9 ms·

How is that different from real world history? Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury yo

by danjac 4y ago

How is that different from real world history? Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse. Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.

panick21_ 4y ago
> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases. > Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases. Again, most of the time that didn't happen. And you often didn't die of tropical diseases either. > Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse. Most towns were not buried and most coal miners don't die in collapses.
- puranjay 4y ago
  > That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions. Rome didn't conquer Spain because they liked the weather.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    > That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions. That doesn't change the numbers involved. Most things that farmers sowed for most of history didn't get burned by invading armies.
- wl 4y ago
  >> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. > That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases. It happened in many prominent cases. Egypt, for example, was called "the breadbasket of Rome."
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Yes but not because armies rampaged over Egypt over and over again. Rome was just another state taxing the farmers.
    - wl 4y ago
      There's a lot of military conquest in Egyptian history. The Hyksos, the Kushites, the Saites, the Persians, the Ptolemies, and finally the Romans.
bumby 4y ago
It's relative. The competing risk only has to be a little greater to bias the decision. (Or, more accurately, the perceived risk). Remember, risk is probability x severity. In your first example, the severity of not growing crops is starvation vs. the severity of wasted toil in agriculture. I'd imagine the probability is probably higher, too.
peanut_worm 4y ago
Yeah but in Middle Earth you have all of those problems plus giant spiders, balrogs, wizards, orcs etc
jerf 4y ago
One of the great lessons to take away from a differential equations class... in my more dour moments, I think it's the only lesson to take away for most students in the course... is how common it is for iterated systems (which is almost anything embedded in "time", which is to say, everything we deal with in the real world) to be very sensitive to the strength of the feedback loop. It is trivial to construct systems that slowly, but surely, go to zero if you start with 0.5000000000000, but slowly but surely go to infinity if you start with 0.5000000000001. Small differences can be a big deal. Also, it should be pointed out that our history is not full of industrial revolutions. There's the one that we're still living in, and arguably two or three that fizzled depending on exactly how you count and where you draw the line, and that's it. Industrial revolutions aren't easy in the real world!
fsloth 4y ago
Innovation was heavily discouraged throughout history by vested interests it challenged. Printing did not pick up in the Ottoman empire due to guild of scribes, for example (I heard).
DennisP 4y ago
> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. That's why so many great civilizations were founded in places with good geographic barriers around a productive interior. Ancient Egypt for example had the Nile and was surrounded by vast deserts, which weren't feasible to cross at the time. On the other end of history, the US has similar advantages.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I assure you that people crisscrossed the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East all the time in ancient days. Egypt's big advantage was its ability to produce lots of food along the Nile River and settle down and focus on something beyond survival.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Egypt was a civilization for about 1500 years before the camel was domesticated. Before the camel, you weren't going to get an army across six hundred miles of desert, and Egypt was easy to defend from anyone trying to enter along the Nile. Egypt's food production was certainly critical to its success, but its isolation was both its defense and its downfall. Other civilizations competed with each other and advanced their technology, while Egypt existed happily in isolation, unaware of new technologies like bronze and chariots. After the camel, along with ships able to carry significant cargo, Egypt's food production became a juicy target, and it was conquered by one civilization after another.
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tshaddox 4y ago
> How is that different from real world history? It's not different from the vast majority of real world history.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Many new world burgeoning civilizations got wiped out/stunted by natural things like droughts and the land being farmable and able to maintain large populations.

by danjac 4y ago

panick21_ 4y ago

> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases. > Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases. Again, most of the time that didn't happen. And you often didn't die of tropical diseases either. > Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse. Most towns were not buried and most coal miners don't die in collapses.

puranjay 4y ago
> That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions. Rome didn't conquer Spain because they liked the weather.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions. That doesn't change the numbers involved. Most things that farmers sowed for most of history didn't get burned by invading armies.
wl 4y ago
>> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. > That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases. It happened in many prominent cases. Egypt, for example, was called "the breadbasket of Rome."
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Yes but not because armies rampaged over Egypt over and over again. Rome was just another state taxing the farmers.
  - wl 4y ago
    There's a lot of military conquest in Egyptian history. The Hyksos, the Kushites, the Saites, the Persians, the Ptolemies, and finally the Romans.

bumby 4y ago

It's relative. The competing risk only has to be a little greater to bias the decision. (Or, more accurately, the perceived risk). Remember, risk is probability x severity. In your first example, the severity of not growing crops is starvation vs. the severity of wasted toil in agriculture. I'd imagine the probability is probably higher, too.

peanut_worm 4y ago

Yeah but in Middle Earth you have all of those problems plus giant spiders, balrogs, wizards, orcs etc

jerf 4y ago

One of the great lessons to take away from a differential equations class... in my more dour moments, I think it's the only lesson to take away for most students in the course... is how common it is for iterated systems (which is almost anything embedded in "time", which is to say, everything we deal with in the real world) to be very sensitive to the strength of the feedback loop. It is trivial to construct systems that slowly, but surely, go to zero if you start with 0.5000000000000, but slowly but surely go to infinity if you start with 0.5000000000001. Small differences can be a big deal. Also, it should be pointed out that our history is not full of industrial revolutions. There's the one that we're still living in, and arguably two or three that fizzled depending on exactly how you count and where you draw the line, and that's it. Industrial revolutions aren't easy in the real world!

fsloth 4y ago

Innovation was heavily discouraged throughout history by vested interests it challenged. Printing did not pick up in the Ottoman empire due to guild of scribes, for example (I heard).

DennisP 4y ago

> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. That's why so many great civilizations were founded in places with good geographic barriers around a productive interior. Ancient Egypt for example had the Nile and was surrounded by vast deserts, which weren't feasible to cross at the time. On the other end of history, the US has similar advantages.

stjohnswarts 4y ago
I assure you that people crisscrossed the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East all the time in ancient days. Egypt's big advantage was its ability to produce lots of food along the Nile River and settle down and focus on something beyond survival.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Egypt was a civilization for about 1500 years before the camel was domesticated. Before the camel, you weren't going to get an army across six hundred miles of desert, and Egypt was easy to defend from anyone trying to enter along the Nile. Egypt's food production was certainly critical to its success, but its isolation was both its defense and its downfall. Other civilizations competed with each other and advanced their technology, while Egypt existed happily in isolation, unaware of new technologies like bronze and chariots. After the camel, along with ships able to carry significant cargo, Egypt's food production became a juicy target, and it was conquered by one civilization after another.

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tshaddox 4y ago

> How is that different from real world history? It's not different from the vast majority of real world history.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

Many new world burgeoning civilizations got wiped out/stunted by natural things like droughts and the land being farmable and able to maintain large populations.