Can you give a reason though? I guess a child haven't asked you an endless chain of whys yet. By the end of which you can't say 'why' just that 'that's how it is', you've reached the limit of knowledge.
Of course when available knowledge is preferable.
I guess you are unfamiliar with iatrogenics. A good example is the case of Semmelweis, who discovered that pregnant women were dying at higher rates IN THE HOSPOTAL compared to births at home.
The reason wasn't known before. But turned out the doctors didn't wash their hands between autopsy and delivering babies.
Oops!
Knowledge comes from practice. Humans always did things first before they gained the knowledge. Think of apprenticeship and the natural sciences for example.
What I have a big issue with is today's notion that application follows knowledge. A top down approach where academia is isolated from the feedback of the real world. What the hell do I mean by that?
A business or an artist goes bust if they do not perform well, they have direct risks attached to their work. While we can produce 'knowledge' (institutional knowledge), new (made up) economic theories, new (un-replicable) psychological explanations and so on, without any apparent problem. The natural selective feedback is missing. Academia is gamified, most researchers know they could be doing more useful research, yet their grants and prospects of publications don't let them.
So when I hear reason and understanding casually thrown around, I smell scientism (the marketing of science, science bullshit if you will) and not actual science. Because no peer review will be able to overrule what time has proven in the real world. And traditions are such things that endured. Usually someone realizes and writes another paper, disproving the previous one, advancing science.
Don't get me wrong, there are and were many unambiguously bad traditions by modern standards, and I'm sure there will be more. But we, the people are the evolutionary filter of traditions. We decide which ones are the fit ones, which ones of the ones we inherited will we pass down and which to banish into history.
Reasons are a human invention to help make sense of the world. If you want to base everything on logical grounds you will run into two things mainly:
Limits of knowledge. Knowledge is always incomplete, as more of it opens up more questions. There are things you intuitively know are good, but can't prove why they are.
Systemic limits of logical reasoning. A sufficiently powerful and consistent formal system (such as formal logic) is incomplete, it cannot prove its own correctness. (Gödel's incompleteness theorems)
The effect of a tradition is usually not apparent. They aren't created consiously or in a goal oriented way.
They usually emerge naturally as a social behavior.
There are also a lot of vestigial traditions that once served an important purpose. (Eg dowry)
What tradition are you talking about?
For example funeral rites help prevent disease from corpses. Without knowing anything about germs.
Or the taboo of incest can avoid genetic defects, without knowing anything about genes.
Traditions formed for a reason. And that reason is way more ancient and more natural than modern logic. It is simply survival.
The people with traditions that helped them survived more often.
I can come up with worse reasons than tradition.
Like, to satisfy a sadistic urge or to cause suffering.
Traditions can and often do serve some purpose even if we don't see them in such a light.
Just as evolutionary traits, only beneficial ones tend to survive the test of time. (Not necessarily beneficial to the individual, but the group)
And I thought running with scissors was bad, but flying?
Any mention of data collection in the ToS?
Do we have the tech to revive people or unbomb something? I believe military actions are very hard to reverse if we are talking beyond the administrative.
Military actions, release of information, establishing precedent of executive power etc.
These are just some categories, there are many fundamentally irreversible actions.
"Because I can"