Comment by JRay (j-3) on Fake Justification · 2021-04-13T20:38:42.777Z · LW · GW

Some of the animals that the Torah declared unkosher were later found to be poisonous or prone to carry pathogens.   Mistaken reasoning leading to a correct conclusion is not necessarily that unlikely, and I don't think it'd be correct to dismiss a conclusion just because the original reasoning process that led to it was incorrect.  Being a commonly held belief is generally enough salience to make something worth investigating.   The evidence in favor of a tradition is often not only the mistaken supernaturalist justification of it, but also thousands of years of a human tribe flourishing while following it (often overfitting, but still having a vastly better ratio of signal to noise in their traditions than in the unconstrained search space)