[empath75]

There is a fairly compelling argument that divination in the ancient world was not a useless waste of time, as is commonly assumed, but that having either a process or a person that can make essentially random choices for them allowed people to make hard, consequential decisions where they might otherwise be paralyzed, especially when the penalty for not acting was worse than making a mistake.

[tekkk]

Never thought of that. Probably a bit too generous given that it could be just as well waste of time and resources, nevermind the bias of the voodoo doctor. Most of it was just weirdly provided therapy I suppose to relieve stress.

But it is funny that humans put a great lot of weight on social contracts and being given explicit orders, maybe even publicly, must help pursuing action instead of rumination. Especially in a world where things seemed to happen randomly anyway.

[schiffern]

"Evolution doesn't optimize for correctness, it optimizes for minimum error cost."

It's a subtle but important distinction.

[generativenoise]

That is such a good line. Another important note is the time horizon of that error function is often quite short.

[twoodfin]

Fascinating. I suppose it also encourages developing adaptable strategies that accommodate imperfect information, vs. succumbing to wishful thinking or other forms of cognitive bias.

[jeffparsons]

Additionally, what has been the correct choice five years in a row might be catastrophically wrong in the sixth year. We need some randomness injected into our behaviour so that some people are always making "suboptimal" choices, to stop everyone from crowding into one local maximum and then getting swept away when the rare but inevitable flood comes along.

[Bjartr]

IIRC, the value of randomness went even further than that. I think it was in the allocation of land for rice paddies. I-ching was used to decide if any given farmer's land was to be used that year or something like that. The benefit wasn't divination selecting better land, but by way of random selection, gave an impersonal excuse to leave fields unplanted some years, which is beneficial in the long term to overall yield.

[OisinMoran]

I've also read that a source of randomness like that could help prevent things like over-extracting some land