This is reasonable though. Tradition and common sense suggest value perhaps more than rationalists think, but if tradition and common sense have value, there is an underlying reason.
I apologize if this list of counterexamples ran too long.
"The Secret of Our Success" literally starts with how European explorers starved to death in environments that other humans thrived in because they lacked the cultural knowledge local hunter gatherers had, includes many other examples of how pure reason can be counter-productive to survival, and ends with a warning that the idea that now it's finally different may not be true.
What G.K. Chesterton said is that, if you can't make an affirmative case for the tradition's origins and show why the cause no longer applies, you should leave the tradition in place.
In the listed examples, rationalists celebrate this principle with examples such as the bitter cassava preparations of the Tukanoan people, which were very labor- and time-intensive. A much shorter processing would have eliminated the obvious, short-term toxicity of the plant, so someone scientific experiments to determine how much processing was actually necessary would likely end up damaging themselves and their reproductive prospects in ways that wouldn't show up for years or decades.
So there's evidence that the rationalist community actually appreciates tradition more strongly than the average person, and searches harder before discarding it.
Like, maybe Christmas as understood for Americans has no value. But the fact a Christmas exist does result in families getting together and provides a cohesive context for the winter season across pop culture, and that can have downstream value.
This is an underlying reason
Female genital mutilation is traditional in some places. That alone doesn't mean it's valuable.
Not that FGTM is comparable, but Rationalism really doesn't do as good a job as it believes it does of explaining why people end up believing ridiculous, harmful things.
An effective form of rationalism would be very good at preventing and reversing irrational and harmful beliefs.
There is zero evidence that the Rationalists have done that.
There's no harm in critically examining why a tradition is there (especially if harmful in other ways). But a lot of the time, "it's a long story" does actually have a reasonable story.
Suppose I want to post a bunch of recipes. I could just post the recipes with absolutely no further commentary. In that case someone else could copy what I write wholesale and that might be depressing, or stop me getting famous, or reduce my income from advertising. So far, so good.
I could preface each recipe with a short relevant paragraph or two saying a bit about why I like the dish, where I got the recipe from, maybe some things I tried that didn't work out. In that case someone just scraping my site would be guilty of copyright violation, yay. Maybe I could force them to take it down. Or they could just copy the recipes, which doesn't seem like it would be super-difficult technically, and then I'd be in the same state as before.
Or I could preface each recipe with six pages of rambling about how much I love my dog and how sweet my now-deceased grandmother was. And that would get me ... so far as I can tell, exactly the same protection from plundering as a couple of relevant paragraphs would. (And would be exactly as vulnerable to a slightly smarter plagiarist stealing just the recipes.)
It's not clear to me that copying just the recipes is hard enough to make any of this worth while, but even if it is I don't see how you get any extra copy-protection from the long rambling anecdotes, compared with a small amount of actually relevant information.
So I think that the rambling-blog-post phenomenon has to have some other explanation. Maybe you can embed more ads in a longer post, or maybe recipe-bloggers just often tend to enjoy telling anecdotes, or maybe they think the anecdotes are what will actually draw readers in.
Traditions can often encode good things, but they shouldn't be respected solely because they are tradition.
One needs to actually spend the time and effort to understand what value is potentially encoded in traditions before suggesting a replacement.
...though yes, in practice if your invoke or, they're fairly likely to explain in elaborate length why it doesn't apply here.
Thanks for sharing your opinion on what other people really think. Low openness people always see disagreements with high openness people as a moral failing on their part.
It's a neat package of non-sequitur, moral grandstanding, and misdirection.
I'm making valid (if deeply critical) points but you're contributing nothing except your misinformed judgments.
Grandstanding is a meaningless color commentary term I only reused because I was the one accused of it despite not being the one moralizing.
This is why people don't respect "rationalists." Because people claim to have superior reasoning skills but would fail a freshman survey course on it.
"I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas" > "People believe bad things, and I don't like that people engage with them."
"It seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate" > "The people who engage with them must also believe the bad things too."
"If someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them." > A nonsensical argument to make about twitter which has a character limit.
Unfortunately most rationalists aren't as smart as they think and mistake verbosity for reason and judgment.
There is more insidious kind of bad idea, like anti-vax philosophy. With these ideas, the layperson doesn't have direct access to comprehensive evidence, the necessary domain complexity exceeds common understanding, human tendency toward suspicious works against you, simple barometers like artificial=bad are useless or harmful, and evidence that seems to support them exists at the margin.
It should be clear that mass social media is causing these bad ideas to proliferate. On the other hard, trying to shut these ideas down through institutional or communal censorship seems to just give them a shot in the arm. Willingness to engage with their proponents shouldn't be seen as tacit support.
The problem with "secret esoteric hacks/techniques" is that other people are not NPCs and are in fact also trying to achieve their goals, and for any goal you can imagine, there are a million people who have put in way more effort into figuring out the optimal path.
If there's a secret method of becoming good at an instrument quickly, why don't music schools teach that? If there's an obscure way to run a 4 hour marathon without much training, why doesn't every training plan include that? The common sense approach is usually right on the inflection point of the 80/20 rule, where you get the easy, simple way to get decent results.
Of course, there are sometimes real constraints (i.e. popular apps like Duolingo are bad for learning a language, because most people who use it are not serious about becoming fluent and not willing to put in time) but even then, the reasonably effective answer is usually 1 layer below the surface (learn the basics through a textbook/course/online material, then just use the language a lot and actively study new vocab/grammar/concepts), not in some obscure rabbit hole.
For example, our eyes are wired the wrong way, that is, the optic nerve goes in front of the retina, causing a blind spot and other issues. From a design perspective, it is really stupid and there is no "good" reason why we are like this, it would be like making a monitor with the connectors in front of the display. Octopus eyes are wired the correct way and it works better.
Eyes have evolved like this out of random chance, as an imperfect but functional solution, and we are too advanced for evolution mechanisms to fix the problem now.
And sometimes the “good reason” that something survives for a long time is that the better alternative was difficult to invent/discover/implement. Which is obviously not a “good reason” to oppose the introduction of better alternatives.
In other words - our system of epistemic evaluation is conditioned on our moment in history. What appears as a fact of the universe today may not be tomorrow.
Unless you're a world-class expert and one of the best in the world already, any insight you can come up with has been had by other people and if they're not doing it anymore it's usually for a good reason.
Even when the the "common sense" route is not optimal along whatever metric your measuring, there's probably something else you're not noticing: the classic dinner of potatoes/rice, cooked vegetables, and a piece of meat might not be the best in terms of health or nutrients or taste, but when you take into account things like ease of cooking, low cost, low mental effort, easy to make bigger portions, it very clearly becomes obvious why basically every civilization has traditional grain/potato-vegetable-meat type meals.
Many people also use tradition as a cover for bias, bigotry, and bullying. When one has been on the other end of that, one learns to view blind tradition with a healthy dose of skepticism.
And yet, still, there is much of value there. Ironically it takes some wisdom to learn which is worth keeping and which is not.