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> Sorry but I can't buy into using history to compare if an empire is collapsing or not The point isn’t that history is the perfect tool for predicting collaps

> Sorry but I can't buy into using history to compare if an empire is collapsing or not The point isn’t that history is the perfect tool for predicting collapse — it’s not. The point is it’s seemingly the best tool we have at this time. What would you suggest as an alternative? Gut feeling? Intuition? “Logic”? The last I deliberately put in scare quotes because there’s no from-first-principles mathematical / logical model of this that accounts for all of these things (and I kind of doubt there can be). And even if it was possible to create one, there isn’t one now and one has to navigate the world in its absence.

0dayz 3y ago
The issue is that history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. I'm not saying history is useless mind you. But the author is putting the cart before the horse, in that they don't form a strong foundation that is based on observable data or events that we suspect is contributing to the collapse. Instead they define a probable cause "Strategic naïvety", okay fine how do we know this is the cause? From The author we don't instead they just jump straight to historic similarities and is only focused on proving the link between present and the past. Instead to demonstrate a more proper way of analyzing plausible collapse, look at China. When we look for China there are various observable data and signs that it isn't doing to great for this demonstration I'll focus on the social aspect, because it's harming the backbone of Chinese might, it's demographic. We can observe various data here like the amount of young people, the amount of babies, immigrants, the welfare of the people, homelessness, social services etc. We can also look at social dynamics such as how many people get together, what about the social hierarchy, how much trust do people have in society, how does socialization generally work? What about it's antisocial cultural norms how severe are they? Etc. Now we can start forming a more proper picture of what the social issue are that are harming demographics, and the inability of the government to even want to consider the issue. Now we can look into history for inspiration or as a alternative timeline into what happen, but not to how things will play out.

0dayz 3y ago

The issue is that history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. I'm not saying history is useless mind you. But the author is putting the cart before the horse, in that they don't form a strong foundation that is based on observable data or events that we suspect is contributing to the collapse. Instead they define a probable cause "Strategic naïvety", okay fine how do we know this is the cause? From The author we don't instead they just jump straight to historic similarities and is only focused on proving the link between present and the past. Instead to demonstrate a more proper way of analyzing plausible collapse, look at China. When we look for China there are various observable data and signs that it isn't doing to great for this demonstration I'll focus on the social aspect, because it's harming the backbone of Chinese might, it's demographic. We can observe various data here like the amount of young people, the amount of babies, immigrants, the welfare of the people, homelessness, social services etc. We can also look at social dynamics such as how many people get together, what about the social hierarchy, how much trust do people have in society, how does socialization generally work? What about it's antisocial cultural norms how severe are they? Etc. Now we can start forming a more proper picture of what the social issue are that are harming demographics, and the inability of the government to even want to consider the issue. Now we can look into history for inspiration or as a alternative timeline into what happen, but not to how things will play out.