[leto_ii]

> What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills

This is unconvincing. In most cultures, most of the time, people manage to pass down building skills without destroying everything they've built before.

[LunaSea]

In Japan there was a tradition of rebuilding every 20 years for the exact reason of transmitting building methods to the next generation.

[mutatio]

Do you have a source for that? Everything I can find on Japanese 20-year re-building cadence is due to religion.

I'm struggling to see any sense in the 20-year cadence cliff-edge for typical knowledge transfer.

[animal_spirits]

Another comment here referenced the Ise Grand Shrine [0], so that is what I bet the OP is referring to. I pose this, religion isn't only about spiritual beliefs, it encompasses rituals, culture, and history. Knowledge transfer is a major part of continuing a religious culture, whether it be through studying of scripts or preaching. So, just because it is religious based doesn't exclude it from also being about transferring of knowledge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine

[mutatio]

The link provided shows that it is due to the religious belief of rebirth, the tradesmen themselves practice their skills continually, so the theory still doesn't map for me. Moreso if we apply Occam's razor: there's no evidence the Japanese practice is for skill transfer yet it's being used to promote that premise for something else.

[beaconstudios]

Religion is just a specific way of encoding useful lessons into oral/written tradition. So it could well be that keeping the trade alive was the original reason but it became a religious doctrine so as not to be violated.

[leto_ii]

This is a seemingly compelling explanation, but I see no reason why it would actually be true.

It seems to me like it treats people as lacking the degree of intelligence and foresight needed to figure out that it's a good idea to pass building techniques along. As if back in the day people were only capable of understanding things if they were framed in a religious or supernatural way.

I just don't think people a couple of thousand years ago were so cognitively different from us. Not to mention that there's still overwhelming evidence of knowledge being passed down for non-religious purposes throughout history.

[beaconstudios]

> It seems to me like it treats people as lacking the degree of intelligence and foresight needed to figure out that it's a good idea to pass building techniques along. As if back in the day people were only capable of understanding things if they were framed in a religious or supernatural way.

I think this speaks to your own prejudice against religion based on how Christianity is treated in the US. Religion isn't predominantly about supernaturality, it's about what works. Supernatural explanations of why it works almost don't matter, if it works.

Let me give an example. Christian morality seems to be to largely be about stabilising society. "Turn the other cheek" prevents cycles of revenge, for example. Does it matter if that's the case because you understand cycles of revenge and how they lead to more harm than the original offence, or because your priest told you that's the right thing to do? It would be ideal if everyone just understood these precepts from logic, but I don't see any structures for disseminating logical behaviour to the broad masses today either.

People thousands of years ago are the same people as us. I see plenty of truth in religion and I see plenty of falsehood in modern, supposedly "rational" modalities. I don't think the balance of how clear-thinking we are has changed at all.

[leto_ii]

I actually didn't mean to be dismissive of religion. It's just that in general I don't think you need religious or any other indirect justifications for the pretty straight-forward idea that it's good to pass building techniques along.

> Christian morality seems to be to largely be about stabilising society. "Turn the other cheek" prevents cycles of revenge, for example.

Again, I think you might be mistaking the effect for the cause. While it may be true that applying the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount might lead to social stability, I don't think that's what Jesus intended exactly. I don't think he was doing social engineering, rather that he was really trying to convey his ideas of what a right and moral life would be. The fact that leading good lives as individuals leads to better societies is a fortunate corollary, not the main purpose.

Incidentally, if you think about it honestly, it's quite clear that Christianity didn't actually lead to particularly nice societies, once it became the politically dominant religion.

For the record I also need to mention I'm not American and was raised Christian (although I don't consider myself one anymore).

[mutatio]

I could see the opposite of that possibly arising, e.g. doing something irrational like creating a training event every 2 decades, due to belief - but the inverse makes no sense to me, what's the advantage to a society to renewing skills at 20 year cliff-edges vs. continual development? Makes less sense still in the context of Japanese kingdoms, the kingdom choosing to continually propagate skills would win.

[beaconstudios]

Because skills aren't always generalisable. For the Ido shine, for example, there's a specific building skillset they use for building temples. New temples aren't built often enough to keep those skills sharp.

> training

Training doesn't impart skills unless the theoretical knowledge is actually used. What better way to use it than to build a temple?