And honestly speaking I’m not sure myself if “tankie” should apply to China, seeing how most of their bad shit happend internally with the notable exceptions of Taiwan and Hong Kong, which are a stretch. There is a distinctive difference between Russia and China, despite both belonging to same political alliance and both have a dictatorial leaderships. Hating west/USA and loving either of them would make one a campist, but I’m not sure about that qualifyng as tankie. Naturally, most campists support both, so by that definition it would make them tankies.

While your definition does describe tankies as well, I always understood it to be a derogatory term for the general authoritarian communist/pseudo-communist block more so than applying to all national supermacists.

I mean that would mean I believe that they’re imperialists supporting the case of white supremacy - I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to claim that most USA supported conflicts have the purpose of benefitting the western world, which is based on white supremacy - and most likely are either politicaly illiterate and are unaware (willingly or by ignorance) of what USA is doing, or are sociopaths. They’re not tankies by virtue of not being pro post soviet dictatorships, but when it comes to the callousness towards loss of innocent human lives, they’re uh… Pretty bad. I’m not making a comparison though, I feel that’s like asking which of two shits stinks worse, and we can clearly see that both defecators had varied and distinctive diets.

There was no “science” done to prove that washing hands had effect on mortality, until someone tested that and found that to be the case. So it’s not “old science” vs “new science” but rather “no science” vs “science”. Lead was used because it was available. Radium was used because it was pretty. Bloodletting was considered helpful strictly because of tradition of bloodletting and because no one done the rigorous testing with valid methodology to check if it actually works, or if it’s just a folk belief that it does.

You keep presenting cases where people just didn’t know something and didn’t care to figure it out, and call it “science” because someone baselessly believed in it. It’s irrational. And before you start anew with ignoring my arguments and listing more cases of people not knowing something as a proof that scientific process is harmful, I seriously don’t care. I originally commented about traditions being bad reasons for doing anything with the assumption we have some common ground in our understanding of how science work, and trying to convice someone that science does work is a fair bit too tall of a task to engage with. I’m not interested in that, sorry.

And now, the risk of the child dying during childbirth is twice as likely if the birth happens in homes instead of happening in hospitals. Almost like discovery of germs and development of antiseptics had consequences. Those pesky doctors must be tracking those homeborn children down and eliminating them in the name of science! Oops!

Your unreasonable bias against any attempts to understand the world instead of relying on traditions of unknown origin does not substitute an argument against it. Neither empirical or analitical method of scientific research is limited to some sort of elitist and corrupt academia, so your view of academia being elitist and corrupt doesn’t disprove the efficiency of those methods. And no, the knowledge doesn’t come from practice at all, if it did then ritually practiced traditions would lead to understanding of their roots and their purpose, and humans didn’t learn about spreading of diseases from burial rites, but rather from events when those rites weren’t practiced. Furthermore, we didn’t learn how to deal with those diseases from the traditions, but rather from breaking away from them and studying bodies instead of getting rid of them - which faced much backlash from the church, which wanted to uphold tradition no matter what.

The knowledge comes not from practice, but from study, from testing different approaches and writing down what worked, until you get testing sample high enough to figure out why it worked. And then, people who figured it out probably taught others what to do without sharing in enough details why it works, and puff you have a tradition. And if people do share why stuff works and publish their research data and methodology, then we have knowledge, based on which other researchers can conduct their own research, check if they get similar results and whatnot. Peer review is a rather robust standard for truth, as far as human capabilities go.

Academia being gamified in a way that only approved research gets funding or spotlight has nothing to do with traditions themselves being any good either. Most often power is legitimized via tradition, and many scientific institutes were muzzled because power following tradition found their pursuit of knowledge undesireable. The fact that many research topics are taboo is direct result of that.

Lastly, your idea that the academia is isolated from the “feedback” of the “real world” is completely nonsensical. Nothing that’s not peer reviewed isn’t treated as particulary valuable, and you peer review the research by repeating the tests with the same methodology. That’s specifically the feedback from the real world. Any sort of feedback that shows some parts of tradition should be changed is commonly met with resistance however, so it stands to reason that the opposite of what you claimed is actually the truth, and it’s tradition that suffers from lack of the “feedback from the real world”.

Well seal clubbing is pretty bad for one. But the point isn’t whenever there are bad traditions, but whenever tradition is a good or bad reason to do something. Rites themselves do nothing, burying or burning the body does. Understanding why you’re doing something is vastly better than doing it because of some (possibly reasonable but unknown) ancient reason no one is able to point out. Taboo of incest is less related to traditions, and more to biology which causes people not to be attracted to their siblings in most cases. There is no ceremony or ritual to prohibition of incest, so I’d say it’s not a tradition. The tradition that have existed, however, was inbreeding of royal families, that wanted to keep their blood pure, which led to copious amount of incest and genetic defects. Many traditions rose from the dominance of one group over another and existed to legitimize this dominance further. Tradition of women being unable to vote, earn money or chose their spouse was born from the many generations of oppression. Tradition of black people being segregated away from white in USA was born out of dehumanization of slaves. There are many cases of traditional honor suicides (like seppuku) or honor killing (like stoning of women accused of adultery) in different traditions as well.

I could keep listing “bad traditions with bad reasons” but that’s not the point I’ve originally made, more of a reply to your point about traditions being born out of useful or natural/survival reasons, which I believe those examples should disprove. The point is still that doing something solely because of tradition is bad, you need knowledge to do that well and in current age there is absolutely no reason not to seek that knowledge. In the past, when people were illiterate an easily digestible oral tradition was useful thing, but we’re way past times when we have no good way to ensure the complicated reasons for doing things are preserved. What if some tradition results in oppression of some people and it’s source is unknown or so ancient it’s no longer applicable, should it be upkept? Conversely, should the ritual blood sacrifice be kept in the celebration of plentiful harvest to appease the gods, or should you only keep the parts like dancing around the bonfire and socializing, because those things are fun and healthy for the community?

If there is wisdom hidden in the tradition, then you want to figure it out, but if it’s kept cryptic, unknown and attempts to research it are met with disdain because someone tries to compromise your tradition, then it’s probably better to fuck around and find out what would happen if you didn’t perform the tradition. And if something bad happens, then at least you can write it down and pass to the next generation as the actual reason for doing things. I seriously doubt there is anything left in human traditions that was figured out in the past, and is currently impossible to decipher or comprehend just by analysis, without even doing empirical tests. And if for some reason something isn’t, then do those tests and find out. If you’re worried about some arcane knowledge of the ancients that is too enigmatic for us to understand just by looking, you can try doing something differently in isolated environment, with various precautions and on limited sample. No reason to keep it as “tradition” instead of “reason”, especially since the underlying reason could have been good, but due to no one knowing what it was, the method could have degenerated over the generations to the point of being ineffective.

You’ve disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it’s justified in your eyes and you’d do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them “the worst” in some way.

I don’t think you can check if array of n elements is sorted in O(1), if you skip the check though and just assume it is sorted now (have faith), then the time would be constant, depending on how long you’re willing to wait until the miracle happens. As long as MTM (Mean Time to Miracle) is constant, the faithfull miracle sort has O(1) time complexity, even if MTM is infinite. Faithless miracle sort has at best the complexity of the algorithm that checks if the array is sorted.

Technically you can to down to O(0) if you assume all array are always sorted.