[_iyig]

>Another flaw of our thinking is conservatism — an insufficient ability to change our common views and beliefs with the new data, new evidence. This is understandable — changing basis views leads to a reconsideration of all related knowledge. An enormous amount of rebuilding is required. Our biological brains just can’t do that in a short time, also it’s much harder with age. Because of this, we give much more weight to old knowledge rather than new evidence, thus making a conservatism bias.

Painting conservatism as purely a human flaw is poor thinking in itself. The positive side of conservative thinking was neatly summarized by G.K. Chesterton: "Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place."

There may be things you don't know, or which have never been known, which the conservative solution to a problem addresses either by accident or design. For examples, see traditional methods of food preparation. Indigenous peoples in South America have passed down numerous traditional recipes for the cassava plant. Every recipe involves a process to remove cyanogenic glycosides [0], which are present in all parts of the cassava plant and lethal if ingested. These recipes were developed without any modern understanding of chemistry or toxicology. Deviation from the old recipes without this knowledge, e.g. to apply a new time-saving cooking technique, could have disastrous consequences. Old knowledge often runs deep.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/jun/22/cassava...