= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Simon_Jester comments on How inevitable was modern human civilization - data - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (103)
From a social psych standpoint, it's very interesting: why do people come up with something, then fail to use it in ways that we would consider obvious and beneficial?
I think a lot of it is hidden infrastructure we don't see, both mental and physical. People need tools to build things, and tools to come up with new ideas: the rules of logic and mathematics may describe the universe, but they are themselves mental tools. Go back to Hellenic civilization and you find a lot of the raw materials for the Industrial Revolution, what was missing? There are a lot of answers to that question: "cheap slaves messing up the economy," "no precision machining capability," "no mass consumption of timber, coal, and iron in quantities that force the adoption of industrial methods," and so on. They all boil down to "something subtle was missing, so that intelligent people didn't come up with the trick."
I speculate that one of the most important missing pieces was the habit of looking at everything as a source of potential new tricks for changing the world.
Well, coal was missing... slaves may have been a big factor; it's probably not coincidental that industrialization started in England and the northeast US and, AFAIK, didn't spread to the US south until after the civil war - but somebody should fact check this. (BTW, I'd love to see an alternate history in which slavery is gotten rid of by economic incentives and government subsidization of the development of mechanized agriculture. Well, I say I'd love to, but it would probably be as exciting as an Ayn Rand novel.)
... but yes, ways of thinking were probably what was lacking.
One important way of thinking was that, for a very long time before the 18th century, change was seen as bad. The word "innovator" was usually preceded by the word "rash". There was a great chain of being with peasants at the bottom, God at the top, and the King up near the top; and anybody who wanted to change things was a dangerous revolutionary. The very idea that things could improve here on Earth was vaguely heretical. The idea that economies could grow was not fully in place.
I think it's also not coincidental that the industrial revolution didn't start until Adam Smith's ideas replaced mercantilist thought. Pre-Smith, people assumed that the total amount of wealth on Earth was fixed.