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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 eas

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.

namaria 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. In principle yes but in this case we're looking at why all civilizations collapsed at the same time. There is no control group. The ones that didn't also went through large scale hardship and change. The point is not collapse vs survival, is why the large scale hardship with multiple concurrent collapses happened. The phenomenon being studied is not 'this civilization collapsed at this time', it's the multiple synchronized collapses and widespread hardship and change. > 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 Climate studies in History show how massive, widespread collapse or large scale change happened in times of marked shifts in world climate, not the other way around > 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. I wholly agree, and I never encountered this problem in academic History
- kbenson 3y ago
  I don't think we're actually in disagreement at all. I wasn't trying to be very specific even in my original comment when I replied to "Sure once you start bleeding you die from blood loss but if you're knifed can you really say you died from anemia?", but just note that we should be careful about assuming the blood loss was from being knifed, or being knifed once. Just that societal level changes can be complex as we should leery of accepting a narrative that neatly provides a cause. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means we should fight against our own instinctual urge to accept and believe simple answers. > Climate studies in History show how massive, widespread collapse or large scale change happened in times of marked shifts in world climate, not the other way around I'm not trying to argue it's the other way around, I'm more making an case that if climate change contributes 1/10th of the stressors causing a civilization collapse, and the rest is a bunch of other stuff added together, some individual items that might be more than 1/10th the cause, we'll still probably look at it and say ah, climate change caused it, because it's what happened and a bunch of other civilizations collapsed at the same time. Sort of similar to losing your job in a recession. It's most often attributed to the recession, but in reality there's likely a lot of things that contributed, and the recession contributed enough to be the the straw that broke the camels back. Were one of those other things not present, the job may not have been lost. What this means is that we likely attribute the variable that the most distinct entities as the cause, as opposed to the variable that contributes to the cause the most. Calling this out as I'm doing is mostly a matter of semantics, I'm fully aware, but I think it might be important to consider when formulating thoughts on this. If climate change at a specific point causes every civilization to collapse, it's obviously the cause. If it causes an increase in the rate of collapse by 50%, it's very likely the cause. If it causes 20% more, now we're getting into a territory where it's contributing, but very possibly not the largest contributor. I understand that with a population of civilizations as small as we have at any specific time in history that a statistical increase large enough to notice from climate change probably means it was indeed climate change, so I'm not trying to convince you it isn't, as much as call forth a way we put narratives to events. We definitely do often say someone lost their job because of the recession, when the relative change overall to the population can be quite small. People understand the world through narratives, and those those narratives match reality to greater or lesser degrees sometimes.

namaria 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. In principle yes but in this case we're looking at why all civilizations collapsed at the same time. There is no control group. The ones that didn't also went through large scale hardship and change. The point is not collapse vs survival, is why the large scale hardship with multiple concurrent collapses happened. The phenomenon being studied is not 'this civilization collapsed at this time', it's the multiple synchronized collapses and widespread hardship and change. > 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 Climate studies in History show how massive, widespread collapse or large scale change happened in times of marked shifts in world climate, not the other way around > 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. I wholly agree, and I never encountered this problem in academic History

kbenson 3y ago
I don't think we're actually in disagreement at all. I wasn't trying to be very specific even in my original comment when I replied to "Sure once you start bleeding you die from blood loss but if you're knifed can you really say you died from anemia?", but just note that we should be careful about assuming the blood loss was from being knifed, or being knifed once. Just that societal level changes can be complex as we should leery of accepting a narrative that neatly provides a cause. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means we should fight against our own instinctual urge to accept and believe simple answers. > Climate studies in History show how massive, widespread collapse or large scale change happened in times of marked shifts in world climate, not the other way around I'm not trying to argue it's the other way around, I'm more making an case that if climate change contributes 1/10th of the stressors causing a civilization collapse, and the rest is a bunch of other stuff added together, some individual items that might be more than 1/10th the cause, we'll still probably look at it and say ah, climate change caused it, because it's what happened and a bunch of other civilizations collapsed at the same time. Sort of similar to losing your job in a recession. It's most often attributed to the recession, but in reality there's likely a lot of things that contributed, and the recession contributed enough to be the the straw that broke the camels back. Were one of those other things not present, the job may not have been lost. What this means is that we likely attribute the variable that the most distinct entities as the cause, as opposed to the variable that contributes to the cause the most. Calling this out as I'm doing is mostly a matter of semantics, I'm fully aware, but I think it might be important to consider when formulating thoughts on this. If climate change at a specific point causes every civilization to collapse, it's obviously the cause. If it causes an increase in the rate of collapse by 50%, it's very likely the cause. If it causes 20% more, now we're getting into a territory where it's contributing, but very possibly not the largest contributor. I understand that with a population of civilizations as small as we have at any specific time in history that a statistical increase large enough to notice from climate change probably means it was indeed climate change, so I'm not trying to convince you it isn't, as much as call forth a way we put narratives to events. We definitely do often say someone lost their job because of the recession, when the relative change overall to the population can be quite small. People understand the world through narratives, and those those narratives match reality to greater or lesser degrees sometimes.