Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
I think Bret rightfully treats it as a secondary career and that his patrons are very right to support him.
Complete disagreement here. Informative writing may serve as entertainment, but if it's done well, that's not all it is. It helps people understand the world, which can provide all kinds of benefits beyond keeping them from being bored for a few minutes.
In fact, this type of work is precisely how people learn almost everything, right up to grad school, which means it's the way the overwhelming majority of education is conducted. Most people going through that aren't doing it for entertainment. Hell, Spivak's Calculus is more on this level—presenting findings to non-experts—than it is an academic endeavor, and no one dismisses that as just being entertainment.
It may not be valuable to people who are already experts in a field, so may not be properly "academic", but this categorization of acoup (and anything like this work) as simply entertainment is going way too far.
The tl;dr is basically that part of an academic's job is to educate not just the professionals but also the lay public. By using fantasy and other pop culture works, he's introducing pretty important military history and theory concepts to those who wouldn't otherwise attempt to wade into it--and if they enjoy it, they might come back for some more pressing and serious can't-sugarcoat-this topics such as the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In general, I would say that academics all too commonly forget the need to engage with people outside of their narrow disciplines, and in doing so, you can cede the field to engaging writers who are way out of their depths and horribly wrong about what they are writing (e.g., Jared Diamond).
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the Diamond example here, but I think of him as precisely a cautionary tale for academics, of what can go wrong when they try to go too far in the pop-science, big-picture, broad-audience direction. Diamond is solidly an academic, not some kind of outsider... he's held a professorship at UCLA for 50+ years. But later in his career decided he wanted to write "big history" interdisciplinary synthesis for a popular audience.
I suppose one could try to write for a popular audience without going that far outside your own discipline/expertise though.
Also - generally speaking, I think being able to speak (or write) in a manner that's compelling for audiences across broad backgrounds, rather than just their niche community is a skillset to be admired.
Science does nothing if people do not believe in it, or do not engage with it.
I definitely agree that this does not give academics license to veer entirely outside of their expertise and use their credentials in the field to hide this (eg: Diamond). But I think not trying at all is worse. Far worse.
I'm also seriously baffled by people who try to portray his views as racist of eurocentric. His preface explicitly spells out that Europe was a backwater until the early modern period. In fact, a large part of the motivation behind Guns, Germs, and steel was to debunk the idea of wester cultural or racial superiority, and provide a compelling counter narrative to those explanations of Eurasian-American divergence.
This sort-of goes too far. The Roman empire at its height was very much not a backwater. What is pretty unique about Europe is the subsequent enormous loss of civilizational complexity in the Early Middle Ages combined with the fact that it could, albeit 1000 years later, drag itself out of the hole again.
Could you elaborate a bit?
Myself I found his books quite compelling. I'm of course not an anthropologist, historian etc. so I may be missing something big.
As for Guns, Germs, and Steel itself, it's not quite as bad as Collapse, but it does have issues. The underlying thesis--of geographical determinism--just doesn't hold up to actual evidence that well: there's not a lot of evidence for Neolithic technology spread in the east-west axis of Eurasia, especially in comparison to the rather prolific spread you see in the Americas. In particular, cereal crops: you see very little spread of cereal domesticants between Mesopotamia/Mediterranean and East Asia, while maize spreads from Mesoamerica well into both North and South America, supplanting indigenous crops in both places.
The deeper issue with GGS, for anthropologists in particular, is that it has an underlying presumption of a unilinear model of civilization--essentially, the idea that something like the tech tree in Civilization games is a good model of how technology works. In anthropology, this model is deeply discredited, as it performs extremely poorly, especially when you look at cultures that straddle chiefdom/state societies.
Academia ostensibly has a dual focus, on both research and education. But the really is usually different from that messaging.
However, these posts are not doing original research which does distinguish them from the main activity of academics. They're essentially brief survey papers (works that summarize the existing publications on a given topic). This is not a knock against ACoUP. These posts are excellent and I enjoy them immensely. They're just not setting out to accomplish the objectives that most academics are trying to achieve.
This snobbery problem opens a bigger chasm between the academics and the general public that would otherwise be necessary, and the political consequences down the line might be serious; if academics are perceived as out of touch, aloof and intentionally incomprehensible, the backlash won't be just anti-snobbish, but anti-intellectual, with possible dire consequences for the viability and vibrancy of Western civilization.
But the fact that popularizers like Bret Devereaux reap so much open disdain indicates that few activities are as unpopular among the gatekeepeers as building bridges across said chasm. A True Intellectual Must Be Dour At All Costs.
I think it is fair to say that the marginal value of one extra ACOUP sized blogpost of high quality popular education material is probably higher than one extra book, but that comes down to the relatively lack of high quality popular education material.
Let the user decimate units for indiscipline and stuff too. or hang cheating officers to win troop loyalty. Could be a real favorite of sadists and masochist.
The "tyranny of the wagon equation" is so good.
There's also the series on the defense of cities, the series on bread and the one on clothing.
Oh, and the series on steel production.
You know what? Just read everything he's written.
Can't wait to read this post.
But from Devereaux's studies on logistics, it seems that the premodern empires, after reaching a certain size, were "almost equal" when it came to military capability, and a lot of the (dis)advantages were on the quality side, such as good maneuvering and an ability to join two armies at precisely the same time.
It surely explains why the Romans never managed to crush the Persians, even though the Roman empire had a lot more resources to draw from. The logistics of running a really massive campaign against the East were too daunting.