Looking for Human Truths? Ask Old People and Check Old Books!
You may have read the important Rashba responsum regarding “בכל דבר שיש קבלה ביד הזקנים והזקנות מעמנו”.
Quoting the introduction to “Democracy: The God That Failed” by Dr. Hans Hoppe, p. 23:
Regardless of the unorthodox interpretations and conclusions reached in the following studies, the theories and theorems used to do so are definitely not new or unorthodox. Indeed, if one assumes, as I do, that a priori social theory and theorems exist, then one should also expect that most of such knowledge is old and that theoretical progress is painstakingly slow. This indeed appears to be the case.
To illustrate his economics’ hoariness Dr. Hoppe then weakly points to the… 16th-century Scholastics (with a hand-waving flourish of Rothbard’s history of economics), when he could have pointed to Mishlei and Chazal (had he known or cared.)
Hoppe also wants to justify and, indeed, glorify “grand social theory”, see the rest of the valuable intro.
Semi-libertarian Nassim Taleb often echoes the same sentiment.
Here, quoting “Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life” p. 176-177:
If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are that it works at less than 10 percent, unless it is has also been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a psychologist? [footnote] Consider that a recent effort to replicate the hundred psychology papers in “prestigious” journals of 2008 found that, out of a hundred, only thirty-nine replicated. Of these thirty-nine, I believe that fewer than ten are actually robust and transfer outside the narrowness of the experiment. Similar defects have been found in medicine and neuroscience; more on those later. (I will discuss the point further in Chapters 18 and (mostly) 19, as well as why the warnings of your grandmother or interdicts aren’t “irrational”; most of what is called “irrational” comes from misunderstanding of probability.)
(I recommend his argument there too, by the way.)
It is critical that it is not just that the books of the ancients are still around and have been filtered by Lindy, but that those populations who read them have survived as well.
While our knowledge of physics was not available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that holds in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment. By classics we can define the Latin (and late Hellenistic) moral literature (moral sciences meant something else than they do today): Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace, or the later French so-called “moralists” (La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day; Erasmus was the thorough compiler.
Don’t second-hander goyim just love quoting other second-hander goyim? And speaking of evolution, haven’t Jews survived even longer?
We have written the Lindy effect is found in Chazal here.
Of course “Chareidism” is partly about denying the historical past and the past’s inconvenient insights (not to mention negating its relevance)…
