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What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people r

What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills, creates the conditions for the iterative improvement of those practices, and enforces a detachment from the results of the practice of building in favor of an attachment to the practice itself, the latter of which seems like a much more valuable asset to possess, considering the life-expectancy of these buildings. What does fire do on a symbolic level? It hardens, cleanses, purifies, and refines. Perhaps they did this every time the leadership changed, so the success or failure of the tribe or settlement under the new leader/chieftain could not be blamed on nor attributed to the previous one. A clean slate for each administration, so to speak. On another note, if these structures are essentially what the guy from the neolithic technology youtube channel gets up to, then maybe they just did it for fun. Guy looks like he's having the time of his life playing in the mud.

leto_ii 6y ago
> What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills This is unconvincing. In most cultures, most of the time, people manage to pass down building skills without destroying everything they've built before.
- LunaSea 6y ago
  In Japan there was a tradition of rebuilding every 20 years for the exact reason of transmitting building methods to the next generation.
  - mutatio 6y ago
    Do you have a source for that? Everything I can find on Japanese 20-year re-building cadence is due to religion. I'm struggling to see any sense in the 20-year cadence cliff-edge for typical knowledge transfer.
    - animal_spirits 6y ago
      Another comment here referenced the Ise Grand Shrine [0], so that is what I bet the OP is referring to. I pose this, religion isn't only about spiritual beliefs, it encompasses rituals, culture, and history. Knowledge transfer is a major part of continuing a religious culture, whether it be through studying of scripts or preaching. So, just because it is religious based doesn't exclude it from also being about transferring of knowledge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine
      - mutatio 6y ago
        The link provided shows that it is due to the religious belief of rebirth, the tradesmen themselves practice their skills continually, so the theory still doesn't map for me. Moreso if we apply Occam's razor: there's no evidence the Japanese practice is for skill transfer yet it's being used to promote that premise for something else.
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
      Religion is just a specific way of encoding useful lessons into oral/written tradition. So it could well be that keeping the trade alive was the original reason but it became a religious doctrine so as not to be violated.
      - mutatio 6y ago
        I could see the opposite of that possibly arising, e.g. doing something irrational like creating a training event every 2 decades, due to belief - but the inverse makes no sense to me, what's the advantage to a society to renewing skills at 20 year cliff-edges vs. continual development? Makes less sense still in the context of Japanese kingdoms, the kingdom choosing to continually propagate skills would win.
        beaconstudios 6y ago
        Because skills aren't always generalisable. For the Ido shine, for example, there's a specific building skillset they use for building temples. New temples aren't built often enough to keep those skills sharp. > training Training doesn't impart skills unless the theoretical knowledge is actually used. What better way to use it than to build a temple?
refurb 6y ago
Wouldn’t natural population growth and decay of current structures be enough demand to ensure building skills remain sharp?
- neogodless 6y ago
  I believe that in the modern world, specialization is more common, where ancient skills might have been more generalized. So comparing to the modern world, I know of one relative in the industry of building homes, but even that person has never "built" their own home, and none of my relatives have bought a newly built home. In other words, in our family the skill of building home is very barely there. We'd likely have to hire out. If, instead, when my parents bought the house I grew up in from my great grandparents, they'd torn it down and built a new one, then the skill would have only skipped one generation, but continue to be exercised within our family.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 6y ago
Imagine if computer engineers have a religion of burning down and rebuilding the entire computer architecture every 20 years, hardware and software, from scratch. Everything will be cleaner, and the problem raised by Jonathan Blow [0] can be addressed too (it's basically: modern system has low understandably & maintainability, everything is extremely complex, and only a few people in the world can understand systems at each low-level component, it only takes a moderate social disruption for the entire digital civilization to collapse"). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317
- Mobleysoft 6y ago
  There is an interesting discussion going on in the recent Microsoft Exchange hack thread about firm's periodically rebuilding their IT infrastructures to protect against malware that shows some convergent thinking that might interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367534 I like your idea. What do you think would be the first step to getting there? I have a client in the controls systems space, a systems integrator that helps municipalities update the systems that keep the water running, and one concern that occurred to me while investigating their business requirements is how the systems they work on are becoming less and less able to recover from certain attacks as the components that make them work become purely digital and electronically controlled. Perhaps we should begin engraving the contents of wikipedia on clay tablets, just in case.

leto_ii 6y ago

> What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills This is unconvincing. In most cultures, most of the time, people manage to pass down building skills without destroying everything they've built before.

LunaSea 6y ago
In Japan there was a tradition of rebuilding every 20 years for the exact reason of transmitting building methods to the next generation.
- mutatio 6y ago
  Do you have a source for that? Everything I can find on Japanese 20-year re-building cadence is due to religion. I'm struggling to see any sense in the 20-year cadence cliff-edge for typical knowledge transfer.
  - animal_spirits 6y ago
    Another comment here referenced the Ise Grand Shrine [0], so that is what I bet the OP is referring to. I pose this, religion isn't only about spiritual beliefs, it encompasses rituals, culture, and history. Knowledge transfer is a major part of continuing a religious culture, whether it be through studying of scripts or preaching. So, just because it is religious based doesn't exclude it from also being about transferring of knowledge. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine
    - mutatio 6y ago
      The link provided shows that it is due to the religious belief of rebirth, the tradesmen themselves practice their skills continually, so the theory still doesn't map for me. Moreso if we apply Occam's razor: there's no evidence the Japanese practice is for skill transfer yet it's being used to promote that premise for something else.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    Religion is just a specific way of encoding useful lessons into oral/written tradition. So it could well be that keeping the trade alive was the original reason but it became a religious doctrine so as not to be violated.
    - mutatio 6y ago
      I could see the opposite of that possibly arising, e.g. doing something irrational like creating a training event every 2 decades, due to belief - but the inverse makes no sense to me, what's the advantage to a society to renewing skills at 20 year cliff-edges vs. continual development? Makes less sense still in the context of Japanese kingdoms, the kingdom choosing to continually propagate skills would win.
      - beaconstudios 6y ago
        Because skills aren't always generalisable. For the Ido shine, for example, there's a specific building skillset they use for building temples. New temples aren't built often enough to keep those skills sharp. > training Training doesn't impart skills unless the theoretical knowledge is actually used. What better way to use it than to build a temple?

refurb 6y ago

Wouldn’t natural population growth and decay of current structures be enough demand to ensure building skills remain sharp?

neogodless 6y ago
I believe that in the modern world, specialization is more common, where ancient skills might have been more generalized. So comparing to the modern world, I know of one relative in the industry of building homes, but even that person has never "built" their own home, and none of my relatives have bought a newly built home. In other words, in our family the skill of building home is very barely there. We'd likely have to hire out. If, instead, when my parents bought the house I grew up in from my great grandparents, they'd torn it down and built a new one, then the skill would have only skipped one generation, but continue to be exercised within our family.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 6y ago

Imagine if computer engineers have a religion of burning down and rebuilding the entire computer architecture every 20 years, hardware and software, from scratch. Everything will be cleaner, and the problem raised by Jonathan Blow [0] can be addressed too (it's basically: modern system has low understandably & maintainability, everything is extremely complex, and only a few people in the world can understand systems at each low-level component, it only takes a moderate social disruption for the entire digital civilization to collapse"). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

Mobleysoft 6y ago
There is an interesting discussion going on in the recent Microsoft Exchange hack thread about firm's periodically rebuilding their IT infrastructures to protect against malware that shows some convergent thinking that might interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367534 I like your idea. What do you think would be the first step to getting there? I have a client in the controls systems space, a systems integrator that helps municipalities update the systems that keep the water running, and one concern that occurred to me while investigating their business requirements is how the systems they work on are becoming less and less able to recover from certain attacks as the components that make them work become purely digital and electronically controlled. Perhaps we should begin engraving the contents of wikipedia on clay tablets, just in case.