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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • kopasz7@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldHistory repeats
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    16 hours ago

    Knowledge comes from practice. Humans always did things first before they gained the knowledge. Think of apprenticeship and the natural sciences for example.

    What I have a big issue with is today’s notion that application follows knowledge. A top down approach where academia is isolated from the feedback of the real world. What the hell do I mean by that?

    A business or an artist goes bust if they do not perform well, they have direct risks attached to their work. While we can produce ‘knowledge’ (institutional knowledge), new (made up) economic theories, new (un-replicable) psychological explanations and so on, without any apparent problem. The natural selective feedback is missing. Academia is gamified, most researchers know they could be doing more useful research, yet their grants and prospects of publications don’t let them.

    So when I hear reason and understanding casually thrown around, I smell scientism (the marketing of science, science bullshit if you will) and not actual science. Because no peer review will be able to overrule what time has proven in the real world. And traditions are such things that endured. Usually someone realizes and writes another paper, disproving the previous one, advancing science.

    Don’t get me wrong, there are and were many unambiguously bad traditions by modern standards, and I’m sure there will be more. But we, the people are the evolutionary filter of traditions. We decide which ones are the fit ones, which ones of the ones we inherited will we pass down and which to banish into history.


  • kopasz7@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldHistory repeats
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    16 hours ago

    Reasons are a human invention to help make sense of the world. If you want to base everything on logical grounds you will run into two things mainly:

    1. Limits of knowledge. Knowledge is always incomplete, as more of it opens up more questions. There are things you intuitively know are good, but can’t prove why they are.

    2. Systemic limits of logical reasoning. A sufficiently powerful and consistent formal system (such as formal logic) is incomplete, it cannot prove its own correctness. (Gödel’s incompleteness theorems)



  • What tradition are you talking about?

    For example funeral rites help prevent disease from corpses. Without knowing anything about germs.

    Or the taboo of incest can avoid genetic defects, without knowing anything about genes.

    Traditions formed for a reason. And that reason is way more ancient and more natural than modern logic. It is simply survival.

    The people with traditions that helped them survived more often.


  • kopasz7@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldHistory repeats
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    19 hours ago

    I can come up with worse reasons than tradition.

    Like, to satisfy a sadistic urge or to cause suffering.

    Traditions can and often do serve some purpose even if we don’t see them in such a light.

    Just as evolutionary traits, only beneficial ones tend to survive the test of time. (Not necessarily beneficial to the individual, but the group)