In the end gradual natural degradation of system is much more reasonable.
It is very unlikely that the lead pipes that were there since the beginning would be such a cause, but the duration of the fall alone is not enough evidence that it wasn't caused by an immediate problem.
You can use a caustic solution to unclog your pipes and it will work flawlessly, every time for an indefinite amount of time. Then, at some point, you'll have leaks due to glue being eaten away, PVC melting, or other damage.
- "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...)
- "Normal Accidents" by Chuck Perrow (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Tec...)
Tainter deals directly with the Roman Empire, but the nutshell is the cost of complexity begins to outweigh its returns, requiring more and more resources just to maintain the status quo, until the entire thing becomes weak and susceptible to failures large and small.
- "Panarchy: Understanding Human and Natural Systems" (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Panarchy-Understanding-Transformation...) is also a fantastic book drawing from ecosystem science and proposes a general model for this. It's pretty well accepted in ecological circles but has been criticised for a lack of empirical data. The general model is the same as Tainter's though.
- "The Logic of Failure" by Dietrich Dorner is also a classic! (https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...)
Well worth reading all of the above.
If I remember correctly what I read on it, the actual date is arbitrarily taken for didactic clarity, and it's the date the capital moved to another city. But the kingdom still called itself Roman, so contemporaries didn't quite notice the difference. BTW, this is how modern Romania got its name -- smaller kingdoms in the former empire called themselves the glorious Rome.
The curious detail is that Barbarian leaders actually wanted to become king of Rome and to be acknowledged as equally civilized, rather than merely sack and loot it. Some of them were actually legioneers, if I remember it correctly. So it's not clear if a legioneer sacked Rome and set himself as king, was the new state still Roman or already not.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...
I don't think anyone is (was?) suggesting that someone replaced the pipes overnight and they were all dead the next morning, but rather that it was an extremely gradual process that after centuries of extending its implantation managed to reduce cognitive capabilities by a couple points, etc.
The simple counterargument "lead use didn't increase" manages to kill such a theory, though.
If you idiot-proof something well enough, it can take a long time for the Universe to invent an idiot good enough to pull the whole thing down. We tend to look at Rome as one of the oldest well-documented cases of the power of logistics, so it's not outside of the realm of reason to suggest that a good process might survive even a generation or two before Chesterton's Fence wins out. But whether that's due to a loss of cleverness or just human nature is likely going to be hard to prove.
In my opinion the Soviet Union had failed decades prior to its collapse (which is saying something for a system that only lasted 69 years), the root cause being the loss of faith of their own citizenry. And in such a scenario, any bump in the road is suddenly going to turn into a catastrophe. I think blaming the bump is failing to see the forest through all those trees.
The Roman Empire spanned from Great Britain, across Europe, and even along North Africa. And the speed of light was the speed of horseback or sail. Things, even when done with the utmost haste, were slow. And so in this scenario the separation between the failure and collapse was going to be even greater.
Heck, maybe you could even get tenure somewhere if you happened to have academic creds of your own.
Surely someone's done it? Are you familiar with any such profiles that you could share?
How not to get published: "The general consensus is right."
So although individuals may not flip-flop constantly, fields as a whole do. Pick almost any topic in almost any field (especially humanities) and read papers 10-20 years apart. There's a constant cycle.
The cycle becomes self reinforcing too, because now you can interact with previous criticisms (Dr. A said this, but Dr. B said he was wrong. In fact, A was correct because B neglected to consider...).
And yes, some fields aren’t able to perform the kind of reliable science of physics or chemistry, and so end up with a lot of papers that just collectively oscillate around topics.
But I have a hard time seeing how that’s what the above commenter was suggesting.
A much better approximation to the truth would be something like this:
How not to get published: "Other authors are wrong."
How to get published: "These specific other authors are right, and I have built upon the solid foundation laid by their brilliant work to do this other thing that may or may not have any actual utility or be of interest to anyone."
[UPDATE] I actually did once publish a paper [1] that explicitly described (some of) the reasons that one of the then-leading theories in my field was wrong and how I thought it could be improved. It was more or less the beginning of the end of my career. I don't know if there was any causal relationship between these two events, but there was definitely a temporal one.
And now that I reflect upon it, it wasn't even me who pointed out the problem, I was actually just citing Ralph Hartley who had pointed out the problems seven years earlier. He was, AFAICT, never heard from again either.
That's not to say there is no fraud, or bad actors. It's just to say that your comment falls hideously short as a potential way of spotting bad acting, so far short that it looks intentionally misleading.
But that's the point. It isn't "research". It's meaningless busy work to justify a paycheck.
> It's just to say that your comment falls hideously short as a potential way of spotting bad acting, so far short that it looks intentionally misleading.
I disagree. The guy was offering his honest opinion. Your comment comes off as someone working in the industry selfishly trying to justify your existence.
When hypothesis change wildly decade by decade (e.g. in nutrition research) without convergence, you can reason that the system isn't working as intended.
In the nutrition example, I think the lack of progress is due to inadequete data and tooling to tackle such a complex field, as well as the limitations imposed by ethical considerations.
Another issue is research bias due to funding from industry. I don't this should be as much of an issue since the efficacy of scientific methods should be mostly independent of funding source.
So often people forget the last 'W' question - Who, What, When, Where, Why and Why Now?!