I spend a lot of time meditating about the overarching patterns that are building as our society moves forward. My thoughts are generally in an attempt to seek out arbitrage opportunities. Finding future arbitrage opportunities is one of my obsessions. Here is the first installment of Overarching Societal Patterns.
The logical fallacy of “The Appeal to Tradition” is probably weaker today than it has ever been in human history. It does, however, still exist very strongly. Wikipedia defines the Appeal to Tradition as: “A common fallacy in which a thesis is deemed correct on the basis that it is correlated with some past or present tradition. The appeal takes the form of “this is right because we’ve always done it this way.” Anytime you hear someone say, “We do it this way because that is the way it’s always been done” they are committing a logical fallacy.
It’s very likely that for most of human history this fallacy didn’t even really need to be spoken. Generations of people passed without relative change. Hunting was always relatively the same; fishing was always relatively the same. People’s lives were always relatively the same for thousands of years. The amount of loss a person could incur by committing this fallacy was lower over history because the pace of change was slow. However, the world as it presently is changes more in five years than it did between years 0-500. As such, the penalty, and cost, for following the ways of the past has become higher than ever. World War 1 is a great example of the cost of The Appeal to Tradition.
World War 1 was one of the bloodiest conflicts ever recorded in human history. It left the European continent absolutely decimated. It is interesting to look at why the military casualties were so high. Oddly enough the appeal to tradition played a massive part in this carnage. The generals in both armies failed to recognize the change in war technology. As such they used historical strategies that were no longer efficient. This led to inappropriate era tactics paired with better warfare technology. The result was massive carnage. Men walked right into automatic gunfire. As the war went on old tactics were dismissed and new tactics took their place. As it happens, World War 1 was also a significant societal step forward as technology began to really increase the pace of change. The appeal to tradition was costly for our ancestors but it has the potential to be incredibly costly for us. World War 1 is one such example; but how about an example in normal/everyday life.
Lighted intersections are much, much, much less efficient than traffic circles. Intersections result in more accidents, more fatal accidents, higher fuel efficiency, and higher time efficiency. Plus they’re prettier. We as a society know this. Why do we continue building intersections? Obviously there are specific instances in which an intersection makes sense; however, the average intersection could easily be made more efficient with a traffic circle. The angles at which accidents happen in intersections are much more prone to be fatal. Head to head collisions and blindsides lead to thousands of deaths per year. Why don’t we save those lives by installing a traffic circle instead? Because we know intersections, it is just how we’ve always done it.
There are hundreds more examples of how the appeal to tradition is hurting us; both individually and as a society. The appeal to tradition is still causing thousands of needless death per year. Each appeal to tradition is an arbitrage opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of by a business man. Let’s help move humanity forward by finding a solution these important problems. It will take a lot of effort to move people to a new way but that effort is worth it if you find the right opportunity.
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