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A fascinating insight for me came via Kyle Harper's book The Fate of Rome: plagues co-evolve to match civilisations. <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardco

A fascinating insight for me came via Kyle Harper's book The Fate of Rome: plagues co-evolve to match civilisations. <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/the-fate-of-rome https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...> That is, the Antonine, and other plauges of Rome relied on the dense urbanisation, highly-developed transportation, and long-range trading patterns, all of which served to provide the conditions in which pathogens which were either benign or simply too virulent to establish themselves in smaller, less-interconnected communities --- in such cases the epidemics would simply burn themselves out, perhaps decimating a village or small trading group of same, but not spreading further. The fact that Yersinia pestis seems to have evolved first in rodent populations (themselves often microcosms of human civilisations with large and interconnected population clusters) seems relevant. IIRC Harper cites hamsters or gerbils as the prior host species to humans. James Burke, of Connections fame, stated in a later interview "ReConnections* of how he'd extend the episodes of the original series that a key consequence of jet air travel would be an increased spread of global pandemics. This occurs toward the end of this video: <https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0 https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0> More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities, whether we're talking human cities (look at the long list of urban vices, online abuse, network issues, and the like). One factor contributing to the "golden age" effect is that such ages exist before the parasites / pathogens evolve. As such, the sense that "something went wrong" seems to me misled, and a better formulation would be that such golden ages were living on borrowed time in the first place. Podcast episode of Harper addressing a similar theme from Plagues Upon the Earth: <https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2511895438.mp3 https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2511895438.mp3>.

llm_trw 2y ago
Or we can listen to Socrates and the fact that civilization eats up the soil it depends to grow its food on: https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~breilly2/world/Lucretuis.htm https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~breilly2/world/Lucretuis.htm Civilization can easily survive a mortality rate that we'd consider impossible, viz. the colonies in the new world, it can't survive hunger.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Harper's analysis includes such factors (he pays a great deal of attention to global climate, particularly the characteristics of the Roman Climate Optimum, which spanned from 200 BCE to 150 CE, and other ecological, political, cultural, and technical factors. It's also true that disease, as with many other pathologies, tends to observe Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics: things get worse under pressure. Overexploitation of natural resources (soil depletion, deforestation, elimination of megafauna, depletion of watersheds and aquifers, exhaustion of mineral resources) all contribute to a general weakening of the civilisation which invokes these circumstances. It's worth noting that the Western Roman Empire at the time of its collapse was not generally in a state of pervasive famine. And Harper isn't giving a One True Way response, he is carefully, with a great deal of historigraphic and scientific evidence building the case that, as I noted above, civilisations and pathogens co-evolve. (My expansion of that to networks or systems and pathologies generally is my own armchair contribution, though based on my own observations of numerous examples at first hand myself.) As much as I appreciate and respect Socrates, he (as with virtually all pre-Baconian philosophers) relied strongly on reason and extremely unsystematic chosen exemplars to posit hypotheses, many of which have since proven greatly mistaken. (His student's student Aristotle polished this to a fine art.) Baconian science is empirical, Socrates is best known for an interrogative technique. This isn't to say that some of the suggestions made by Socrates and other philosophers are necessarily wrong. But it is quite rare for same to have been grounded in anything remotely resembling what we'd now call scientific knowledge, a phrase whose apparent redundancy is best resolved by noting that "science" now means not merely knowledge but the systematic approach of observing, deducing, testing, and validating hypotheses, something Socrates did not practice, and Harper has. Which isn't to say that the shallow interpretation of Harper's narrative might not also be false. But for a third time, that's not my point, the co-evolution of systems and pathologies is, and I'd hope that at least some of my readers here have managed to grasp that concept despite my own bungled attempts to express it.
Terr_ 2y ago
> More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities For a non-biology example: Scams are shaped by the economies they exist in, and vice-versa.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Yes, and rely highly on anonymity whether through large populations (cities) or distance (telecommunications and/or transportation). The term "confidence man" came into general usage following publication of a novel by that title by Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame). It is set on the first great interstate highway of the United States: the steamboat-plied Mississippi River. Harking back to Roman (and Greek) times, I find it quite telling that Mercury (or Hermes) is the god of messages, travel, roads, merchants, thieves, and cunning, amongst others. There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery. (It's difficult to be fooled by those one lives closely with in small communities for long periods of time. Those may be scoundrels or be known to be untrustworthy but rarely gain confidence in Melville's sense.) Another curious relationship I suspect about telecommunications is that they effectively reduce reliance on social factors of trust. Mind that this may increase overall societal trustworthiness in many cases, but it's through the replacement of, well, just plain raw trust (unevidenced belief) through monitoring, assessments, and independent validation. In an age before telegraph and jet airlines (or even steamships and railroads), once someone was out of eyesight and earshot, they were lost to direct control or monitoring until either they returned or an emissary could reach them, whether for hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Merchants, diplomats, ships' captains, colonial governors, and the like all operated autonomously for periods of time which would strike us as utterly alien today. Many of the practices, and much of the language used in communications, seems to me to have arisen to express, reinforce, or establish trust in such circumstances. Post-telegraphic language became, well, telegraphic (short, abbreviated, costing or paid by the word) not only due to the expense of the medium, but, carrying over to even non-telegraphic correspondence, because long sustained absences or periods of incommunicado no longer occurred. (This is one topic touched on in The Control Revolution by James Beniger (1986): <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolution https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolut...> Not to be confused with another excellent book of the same title by Andrew Shapiro, addressing the nascent Internet and World Wide Web. Which, come to think of it, also addresses the themes of trust and communications.)
foobarian 2y ago
I find it fascinating that most plague outbreaks seem to have taken down double digit percents of the populations. That's just wild. If 50% of humanity got wiped out suddenly by a pandemic I can't begin to imagine what the consequences would be.
- bear141 2y ago
  This would obviously be terrible, but are there any long term consequences from this that wouldn't be positive?
  - UncleOxidant 2y ago
    Housing prices would come down.
    - gattilorenz 2y ago
      And workers become more scarce, leading to increased salaries. The plague is one of the reasons behind the economic growth of Florence (and many other places) in the middle ages.
      - UncleOxidant 2y ago
        And apparently led to the end of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    Think about how many highly specialized jobs are needed to run modern-day society. Think about how much of the required knowledge and skill to do those jobs would be lost, not to mention available person-hours. We could be set back a century or more, but without the cheap and plentiful natural resources that got us to where we are today.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Also I’d expect lots of countries to collapse into anarchy, no particular reason to believe that whatever rises from the ashes will be any better.

llm_trw 2y ago

Or we can listen to Socrates and the fact that civilization eats up the soil it depends to grow its food on: https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~breilly2/world/Lucretuis.htm https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~breilly2/world/Lucretuis.htm Civilization can easily survive a mortality rate that we'd consider impossible, viz. the colonies in the new world, it can't survive hunger.

dredmorbius 2y ago
Harper's analysis includes such factors (he pays a great deal of attention to global climate, particularly the characteristics of the Roman Climate Optimum, which spanned from 200 BCE to 150 CE, and other ecological, political, cultural, and technical factors. It's also true that disease, as with many other pathologies, tends to observe Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics: things get worse under pressure. Overexploitation of natural resources (soil depletion, deforestation, elimination of megafauna, depletion of watersheds and aquifers, exhaustion of mineral resources) all contribute to a general weakening of the civilisation which invokes these circumstances. It's worth noting that the Western Roman Empire at the time of its collapse was not generally in a state of pervasive famine. And Harper isn't giving a One True Way response, he is carefully, with a great deal of historigraphic and scientific evidence building the case that, as I noted above, civilisations and pathogens co-evolve. (My expansion of that to networks or systems and pathologies generally is my own armchair contribution, though based on my own observations of numerous examples at first hand myself.) As much as I appreciate and respect Socrates, he (as with virtually all pre-Baconian philosophers) relied strongly on reason and extremely unsystematic chosen exemplars to posit hypotheses, many of which have since proven greatly mistaken. (His student's student Aristotle polished this to a fine art.) Baconian science is empirical, Socrates is best known for an interrogative technique. This isn't to say that some of the suggestions made by Socrates and other philosophers are necessarily wrong. But it is quite rare for same to have been grounded in anything remotely resembling what we'd now call scientific knowledge, a phrase whose apparent redundancy is best resolved by noting that "science" now means not merely knowledge but the systematic approach of observing, deducing, testing, and validating hypotheses, something Socrates did not practice, and Harper has. Which isn't to say that the shallow interpretation of Harper's narrative might not also be false. But for a third time, that's not my point, the co-evolution of systems and pathologies is, and I'd hope that at least some of my readers here have managed to grasp that concept despite my own bungled attempts to express it.

Terr_ 2y ago

> More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities For a non-biology example: Scams are shaped by the economies they exist in, and vice-versa.

dredmorbius 2y ago
Yes, and rely highly on anonymity whether through large populations (cities) or distance (telecommunications and/or transportation). The term "confidence man" came into general usage following publication of a novel by that title by Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame). It is set on the first great interstate highway of the United States: the steamboat-plied Mississippi River. Harking back to Roman (and Greek) times, I find it quite telling that Mercury (or Hermes) is the god of messages, travel, roads, merchants, thieves, and cunning, amongst others. There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery. (It's difficult to be fooled by those one lives closely with in small communities for long periods of time. Those may be scoundrels or be known to be untrustworthy but rarely gain confidence in Melville's sense.) Another curious relationship I suspect about telecommunications is that they effectively reduce reliance on social factors of trust. Mind that this may increase overall societal trustworthiness in many cases, but it's through the replacement of, well, just plain raw trust (unevidenced belief) through monitoring, assessments, and independent validation. In an age before telegraph and jet airlines (or even steamships and railroads), once someone was out of eyesight and earshot, they were lost to direct control or monitoring until either they returned or an emissary could reach them, whether for hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Merchants, diplomats, ships' captains, colonial governors, and the like all operated autonomously for periods of time which would strike us as utterly alien today. Many of the practices, and much of the language used in communications, seems to me to have arisen to express, reinforce, or establish trust in such circumstances. Post-telegraphic language became, well, telegraphic (short, abbreviated, costing or paid by the word) not only due to the expense of the medium, but, carrying over to even non-telegraphic correspondence, because long sustained absences or periods of incommunicado no longer occurred. (This is one topic touched on in The Control Revolution by James Beniger (1986): <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolution https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolut...> Not to be confused with another excellent book of the same title by Andrew Shapiro, addressing the nascent Internet and World Wide Web. Which, come to think of it, also addresses the themes of trust and communications.)

foobarian 2y ago

I find it fascinating that most plague outbreaks seem to have taken down double digit percents of the populations. That's just wild. If 50% of humanity got wiped out suddenly by a pandemic I can't begin to imagine what the consequences would be.

bear141 2y ago
This would obviously be terrible, but are there any long term consequences from this that wouldn't be positive?
- UncleOxidant 2y ago
  Housing prices would come down.
  - gattilorenz 2y ago
    And workers become more scarce, leading to increased salaries. The plague is one of the reasons behind the economic growth of Florence (and many other places) in the middle ages.
    - UncleOxidant 2y ago
      And apparently led to the end of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  Think about how many highly specialized jobs are needed to run modern-day society. Think about how much of the required knowledge and skill to do those jobs would be lost, not to mention available person-hours. We could be set back a century or more, but without the cheap and plentiful natural resources that got us to where we are today.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Also I’d expect lots of countries to collapse into anarchy, no particular reason to believe that whatever rises from the ashes will be any better.