My name is Jonathan Ray and I run the Las Vegas rat meetup. I used to study ML in grad school and then worked in tech but I quit that to be a pro gambler.
Some of the animals that the Torah declared unkosher were later found to be poisonous or prone to carry pathogens. Mistaken reasoning leading to a correct conclusion is not necessarily that unlikely, and I don't think it'd be correct to dismiss a conclusion just because the original reasoning process that led to it was incorrect. Being a commonly held belief is generally enough salience to make something worth investigating. The evidence in favor of a tradition is often not only the mistaken supernaturalist justification of it, but also thousands of years of a human tribe flourishing while following it (often overfitting, but still having a vastly better ratio of signal to noise in their traditions than in the unconstrained search space)
Some of the animals that the Torah declared unkosher were later found to be poisonous or prone to carry pathogens. Mistaken reasoning leading to a correct conclusion is not necessarily that unlikely, and I don't think it'd be correct to dismiss a conclusion just because the original reasoning process that led to it was incorrect. Being a commonly held belief is generally enough salience to make something worth investigating. The evidence in favor of a tradition is often not only the mistaken supernaturalist justification of it, but also thousands of years of a human tribe flourishing while following it (often overfitting, but still having a vastly better ratio of signal to noise in their traditions than in the unconstrained search space)