Imagine trying to use this "figure it out from inferential reasoning" method on some other piece of obsolete cultural knowledge Like how to drive a stick shifthttps://twitter.com/AmeliaRoseWrite/status/1345695641343705090 …
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If you're living in the desert you absolutely cannot afford to fuck around and find out You do what you're told, what your culture has accreted as conventional wisdom after generations of costly trial and error If you can't be relied to do what you're told you get punished
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The example that comes to mind is the cultivation of manioc (cassava) in indigenous cultures Manioc is a godsend in many parts of the world, a highly concentrated starchy foodstuff that thrives in environments where most other crops fail It is also incredibly toxic
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These two things are unfortunate facts that go together - the cassava plant protects itself from being dug up for its calorie-rich roots by being full of cyanide If you eat manioc raw, you are likely to die a horrible death shortly
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Manioc can only be eaten after processing - the plant must be soaked and dried repeatedly, squeezing out the water (carrying the cyanide away) periodically throughout, and then thoroughly cooked It's highly labor-intensive, societies that depend on it spend a lot of time on it
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In some cultures their traditional process takes *three days* of soaking between harvesting the plant and eating it It's a tradeoff - the less time you spend soaking it the more work you have to do squeezing the old water out, the less work you do the longer it takes
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But there's no getting around it And people who arrived later DID try to get around it, constantly There are repeated stories of explorers and traders coming into contact with indigenous societies and thinking of soaking and squeezing the manioc as a "ritual" they didn't get
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You know, it's not an unreasonable thing to think - lots of things in the world seem to be rituals and superstitions people come up with because they take things too far Surely you can cut down the "ritual" process of soaking the manioc from three days to one day
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And the thing is, they can't tell you why, exactly and specifically, you have to soak it for three days They didn't have modern biochemistry, they couldn't isolate the cyanide from manioc and tell you that it's a potent neurotoxin They just knew it's what you're supposed to do
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And unfortunately, this kind of thing is a continuum Cyanide poisoning can be chronic as well as acute Half-assing the preparation process *seems like it works*, nobody just up and dies right away
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If you soak it for one day instead of three days, everyone seems fine at first, and then slowly over time people start getting serious health problems Developing goiters (the cyanide builds up in your thyroid gland), dying young
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Hell, if it's mild enough, you don't even actually know anyone is sick People just start getting... clumsier, weaker, more scatterbrained The cyanide slowly poisoning your brain and your nervous system but this being hard to distinguish from the overall signs of age
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(I think about the difficulty of knowing just how much your brain has been damaged by your environment a lot Re: the lead poisoning epidemic of the mid-20th century, or what we're likely to see in the aftermath of COVID-19)
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Obviously what happened historically is that it was an evolutionary process People who were more "superstitious" and scrupulous about soaking and squeezing the cassava again and again and again lived in communities that were healthier and lived longer
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People whose communities half-assed it died off They may not even have ever known that was why they died off They were just weaker and lost more people to accidents, predators, losing wars against other communities
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This happened again en masse when European colonization disrupted the culture of West Africa Feeling the new economic squeeze of harsh masters demanding more work for less reward, land being cleared to grow cash crops, being ravaged by war etc, the "old ways" were forgotten
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The 19th and 20th centuries saw an explosion of goiters as a chronic condition in many parts of West Africa, and the introduction of a new illness, "konzo" ("bound legs") in hunger-stricken communities, where random people mysteriously lost the ability to walk
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Modern science had to swoop in and try to figure out the cause and it took them a while, for all their technology and expertise It's a hard thing to nail down, the first suspects are either germs or a nutrient deficiency and it wasn't that
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The actual answer, the opposite of a nutrient deficiency - an environmental toxin that's universally present in the community's staple food source - was kind of a harsh surprise
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There's been a lot of papers written about the UN having to go humbly to find old women who remembered the "old ways" so they could train the younger generations on how manioc should be properly prepared It's the original case study of hidden value in "primitive folkways"
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And I mean yeah In the *long* run Western science and our philosophy of asking questions and overturning tradition and inventing new things won, I suppose In the modern era you can just buy tapioca starch made from cassava in a factory with no risk of poisoning yourself
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But a lot of people suffered and died in that transition The long period of time in between in which smart arrogant white people showed up and said "This whole three day soak thing is a huge waste of time and time is money so we're changing it"
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It turns out that ugly cliché of "I'm just telling you how to do it because this is how my mom told me to do it and how her mom told her to do it and scores of generations that survived this long can't be wrong" isn't always a bad thing
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Most people in history who survived a long time didn't do it by being clever and using their brains and figuring things out from scratch at all They survived by taking orders and doing what you're supposed to do
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End of conversation
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