A’ight. Engaging with the post a bit more than my previous comment (note: haven’t yet read the whole thing, just the first half).
I have some kind of aversive reaction to the claim:
The right way to approach baking is to realize it is not a ritual. Instead, try to understand the principles of how baking works, to understand why an ingredient is in the recipe, and why a particular step is needed
I certainly agree that you’ll gain a lot of benefits if you approach baking this way. But, like, sometimes I just don’t have the time/energy/investment to fully understand a process, and just want a blackbox procedure that mostly works. And, sometimes I try to fudge that procedure and then want to complain about it a bit.
(I think your overall point stands, and in other circumstances I might have been the person arguing that “yeah you really should understand the underlying process here.”)
Put another way: insofar as you’re defining “Ritual” as “blackbox process you don’t really understand”, it’s probably true for most rituals that you’d be better off if you understood the underlying process. The question is how often it’s worth paying the upfront cost. You can’t do it for literally every process you use.
I understood “ritual” here as not just a blackbox process, but a blackbox process which has undergone cultural selection—i.e. metic knowledge. If we “treat baking as a ritual” in that sense, it would mean carefully following some procedure acquired from someone else, on the assumption that some parts are really important and we don’t have a good way to tell which.
I thought “ritual” was used in a rather dismissive way, like “superstition”. In defence of rituals: Cultural evolution is a process that comes up with rituals (like food preparation steps) that actually work. Sometimes for the wrong reason, or they have an important but unacknowledged side-effect.
I highly recommend “The Secret of Our Success” by Joseph Henrich on this topic. It has a story how a complex process of detoxifying manioc was passed down over generations. Apparently if you only cook it you still get chronic poisoning over decades. Ideally you know and understand this. But if not, you better just copy the exact preparation steps from the most healthy and successful community member.
Rituals can be useful even when nobody understands why. For example a community of hunters reading bones like a map to predict their next hunting success. It randomizes the place they are hunting, and prevents them form re-visiting the same spot where they were successful.
Put a little differently, there is a reason why we have Betty Crocker cake mixes and Aunt Jamima or Bisquick pancake mixes for people. It provides a ritual they can blindly follow and get repeatedly good results.
However, it they try deviating from the ritual (the defined recipes on the box) the results will start getting unpredictable with the underlying knowledge. In worst case scenarios (not sure baking gets us there but perhaps) people start thinking the world in that area is just random outcomes or is unpredictable.
A’ight. Engaging with the post a bit more than my previous comment (note: haven’t yet read the whole thing, just the first half).
I have some kind of aversive reaction to the claim:
I certainly agree that you’ll gain a lot of benefits if you approach baking this way. But, like, sometimes I just don’t have the time/energy/investment to fully understand a process, and just want a blackbox procedure that mostly works. And, sometimes I try to fudge that procedure and then want to complain about it a bit.
(I think your overall point stands, and in other circumstances I might have been the person arguing that “yeah you really should understand the underlying process here.”)
Put another way: insofar as you’re defining “Ritual” as “blackbox process you don’t really understand”, it’s probably true for most rituals that you’d be better off if you understood the underlying process. The question is how often it’s worth paying the upfront cost. You can’t do it for literally every process you use.
I understood “ritual” here as not just a blackbox process, but a blackbox process which has undergone cultural selection—i.e. metic knowledge. If we “treat baking as a ritual” in that sense, it would mean carefully following some procedure acquired from someone else, on the assumption that some parts are really important and we don’t have a good way to tell which.
I thought “ritual” was used in a rather dismissive way, like “superstition”. In defence of rituals: Cultural evolution is a process that comes up with rituals (like food preparation steps) that actually work. Sometimes for the wrong reason, or they have an important but unacknowledged side-effect.
I highly recommend “The Secret of Our Success” by Joseph Henrich on this topic. It has a story how a complex process of detoxifying manioc was passed down over generations. Apparently if you only cook it you still get chronic poisoning over decades. Ideally you know and understand this. But if not, you better just copy the exact preparation steps from the most healthy and successful community member.
Rituals can be useful even when nobody understands why. For example a community of hunters reading bones like a map to predict their next hunting success. It randomizes the place they are hunting, and prevents them form re-visiting the same spot where they were successful.
Put a little differently, there is a reason why we have Betty Crocker cake mixes and Aunt Jamima or Bisquick pancake mixes for people. It provides a ritual they can blindly follow and get repeatedly good results.
However, it they try deviating from the ritual (the defined recipes on the box) the results will start getting unpredictable with the underlying knowledge. In worst case scenarios (not sure baking gets us there but perhaps) people start thinking the world in that area is just random outcomes or is unpredictable.