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Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

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Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#51

Post by clock_tower »

mc32 wrote: post #33
rmchugh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the Danes were ever military only, Denmark was also an agricultural society during the viking period. As I understand it, the viking raids were in fact organised around the agricultural calendar, with the two raiding seasons taking place after the harvest and after the sowing. And of course the Vikings were interested in acquiring farming land and often settled and farmed in their places of conquest. A m…

I didn't mean for the imperfect example of the Danes to take it off tangent, it was only to illustrate a people I could think of for whom raiding was integral but your examples or any other is just as well. I think someone (civ) could have taken it further and been sociopathic and only relied on military force for survival. Obviously there are benefits in diversifying, but I think while not ideal, it's possible and c…

It does work to an extent, but it's self-limiting; for what pure militarism can and can't do, look at Sparta.

Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#52

Post by pixl97 »

wyager wrote: post #23
stcredzero wrote: post #12

The older I get, the more it strikes me that civilization is inherently unstable. It may be metastable, in the way that a predator-prey relationship is stable. A technological civilization like ours is not stable. It's a conflagration . It's subject to a number of exponential processes. Our economy is based on exponentiation. If progress is based on war, then that's just another nail in the coffin. This makes for a p…

This is why it's critical to become starfaring as soon as possible . Every year we delay carries tremendous risk.

If you can get to another star in a reasonable amount of time, you are likely sewing the seeds of your own destruction. The amount of energy in a relativistic weapon makes nukes look weak.

Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#53

Post by pixl97 »

ComteDeLaFere wrote: post #17
MarkPNeyer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pressure analogy seems reasonable to me. It suggests that this goes both ways: Two societies pushing against each other lead to pressure. This pressure results in military conflict. Whoever wins the military conflict can exert increased pressure. The necessity of winning wars put pressure on the society to develop better ways of winning wars. These better ways put more pressure on external societies, etc. China w…

-> They stagnated basically because there was little to no fighting. A fair assessment, but now I realize that another way to say this is - They stagnated because there was little to drive innovation. Stated this way, it at least makes us consider that there might be an alternative to constant warfare as a driver of progress. Maybe recognition of this is some kind of societal turning point as well?

War may drive innovation, but it may also have other purposes. Like resetting service and management economies that spend lots of effort keeping themselves running but not producing products. People think that the more efficient businesses always win are wrong. A bureaucratic sector can wedge itself into the legal system and enforce inefficiency.

Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#54

Post by thatcat »

aswanson wrote: post #41
phkahler wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it Age of Empires taught me that the key to world domination is control of the natural resources plus growing as fast as possible. To win a long game you must control the remote resources as well as those in your immediate area. Try to consume the non-local resources first.

Isnt there an associated penalty for consuming non-local resources first?

Remote resources are hard to defend but unlikely to be occupied by an enemy early, by conserving resources in a local protected area you have more accessible reserves when the main settlement is under siege later.

Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#55

Post by jwtadvice »

jordanlev wrote: post #46
jwtadvice wrote: post #11

Yes: geostrategy is a huge defining factor in the organization of the planet, the movement of people and the evolution of society. It is a primary factor, including resource extraction technologies, agricultural capability, and more. I think rounding that up to "drove the rise of civilizations" is a crude way to put that. For example, the simulation pits "agriculture plus military" against "agriculture". Then they fo…

> A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in... Any recommendations on good places to learn / keep abreast of this kind of info? I'd love to read news that was more high-level about what's really going on, but it's hard to find. Many years ago, Stratfor had a free weekly newsletter that had excellent info along these lines, but after they got hac…

Washington Thinktanks are a good start (though they still tend to 'flourish' things in nationalist language). I prefer their publications to their press events, though the latter is easier to consume.

The press briefings at the State Department are pretty good from a reporting side, but you need to follow for a long time before you see the forest instead of the trees.

A good direct source is the Strategic Studies Institute. They publish primarily academically minded geostrategy reports and assessments, and are mostly centered in the military War Colleges and a couple universities that offer Strategic Studies programs.

Establishments that host pre-PRified documents from strategy organizations are a good source of mostly historic but sometimes current documents. Looking up, for example, the Pentagon Papers or pre-PR version of the Wolfowitz Doctrine are very clear. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) does a good job documenting some of these documents. Of course Wikileaks and others who have copies of documents (like the Stratfor docs you mentioned) is another.

But let's put that out to Hacker News: what are your sources?

Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#57

Post by clock_tower »

joshuaheard wrote: post #35
LordHumungous wrote: post #21

Interestingly, from a cursory glance at those images, it looks like the biggest gap between the model and the data is in Iran and central Asia. The model predicts a low incidence of civilization there, which makes sense due to the region's low agricultural potential, but in reality large civilizations have thrived in those areas. I wonder what factor explains this divergence? Trade along the Silk Road?

Long term climate change? Those areas were probably fertile when the ancient civilizations thrived there.

It was local climate change and poor resource management -- two problems which fed on each other. Desertification isn't new to the 20th century...

Iran was originally wooded, but the forests were marginal -- not very fertile, easy to lose, mostly valuable for keeping topsoil in place. These were cut at rates faster than they could regenerate, and the country desertified. The ancient Persians were superb engineers (their air-conditioning and water-transport methods, in particular, get a lot of attention in sustainability circles today), but poor foresters.

Of course, regenerative forestry was only invented in the 19th century. Persia isn't the only part of the world where marginal forests were over-harvested and lost; the forests that survived were those in very tree-friendly regions, or in uninhabited regions, or both. In Persia, the temperate-rainforest zone north of the Elburz Mountains (on the south shore of the Caspian Sea) was forested much longer, although these days it's more urbanized than anything else.

The problem in Iraq -- Mesopotania -- was a different one: the Babylonians put in irrigation canals, but, over time, irrigation canals render the soil salty and toxic to plants. This takes thousands of years; but by the time the Mongols arrived, parts of Iraq were already a salt marsh, and after Hugalu Khan destroyed the irrigation systems, no one could get much value from rebuilding them. The climate is still mild and pleasant; the soil, much less so.

Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#58

Post by clock_tower »

kowdermeister wrote: post #47
wyager wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it's critical to become starfaring as soon as possible . Every year we delay carries tremendous risk.

Do you think we can get rid of this once we leave the planet and go multi-planetary? We will bring our gray matter with us. May a few generations grow up and they will repeat our mistakes. Possibly the only solution is to get way smarter by gene editing and preserve as much data as we can from our age.

Over time, populations adapt to their circumstances. In a society in which Malthusian pressures operate, and the thrifty and peaceful out-reproduce the violent and improvident, society will become more thrifty and peaceful over time -- and will eventually become prosperous and organized enough to escape the Malthusian trap. (The opposite pressures can also operate, but you need external sources of chaos for selection in favor of chaos to occur. Order is normally self-establishing, self-reinforcing, and stronger than chaos over time.)

A Farewell to Alms discusses this in great detail; England began the Industrial Revolution (i.e. broke out of the Malthusian trap) in the late 18th century, but if not for them, the Continent would have done it in the 19th; if not the Continent, then Japan in the late 19th or China sometime in the 20th.

Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#59

Post by anonymouslee »

softwarelimits wrote: post #44

what are the best open source tools for social simulations?

I'm part of an NSF funded research coordination network focused on supporting good practices for computational modeling (www.comses.net). We've been curating a comprehensive list of computational modeling platforms at https://www.openabm.org/modeling-platforms but for the most part the popular modeling platforms are NetLogo (https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/), Repast (https://repast.github.io/), and Mason (https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/).

Rob Allan wrote a survey of agent based modelling toolkits available at http://www.grids.ac.uk/Complex/ABMS/ (in 2011 though so some things are out-of-date).

It's important to strive towards models that are as simple as possible so you don't end up "simulating the world" and so you can better understand and analyze the processes that led to the interesting results. It's also important that you document and open your source code to review because as we all know, it's trivial to hardcode your assumptions into a program to tell you what you want to see.

Re: Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

#60

Post by clock_tower »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #22

And then there is Caral, a civilization that seems to have evolved without any violence. Here is an excellent video about the discovery [1]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0jSXv9Jyk

Norte Chico society was unusual in a lot of ways, including disinterest in violence (which was helped along by having no neighbors). I'd recommend 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus for an in-depth look.
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