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My favorite retort to those who blame the post-WWII tech boom on war: if that's true why wasn't WWI the cause of a similar boom? And why weren't the Aztec or th

by api 11y ago

My favorite retort to those who blame the post-WWII tech boom on war: if that's true why wasn't WWI the cause of a similar boom? And why weren't the Aztec or the Mongols much more advanced? War can certainly accelerate and mobilize what's already there but I find the argument that it creates unconvincing.

gbog 11y ago
> was WWI You mean "wasn't" ?
- api 11y ago
  Yes, fixed. Mobile is the foot rub.
nkozyra 11y ago
I'd say the Mongols and Aztecs were more advanced after their conquests than before. Expecting the radio or flight to have been invented just because there were many centuries of conflict belies the incremental nature of innovation. And WWI certainly drove innovation; I think this always manifests most in military facets, obviously and tends to cascade into commercial sectors more slowly. Not much time separated WWI and WWII and a great deal of it was mired in the largest modern economic depression. I don't support any of this, but it's literally competing with a gun to your head.
- gbog 11y ago
  > Mongols more advanced after their conquests than before Maybe, but the point is that Mongols, for some reason (maybe geography and weather?), did never stop being fighters. They never "settled down" to grow wealth, which is a very long process with many parameters (cities, knowledge stores, trustable and transmissible commercial bonds, etc.) So they are very good warriors, and have been very successful in their conquest, but compared to their Chinese neighbours (which are not the prototype of the aggressive people, to understate it a bit), they are just much smaller, and grew much less wealth.
- mcv 11y ago
  The Mongols were definitely more advanced after their conquests, but so was everybody else, simply because technology progresses. They did acquire technologies from the countries they conquered, but I don't think they were ever significantly ahead of all their neighbours, other than in their excellent organization, strategy and way of life that allowed them to do this in the first place.
ekianjo 11y ago
> War can certainly accelerate and mobilize what's already there but I find the argument that it creates unconvincing. The problem with war-driven progress is that it's incidental. In War you are focusing on the War Machine, on destroying as much as you can both in human lives and resources. Obviously you are bound to make discoveries that will be useful in other fields later on as well. But to me it sounds very wrong on a ethical basis to justify that what we have today in terms of tech is a direct by-product of war. Innovation/Science also occurs outside of the spectrum of war, and it is very reductive to say that War advances Science as a whole. On top of that, let's not forget that the scientists and technologists involved in the War Machine could have spent their time and lives doing something else and we will never know what other courses innovation could have taken.
- api 11y ago
  I wonder if the real origin of war progress isn't Keynesian, and if a basic income, a lot of R&D spending, and a lot of incentive to invest might not achieve the same thing without all the death. War seems like a way to sell stimulus to conservatives.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    Modern medical science came to be from Napoleon's conquest. Plenty of wounded and corpses to ... experiment on. So it's like that.
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      I don't mind downvotes at all, but... http://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/interviews/lemaire.asp http://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/interviews/lemaire.asp "In my opinion, the great leap forward in medical knowledge, the birth of modern medicine, occurs somewhere in the period between the beginning of the Revolution and the end of the Empire." I don't if or when this became obscure knowledge, but I don't even remember when I first learned it. To be sure, Koch, the germ theory and understanding of sepcis came later, almost inexplicably.
  - 11y ago
AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
WWI did cause a boom in some technologies. Automotive and aircraft technology, certainly.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
There was a huge industrial boom post-WWI. At least in the US, there was also a big agricultural boom in addition. See Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl" for a very shallow treatment of it. The Mongols were advanced in ways and not in others. The Aztecs ( really, the Mexica ) were as well. The Aztecs come off as bloody. At least for the Mongols, once a conquered place knelt, they were left alone ( outside of taxes ) and were now on a trade network unlike what had ever been seen, which generally raised standards of living. For a blinding array of reasons, things ground to a halt in the Interwar period, leading to the Depression. WWII ended that... Our collective, international inability to manage monetary policy lead to something like 4% of humanity being put to the sword. So who's bloody now?

by api 11y ago

gbog 11y ago

> was WWI You mean "wasn't" ?

api 11y ago
Yes, fixed. Mobile is the foot rub.

nkozyra 11y ago

I'd say the Mongols and Aztecs were more advanced after their conquests than before. Expecting the radio or flight to have been invented just because there were many centuries of conflict belies the incremental nature of innovation. And WWI certainly drove innovation; I think this always manifests most in military facets, obviously and tends to cascade into commercial sectors more slowly. Not much time separated WWI and WWII and a great deal of it was mired in the largest modern economic depression. I don't support any of this, but it's literally competing with a gun to your head.

gbog 11y ago
> Mongols more advanced after their conquests than before Maybe, but the point is that Mongols, for some reason (maybe geography and weather?), did never stop being fighters. They never "settled down" to grow wealth, which is a very long process with many parameters (cities, knowledge stores, trustable and transmissible commercial bonds, etc.) So they are very good warriors, and have been very successful in their conquest, but compared to their Chinese neighbours (which are not the prototype of the aggressive people, to understate it a bit), they are just much smaller, and grew much less wealth.
mcv 11y ago
The Mongols were definitely more advanced after their conquests, but so was everybody else, simply because technology progresses. They did acquire technologies from the countries they conquered, but I don't think they were ever significantly ahead of all their neighbours, other than in their excellent organization, strategy and way of life that allowed them to do this in the first place.

ekianjo 11y ago

> War can certainly accelerate and mobilize what's already there but I find the argument that it creates unconvincing. The problem with war-driven progress is that it's incidental. In War you are focusing on the War Machine, on destroying as much as you can both in human lives and resources. Obviously you are bound to make discoveries that will be useful in other fields later on as well. But to me it sounds very wrong on a ethical basis to justify that what we have today in terms of tech is a direct by-product of war. Innovation/Science also occurs outside of the spectrum of war, and it is very reductive to say that War advances Science as a whole. On top of that, let's not forget that the scientists and technologists involved in the War Machine could have spent their time and lives doing something else and we will never know what other courses innovation could have taken.

api 11y ago
I wonder if the real origin of war progress isn't Keynesian, and if a basic income, a lot of R&D spending, and a lot of incentive to invest might not achieve the same thing without all the death. War seems like a way to sell stimulus to conservatives.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Modern medical science came to be from Napoleon's conquest. Plenty of wounded and corpses to ... experiment on. So it's like that.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    I don't mind downvotes at all, but... http://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/interviews/lemaire.asp http://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/interviews/lemaire.asp "In my opinion, the great leap forward in medical knowledge, the birth of modern medicine, occurs somewhere in the period between the beginning of the Revolution and the end of the Empire." I don't if or when this became obscure knowledge, but I don't even remember when I first learned it. To be sure, Koch, the germ theory and understanding of sepcis came later, almost inexplicably.
- 11y ago

AlgorithmicTime 11y ago

WWI did cause a boom in some technologies. Automotive and aircraft technology, certainly.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

There was a huge industrial boom post-WWI. At least in the US, there was also a big agricultural boom in addition. See Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl" for a very shallow treatment of it. The Mongols were advanced in ways and not in others. The Aztecs ( really, the Mexica ) were as well. The Aztecs come off as bloody. At least for the Mongols, once a conquered place knelt, they were left alone ( outside of taxes ) and were now on a trade network unlike what had ever been seen, which generally raised standards of living. For a blinding array of reasons, things ground to a halt in the Interwar period, leading to the Depression. WWII ended that... Our collective, international inability to manage monetary policy lead to something like 4% of humanity being put to the sword. So who's bloody now?