Prioritizing your objectives is better than grazing past them accidentally
A silly argument:
The goal of this activity/institution is to achieve X. It doesn’t really achieve X, but it does achieve Y, which is even better!
If achieving Y is more important, why on earth would you go about that by trying and failing to achieve X? You should directly focus on Y instead.
School allegedly teaches geometry/history/etc. Sometimes people complain that these skills aren’t useful, or that people forget everything anyway. People respond by saying it teaches socialization or learning how to learn or something.
If the purpose of school is socialization, why not have 8 hours of recess? Why not have mixed classes instead of keeping them in age-segregated cohorts? Instead of discouraging kids from disruptively talking during class, why not let them talk as much as they want?
If the purpose of school is to teach people to learn how to learn, why not let them play video games all day? Video games require you to learn skills, so you’re still (ostensibly) learning how to learn. And I predict that people can learn a higher volume of skills by playing video games than by studying.
(For the record, I am skeptical that “learning how to learn” is a thing. Empirical research on this is complicated and shows mixed results.)
You should warm up before lifting weights. A lot of people warm up by doing random weird stuff. The best way to warm up for an exercise is to do that same exercise with lighter weights, not to do some other thing. You want to warm up the muscles you’ll be using, in the range of motion they’ll be moving through. The best way to do that is to actually do the exercise, but with light enough weight that you won’t strain yourself.
Learning Latin is good because it helps you learn English vocabulary/roots – Why not just memorize English roots then?
Playing chess makes you smarter – Well, presumably you want to be smarter so you can perform better at activity X (among other things), so it would be better to practice activity X directly because then you’d accomplish two things simultaneously, by getting smarter and getting better at X. (Plus, playing chess doesn’t make you smarter, but that’s beside the point.)
Religion is good because it gives people a sense of community – Why not just make a community that’s grounded in reality? Although to be fair, attempts to create secular communities with religion-y vibes have mostly failed.
You should diet instead of taking Ozempic because dieting teaches you dedication – What do you want dedication for? Whatever that thing is, build your dedication by doing that thing, instead of by doing the thing that no longer requires dedication. You might as well argue that people should ditch the printing press and transcribe books manually, or ditch their heater and cut firewood by hand, because those things teach dedication just as well as dieting does.