Principle of Emphasizing Elderly Opinion
Elders are useful "because they are more likely to have accumulated useful knowledge"
Essentially the "useful knowledge is useful" tautology, which is true
However, in order to correctly judge "whether a certain knowledge X is useful or not", knowledge Y is necessary. Often, there are cases where people do not have this and cannot make a judgment.
Therefore, we use "knowledge produced by individuals who have produced useful knowledge is likely to be useful knowledge" as a one-step inference.
This is the principle of appreciating the words of the wise.
However, knowledge is needed again to determine "has produced useful knowledge".
So as a rough approximation
The elders are more likely to have a lot of knowledge stored up."
Individuals who store a lot of knowledge are more likely to produce useful knowledge."
use.
This synthesis leads to the inference that "knowledge generated by elders is useful.
(Another pattern is the use of principle of social proof, i.e., the pattern of thinking "everyone says he is a wise man, so he is a wise man.") It is False True/False Dichotomy to argue whether it is true or false for each of these steps, and it is all probabilistic reasoning. Probabilistic inferences are useful if they have a high enough success rate. How high the success rate is sufficient is an attribute of the receiver, not of the inference itself.
When the probability decreases smoothly, at some point it switches from "useful" to "not useful" for the receiver, but there is no clear boundary on the inference side, and the "usefulness" of the inference varies from receiver to receiver.
In an environment where stupid individuals die quickly, the probability that individuals surviving longer were not stupid was high.
This "culling pressure to kill fools" has slowly declined with the progress of civilization.
Not an attribute of the time period, but of the situation. There are situations of similar composition even today. For example, in an organization where incompetent people are immediately left or fired, those who survive over the long term are likely not incompetent.
Other changes in circumstances
Decline in correlation between "storing useful knowledge" and "being able to generate useful knowledge"
The duration of usefulness of knowledge in "Useful Knowledge" shrinks.
Depends on the type of knowledge
The usefulness of applying "knowledge accumulated in the past" to a new environment
Compare "rapid acquisition of knowledge from a new environment."
As values diversify, what "useful" means changes.
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