Seriously? There are as many interpretations of the Bible as there are of the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movie. It may be a byword for many things, but consistency is not one of them.
I believe it was Pope Benedict XIV when he re-justifed why the RCC doesn’t have female priests that used the argument that they’ve always done it that way.
Even a broken clock is correct twice a day. In your above post you mentioned “if” there is additional evidence. The appeal to tradition is still a fallicy it just doesn’t invalidate other evidence.
You have not provided any cites or evidence to the contrary.
Cites? I provided one, and you provided another - both of which demonstrate my point. That makes two.
Few arguments are valid without evidence to back them up - it does not follow that all arguments that require evidence for validity are therefore otherwise fallacies. 
Nothing you have provided demonstrated that the appeal to tradition was the reason for the claim to be true. I am growing tired of having that inconvenient reality ignored. Without a cite supporting that claim I will let you win the uhuhh argument.
Have a grand day.
Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as…
I think when the stakes are so high, of course people will go with “tried and true”. That is just plain good sense.
But most things don’t have life and death consequences.
Really, I think it comes down to laziness and sentimentality. No one is seriously afraid that gay marriage is going to harm them personally. But many folks are afraid that it will involve having to change their mindsets and giving up their romantic, idealistic notions.
Traditions are a problem when their only justification is traditionalism.
People usually misinterpret what a logical fallacy means. A logical fallacy simply means that the use of such a device does not prove your point true. The observe (that the use of a logical fallacy disproves your point) is not correct.
“We’ve always done it that way” doesn’t mean that it the end of the argument, drop mike. There is certainly the possibility that we could do it better. But the fact that we have done something a certain way is persuasive evidence that it has worked at least in a serviceable way in the past and continues to work somewhat well today. Presumably, people over the years have thought of different ways to do it but came back to the traditional way for some reason. It can be presumed that it is the best way we know how to do it.
That’s not to say that a tradition is set in stone; perhaps there is a better way But the burden is on the proponent of changing what we’ve always done to show at the outset that the new proposition will at least work as well as the old one, and be without unintended consequences. A long history of doing something should count as a strong factor in retaining that policy.
Thank you for wording that better than I did. The fact that an appeal to tradition proves true due to external evidence does not indicate that appeal to tradition had any role in proving the point.
Which relates to the OP’s original question:
Outside of religion and mythology an appeal to tradition is always a logical fallacy and it only not a fallacy in the case of religion and mythology because we are being polite 
I think a person’s view of “tradition” is related to their assessments of the present state of society, as well as that of the societies of our immediate ancestors (e.g. American history from 1900 to the present) and closely tied to one of the fundamental differences between political conservatives and liberals.
Conservatives are generally happy with the status quo, and if anything, believe that things were better in the past. They’d like things to remain the same, or revert to how things were at an earlier time for which they can cite evidence of things being better. They are wary of new, heretofore untested changes in societal or government structure because they worry these will have negative effects, and why risk messing up a system that is generally working quite well already?
Liberals are generally unhappy with the current state of society, or some aspect of it, and in their view even an untested, unproven change is obviously better than allowing the unacceptable flaws in the current system to continue any longer.
If you are happy with today’s society and the societies of our immediate ancestors, then “tradition” is a pretty strong argument by itself for continuing to do something, because tradition is by definition the aggregate of all the practices and customs that got us to (what you view as) the good place we’re in today.
On the other hand, if you think today’s society is unjust, immoral, cruel, discriminatory, or whatever, then an appeal to “tradition” makes exactly the opposite argument, because you might view tradition as the aggregate of all the negative and even harmful behaviors that led to the poor state of affairs today.
For example, if you’re a happily married upper-middle-class white lawyer with a nice house in the suburbs, two cars, 3 kids and a boat, then tradition has worked out pretty well for you and tradition alone is a pretty good argument for keeping things the way they are. On the other hand, if you’re an unemployed gay black man in the Bronx who just got out of serving a 10-year sentence prison for marijuana possession and can’t get a job because (thanks to a defective public education and prison system) you have no skills anyone wants to pay for, you probably have a pretty dim view of the past 200 years of “tradition” that built the society you’re living in.
Why do chain restaurants dominate the restaurant business? Because people like to go with the tried, true, and familiar even in something as trivial as what to have for lunch.
The most famous articulation of this principle is Chesterton’s fence. Say you are travelling down a road and a gate is barring your way. You don’t see the purpose of the fence and want to tear it down. Chesterton said that since gates don’t appear spontaneously, the gate obviously has some purpose. First you need to understand the purpose of the gate before you know whether it should be torn down.
It is an adolescent impulse to assume the only reason to what to preserve something is a character flaw.
And I can promise you, Chesterton’s fence did not exist on a BLM access easement, they are destroyed all the time despite “tradition.”
But it is a false analogy, typically “tradition” is invoked despite someone knowing the reason behind a “tradition” E.G. the confederate flag was incorporated into Mississippi’s flag in the 1950’s due to the brown vs board of education decision. It was a character flaw of the legislature at the time to commit such an overt racist act. It is a character flaw of the people and legislature of the state whom want to preserve that racist “tradition” today. It is an attribution error to assume it is always without cause that people want to abandon some traditions.
That’s really the crux of the matter.
Traditions are only as good as the performance of that tradition. For example, the traditional way to cook a turkey is roughly 20 minutes per lb at 350 degrees F. That’ll get you a fully cooked bird every Thanksgiving, it won’t make anyone sick, and it’s not likely to be burned. So if you go “traditional”, you’ll get an adequate bird every time.
However, technological advances like leave-in probe thermometers let you do less traditional things like cooking the bird for 30 minutes at 500, then dropping the temp to 350 and cooking until the internal temp (as measured by the probe) is 150 degrees. It’s not the “traditional” way to cook the bird, but it produces a superior result.
If someone argues that turkeys should be cooked the "traditional’ way for no other reason than because it’s traditional, then it’s idiotic.
If they argue that they should be cooked that way because their oven only goes to 350, or because they don’t have a probe thermometer, etc… then that’s a different story.
Unfortunately, most appeals to tradition are more along the first example- without any basis in performance or fact.
This often gets confused with a healthy degree of natural conservatism that opines that one should stick with the traditional until something comes along that is proven to be better. If someone came along and told me that I should sous-vide a turkey in a garbage bag at 150 degrees in my bathtub, I’d be extremely skeptical, because I know that the traditional way, and the probe-thermometer way already work. Maybe Hefty sous-vide is the way to go, but I’d want to see more proof before I threaten my family with it.
(says the guy who actually owns a sous-vide circulator)
Hmmm… given my tiny Asian oven (and I’m lucky that I even have an oven), I might perform this experiment in my bathtub before next Thanksgiving. I have a small Sansaire immersion circulator, and if it can keep heating the water faster than it cools, I don’t imagine there would be danger.
Sorry for threadjacking.
And that’s already an example of a recently-changed tradition (for some values of tradition, and some values of recently-changed). How long have the tools to cook in that oh-so-exact fashion been around?
I don’t doubt that there was probably some traditional rule-of-thumb that people used before modern ovens or weighing, and that the idea of “X minutes per lb” was probably scandalous in its time.
But that kind of bears out our points- tradition is, for lack of a better description, a widely celebrated and accepted way of doing things. Now there’s nothing particularly sacred about most of them (even if people think there are), and they’re just a reflection of the status-quo, and a sort of living reminder of the value of being conservative (in the sense of not all change is good, change for its own sake is usually not a great idea, and that if things work, why fiddle with them).
But too many people take that to mean that it’s holy writ or something. I’m reminded of the foreword of a cookbook I own (can’t recall which one) where the author mentions his wife cooking a ham, and that step 1 of cooking it was to cut off the end. The author wondered why, and his wife said “Because that’s how my mom taught me.” So the next time he saw his MIL, he asked her. She said “Because that’s how my mother taught me.” Eventually he ran across his GMIL, and asked her. Her answer was “Because that’s how I could make it fit in my pan.”.
So generations of women in that family followed tradition blindly, cutting off the end of the ham as part of a recipe, even though there was no culinary reason other than the grandmother didn’t have a pan large enough for a typical ham.
That’s an example of how tradition can be a bad thing. On the other hand, traditions, especially more non-action-oriented ones (i.e. not cooking, building, etc…) provide a vital link to the past, and initiate new members into communities, etc… Military units and similar organizations have traditional practices for these very reasons- so that new recruits and current members will all have that link to the past, a shared set of values and expectations, and a sense of community and belonging to something larger than themselves, which is vitally important when it comes to organizations meant to put themselves in harm’s way. That’s why they played bagpipes at Wenjian Liu’s and Rafael Ramos’ funerals in NY, for example. Neither of them was remotely Scottish or Irish, but they were NYPD police officers, and that’s what they do at funerals.
I quite like Sir William Blackstone’s attitude to the traditions that envelope the British constitution and English common law:
“We inherit an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless. The interior apartments, now converted into rooms of convenience, are cheerful and commodious, though their approaches are winding and difficult.”
In the hope of fighting ignorance, the state flag of Mississippi has been unchanged for over 100 years. It was adopted in 1894, a time when there were no active chapters of the KKK in the US and the inclusion of the Confederate battle flag in its design was almost certainly done out of respect for those who served and/or died in the war, as opposed to any racial prejudice concerns. At the time, there were many surviving family members of those killed, as well as some veterans who survived. Remember, the majority of these had never been slaveowners and worked very hard and long every day just to have a roof over their heads and food on the table. Tradition? Yes. Heritage? Yes. Bigotry and prejudice? Certainly not. That would come later.
By now, I’d assume most of yall might figure that I would be against changing Mississippi’s state flag. You would be wrong. When I moved here, I hated it, and still do. I know state offices that have the US flag, but not the state flag for this very reason. The Govener came out and, citing a referendum from 2001where the citizens voted in favor of keeping the design, saying “The will of the people must be followed”. I suspect he will come to regret those words come November, when he is up for re-election. The flag no longer represents the people, it should be changed.
I know it goes against the prejudices of many who read these boards, but Mississippi is not a hotbed of bigotry and hatred. Sure, in the urban centers where there is competition for jobs and tax monies, there is friction between various groups, and there is often differences in skin color can be seen in those groups. But you take away those pressures, go out to the rural areas, and I think most would be surprised. It is noticeably friendlier to those of color than, say, rural Texas, Alabama, or Tennessee. Mississipians really seem to be putting the race issue behind them and move forward. There seems to be forces, both from the left and the right, that would like to keep that from happening, though. Tradition, I guess.
You are correct on one part, I was thinking of Georgia.
I do not agree that celebrating those who fought a war, which was primarily to ensure slavery was kept legal, is a pure act.
Note that Anti-miscegenation that had to be overturned by SCOTUS, Riots from integration of schools, service stations refusal to offer restrooms, the mess around the Sovereignty Commission files show the history of Mississippi. Add in recent ‘welfare crazy checks’, de facto segregation etc…
Overt racism, subtle racism, and institutional racism are very much alive and well in Mississippi.
All make the claim that “tradition” and being proud that your ancestor fought to keep human beings as property makes the 2001 vote look like it was, an overt, racist act.