Imagine trying to use this "figure it out from inferential reasoning" method on some other piece of obsolete cultural knowledge

Like how to drive a stick shift https://twitter.com/AmeliaRoseWrite/status/1345695641343705090

I wouldn't even try the "figure it out" thing with something like a vinyl record player, because it's guaranteed the kid will scratch the hell out of the record if they don't know what they're doing

He only went with it because the only thing getting damaged was a can of beans

But it's not, like, a good philosophy for learning or teaching in general

Not as you get older and things matter more

You don't learn to drive by getting behind the wheel of a car and "figuring it out"

I dunno

I feel like ironically this whole badass self-reliance Rational Man thing is very modern

It is the product of a society built on abundance and safety

You gotta be rich, relatively speaking, to just fuck around and try to figure shit out on your own

The people most likely to fuck up their house with DIY projects are middle class homeowners with too much time on their hands, who won't have a landlord coming after them for breaking something, and all that

Those badass hunter-gatherer societies living on the edge of survival that guys like this idolize did NOT fuck around like this, is the thing

In a society living under harsh conditions you learn what your elders teach you and you fucking follow it, period

When they tell you a plant is poisonous, you listen to them, and you don't touch it

They don't let you just fuck around putting different things in your mouth to find out what is and isn't poisonous

Because if it is poisonous, they can't pump your stomach, you just die

When they tell you you don't fuck around in a predator's territory and do stupid shit to attract their attention like leaving trash out in the open, they expect you to just do it

You don't ask questions about it or try it anyway to see what really happens

Someone who doesn't listen when told not to do it the first time gets everyone killed

This is why these things graduate from just "advice" to being actual "orders", and from "orders" to "laws", and "laws" to "religious taboo"

Like look the reason for the long list of taboos and prohibitions in Leviticus is the ancient Israelites were wandering in the desert, the situation in which a society has the least amount of surplus or slack

If you're living in the desert you absolutely cannot afford to fuck around and find out

You do what you're told, what your culture has accreted as conventional wisdom after generations of costly trial and error

If you can't be relied to do what you're told you get punished

The example that comes to mind is the cultivation of manioc (cassava) in indigenous cultures

Manioc is a godsend in many parts of the world, a highly concentrated starchy foodstuff that thrives in environments where most other crops fail

It is also incredibly toxic

These two things are unfortunate facts that go together - the cassava plant protects itself from being dug up for its calorie-rich roots by being full of cyanide

If you eat manioc raw, you are likely to die a horrible death shortly

Manioc can only be eaten after processing - the plant must be soaked and dried repeatedly, squeezing out the water (carrying the cyanide away) periodically throughout, and then thoroughly cooked

It's highly labor-intensive, societies that depend on it spend a lot of time on it

In some cultures their traditional process takes *three days* of soaking between harvesting the plant and eating it

It's a tradeoff - the less time you spend soaking it the more work you have to do squeezing the old water out, the less work you do the longer it takes

But there's no getting around it

And people who arrived later DID try to get around it, constantly

There are repeated stories of explorers and traders coming into contact with indigenous societies and thinking of soaking and squeezing the manioc as a "ritual" they didn't get

You know, it's not an unreasonable thing to think - lots of things in the world seem to be rituals and superstitions people come up with because they take things too far

Surely you can cut down the "ritual" process of soaking the manioc from three days to one day

And the thing is, they can't tell you why, exactly and specifically, you have to soak it for three days

They didn't have modern biochemistry, they couldn't isolate the cyanide from manioc and tell you that it's a potent neurotoxin

They just knew it's what you're supposed to do

And unfortunately, this kind of thing is a continuum

Cyanide poisoning can be chronic as well as acute

Half-assing the preparation process *seems like it works*, nobody just up and dies right away

If you soak it for one day instead of three days, everyone seems fine at first, and then slowly over time people start getting serious health problems

Developing goiters (the cyanide builds up in your thyroid gland), dying young

Hell, if it's mild enough, you don't even actually know anyone is sick

People just start getting... clumsier, weaker, more scatterbrained

The cyanide slowly poisoning your brain and your nervous system but this being hard to distinguish from the overall signs of age

(I think about the difficulty of knowing just how much your brain has been damaged by your environment a lot

Re: the lead poisoning epidemic of the mid-20th century, or what we're likely to see in the aftermath of COVID-19)

Obviously what happened historically is that it was an evolutionary process

People who were more "superstitious" and scrupulous about soaking and squeezing the cassava again and again and again lived in communities that were healthier and lived longer

People whose communities half-assed it died off

They may not even have ever known that was why they died off

They were just weaker and lost more people to accidents, predators, losing wars against other communities

This happened again en masse when European colonization disrupted the culture of West Africa

Feeling the new economic squeeze of harsh masters demanding more work for less reward, land being cleared to grow cash crops, being ravaged by war etc, the "old ways" were forgotten

The 19th and 20th centuries saw an explosion of goiters as a chronic condition in many parts of West Africa, and the introduction of a new illness, "konzo" ("bound legs") in hunger-stricken communities, where random people mysteriously lost the ability to walk

Modern science had to swoop in and try to figure out the cause and it took them a while, for all their technology and expertise

It's a hard thing to nail down, the first suspects are either germs or a nutrient deficiency and it wasn't that

The actual answer, the opposite of a nutrient deficiency - an environmental toxin that's universally present in the community's staple food source - was kind of a harsh surprise

There's been a lot of papers written about the UN having to go humbly to find old women who remembered the "old ways" so they could train the younger generations on how manioc should be properly prepared

It's the original case study of hidden value in "primitive folkways"

And I mean yeah

In the *long* run Western science and our philosophy of asking questions and overturning tradition and inventing new things won, I suppose

In the modern era you can just buy tapioca starch made from cassava in a factory with no risk of poisoning yourself

But a lot of people suffered and died in that transition

The long period of time in between in which smart arrogant white people showed up and said "This whole three day soak thing is a huge waste of time and time is money so we're changing it"

It turns out that ugly cliché of "I'm just telling you how to do it because this is how my mom told me to do it and how her mom told her to do it and scores of generations that survived this long can't be wrong" isn't always a bad thing

Most people in history who survived a long time didn't do it by being clever and using their brains and figuring things out from scratch at all

They survived by taking orders and doing what you're supposed to do