4 ms·

It's part of the causal chain. Whether it's sea peoples, a pandemic, or escalating international tension, if it disrupts trade of essential items, it will disru

by mcv 4y ago

It's part of the causal chain. Whether it's sea peoples, a pandemic, or escalating international tension, if it disrupts trade of essential items, it will disrupt prosperity, the way of life, and a whole host of other things.

namaria 4y ago
Sure once you start bleeding you die from blood loss but if you're knifed can you really say you died from anemia?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kbenson 4y ago
  And what if that bleeding is from numerous sources internal and external, from a long succession of rough situations? You might not even die from blood loss, you might just have such anemia that mustering your strength to gather the resources needed to survive becomes harder and harder until you perish from exhaustion and lack of sustenance. I find that often the end of things comes down not just to a single definable cause, but when a few events that might have been weathered successfully in isolation happen in an overlapping manner, and may cause additional problems otherwise.
  - namaria 4y ago
    "The system failed" is not much in the way of explanation. All systems over a huge area failed at the same time. Explaining why and how requires more then "multiple things went wrong". Climate and technological changes seem to be a strong candidate.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      I found Robert Drews' explanation the most coherent, although it hasn't caught on so there must have been some problem with it. His explanation was military-technological: infantry weaponry and tactics advanced to the point that infantry > chariotry. At that point, masses of common people with relatively cheaply made weapons (still bronze at this point) could beat the military of the established civilizations, and all those cities were ripe for the looting. Only Egypt and Assyria were able to adapt their militaries to the new realities and survive. This also explains why, when civilization reestablished itself in the Iron Age, it was in a much different form.
    - kbenson 4y ago
      My point is that it may be hard to tease out how much of that is survivorship bias (survivorship of records of failed states, that is). If it often takes multiple things failing at once to actually have the societies fail, then when you look back that's what you'll see, because other societies that fails will exhibit that to a high degree as the times when things don't happen to coincide are cases where the societies were able to pull through.
      - namaria 3y ago
        I don't see how survivorship bias applies to analyzing societal collapse when you don't take into account societies that didn't fail... Non failing societies is precisely what you should leave out in this case
        kbenson 3y ago
        Any conclusion drawn that excludes a bunch of similar situations because the ultimate outcome ended up being different seems likely to be flawed, IMO. It's easy to point at climate change and say that's a deciding factor, but if there's ten times as many societies that faces similar climate change situations and didn't fail, then it's either not climate change, or it's climate change in combination with some other aspect of their society which made the problem something they couldn't deal with, whether that be cultural, socioeconomic, or another problem that happened at the same time. Back to the original point, I think sometimes "multiple things went wrong" totally can be a reason, and if there's an inability to accept that, I think that itself should be questioned. If a society is attacked, and there's a famine because of climate change, and the king dies from an illness unexpectedly and the succession is messy and there's not strong leadership, perhaps any one of those things is a hurdle that can be overcome, but if they all happen in a short period of time, that's definitely going to be a much larger stressor for a society. That doesn't mean they don't need to be identified, and we should accept "eh, multiple things happened" as the only answer, but any inability to accept the there might have been a confluence of events that combined to cause an outcome would be a failure on the part of historians, IMO.
        3y ago

by mcv 4y ago

namaria 4y ago

Sure once you start bleeding you die from blood loss but if you're knifed can you really say you died from anemia?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kbenson 4y ago
And what if that bleeding is from numerous sources internal and external, from a long succession of rough situations? You might not even die from blood loss, you might just have such anemia that mustering your strength to gather the resources needed to survive becomes harder and harder until you perish from exhaustion and lack of sustenance. I find that often the end of things comes down not just to a single definable cause, but when a few events that might have been weathered successfully in isolation happen in an overlapping manner, and may cause additional problems otherwise.
- namaria 4y ago
  "The system failed" is not much in the way of explanation. All systems over a huge area failed at the same time. Explaining why and how requires more then "multiple things went wrong". Climate and technological changes seem to be a strong candidate.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    I found Robert Drews' explanation the most coherent, although it hasn't caught on so there must have been some problem with it. His explanation was military-technological: infantry weaponry and tactics advanced to the point that infantry > chariotry. At that point, masses of common people with relatively cheaply made weapons (still bronze at this point) could beat the military of the established civilizations, and all those cities were ripe for the looting. Only Egypt and Assyria were able to adapt their militaries to the new realities and survive. This also explains why, when civilization reestablished itself in the Iron Age, it was in a much different form.
  - kbenson 4y ago
    My point is that it may be hard to tease out how much of that is survivorship bias (survivorship of records of failed states, that is). If it often takes multiple things failing at once to actually have the societies fail, then when you look back that's what you'll see, because other societies that fails will exhibit that to a high degree as the times when things don't happen to coincide are cases where the societies were able to pull through.
    - namaria 3y ago
      I don't see how survivorship bias applies to analyzing societal collapse when you don't take into account societies that didn't fail... Non failing societies is precisely what you should leave out in this case
      - kbenson 3y ago
        Any conclusion drawn that excludes a bunch of similar situations because the ultimate outcome ended up being different seems likely to be flawed, IMO. It's easy to point at climate change and say that's a deciding factor, but if there's ten times as many societies that faces similar climate change situations and didn't fail, then it's either not climate change, or it's climate change in combination with some other aspect of their society which made the problem something they couldn't deal with, whether that be cultural, socioeconomic, or another problem that happened at the same time. Back to the original point, I think sometimes "multiple things went wrong" totally can be a reason, and if there's an inability to accept that, I think that itself should be questioned. If a society is attacked, and there's a famine because of climate change, and the king dies from an illness unexpectedly and the succession is messy and there's not strong leadership, perhaps any one of those things is a hurdle that can be overcome, but if they all happen in a short period of time, that's definitely going to be a much larger stressor for a society. That doesn't mean they don't need to be identified, and we should accept "eh, multiple things happened" as the only answer, but any inability to accept the there might have been a confluence of events that combined to cause an outcome would be a failure on the part of historians, IMO.
        3y ago