Here's a story some people like to tell about the limits of reason. There's this plant, manioc, that grows easily in some places and has a lot of calories in it, so it was a staple for some indigenous South Americans since before the Europeans showed up. Traditional handling of the manioc involved some elaborate time-consuming steps that had no apparent purpose, so when the Portuguese introduced it to Africa, they didn't bother with those steps - just, grow it, cook it, eat it. The problem is that manioc's got cyanide in it, so if you eat too much too often over a lifetime, you get sick, in a way that's not easily traceable to the plant. Somehow, over probably hundreds of years, the people living in manioc's original range figured out a way to leach out the poison, without understanding the underlying chemistry - so if you asked them why they did it that way, they wouldn't necessarily have a good answer. Now a bunch of Africans growing and eating manioc as a staple regularly get cyanide poisoning. This is offered as a cautionary tale against innovating through reason, since there's a lot of information embedded in your culture (via hundreds of years of selection), even if people can't explain why. The problem with this argument is that it's a nonsense comparison. First of all, it's not clear things got worse on net, just that a tradeoff was made. How many person-days per year were freed up by less labor-intensive manioc handling? Has anyone bothered to count the hours lost to laborious traditional manioc-processing, to compare them with the burden of consuming too much cyanide? How many of us, knowing that convenience foods probably lower our lifespans relative to slow foods, still eat them because they're ... more convenient? How many people didn't starve because manioc was available and would grow where and when other things wouldn't? If this is the best we can do for how poorly reason can perform, reason seems pretty great. Second, we're not actually comp