Validity of Ancient Practices

[heracleitos]

What are your opinions about the practices that are generations old, and what we still practice today without any critical questioning about their validity?

Even though we do have a few more formal knowledge-justification methods that are occasionally useful, the default fallback method remains trial and error.

Furthermore, we can safely assume that quite a bit of trial and error went into developing traditional practices:

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Especially in the realm of human behavior, we know that nothing is provable (math) and very, very little is testable (science). Therefore, everything we truly know about it, is the result of endless trial and error.

In fact, modern western society is quite presumptuous and even outright ridiculous to believe that it can add value, on the fly, in knowledge domains that are necessarily governed by trial and error.

Even worse, the often imbecile beliefs of modern western society even liberally carry over to taking down fences in science. It has now even become a society that does not need to test its vaccines, because hey, vaccines do not need to be tested!

[Sushan]

What are your opinions about the practices that are generations old, and what we still practice today without any critical questioning about their validity?

Even though we do have a few more formal knowledge-justification methods that are occasionally useful, the default fallback method remains trial and error.

Furthermore, we can safely assume that quite a bit of trial and error went into developing traditional practices:

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Especially in the realm of human behavior, we know that nothing is provable (math) and very, very little is testable (science). Therefore, everything we truly know about it, is the result of endless trial and error.

In fact, modern western society is quite presumptuous and even outright ridiculous to believe that it can add value, on the fly, in knowledge domains that are necessarily governed by trial and error.

Even worse, the often imbecile beliefs of modern western society even liberally carry over to taking down fences in science. It has now even become a society that does not need to test its vaccines, because hey, vaccines do not need to be tested!

You have a point. Sometimes we simply believe modern things, just because they are modern, but ridicule ancient practices claiming that they do not have any scientific value. Yes, they may had a value those days which we still cannot understand. So it is good to study them without simply rejecting or ridiculing them. And also we must be open minded to reject as well as accept such ancient practices. Taking either side won't help the human evolution or scientific development, and all endeavors should be aimed at human advancement.