Lengthening Low-Tech History

[Flyndaran]

Diseases that can only create plagues in dense highly populated areas could keep people isolated and in small groups.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Diseases that can only create plagues in dense highly populated areas could keep people isolated and in small groups.

The fact is that that's the case for the majority of diseases. Through nearly all of recorded history, cities were unhealthy places to live, because a larger population in close contact can sustain more endemic diseases, and because cities had large numbers of animals whose diseases could mutate to affect humans. But city dwellers responded by evolving immunities. Then some of them came to countries without many cities, and contagion led to pandemics that wiped out entire populations.

You need to find a factor that isn't already part of Earth's history, I think.

Bill Stoddard

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

You need to find a factor that isn't already part of Earth's history, I think.

Or make things universal that were only present in parts of Earth. Plenty of places on Earth had long technological stalls (usually at TL 0-1, which is unsurprising since TL 0 is 90% of human history and TL 1 is 50% of the rest).

[DCB]

Originally Posted by Rhoanna

After all, how does one discover that process (unless deities/saints just tell the process to some smith)?

For many settings, that's a perfectly plausible explanation for the knowledge (whether or not it's actually true -- for example, a powerful guild could promote the idea that they're working under divine inspiration to increase their prestige and to justify harsh repression of competition).

That's beside the point, though, which is that representing the knowledge in this form discourages experimentation. For example...

Someone has to discover that two repetitions doesn't work, but three does. And then, why not try four, since what harm can more piety do? Or maybe add a prayer to St. Clement, patron saint of blacksmiths? Or maybe recite a bible passage about some exorcism or smithing?

...even you, attacking this problem with a blatantly post-Enlightenment mindset, have fallen into the trap of working within the representational paradigm. You're not talking about "heat for 30% longer" but "for another prayer", sharply reducing the space of possible experiments and making methodical exploration substantially more difficult.

It also makes accidental experiments less likely -- a pious smith in a rush is less likely to skip part of a religious ritual than he is to shorten some rule-of-thumb timing. Even saying the prayer faster is unlikely, for reasons of piety and also because it's apt to be used to set the cadence of hammering the iron/pumping the bellows/etc. So the set of actions is much more constrained.

Moreover, a pious pre-Enlightenment smith likely wouldn't be quite so cavalier about freestyling his religious rituals, making this type of experimentation even less likely.


That's not to say it can't happen, of course, just that this is one way of plausibly extending developmental timelines, as per OP's request.

[DCB]

Originally Posted by Sindri

It's certainly not a given but it seems like most times a society gets it's hands on something that appeals to it enough to manufacture it itself in notable quantities it rapidly starts to mess around with it.

I'm not sure that's true of the pre-Enlightenment world in general. "Analyze and innovate" is a modern mindset, not the default state of human behaviour.

That being said, your players will also be working from a post-Enlightenment mindset, meaning they may well find more static mindsets -- even historically accurate ones! -- to be "unrealistic". As a result, "plausible" may be more restrictive than "realistic" here.

Guilds also have the "disadvantage" of bringing people focused on the same trade together and preserving what knowledge already exists though.

Why did guilds forbid things like new weaves? Was it an attempt at assuring quality?

If I'm remembering this podcast correctly, it was to prevent upsetting the apple-cart, essentially. The masters of the guild were in a comfortable position, so change wasn't beneficial for them, so they suppressed it.

That type of active suppression of change is a way to lengthen your history while maintaining stable societies.

Greek/Roman knowledge wasn't really an outside influence though

Not in the sense of being completely separate, no, but it was significantly unavailable until re-introduced, meaning its re-introduction had both a progressive and a disruptive effect. Based on that, based on its effects, and based on how it was received and characterized at the time and later, it's fairly close to an outside influence.

Terminology doesn't really matter, though; the point is just that it's plausible that technological progress in Europe would not have undergone the acceleration it did with that influx of knowledge, meaning the time from TL 3-4 without such an event could very plausibly be substantially longer than it was historically.

It was a substantial part of the basis which allowed them to reach TL 3 in the first place let along work at TL 4 and so it's really part of European TL history.

True, but kind of beside the point. If the question is how long it can plausibly take a society to go from TL 2-3 or 3-4, it doesn't really matter what knowledge the society used to have available, only what knowledge the society has available going forward, and that can decrease as well as increase.

[gjc8]

Originally Posted by DCB

...even you, attacking this problem with a blatantly post-Enlightenment mindset, have fallen into the trap of working within the representational paradigm. You're not talking about "heat for 30% longer" but "for another prayer", sharply reducing the space of possible experiments and making methodical exploration substantially more difficult.

Different prayers with different lengths. Talk fast or slow. Etc.

[DCB]

Originally Posted by gjc8

Different prayers with different lengths. Talk fast or slow. Etc.

Note that my original post covered this; see the bolded parts. Even ignoring any of that, is it not more difficult to come up with prayers to cover all timings than to simply use, say, a water clock?

To expand a little, it's certainly not necessary that framing the activity in religious terms would tend to preserve it from change -- some real-world religions are very free-wheeling about their ceremonies -- but it's certainly realistic, as it appeared to happen regularly in our own history, and -- assuming "realistic" implies "plausible" -- that's good enough for our current purposes.

We're not trying to say that it would be impossible for a modern, post-Enlightenment person to perform science in the situation; we're trying to determine which conditions would make slower technological progression plausible.

[combatmedic]

Men were doing the good old 'analyze and innovate' for millenia before the so-called 'Enlightenment.'

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Men were doing the good old 'analyze and innovate' for millenia before the so-called 'Enlightenment.'

But only in a personal subjective way. That is not ever anywhere near as useful as a truly scientific approach.
It can get you only so far, so fast. Methodical experimentation requires an O.C.D. type if not adhering to such an approach.

[gjc8]

Originally Posted by DCB

To expand a little, it's certainly not necessary that framing the activity in religious terms would tend to preserve it from change -- some real-world religions are very free-wheeling about their ceremonies -- but it's certainly realistic, as it appeared to happen regularly in our own history, and -- assuming "realistic" implies "plausible" -- that's good enough for our current purposes.

Plausible is in the eye of the beholder, of course. I'd believe it might slow things somewhat. But I'm skeptical it could achieve a drastic slowdown.

If you look at history, people are quite willing to be "innovative" about religion, too.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

But only in a personal subjective way. That is not ever anywhere near as useful as a truly scientific approach.
It can get you only so far, so fast.

Yes, the scientific method is better than personal subjective experimentation. But personal subjective experimentation is exactly what happened, and what lead to the historical advancement that we got. So any mechanism that limits people to only personal subjective experimentation isn't going to slow down pre-Enlightenment technological advancement.