>We should charge the man with the duty of looking up the purpose of the fence in the archive
A fine sentiment, but still falls short of preserving & benefiting from the wisdom of the yore.
In the eternal battle of the new & better versus the old & tried & tested, the old & tried & tested may have been well reasoned, formulated, and described in the past.
But then again it might have never been reasoned through; instead it might have evolved, might have undergone a process of natural selection, might have won long term battle of ideas without being understood. The reasons might not have been explicitly known at any point in the past.
A good idea doesn't necessarily appear good, even on closer examination. There are some counter-intuitively good ideas; for example using random, stochastic processes[1] can yield better results than strict plans in face of partial information. For another example, we humans are pretty bad at understanding exponential and other non-linear processes (cue the present Coronavirus worries), and any reasoning based on estimation of several interacting non-linear effects tends to diverge wildly from reality. Not only our human ability to rationalize is limited, at times we aren't even aware that our ideas were suboptimal, and that there are whole classes of possible better solutions. Conversely, there are several XIX and XX century ideologies, programs, projects etc. that were well grounded in reasoning, but turned out to have led to such terrible results that we decided to never try them again.
There is a slow- but constantly-running natural selection of ideas, customs, traditions, organizational schemas, cultural trends, etc. The better ones tend to become more successful, and establish themselves as part of the culture. Some of the selected ideas won't be fully reasoned through or even understood at that time, and that is fine. Just like we make technical & business decisions with imperfect, partial information, we need to be able to handle the past customs, ideas etc., with partial, or even missing, reasoning behind them. Having been successful in the longer term is also a pretty good indicator of their qualities.
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[1] in context of a hunter-gatherer society, using supernatural divination for making hunting plans has no rational basis, but in certain natural settings yields optimal results due to essentially random nature of the divination
A fine sentiment, but still falls short of preserving & benefiting from the wisdom of the yore.
In the eternal battle of the new & better versus the old & tried & tested, the old & tried & tested may have been well reasoned, formulated, and described in the past.
But then again it might have never been reasoned through; instead it might have evolved, might have undergone a process of natural selection, might have won long term battle of ideas without being understood. The reasons might not have been explicitly known at any point in the past.
A good idea doesn't necessarily appear good, even on closer examination. There are some counter-intuitively good ideas; for example using random, stochastic processes[1] can yield better results than strict plans in face of partial information. For another example, we humans are pretty bad at understanding exponential and other non-linear processes (cue the present Coronavirus worries), and any reasoning based on estimation of several interacting non-linear effects tends to diverge wildly from reality. Not only our human ability to rationalize is limited, at times we aren't even aware that our ideas were suboptimal, and that there are whole classes of possible better solutions. Conversely, there are several XIX and XX century ideologies, programs, projects etc. that were well grounded in reasoning, but turned out to have led to such terrible results that we decided to never try them again.
There is a slow- but constantly-running natural selection of ideas, customs, traditions, organizational schemas, cultural trends, etc. The better ones tend to become more successful, and establish themselves as part of the culture. Some of the selected ideas won't be fully reasoned through or even understood at that time, and that is fine. Just like we make technical & business decisions with imperfect, partial information, we need to be able to handle the past customs, ideas etc., with partial, or even missing, reasoning behind them. Having been successful in the longer term is also a pretty good indicator of their qualities.
--
[1] in context of a hunter-gatherer society, using supernatural divination for making hunting plans has no rational basis, but in certain natural settings yields optimal results due to essentially random nature of the divination