Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

It goes with what Christopher Alexander understood about living architecture. How people use it matters. The whole point of pattern languages was the creation of a grammar where all possible ways in which patterns come together develop a valid, architecturally cohesive design. This allows the inhabitants themselves to make changes as their life and circumstances change, and as long as they follow the grammar, it will come out as a cohesive, functional design. Alexander also systematically studied indigenous architecture and went in with a background in mathematics. There is a reason his work influenced people working with software architecture and human-computing interactive design (but our computer systems and products does not realize the full potential of Alexander’s ideas).

There is a kind of bias at play, where we think the culture itself is rigid, and becomes out of date, and therefore, impedes progress. It does not have to be that way, and often time, the culture itself encodes ideas that are crucial. Furthermore, cultural practices can be understood or designed such that it is flexible and versatile — similar to Peru’s pre-Hispanic system of canals. If anything, it’s the bias of our modern worldview that tries to fix culture into the rigid structures just as it tries to create rigid solutions.

For a deeper reading on why that might be, I suggest: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

> hundreds of years of neglect

Hundreds of years, whether of neglect or not, means that it wasn't "in modern times". And, in modern times, hundreds of years of neglect is hard to come by. Either it's maintained, or it's torn down, because we haven't had civilization-ending catastrophies in modern times. So I would not expect to be able to show you many examples, because the pool of candidates is so small.

I won't litigate strongly against this statement because its obvious this matters, but human interests and norms are not immutable and the mechanism to change it definitely involve doing things (at some scale) that can be seen as abnormal or against (some) human interests. This tension and how it's resolved is the evolutionary pressure.

> where we think the culture itself is rigid

Well, the article cites the example of the Spanish failing for decades to irrigate the land because they dismissed the existing culture. Seems like the author has a rigid view of culture, because it seems clear to me that the syncretic culture post-conquest (Spanish ruled) was one radically different to indigenous or european ones.

The depth of intelligence in a human language developed and tested over millennia is truly incredible, more than I believe most of us can appreciate. In a language there exist tactics/knowledge lying dormant waiting for the right circumstances for application. Human languages are not developed in a world favoring local maxima, but in a chaotic world favoring true robustness and antifragility. We would be fools to surrender a time-tested model of nature, to allow languages to die.

I like to think that societies in Latin America (and, importantly, all around the world) survived thousands of years not because of luck, but because the cultures (language, traditions) they developed had ingrained the "scientific knowledge" necessary to survive in the conditions that lived in. An important part of it was that they did not see only as rulers and owners of the world, but only as one part of it. That is one of the basis of what people call magical thinking, but it is sound once you stop disqualifying it just because the word "magical" is in it.

And, I mean, literally, only those who could adapt and understand their world to survive, survived. The knowledge maybe was not as fast evolving as the scientific methods allows to be, but it is, ultimately, the same method. Try, fail, and repeat. Those who were successful survived.

The knowledge ingrained in the culture, traditions and understanding accompanying it was, and _is_, a fundamental part of the solutions that allowed them not to only survive, but to thrive in their environments.

The first comment in this post says that you do not need the culture to carry out the solutions. That may be true, but it does miss that our culture is the strongest (after "basic necessities") incentives we have to choose some things over others. Or understanding of the world is our culture, and our understanding of the world is what makes us take some actions instead of others. You might be able to mimic technical solutions, but to fully understand them, you need the culture that developed them, as it is _literally_ the understanding of the world that allowed the solutions to exist.