I would think most peoples ideal is to live in healthy natural commmunities with a diverse age range to get wisdom and tradition from the old and energy and new ideas from the young.
For wisdom, there is books. Old people does not equal wisdom. Quite the opposite sometime. I feel like we give too much credit to old people and what they have to say.
The tricky part is distinguishing between things that are successful and things that just haven't obviously failed. Tradition might not always be the best of all possible guides here, as it tends to be a collection of things whose primary commendation is that they didn't immediately cause a society to fail.
> [tradition] tends to be a collection of things whose primary commendation is that they didn't immediately cause a society to fail.
Not at all. Traditions become traditions over long periods of time. Thus, they tend to be collections of things that haven't caused a societal failure in the last several hundred years, which is a much better record than not causing immediate failure.
I have a friend who rarely uses crosswalks. He tends to walk into traffic while shouting "Plot armor!". He has yet to be run over, so this has an excellent track record. Yet I suspect it just might be other than the greatest of all possible ideas, despite the lack of demonstrated failures.
(Yes, this is absurd. Yes, I've told him this is clearly a bad idea. Yes, it's actually true.)
Which is to say one should be cautious of survivorship biases and the role of context. Judging traditions as successful based on a limited context where they haven't obviously failed both ignores the situation upon which they may depend and other scenarios where precisely those might have failed. Like the other people who have tried what my friend has and been rendered into chunky salsa for it.
Traditions provide community cohesion. They're an expression of shared values that create emotional bonds so your neighbours don't cheat you and vice versa. They are highly adaptive, because if they weren't, they wouldn't appear in literally every human civilisation, ever.
So yes, traditions are typically worthwhile, just not necessarily for their apparent or stated purposes.
The community cohesion aspect is very well described in this article of Nicholas Taleb "How to be Rational about Rationality", especially with regards to the Jewish communities:
... Jews have close to five hundred different dietary interdicts. They may seem irrational
to an observer who sees purpose in things and defines rationality in terms of what he can
explain. ...
But it remains that whatever the purpose, the Kashrut survived approximately three millennia not
because of its “rationality” but because the populations that followed it survived. It
most certainly brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. Simply it aided
those that survived because it is a convex heuristic. Such group cohesion might be also
responsible for trust in commercial transactions with remote members of the community.
