A priori best practices

Corey Ladas states:

There are no a priori best practices.

There are only the practices you are using now.

And practices that are better than the ones you are using now.

Eh, eh, great post in a mix of humbleness, experience and fun. In my opinion the way to tackle this is from an engineering perspective: engineers don't work based on a priori intuition, but over proven practices (our business is not mature enough to call them best, just proven). As architects, we have to choose, whenever possible, from a body of well known proven practices. Whenever we can't find an appropriate one, we have to manage the higher risk of building upon an unproven practice, and hope that this practice is proven.