Respect for elders in many societies might be a kind of compensation for our short-term memory. The word senate comes from senatus, “aged” in Latin; sheikh in Arabic means both a member of the ruling elite and “elder.” Elders are repositories of complicated inductive learning that includes information about rare events. Elders can scare us with stories—which is why we become overexcited when we think of a specific Black Swan. I was excited to find out that this also holds true in the animal kingdom: a paper in Science showed that elephant matriarchs play the role of superadvisers on rare events.
Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 78). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Respect for elders compensates for our short-term memory. Nice idea. Traditions (which are societies habits [btw., connect it to chyba R: Hooked by Nir Eyal where he said that habits are a way for your mind to save energy]) do that in general.
This shows the wisdom of traditions, books that have been around for long (like the bible), customs, elders, etc. Our minds are too stupid to grasp them rationally and therefore we assume that these things don't make sense. But we cannot throw them out!
Fuck these topics (and those other above) interest me so much. How can you call it? It's like the combination of psychology, economy, history, sociology, philosophy, logic. How do you call it? I would love to study it.
How to handle complex (seemingly random) information if we shouldn't compress it?
Splitting it up into smaller parts? You can then test them more quickly. Also, smaller parts have less Black Swans, because you're simplifying less. So you can get an understanding of a complex thing by splitting it into less complex parts which you can understand and then combine them to understand the whole. It also relates to knowing the basics. Understanding the building blocks of the subject will make you less liable to oversimplification because you'll already have true parts of it. This also speaks to first principles thinking as a tool to splitting and getting to the truth.
Experimentation?
Using computers?
Finding answers from others, preferably elders or old books, because they're the repositories of complicated inductive learning which passed the test of time.
Giving it time—"procrastinating" on reaching conclusions—saying "I don't know" until it plays itself out or until you reach greater understanding by following the previous steps or until the unconscious connects the dots (link to time of slack and better decision making)