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Why Superstition is Smarter Than Science - Chesterton’s Fence Explained - Future IQ

12,550 views Wait, is this logic right? • May 08, 2025
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In a world where rational thinking and modern logic dominate, could we be overlooking the hidden wisdom of ancient traditions? In this video, we explore how being too rigid with modern science can sometimes lead us to making irrational decisions that cause more harm than good. Chesterton's Fence, an ancient concept, reveals why rejecting old traditions may actually put us at risk. Are we truly smarter than our ancestors, or have we simply forgotten the life-saving lessons they passed down through generations?

From the surprising benefits of traditional rituals to the dangers of overthinking, this video challenges the conventional belief that modern science always has the answers. We dive into why some so-called "irrational" traditions are, in fact, rooted in centuries of wisdom that protect us in ways we don't fully understand. Traditions that save lives, ancient wisdom, and the dangers of modern logic are explored through real-world examples where rejecting the old ways led to disastrous consequences.

If you’ve ever wondered whether traditions like astrology, homeopathy, and other rituals might have deeper logic behind them, this video provides the insight you’ve been looking for. Hit the like button if you agree that we need to reconsider the value of ancient wisdom, and don’t forget to subscribe for more videos that challenge your perspective on tradition vs. progress.

Join the Future IQ Community: https://tapthe.link/futureiqwa

More Videos:
A cow on a golf course taught me how to deal with unfairness in life: https://youtu.be/77_YwP9aok8
It's Ok to Copy Others - Steal Like an Artist: https://youtu.be/2IedwFNMrBQ
Is Jyotish Shastra Indian?: https://youtu.be/gatm0hDY-iE
How Astrologers Predict Future / Fool You: https://youtu.be/FcSuHP113NI

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

00:00 Introduction
00:39 Don't Challenge The Tradition
02:54 Humans Are Terrible At Randomising
06:29 Chesterton's Fence
07:35 The Great Chinese Famine
08:42 Homeopathy is Bullsh*t
11:17 Astrology
13:29 Forest Fires
14:30 Soviet 5-day work week
16:43 Primogeniture
19:16 But Don't Follow the Tradition Blindly
23:00 97% - 3% Rule

Sources:
Cassava story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/
Fire suppression makes wildfires more severe: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46702-0
McDonald’s Big Mistake: https://tapandesai.com/chestertons-fence/
Chesterton’s Fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
You can’t be random: https://roadtolarissa.com/oracle/
Soviet 5-day work week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar

Editing Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/low-intensity-fires-reduce-wildfire-risk-60-percent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/low-intensity-fires-reduce-wildfire-risk-60-percent
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kundali_2.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gatm0hDY-iE
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/woman-feels-good-after-taking-placebo-2280922743
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kundali_2.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gatm0hDY-iE
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/woman-feels-good-after-taking-placebo-2280922743
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IedwFNMrBQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapulimancy
https://animalia-life.club/qa/pictures/eskimos-hunting-caribou
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278691510003297
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6611475/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NZurV_OiMM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucano_people

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Transcript

Watching Future IQ could get you killed. Oh, sometimes thinking from first principles, what we teach on this channel, can get you poisoned. That's not better. Thinking rationally can make you starve to death. Even worse, sometimes you have to do the dumb things that all the other people are doing because you realize 30 years later that they were not so dumb after all. Right. Well, so are you now saying that homeopathy and astrology which we have constantly decrieded on the channel are good? Yes. Okay. Let's start with a nice example. Okay. Please. In South America, Colombia, right? In the Amazon forest, there is a tribe called Tukanowans. Okay. Not sure of the pronunciation. Okay. But they eat
casawa, which is like a potato-like thing. Okay. Now they have a very complex multi-day process to process the casava before they eat. Right? First it has to be scraped. Then the next day it has to be grated. The next day it has to be washed and then the day after that it has to be boiled. So Tukanoan women spend 25% of their life just doing this with casawa. Now the Portuguese who took over that part of America. Yeah. They saw casava and they saw a lot of potential and they exported it to West Africa. Yeah. Because it grows plentifully and in really weird climate.
Now smart people, rational people, they look at all of this and they ask why do we do this much work on the casawava and the tukanowans have no answer. The tukanoans say uh because we have always done it this way. Okay. No explanation, no answer, nothing. It's like a tradition that has been handed down over time. Correct. And we know a lot of people around here who are not big fans of traditions especially when you can't explain the reason for the tradition. Right? So the West Africans started eating casava just like that without going through the process. And now West Africans are dying of cyanide poisoning.
Wait, what? It turns out that that multi-day process is needed to get rid of cyanide which is there in casava roots naturally and the tukanowans were following a process for thousands of years without knowing why but and also without realizing that it was saving their life. It was getting rid of the cyanide. Now scientists have done all the analysis and they have found each step of the process reduces the cyanide by some amount. That's just like one example man. Okay, let me give you more examples. Okay, please. Karibu hunters in North America, right? Indigenous tribes, what they do is that once they have hunted a karibu to decide where to look for the next kariu, they take the
bones of this karibu, heat them over the fire and then when the bone cracks, whichever direction the crack is pointing, they go and hunt for karibu there. So they use divination to figure out their next hunting spot. Yes. So they are dumb like all old tribes are dumb and modern science can come and tell them that they should be using an algorithm to do this and it turns out that they are right and modern algorithms are wrong but how would you like me to explain? Yes please. Yes. So what happens is that if you don't use the boons if you don't use divination the hunters decide where to hunt.
Correct. Okay. Now the way human brain works is that you tend to copy people who are successful especially successful people. So what happens is that people keep going back to the same area to hunt kuribu and the kuribu have enough of an instinct to start avoiding that area. Survival instinct of course correct. So really what you should be doing I mean if you analyze this whole thing mathematically you find out that the best strategy for the humans is to completely randomize the hunting spots. Ah but here is the problem. Humans are terrible at randomizing. Okay. True.
There is a program on the internet. We'll put a link in the description which proves that you can't be random even if you tried to. Yeah. And in fact, check the program out, but I'll prove it right now. Think of a number between 1 and 10 and write it in the comments. You thought of the number seven. So, uh, that's not the real example, but yeah, check out that you can't be random if you tried, right? Yeah. Whereas when you do the bones, that forces you to be truly random, right? And there are many other examples like this of uh you know picking farming plots and so on of divination which result in randomness which is good right for the survival of
the species to not starve to death right in all these examples what you will notice is that there are rituals there which the people following have no clue why they're following those rituals yet in reality those rituals are serving an important purpose purpose. Yeah. Where do these rituals come from? I mean, yeah. So, there is a very nice evolutionary explanation for this, right? Imagine two tribes. One of them randomly starts doing something, the other is not. Okay. Now, the random thing that this tribe starts doing, it has some purpose which they don't know about, but it is doing something good.
And over a long enough period of time, this tribe population keeps going down. and this tribe just looks more and more successful after a while this tribe copies right and so rituals which in the long term result in good things they get copied because as I said humans like to copy everything that successful people are doing that's why you will use the toothpaste that aliyah uses right so that I'm not I'm not kidding check out the link okay this explains this in detail but yes Yeah, we've done multiple episodes on uh how we copy and how uh we follow the behaviors of successful people. We'll put links in the description and also on the screen for
you to check out. But the examples that you've given so far remind me of Chesterton's fence. Absolutely right. Chesterton's fence is a very good mental model to have. The idea of Chesterton's fence is by GK Chesterton and what he said is that do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up. Right? You will see the parallels with the examples in this episode. You live in a village and there there is a fence there and you have no idea why that fence is there.
Nobody's using it. and then you remove the fence and then one day you find out that all the cows have died because sheep came from somewhere and ate away the grass or something like that. Right? The point is do not remove something until you understand why it was there in the first place. Right? And it works for everything from traditions to rituals to uh I should point out that not paying attention to Chesterton's fence resulted in 30 million people dying. 30 million people. Yes. the largest man-made disaster in the world. Explain the great Chinese famine of 1959-61. Okay. Mao who believed in communism and central planning and efficiency of central planning wanted to increase the production of grains and to
do that you have to decrease the pests which are eating away the grains. So they started the four pests campaign. Eliminate rats, eliminate flies, eliminate mosquitoes and sparrows. Not the sparrows. What? Just because sparrows are cute, they don't eat grain and they are not reducing the but they're itty bitty eaters. Well, anyway, yes. Turns out that getting rid of the sparrows was a big mistake. The sparrows were the ones who were controlling the locust population. Getting rid of the sparrows resulted in the locust population going up and huge chunks of the grain getting eaten by locusts. And that is one of the contributing factors to 30 million people dying of starvation in China. Okay, I see a reason for
traditions, for rituals, for Chesterton's fence to stand. But how do does this apply to homeopathy and astrology? There better be a strong Chesterton's fence there. Okay, let's look at homeopathy. I totally believe that homeopathy is full. All they're giving you is sugar water. Agreed. And yet there are a large number of people who swear by homeopathy. Also agreed. And it's such a certain fence. Why has it survived for such a long time? Right? That's the question. Here's the explanation. Okay. When people get an illness of some sort, right? There's a fairly high chance that if you give it time, the body is going to fix things itself, right? True. But most modern people don't have the patience to let
that happen. So they run to the doctor a little too early. Part one of the problem. Part two of the problem is that there are enough reasons why modern medicine doctors will give you a medicine whether you need it or not. Right. Part of it is reasons. Well, part of it is because there are unscrupulous doctors out there who want to prescribe expensive medicine to you. Part of it is because there are good doctors who would like to tell you don't do anything but then the patients get unhappy. This is not a good doctor. He didn't give a medicine and he charged me 600 rupees for not doing anything right. So it's just the whole system is rigged in a way
that you go to a doctor you are going to come back with a medicine right okay uh and big pharma right whereas if you go to a homeopath he sits there he listens to you he gives you a prescription which is nothing right it is just basically making you wait 3 weeks and your body cures yourself and then you can claim that homeopathy is awesome right not just that but the placebo effect is also in force right. Yeah. Uh finally and this helps society also in a way that it significantly reduces the number of random antibiotics that are going to get prescribed to people and reduces antibiotic resistance. Right. Yeah. So, so homeopathy should be allowed to stay as
a chesterton's fence because it actually reduces the burden on the medical system and also if not cured by homeopathy somebody is anyways going to convince them you should go to a alopath no not alopath to a doctor to someone who prescribes evidence-based medicine. So yeah I see the chest fence here very smart but what about astrology? I mean we've already proven that astrology is just a corruption of astronomical sciences. There can't be an there can't be a case for Tristan Spence there. Yeah. Well, the case simply is that it has been around for 2,000 years and people swear by it and there are people whose life has been changed by it. So, let me take an example. Okay. Okay. Uh
somebody I know believes in Kundali and there's a person who every 6 months reads the Kundali and tells her what's expected in the next 6 months, year. Okay. And that person told her that you are going to get a really nice software job. Okay. Okay. Now, as a result of that, these are the things that happened. Okay. She started studying really hard for software interviews. Okay. Okay. She started applying to all kinds of jobs. Okay. She did a whole bunch of things that would normally not be considered reasonable or sensible for somebody who was her age and her situation and all of that, right? and she even you know applied uh in a different city. Okay. And she actually
got a job but and that changed her life. Okay. The things that were fixed were the following right? Imposter syndrome fixed because you know the astrologer has said that you are going to get a great software job. you need to work hard on this fixed because you know I mean a lot of time the reason we don't work hard is because we don't know if there is any point to doing this but the point was clear right applying in a different city again it's like you know we're not going to put that much effort for something we're unsure of but if you're sure of it you're willing to put much more effort in right so it kind of
became a self-fulfilling prophecy for her much more than that okay much broadly if you look at astrology What it is doing is that it is reducing your choices. It is getting rid of analysis paralysis. It is getting rid of imposter syndrome. And it is increasing your confidence and ambition. Right. All of these are episodes we've already done on the channel. Go check them out because they will explain this behavior in much more detail. Yeah. And there are many other Chesterton fences. Okay. Let me take very different examples, not just astrology and homeopathy. Sure. Okay.
forest fires like the ones that happen in California. Yeah. So forest fires have been happening since time immemorial, right? What happened in the 1900s is that we suddenly got a whole bunch of technology and a whole bunch of tools and using all of that we were able to control forest fires. Right. True. So for many years we were able to stop forest fires which occur naturally and prevent them from getting too bad. Okay. The result of that is that now when every once in a while a forest fire happens it is so big that it destroys houses. The earlier thing of just letting small forest fires happen and not trying to stop them all the time is
actually the right thing to do. There's research on that. Check out the papers. Right. Interesting. Another example. Okay. Soviet Russia last century newly formed communist nation central planning they came up with a brilliant idea of improving productivity in the country by 20 to 25%. What idea was this? Okay. Now imagine right a normal week is 7 days and there used to be one weekly holiday. Yeah. Okay. They said let's get rid of seven days. Huh? Let a week be 5 days. Okay. Okay. And then after that a week repeats. Okay. Okay. So instead of 7 day week you have 5 day week and then you still get one day off except that each person gets a different day off in the
week. Right? So every day of the week 20% of the people have a holiday and it rotates. Okay. Okay. So you can see that now factories are not closed. Yeah. They're just running continuously. So productivity has gone up. Yeah. Yeah. Has it? Did it? No, it didn't work. Would you like to know why? Uh one when a person gets a holiday their family doesn't have a holiday on the same day right so they would just be sitting at home getting really unhappy the worker morale went down like crazy okay you can't take vacations and so on second is that if factories never shut down right the machines wear and tear increased right the break that was
needed for the machines especially for maintenance and things like All of that went for a toss and then bigger breakdowns started happening right. So and a whole bunch of such problems because of which after some years they gave up on this system and later it was found out that it didn't result in any increase in productivity at all. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean the 7-day work week with uh 1 day of holiday or 2 days of holiday whichever one you go for is intended to give a respite which is necessary to recover and get back to full strength not just for the people but also for the machinery and the systems and everything right a
completely different thing uh which seems like just tradition but uh and makes no sense but works right uh and that is primogenature okay primo Primogenature. What is that? When a king dies, the eldest son or the eldest child is going to become the king in their place. Like a dynasty. Dynasty, right? Primogenature. Go on. The thing is that that seems like a bad idea because you know you should choose on merit. Yeah. I mean that's the whole point of democracy and what not that if you look at history in places where merit was used to decide the next king there was huge problems because what would happen is that as soon as somebody became king then all the
children and whoever else are possibly in line for the throne now they are all fighting each other okay and instead of everybody working together there is Just complete backstabbing going on for 20 years, right? And when the king dies, then just open war breaks out like happened in case of Aurangim, right? It is just terrible for stability. Whereas with dynasty, uh what happens is that every once in a while you get a dumb person be who becomes king. Yeah. and then somebody else who's smart enough manages to sort of become the behindthe-scenes person like in case of Shahajan Nurjahan the whole thing right so that merits another episode we'll probably get him to talk about that a little while later
but what what I'm seeing right now is in in the meritocracy example the uh dispute would be public but in a dynasty example the dispute is settled internally privately and whatn not correct yeah so see In primogenature there is one person who is clearly marked out as this is the one who has the right to be king right and everyone has agreed to that for centuries right tradition. So then if someone comes along and says no no no somebody else should be king that person's statement is much less defensible right and that person has to fight that much harder to convince other people because it's difficult to convince people right whereas if there were no rules then this
rule is as good as another right it's a free-for-all it's a free it's a free-for-all exactly so yeah primogenature is a good example of a chest fence It has its own problems though. But here's what bothers me is that Chesterton's fence is basically telling us to follow traditions blindly. Not really. Okay. The statement says do not get rid of the fence until you know why the fence was there in the first place. Right. So let me explain with the example of primogenature. Right? Your first cut is primogenature is dumb because it is not merit- based. If you try to replace it with a simplistic merit based system, then you run into all those problems.
But if you really understand what problems primogenature was solving and then you come up with a system which solves those problems which creates the correct consensus and then it also gives you the benefit of merit-based then you end up with a better system which took hundreds of years and that is called democracy. Correct? Right. So what you have to do is understand that usually our first cut at getting rid of a tradition is too simplistic. We haven't understood the subtleties and we have to dig deeper. Right? So for example, some religions prevent you from eating certain animals. Right? First cut sounds dumb. Why shouldn't I be able to eat it?
But if you analyze carefully you realize that in those places in those kinds of situations that system used to prevent the spread of parasites and diseases and so on right once you understand that and once you're able to say that well modern antibiotics ensure that this is not needed then you can remove that right only if that is true won't be true in a place where modern antibiotics are not easily available or not easily prescribed, right? A religion which tells you, oh, you have to fast on so and so days again seems dumb. Why should I weaken myself now? There is enough food, right? Yeah. But if you analyze it a little further, you will realize that
giving your body, your digestive system a break once a week is actually a good idea. or giving your body a break from carbohydrates for 24 hours actually burns fat and makes you healthier and things like that, right? And then if you work backward and you figure all of those out, then you are in a much better position to decide whether you should remove this or you need to be careful. If you remove this, you have to replace it with something else and so on. Right? So the thing with Chesterton's fences is that every time we come across such a fence, we have to question why that exists and digging deep into that question will yield better answers on
how to replace that fence with something better. And I see that this also applies in terms of a lot of rituals that we now follow blindly like for example um and we we do a lot of processions. Yeah. Which were essentially started when we were being ruled by the British as a way to congregate under the Ganesh celebrations and the dura puja and things all of the processions that basically happened started as a way to congregate under the British Raj and make plans you know for whatever. But see generally though one thing to keep in mind is that like the uh don't eat certain animals thing it was true in those days it is no longer true now.
Correct. Same is true of probably 70% of vast chastra. Correct. Right. So it is not that all traditions you have to follow. Right. Also there's a bunch of traditions that's a it's fine. I mean if you follow it it's not really a negative right so like doing Ganesh puja what what's the big problem with doing that right so what I would suggest is that you should follow the 973 rule right stick to the 97% of traditions which are not really causing any significant harm minor inconvenience you should accept because you know of the chance that this is a tradition that is you know doing some important work in 3% % of the cases where you can see that there is serious
possible harm there you analyze it well and then fight it and try to get rid of it. Right? If you're wondering why he said 97 and three as specific numbers then we have an episode on that called a cow on a golf course changed my life. Check that out. We'll line it up for you next. Shriant Naven Future IQ.