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Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

The article presents an engineering answer to s sociological question.

The reason technology did not advance in Middle Earth is because innovation was not rewarded. Innovation and experimentation were punished.

Mine a little too deeply? You awaken a balrog that kills you an everyone you have ever known.

Want to expand into that verdant area across the river? You didn't expect giant spiders, did you?

Build a disruptive startup and bank $50B? You'll hear dragon wings a-flappen.

Middle Earth was not filled with innovative disrupters because the risk and reward equation strongly discouraged innovation.

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Most of those can be avoided with a bit of foresight. Take Balrogs, for example: by the Third Age there weren't all that many of them left, and on the off-chance that you do run into one, you can lure it into a trap made from one of those extremely deep pits that Dwarves are so fond of digging. Just make sure the pit is narrow enough that it can't spread its wings (if they have wings) and be careful that the pit doesn't have water at the bottom to break the Balrog's fall -- you may need to use bilge pumps. Perhaps consult with someone who managed to beat one in a fight; Glorfindel is still around, and making regular visits to maintain friendly relations with the Elves is just good business sense. And of course you should make sure that certain key sections of tunnel can be collapsed; you'll want this anyway to deal with the nameless monstrosities older than the world itself that you start running into at a certain depth.

The other threats are analogous. Giant spiders? Creepy but overrated. Someone with decent aim can one-shot most of them with a thrown rock, as demonstrated by a Mr. Baggins of Hobbiton, and their territory is a fairly small portion of Mirkwood. Dragons? Definitely an issue, but one that can be mitigated by storing your treasure horde in a maze of tunnels too small for a dragon to crawl through -- or, better yet, use multiple geographically isolated hordes. And again, the ability to collapse certain sections of tunnel would be both technologically unchallenging and very helpful here. Arguably it was the Dwarves' lack of innovation that led to them having such persistent dragon issues.

How is that different from real world history?

Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them.

Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse.

Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.

> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them.

That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases.

> Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.

Again, most of the time that didn't happen. And you often didn't die of tropical diseases either.

> Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse.

Most towns were not buried and most coal miners don't die in collapses.

> That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases

That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions.

Rome didn't conquer Spain because they liked the weather.

> That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions.

That doesn't change the numbers involved. Most things that farmers sowed for most of history didn't get burned by invading armies.

>> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them.

> That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases.

It happened in many prominent cases. Egypt, for example, was called "the breadbasket of Rome."

Yes but not because armies rampaged over Egypt over and over again. Rome was just another state taxing the farmers.

There's a lot of military conquest in Egyptian history. The Hyksos, the Kushites, the Saites, the Persians, the Ptolemies, and finally the Romans.

It's relative. The competing risk only has to be a little greater to bias the decision. (Or, more accurately, the perceived risk).

Remember, risk is probability x severity. In your first example, the severity of not growing crops is starvation vs. the severity of wasted toil in agriculture. I'd imagine the probability is probably higher, too.

Yeah but in Middle Earth you have all of those problems plus giant spiders, balrogs, wizards, orcs etc

One of the great lessons to take away from a differential equations class... in my more dour moments, I think it's the only lesson to take away for most students in the course... is how common it is for iterated systems (which is almost anything embedded in "time", which is to say, everything we deal with in the real world) to be very sensitive to the strength of the feedback loop. It is trivial to construct systems that slowly, but surely, go to zero if you start with 0.5000000000000, but slowly but surely go to infinity if you start with 0.5000000000001. Small differences can be a big deal.

Also, it should be pointed out that our history is not full of industrial revolutions. There's the one that we're still living in, and arguably two or three that fizzled depending on exactly how you count and where you draw the line, and that's it. Industrial revolutions aren't easy in the real world!

Innovation was heavily discouraged throughout history by vested interests it challenged. Printing did not pick up in the Ottoman empire due to guild of scribes, for example (I heard).

> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them.

That's why so many great civilizations were founded in places with good geographic barriers around a productive interior. Ancient Egypt for example had the Nile and was surrounded by vast deserts, which weren't feasible to cross at the time. On the other end of history, the US has similar advantages.

I assure you that people crisscrossed the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East all the time in ancient days. Egypt's big advantage was its ability to produce lots of food along the Nile River and settle down and focus on something beyond survival.

Egypt was a civilization for about 1500 years before the camel was domesticated. Before the camel, you weren't going to get an army across six hundred miles of desert, and Egypt was easy to defend from anyone trying to enter along the Nile.

Egypt's food production was certainly critical to its success, but its isolation was both its defense and its downfall. Other civilizations competed with each other and advanced their technology, while Egypt existed happily in isolation, unaware of new technologies like bronze and chariots. After the camel, along with ships able to carry significant cargo, Egypt's food production became a juicy target, and it was conquered by one civilization after another.

> How is that different from real world history?

It's not different from the vast majority of real world history.

Many new world burgeoning civilizations got wiped out/stunted by natural things like droughts and the land being farmable and able to maintain large populations.

There just wasn't any need - they had a world filled with magic.

Why would you ruin the natural world for industrial gains? In fact the Orkai and the white wizard was quite industrious with their forges and their war machine production and the natural world pushed back.

That and I don't see the start up world being that different from a risk perspective just the outcomes are different. And maybe middle earth was still to early.

Any calculation of risk must include the outcomes.

In the real world, the worst case realistic scenario for a startup is that you fail and lose all your money, and maybe face lawsuits.

In a fantasy setting, the worst case realistic scenario is that your skin is flayed from your bones and you spend the rest of existence serving a liche as a skeleton warrior.

Filled with magic, is overstating the magical capabilities of the world.

Gandalf, one of the most powerful wizards in the world can't even throw fireballs at his enemies. He has to gather pine cones set them on fire, then throw the pine cones. Most of the humans were magicless and could have used a tractor.

The article is fun, but I have my own theory - necessity is the mother of invention. In a magic world, where's the necessity?

Magic in Tolkien is rare and subtle. It isn’t in common use at all, and isn’t applied to solve many problems.

This is pretty much it but it's larger than that. It's not just "magic", it's the whole nature of Tolkien's world. The world has a creator-all-powerful God and everybody in it knows it. He created all sentient creatures in it for his own entertainment. Everything that "is", is however he wants it to be and that's the nature of things, there's no Science to "discover". The world was flat like a thousand years ago until some men interfered with God's entertainment and he sank their island and reshaped the world round. Nobody doubts this too. There's many immortal beings out there you can ask firsthand (the Elves). Oh and those also know (or know someone who knows) the lesser gods that know the God. He's real.

Men in the world of Tolkien don't have any reason to "innovate" or even inquire about the world, really.

I was just joking but this interpretation is a great metaphor for our modern world.

A meme (not the 4chan kind) going around lately is the history of the modern world is us as a society knowing less - as opposed to esotericism which is a belief that sometime in the past all the knowledge existed and then we forgot it, it got fragmented, and we find the origin, the center, then we can be free or make gold out of lead or whatever. Scientific revolution, postmodernism etc starts from the assumption we don't know anything and we can't know anything - instead of an origin, knowledge permeates everything.

So if we have a fantasy world where there are actual immortal beings and magic really exists (even though rare as mentioned by another poster) then how can you ever start with the assumption that nobody in the world knows? If you want knowledge, it's a matter of finding the right person or the right ancient scrolls or artifact.

Because the author was very much in love with forests and nature and didn't care at all for modern cities and technology?

Compared to the very lucrative job of digging for coal...

It may not be lucrative now, but it was needed to launch the industrial revolution.

It's similar to manufacturing jobs from the past. Compared to other options, it was lucrative.

The reason why Henry Ford started paying people $5 was not out of generosity or to help them buy his vehicles. It's because the job was monotonous and people would constantly walk off the assembly line. People stayed because it provided a reasonable pathway to middle class when there weren't a lot of other viable options.

Coal mining in the UK was very lucrative, but wealthy people hired armed men to ensure they took the wealth rather than the miners.

Don't forget 'forge the most beautiful, magical set of jewels in the history of history, and then Satan will steal them from you, so you and the boys go on a bloody, genocidal crusade to retrieve them, bringing everything you touch and everyone you meet to ruin.'

That, and 'structure your society towards acquisition of material wealth and technological advancement, so you start plundering and enslaving your neighbours, and eventually, under the guidance of Satan Jr, you decide to invade heaven. And get Atlantis'd.'

Asking why ME didn't have an industrial revolution is looking through a very particular, very uninteresting cultural lens. (It's uninteresting because 'economic growth at any cost' is a common, and rather uninteresting modern view on life, and rarely takes into account it's externalities. Which Tolkien really, really dislikes.)

Tolkien's Middle Earth doesn't need, or want more clever, vain people. Most of the horrible things that happened in it were caused by them.

Yea I wonder if the purpose of this article is to promote capitalism while using a cringey comparison to distract from it. I hope those brain cells were put to good use.

Anyway, middle earth was a setting built to tailor and flesh out the stories in them. Combined together these -are- productive value that people pay for in good times, it seems.

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