[jakobegger]

> How could people tell that it was from that food? And how do they go, yeah, we just forgot to do X

There's no need for people to understand what is going on. People have a tendency to try random stuff without any reason. The folks who accidentally do the right thing survive, while the others die.

And it's also important to note that probably not a single person came up with the whole procedure. People might use a recipe that worked for a similar plant, and adapt it. A lot of people probably died or became ill. They likely never realized their mistake. It's just that over the years the people who did it right had an evolutionary advantage and survived, and now we wonder how they figured it out, when it was all just an accident.

[pbhjpbhj]

Not only trying random stuff but being subject to random events -- you have to flee camp, you come back a couple of days later to find your porridge has 'grown', you leave it by the fire, get distracted, come back later and you've got some leaven 'bread'.

You carry milk in a gourd, the end of the journey and it's separated, you try to make the same again but go too far end up with butter ...

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> There's no need for people to understand what is going on. People have a tendency to try random stuff without any reason.

You're not giving people very much credit. The things they try may seem random to an outside observer, but they made sense to the person trying them. They had some mental model of how it works, and applied that model. Sometimes even a very inaccurate model is good enough.

[perl4ever]

Yeah, but it's an important point that taking risks without a model can lead to solutions that would not be found otherwise. Suppose there are ten options for survival and 100 people who are under threat. If they try to develop a theory and all fail, and do not act without hope of success, then they all die. If they develop a theory and follow it, and it is wrong, then they all die. But if at least one option is correct, and they simply try them at random, disagreeing with each other, then about ten people will survive and pass on their genes and/or knowledge.

People are not 100% rational, and being 100% rational is not evolutionarily optimal.

[jakobegger]

I think you are giving people too much credit. I feel like most of the time the mental model only comes after the fact, in an attemp to rationalize whatever ridiculous things people do.

Look at people who flock to homeopathy, or those who buy "water vitalisation" devices, or other ridiculous gimmicks. There's no rational reason why people would come up with ridiculous things like that. Unless you look at it from an evolutionary perspective. These ridiculous ideas are just people randomly exploring the search space, and natural selection picks the ones who got something right.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> Look at people who flock to homeopathy, or those who buy "water vitalisation" devices, or other ridiculous gimmicks. There's no rational reason why people would come up with ridiculous things like that.

What are you talking about? Those things absolutely have a model behind them. It's an incredibly bad model that doesn't stand up to any serious scrutiny, but it is a model none the less.

> These ridiculous ideas are just people randomly exploring the search space, and natural selection picks the ones who got something right.

I think you might be giving the word "model" too much weight. It doesn't have to be a mathematical proof or anything. "God won't let me die because I'm too pretty" is a model.