sometimes, there exists a good reason for doing something that seems silly from first principles, but the people doing it are incapable of articulating that reason; they might not even be aware that this is the reason. for example, some people might be conservative because they feel a strong disgust for things they don’t understand, and a fear of change. this is a completely irrational reason, but there also exists a more reasonable argument for conservatism, which is someform of chesterton’s fence / wariness of unforeseen consequence. because of natural selection or cultural selection, people can be selected to have traits that are good for their survival, even if their reasons for exhibiting those traits are totally irrational. so it’s worth being cautious about overly eager dismissal of things just because the articulated reasoning seems very irrational.

of course, on the flip side some things are just bad and maladaptive to the current world. some seemingly irrational things truly are just irrational.