Tradition
The political term for the process of accumulation of information, which obeys the laws of evolution by natural selection as described by the theory of liberalism.Under the same name, we also call the informational content of that process its tradition at some current moment. So it is somewhat analogous to memory.
About the essential role played by tradition in the existence and evolution of an extended order, read the fine book, The Fatal Conceit. The Errors of Socialism by Friedrich A. Hayek, 1988.
At many places in the TUNES project, including this glossary, "traditional" system design is being harshly criticized. Again (see expediency), this does not mean that all traditions are bad, which is pure nonsense, for any order in a dynamical system is based on traditions, so no traditions just means no information.
This means that traditions do evolve and compete, and while tradition, as a process, is undiscussable, tradition, as the current contents of the process, is under the permanent question of competing traditions as well as reason. That is, we must refuse the kind of conservatism that tends to conserve the unadapted contents of some traditions against reason, but at the same time, we mustn't fall in the opposite mistake of outrageous rationalism.
So in the TUNES project, at the same time as we do criticize flaws in currently traditional system design, we are glad to accept all the rest of the wondrous tradition of computing, not to talk about all the traditions that made computing possible from ancient times to nowadays.
That is, we do participate the best we can in this process of natural selection, eliminating from tradition the flaws we detected and shout about, and conserving the huge amount of good in it that we do not even talk about, taking it for granted until demonstrated otherwise.
Sadly, most people tend to either blindly accept or blindly reject equally all traditions, which makes them conservative or revolutionary. Too few people are aware of the role of tradition, because most people, having learned nothing from the history and sub-histories of mankind, view the world as essentially static.
Again, this is the fight for dynamism against statism.
This page is linked from: Blind Men and the Elephant Communism Conservatism Expediency Inheritance Liberalism Monopoly No-Kernel Open Orthogonal Persistence Rationalism Revolutionary