Lengthening Low-Tech History

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Well, start by assuming there's little or no scientific community, because why would there be, right? To the extent that researchers exist at all, they're largely unaware of each other. Boom, no communication.

After all, historically speaking, the idea that knowledge should be actively collected, advanced, and disseminated for the good of mankind is somewhat unusual. Even Classical Greece and Persia, so far as I know, treated science as more of a hobby or an abstract philosophical exploration than an institution. It wasn't until the late Renaissance that we had universities and academic societies and something we would recognize as modern science, and formal pedagogy (creating a large educated population, if not necessarily well-educated) came even later, from the Industrial Revolution.

Even if two or more scientists do know about each other, letters travel slowly (if at all), and travel can be dangerous. Research notes can be destroyed by accident, or time, or war, or by illiterate peasants using them for kindling or building material. So even writing isn't proof against technological stagnation.

Practical inventions could spread quickly, if they were adopted by the peasantry - but the inspiration that leads to a novel invention is essentially luck. In our own history, there are numerous inventions that could have happened much earlier, but didn't because no one thought of them or stumbled on them by accident. There's no reason why that state couldn't go on basically forever. And more esoteric theories might never develop or spread at all, having no obvious application.

And who's to say that your scientists are even right? A treatise on how the diseases of the body are caused by certain elemental spirits, whose presence can be divined by examining the shape and color of the feces, and who can be purged by striking the body with certain minerals associated with each element, isn't the sort of thing that's likely to lead to better medicine.

Artisans are unlikely to experiment much, particularly if the underlying scientific principles are poorly understood; after all, they already know their crafts, so why would they waste time and valuable materials performing their craft wrong? A skilled artisan might have at best a few sons or assistants to learn the craft, and no time or care to write a book; if guilds exist, they might jealously guard their knowledge rather than sharing it. In any of these cases, nothing new is discovered, and the pool of people who could conceivably advance the state of the art remains comfortably small.

This is pretty much true but a lot of it is describing how things actually worked which means that until a certain point it isn't doing anything. You can have the development of larger scientific communities happen later which will definitely slow down things but at some point it has to be developed because the ability to organize a scientific community is part of TL and without it you are actually at TL 4 (Scientific community organizing TL 1.) or something. You can also make people just less willing to share information but that would generally involve messing with people's psychology and as I noted before can have bad consequences if taken too far. There is probably also a cultural way to keep scientists from sharing information with each other but I'm not sure what it is. Information that forms the basis of a profession is extremely easy to keep limited but for people generally like to spread other information as much as they can if only to argue.

Still delaying development of the community is a good idea. Are there are subjects or fields in particular that will suffer more than others from not being able to communicate with a large community of scientists?

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Sindri

You can have the development of larger scientific communities happen later which will definitely slow down things but at some point it has to be developed

Why? No it doesn't. You can maintain the status quo forever if you want. It won't feel realistic, but only because real history wasn't stagnant forever - and because players will be tempted to use their anachronistic knowledge to invent everything that the campaign world never quite seems to figure out.

because the ability to organize a scientific community is part of TL and without it you are actually at TL 4 (Scientific community organizing TL 1.) or something.

No, you're actually at TL1, or wherever you started, because the TL never advanced for a number of reasons - one of which could be the lack of any scientific community (and others of which can be war, resource deprivation, cultural aversion, whatever).

Still delaying development of the community is a good idea. Are there are subjects or fields in particular that will suffer more than others from not being able to communicate with a large community of scientists?

I can't think of any offhand. At first I considered that a "catalog" science like botany or zoology would be easier, but AFAIK the real value in those sciences is in finding the relationships between species and establishing a standard nomenclature; the former needs more data than a lone scientist is likely to collect (unless he travels the world looking for new specimens) and the latter requires that everyone working in the field agree on a standard, so you'd have to communicate with everyone in the field.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Sindri

Still delaying development of the community is a good idea. Are there are subjects or fields in particular that will suffer more than others from not being able to communicate with a large community of scientists?

A field that's dependent on a fairly small number of discoveries will have significant randomness for a small community; it could be almost as fast as for a large community, it could simply never occur.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Why? No it doesn't. You can maintain the status quo forever if you want. It won't feel realistic, but only because real history wasn't stagnant forever - and because players will be tempted to use their anachronistic knowledge to invent everything that the campaign world never quite seems to figure out.

No, you're actually at TL1, or wherever you started, because the TL never advanced for a number of reasons - one of which could be the lack of any scientific community (and others of which can be war, resource deprivation, cultural aversion, whatever).

But I don't want to maintain the status quo forever. The idea is to stretch out history as far as it can be while still feeling realistic and while still eventually developing all the desired stuff which I've been simplifying to TL 4. In this case since having a scientific community is more fun than not having one I'd prefer to have one which means it needs to get developed at some point. Of course that can be relatively recently allowing for slowed technological development until it is.

[whswhs]

I think it's important to distinguish in this discussion between science and technology. Technology came first and was initially created without any help from science; Paleolithic hunters didn't need mineralogy or crystallography to make flaked stone blade—though they surely learned a bit about practical mineralogy in making them. When science emerged, it had no immediate impact on technology. Even as late as the Industrial Revolution, the influence often went the other way: Thermodynamics emerged from such sources as Carnot's analysis of the operating efficiency of heat engines, for example. Probably the first examples of purely theoretical science giving rise to useful technology were the aniline dye industry emerging from organic chemistry and radio emerging from Maxwell's electromagnetic equations—that is, roughly TL6.

To prevent science, the most important thing is to prevent the general publication of scientific findings. That may result in technology continuing to develop empirically, by tinkering, and thus significantly slower, without the accelerator effect of systematic research.

This could be done technologically, by not having the printing press emerge. But that may be hard to manage: The Chinese developed it at TL4 and the Europeans either copied it or invented it independently a bit later but also at TL4. Slowing technological growth might prevent this, but that reduces to preventing or limiting technology. Alternatively, it might be possible to hinder the printing press's adoption by having a logographic script rather than a syllabic or alphabetic one—which in turn might be accomplished by not having languages with a standard CV syllable structure; syllabic writing appears to emerge in languages with simple two-sound syllables, like Japanese, and alphabetic writing emerges out of syllabic writing.

Or, culturally, not having the ethos of open publication of results could hinder the emergence of science. The Royal Society's rules where credit went to the first publication really made a difference! Before them, advanced knowledge was often esoteric or even occult—and "science" wasn't clearly demarcated from "sorcery." The Taoists, who worked that way, came up with some damned clever things but never achieved a self-sustaining scientific revolution.

As to slowing down technology—I would favor several changes in legal institutions:

* Make ownership of property, and especially of capital, insecure, and contracts hard to enforce; this makes it hard for people to make long-term plans or to profit from innovating.
* Set up guild monopolies of trades, which can restrict artisans to established methods.
* Hinder interregional trade, so that a country that comes up with a new and more efficient method of producing something can't profit by exporting it.
* Alternatively, have a single massive empire that controls pretty much everything, to make innovation driven by military competition unnecessary—you don't want people inventing the flexion or torsion catapult or the polyreme, to pick early examples, lest they get the idea that innovation is worthwhile in general. You can actually combine this with hindering interregional trade if the empire has internal tariffs, as I believe the Romans did.

I'm not sure there's any good way to make technological innovation unworkable in itself. I suppose you could have constant fog to prevent people seeing the stars and devising calendars, or a purely oceanic world where fire is impossible and sapient beings might not have hands . . . but that's radical departures from Earth and in the latter case from humanity. If we're talking about slowing human innovation on Earth, I'd look at institutions.

One other method definitely works, because we know it DID work, historically. Suppress the practice of rational inquiry, and, in particular, reject the concept of natural causes as a blasphemous limitation on God's omnipotence. The Muslim world did this when the Sunni took over and suppressed the Mutazilites—and went from one of the leading intellectual communities of the world (ahead of the Chinese in science, though not in practical arts) to being left in the dust by the West, where Thomas Aquinas had argued the opposite point in Paris and won the debate (so that we have Catholic theology to thank for Western science).

Bill Stoddard

[martin_rook]

The comments about recurring natural disasters flattening cities and The Song of Ice and Fire gave me an idea. Westeros seems to have seasons which last for years. What if the setting has drastic environmental changes that happen on a short enough time-frame to keep civilizations from getting too stable. Like, ice ages happen to one degree or another (heh heh) every 500-1000 years or so and last for a few centuries. The kind of society or state that develops during one "season" might not be set up to endure the next change without being radically altered -- and I think that would change tech development.

[ErhnamDJ]

You could also just make it difficult for any societies to flourish.

Perhaps make tin and copper even rarer than they were. You could increase flooding, make rivers dry up or move frequently (which would destroy the cities built around them), you can make sure there's nowhere on the map safe for coastal travel (definitely no Mediterranean), you can put mountain impasses in inopportune places to prevent the spread of crops and animals and technologies, you can give them food crops that don't provide as much nutrition, you can put have frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, potential trade routes blocked by tundra or deserts or horse archers, and so on like that. Minor things that your players wouldn't necessarily even pick up on. They're not going to know that the available wheat varieties all have 20% less calories and protein.

You can do an awful lot with simple geography to prevent people from progressing past TL 1 or 2.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Perhaps make tin and copper even rarer than they were. You could increase flooding, make rivers dry up or move frequently (which would destroy the cities built around them), you can make sure there's nowhere on the map safe for coastal travel (definitely no Mediterranean), you can put mountain impasses in inopportune places to prevent the spread of crops and animals and technologies, you can give them food crops that don't provide as much nutrition, you can put have frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, potential trade routes blocked by tundra or deserts or horse archers, and so on like that. Minor things that your players wouldn't necessarily even pick up on. They're not going to know that the available wheat varieties all have 20% less calories and protein.

Yes. This is the subject of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ken Hite gives a decent quick summary of the idea in the "great motherlands" passages of GURPS Infinite Earths. You could have a world with nothing but wicked stepmotherlands.

Bill Stoddard

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by Sindri

How long did you have them take to go from castaway to TL4+X?

In practical capabilities they fell quite quickly once cut off from ultra-tech industry. In terms of knowledge, rather arbitrarily I decided it took two flood-cycles, i.e. several hundred years.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by whswhs

This could be done technologically, by not having the printing press emerge. But that may be hard to manage: The Chinese developed it at TL4 and the Europeans either copied it or invented it independently a bit later but also at TL4. Slowing technological growth might prevent this, but that reduces to preventing or limiting technology. Alternatively, it might be possible to hinder the printing press's adoption by having a logographic script rather than a syllabic or alphabetic one—which in turn might be accomplished by not having languages with a standard CV syllable structure; syllabic writing appears to emerge in languages with simple two-sound syllables, like Japanese, and alphabetic writing emerges out of syllabic writing.

I don't know about how effective the logographic script would be at discouraging printing presses. I mean it makes sense but while Hanzi may not be a pure logographic script very little is and it was the script used for the first printing press. I suppose it could be argued that this was unlikely and either dependent on other factors or luck.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure there's any good way to make technological innovation unworkable in itself. I suppose you could have constant fog to prevent people seeing the stars and devising calendars, or a purely oceanic world where fire is impossible and sapient beings might not have hands . . . but that's radical departures from Earth and in the latter case from humanity. If we're talking about slowing human innovation on Earth, I'd look at institutions.

While I don't want people to limit their responses by this I have considered the idea of settings without stars and thus having a night sky limited to whatever is in the solar system so I'd be interested in hearing about any less than obvious effects of that. Practically speaking it's probably not a good idea but it's aesthetically interesting.

Originally Posted by whswhs

One other method definitely works, because we know it DID work, historically. Suppress the practice of rational inquiry, and, in particular, reject the concept of natural causes as a blasphemous limitation on God's omnipotence. The Muslim world did this when the Sunni took over and suppressed the Mutazilites—and went from one of the leading intellectual communities of the world (ahead of the Chinese in science, though not in practical arts) to being left in the dust by the West, where Thomas Aquinas had argued the opposite point in Paris and won the debate (so that we have Catholic theology to thank for Western science).

Bill Stoddard

Yeah this works. I wonder if there are any alternative arguments against the concept of natural causes for variety that don't ultimately boil down to the same sort of justification. Ideally you want something that gets people to stop others inquiring instead of just not doing it themselves.

Originally Posted by martin_rook

The comments about recurring natural disasters flattening cities and The Song of Ice and Fire gave me an idea. Westeros seems to have seasons which last for years. What if the setting has drastic environmental changes that happen on a short enough time-frame to keep civilizations from getting too stable. Like, ice ages happen to one degree or another (heh heh) every 500-1000 years or so and last for a few centuries. The kind of society or state that develops during one "season" might not be set up to endure the next change without being radically altered -- and I think that would change tech development.

Hmm a real ice age seems like it would be difficult to arrange with that sort of frequency but you might be able to get things like the Little Ice Age.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Yes. This is the subject of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ken Hite gives a decent quick summary of the idea in the "great motherlands" passages of GURPS Infinite Earths. You could have a world with nothing but wicked stepmotherlands.

Bill Stoddard

I've read that one, it was a fascinating read.