Discover more from Overcoming Bias
Bryan portrays himself as an intellectual elitist, but he has an oddly unflattering portrait of the elite. When it comes to the dreamworld of political debate, elites are relatively rational but that is exactly the sphere in which individuals are least decisive over actual outcomes. When it comes to the really big, important decisions, such as how many kids to have, individuals in the elite are highly decisive in steering outcomes yet quite irrational. They underappreciate the joy of kids.
That is Tyler. This seems a plausible example of where thinking goes wrong, i.e., where those who think less tend to make better decisions by following tradition and intuition, and those who rely more on explicit reasoning often take many decades to realize their mistake. What are the clearest other examples of this, and what features do such examples have in common? Ideally, we’d use these features to construct a coherent argument to warn young excess thinkers away from their most common mistakes.
What Tradition Knows
Actually, I suspect a lot more thought went into at least some of the world cuisines. For example, in Japanese cuisine, deep fried food is traditionally served with radish as radish apparently helps to digest fat (or something like that). Traditional Chinese meal planning is typically meant to incorporate the medicinal qualities of the food eaten. For example, there is a whole set of recipes using various exotic herbs meant specifically for women who have just given birth. So I think we should probably give a little credit to our forefathers.
You're ascribing to tradition what is really the result of living in a different environment with more limited options. Historically, people didn't choose to, say, avoid highly processed foods or eat what their ancestors ate. They didn't eat unhealthy modern foods because they didn't exist yet, and they ate what their ancestors ate because that's what was available. They weren't any smarter than we are about food, but their environment limited their choices. The rules most people followed were more likely to be:(1) Eat what's available so you don't starve(2) If you have a choice, eat what tastes better