often, most or all of the people skilled in deploying such adaptive practices do not understand how or why they work,
or even that they “do” anything at all. Such complex adaptations can emerge precisely because natural selection has
favored individuals who often place their faith in cultural inheritance—in the accumulated wisdom implicit in the
practices and beliefs derived from their forbearers—over their own intuitions and personal experiences”
Really interesting, to have ‘faith’ in evolution in understanding that people do the things they do sometimes
because doing them that way is the reason they are here.
Antoher example was how divination making decisions for a group led to the ‘rational’ answer of randomization in
there hunts (where one party, the hunted dont want to meet the other party, the hunter)
“Saying “it’s our custom” is not considered a good reason. The pressure for an acceptable, clear, and explicit
reason for doing things is merely a social norm common in Western populations”. I’d argue that our wariness comes
from a long history of institutional customs (the church or any other religion) holding us back.
”But that is the trouble: we have no way to tell which traditions are adaptive and which are merely drift."
"The state needs to make the people and things it rules legible to agents of the government. Legibility means
uniformity."
"The problem is that not all important things can be made legible. Much of what makes a society successful is
knowledge of the tacit sort: rarely articulated, messy, and from the outside looking in, purposeless. These are
the first things lost in the quest for legibility”
Because societal transitions are so fast, what are we losing?