Search for the phrase "And then there’s manioc. This is a tuber native to the Americas." Read the extended block quote afterwards and the first few paragraphs after the block quote. If anything, Chesterton's Fence is insufficient--if a certain practice works, it sometimes works for reasons that even the practitioners can't explain.
Furthermore, I can point to numerous examples of catastrophic failure directly caused by insufficient status quo bias, like tearing apart cities because it's the 20th century and we need to build freeways straight through the middle of them, or communism. So it's a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.
All those anecdotes are cute, but has there been any attempt at systematically determining whether the net result of all instances of a particular culture’s practices which are justified by “do it this way because it has always been done this way”? This seems difficult to analyze, but it’s critical to the validity of any argument that invokes these cute anecdotes. Isn’t it plausible that generations of repressing people’s curiosity in experimenting with food preparation had a net negative effect?
Interesting point. I think you could characterize "being conquered by the Portuguese in the first place" as a negative outcome, so there's a plausible argument that the Portuguese were more willing to embrace innovation, which is how they gained the ability to conquer the Tukanoans in the first place.
On the other hand, if you dig into the history of colonization, indigenous cultures had a massive home field advantage, and it was common for Western colonies to utterly fail, either starving to death in the same lands that indigenous people were able to survive in or in some cases, completely defecting from their original culture and joining indigenous populations.
That having been said, I also think you're underestimating the degree to which it's easy to verify the value of legacy practices.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Search for the phrase "And then there’s manioc. This is a tuber native to the Americas." Read the extended block quote afterwards and the first few paragraphs after the block quote. If anything, Chesterton's Fence is insufficient--if a certain practice works, it sometimes works for reasons that even the practitioners can't explain.
Furthermore, I can point to numerous examples of catastrophic failure directly caused by insufficient status quo bias, like tearing apart cities because it's the 20th century and we need to build freeways straight through the middle of them, or communism. So it's a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.