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A strong claim for causality requires a counterfactual scenario: if the stirrup hasn’t been invented, then ___. I always find these hard to imagine when the ca

by tlb 8y ago

A strong claim for causality requires a counterfactual scenario: if the stirrup hasn’t been invented, then ___. I always find these hard to imagine when the cause is a basic technological development. Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given ridable horses. It’s easier to try to imagine a world with no horses, or where they were unsuitable for riding.

lainga 8y ago
>then... I'm not sure, could we make do with chariots and chariot archers? Would civilisation develop as normal, but more slowly in rough terrain?
- trhway 8y ago
  2000 years ago the Europe was swampy and nothing heavy worked outside of Roman roads. Climate change during the 1st millennium with Europe warming up and drying up a bit allowed for many things including heavy cavalry (which had existed in dry Asia for example long before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataphract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataphract )
ricree 8y ago
>Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given ridable horses. Perhaps, though the stirrup as we think of it shows up a lot later than horseriding does. Although the stirrup seems obvious at first glance, it requires a number of advances in saddles to support, or at least to take full advantage of them. That said, as the article points out, you don't need stirrups to have cavalry, or even heavy cavalry.
nerdponx 8y ago
It's not just a question of whether it was invented at all. It's also a question of when and where.
blotter_paper 8y ago
>Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given ridable horses. This isn't obvious to me. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm not convinced that it's right either. Henry Turtledove's short stories The Road Not Taken and Herbig-Haro explore a future where aliens invade Earth with FTL drives, but only basic weaponry. It turns out that FTL drives are a relatively simple technology, but one we missed. Not expanding outward in space forced us to pursue more competitive development of other technologies on Earth, and when the aliens invade we quickly kill them and take their FTL drives, suddenly becoming the dominant species in our part of the universe. It's just fiction, of course, but I think us having missed some basic tech is an interesting possibility. It's only theoretically possible to show that we missed something in the past, not the present, since the discovery of something which should have been obvious in the past makes it no longer valid as evidence of our failure to have discovered obvious things in the present -- it's been discovered now. That being said, can we think of such examples? Things that don't have any obvious barriers, but which we still failed to invent for long stretches of time? The screw as a fastener seems like a potential candidate to me; the Archimedes' screw was used to move water and grain in ~300 BC, and nails have been around since prehistory, but screws as fasteners don't show up until the 1400s AD. You could argue that the widespread adoption of screws in the 1800s AD required certain machine tools for mass manufacture of screws with threading at regular increments, but this doesn't explain the 1700 year gap between invention of the screw and any use of hand-crafted screws as fasteners. There could also be gaps in our understanding of this history, of course, but that would be true to varying degrees for any proposed example.
- riffraff 8y ago
  The lack of wheels as a mean of transportation in pre-columbian civilizations is a classic example. Steam machines might be another, basic ones were already in use in ancient Greece but their development stalled for millennia.
mannykannot 8y ago
The default counterfactual is the status quo ante. If the stirrup had clearly been invented at a different time than the emergence of feudalism, then the hypothesis would not have been advanced in the first place.
- tlb 8y ago
  It's meaningless to compare with the status quo ante, because you want to investigate the effects of a single change (the stirrup is adopted in Europe) and not freeze everything else in the world. Otherwise, the answer to "what if the stirrup hadn't made it to Europe" would be "it's still the early middle ages". The stirrup hypothesis is a statement comparing our world to a world without stirrups, but still with all the later inventions.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    By your approach to methodology, it would be impossible to meaningfully investigate the question of whether the European discovery of the Americas changed the world in any way.
    - tlb 8y ago
      Yes, because I think that is impossible to meaningfully investigate. You'd have to go through some mental gymnastics to explain how, in the counterfactual situation, it remains undiscovered through the age of jet airplanes and satellites.
      - mannykannot 8y ago
        So, to be clear, your position is that no argument can be made that anything changed as a consequence of the European discovery of the Americas, because there is no plausible scenario in which Europe never learns of the existence of America? This seems to insist on an an unnecessarily broad counterfactual, if we cannot say, for example, that the cultivation of potatoes in Europe began as a consequence of the European discovery of America.
TomMckenny 8y ago
>Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given ridable horses. The key word is eventually. The number of inventions that are blindingly obvious yet took millennia to appear boggles the mind. A nice example is swimming, where various strokes appeared incredibly late in otherwise "advanced" cultures and only in imitation of other "primitive" cultures. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_crawl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_crawl

by tlb 8y ago

lainga 8y ago

>then... I'm not sure, could we make do with chariots and chariot archers? Would civilisation develop as normal, but more slowly in rough terrain?

trhway 8y ago
2000 years ago the Europe was swampy and nothing heavy worked outside of Roman roads. Climate change during the 1st millennium with Europe warming up and drying up a bit allowed for many things including heavy cavalry (which had existed in dry Asia for example long before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataphract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataphract )

ricree 8y ago

>Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given ridable horses. Perhaps, though the stirrup as we think of it shows up a lot later than horseriding does. Although the stirrup seems obvious at first glance, it requires a number of advances in saddles to support, or at least to take full advantage of them. That said, as the article points out, you don't need stirrups to have cavalry, or even heavy cavalry.

nerdponx 8y ago

It's not just a question of whether it was invented at all. It's also a question of when and where.

blotter_paper 8y ago

>Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given ridable horses. This isn't obvious to me. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm not convinced that it's right either. Henry Turtledove's short stories The Road Not Taken and Herbig-Haro explore a future where aliens invade Earth with FTL drives, but only basic weaponry. It turns out that FTL drives are a relatively simple technology, but one we missed. Not expanding outward in space forced us to pursue more competitive development of other technologies on Earth, and when the aliens invade we quickly kill them and take their FTL drives, suddenly becoming the dominant species in our part of the universe. It's just fiction, of course, but I think us having missed some basic tech is an interesting possibility. It's only theoretically possible to show that we missed something in the past, not the present, since the discovery of something which should have been obvious in the past makes it no longer valid as evidence of our failure to have discovered obvious things in the present -- it's been discovered now. That being said, can we think of such examples? Things that don't have any obvious barriers, but which we still failed to invent for long stretches of time? The screw as a fastener seems like a potential candidate to me; the Archimedes' screw was used to move water and grain in ~300 BC, and nails have been around since prehistory, but screws as fasteners don't show up until the 1400s AD. You could argue that the widespread adoption of screws in the 1800s AD required certain machine tools for mass manufacture of screws with threading at regular increments, but this doesn't explain the 1700 year gap between invention of the screw and any use of hand-crafted screws as fasteners. There could also be gaps in our understanding of this history, of course, but that would be true to varying degrees for any proposed example.

riffraff 8y ago
The lack of wheels as a mean of transportation in pre-columbian civilizations is a classic example. Steam machines might be another, basic ones were already in use in ancient Greece but their development stalled for millennia.

mannykannot 8y ago

The default counterfactual is the status quo ante. If the stirrup had clearly been invented at a different time than the emergence of feudalism, then the hypothesis would not have been advanced in the first place.

tlb 8y ago
It's meaningless to compare with the status quo ante, because you want to investigate the effects of a single change (the stirrup is adopted in Europe) and not freeze everything else in the world. Otherwise, the answer to "what if the stirrup hadn't made it to Europe" would be "it's still the early middle ages". The stirrup hypothesis is a statement comparing our world to a world without stirrups, but still with all the later inventions.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  By your approach to methodology, it would be impossible to meaningfully investigate the question of whether the European discovery of the Americas changed the world in any way.
  - tlb 8y ago
    Yes, because I think that is impossible to meaningfully investigate. You'd have to go through some mental gymnastics to explain how, in the counterfactual situation, it remains undiscovered through the age of jet airplanes and satellites.
    - mannykannot 8y ago
      So, to be clear, your position is that no argument can be made that anything changed as a consequence of the European discovery of the Americas, because there is no plausible scenario in which Europe never learns of the existence of America? This seems to insist on an an unnecessarily broad counterfactual, if we cannot say, for example, that the cultivation of potatoes in Europe began as a consequence of the European discovery of America.

TomMckenny 8y ago

>Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given ridable horses. The key word is eventually. The number of inventions that are blindingly obvious yet took millennia to appear boggles the mind. A nice example is swimming, where various strokes appeared incredibly late in otherwise "advanced" cultures and only in imitation of other "primitive" cultures. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_crawl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_crawl