Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

A fascinating insight for me came via Kyle Harper's book The Fate of Rome: plagues co-evolve to match civilisations.

<https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...>

That is, the Antonine, and other plauges of Rome relied on the dense urbanisation, highly-developed transportation, and long-range trading patterns, all of which served to provide the conditions in which pathogens which were either benign or simply too virulent to establish themselves in smaller, less-interconnected communities --- in such cases the epidemics would simply burn themselves out, perhaps decimating a village or small trading group of same, but not spreading further.

The fact that Yersinia pestis seems to have evolved first in rodent populations (themselves often microcosms of human civilisations with large and interconnected population clusters) seems relevant. IIRC Harper cites hamsters or gerbils as the prior host species to humans.

James Burke, of Connections fame, stated in a later interview "ReConnections* of how he'd extend the episodes of the original series that a key consequence of jet air travel would be an increased spread of global pandemics. This occurs toward the end of this video:

<https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0>

More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities, whether we're talking human cities (look at the long list of urban vices, online abuse, network issues, and the like). One factor contributing to the "golden age" effect is that such ages exist before the parasites / pathogens evolve. As such, the sense that "something went wrong" seems to me misled, and a better formulation would be that such golden ages were living on borrowed time in the first place.

Podcast episode of Harper addressing a similar theme from Plagues Upon the Earth: <https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2511895438.mp3>.

> More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities

For a non-biology example: Scams are shaped by the economies they exist in, and vice-versa.

Yes, and rely highly on anonymity whether through large populations (cities) or distance (telecommunications and/or transportation).

The term "confidence man" came into general usage following publication of a novel by that title by Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame). It is set on the first great interstate highway of the United States: the steamboat-plied Mississippi River. Harking back to Roman (and Greek) times, I find it quite telling that Mercury (or Hermes) is the god of messages, travel, roads, merchants, thieves, and cunning, amongst others. There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery.

(It's difficult to be fooled by those one lives closely with in small communities for long periods of time. Those may be scoundrels or be known to be untrustworthy but rarely gain confidence in Melville's sense.)

Another curious relationship I suspect about telecommunications is that they effectively reduce reliance on social factors of trust. Mind that this may increase overall societal trustworthiness in many cases, but it's through the replacement of, well, just plain raw trust (unevidenced belief) through monitoring, assessments, and independent validation. In an age before telegraph and jet airlines (or even steamships and railroads), once someone was out of eyesight and earshot, they were lost to direct control or monitoring until either they returned or an emissary could reach them, whether for hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Merchants, diplomats, ships' captains, colonial governors, and the like all operated autonomously for periods of time which would strike us as utterly alien today. Many of the practices, and much of the language used in communications, seems to me to have arisen to express, reinforce, or establish trust in such circumstances. Post-telegraphic language became, well, telegraphic (short, abbreviated, costing or paid by the word) not only due to the expense of the medium, but, carrying over to even non-telegraphic correspondence, because long sustained absences or periods of incommunicado no longer occurred.

(This is one topic touched on in The Control Revolution by James Beniger (1986): <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolut...> Not to be confused with another excellent book of the same title by Andrew Shapiro, addressing the nascent Internet and World Wide Web. Which, come to think of it, also addresses the themes of trust and communications.)

> There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery.

On the road a person has a heavy dose of anonymity (especially in past times), a steady supply of new potential targets without the usual societal protection mechanisms around them, all likely carrying things someone else is very interested in.

For a long time being on the road was like operating outside of society so it was attractive to people who didn't fit in society and had to gain from staying outside, like tricksters.

That's a lot of it.

The marks are also removed from their own support and defence networks, and have to rely on strangers.

There are any number of interesting consequences and manifestations of this. One that comes to mind is the development and prevalence of fast-food franchise networks (McDonalds, KFC, Jack in the Box, etc.) which largely co-evolved with the US Interstate Highway system. For the first time people were traveling long distances by automobile and needed identifiable foodservice options they could trust to at least offer consistent service. Similar effects in the hospitality sector with branded hotels and motels. Previously such services had almost entirely been local institutions, known to locals or the occasional transport workers (truckers, sailors) they served.

An interesting foreshadowing of the Interstate food/gas/lodging phenomenon developed on the passenger rail service of the Santa Fe, most especially that of the Harvey House chain of restaurants located at station stops and catering specifically to the rail passenger clientelle: a large passenger influx arriving on a (nominally) fixed schedule and requiring a full meal service within a specific interval during the train's station stop. The chain was launched in 1876 and grew to 45 restaurants (and 20 dining cars) in 12 states. I believe this was the first chain restaurant, literally strung along the rail lines:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Harvey_Company>

This neatly fits into the history of economies as described by Graeber in Debt: in a close knit society gift economies are a logical extension of how families share resources so barter or trade only really arose when different societies had to interact with each other (with the alternative being war) because those societies did not have the same level of shared mutual trust as each group had within itself.

Under late stage[0] capitalism we're incentivized to think of all relationships as transactional. All interactions between friends are or should be transactions. We spend time, pay attention, give and expect a return. If you're wasting time just having fun instead of working on your side hustle, you're falling behind. Your girlfriend breaking up with you is a learning opportunity you should turn into a blogpost about leadership skills and human resources. If you trust a stranger enough to fall for a scam, that's your fault for being naive. This even manifests in fintech: the entire selling point of blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies is "zero trust". But of course the hyperindividualized individual is also the perfect consumer: alone you lack communal spaces so you go somewhere you pay to be in order to talk to other people who paid to be there or have interactions with people you pay to talk to.

I guess I'm not surprised why religion is still so widespread in the US. Tithes and charity aside, churches and their communal spaces are rare opportunities to spend time with people without spending money or expecting anything in return.

[0]: There must be some unwritten law that anyone talking about present day capitalism will always think it's "late stage" with the expectation that it has developed to a point where it is so clearly self-destructive it must change into something else soon. Even the early 20th century communists were convinced capitalism would collapse under its social stresses any moment now and allow them to have communism rise out of its ashes.

Or we can listen to Socrates and the fact that civilization eats up the soil it depends to grow its food on:

https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~breilly2/world/Lucretuis.htm

Civilization can easily survive a mortality rate that we'd consider impossible, viz. the colonies in the new world, it can't survive hunger.

Harper's analysis includes such factors (he pays a great deal of attention to global climate, particularly the characteristics of the Roman Climate Optimum, which spanned from 200 BCE to 150 CE, and other ecological, political, cultural, and technical factors.

It's also true that disease, as with many other pathologies, tends to observe Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics: things get worse under pressure.

Overexploitation of natural resources (soil depletion, deforestation, elimination of megafauna, depletion of watersheds and aquifers, exhaustion of mineral resources) all contribute to a general weakening of the civilisation which invokes these circumstances. It's worth noting that the Western Roman Empire at the time of its collapse was not generally in a state of pervasive famine.

And Harper isn't giving a One True Way response, he is carefully, with a great deal of historigraphic and scientific evidence building the case that, as I noted above, civilisations and pathogens co-evolve. (My expansion of that to networks or systems and pathologies generally is my own armchair contribution, though based on my own observations of numerous examples at first hand myself.)

As much as I appreciate and respect Socrates, he (as with virtually all pre-Baconian philosophers) relied strongly on reason and extremely unsystematic chosen exemplars to posit hypotheses, many of which have since proven greatly mistaken. (His student's student Aristotle polished this to a fine art.) Baconian science is empirical, Socrates is best known for an interrogative technique.

This isn't to say that some of the suggestions made by Socrates and other philosophers are necessarily wrong. But it is quite rare for same to have been grounded in anything remotely resembling what we'd now call scientific knowledge, a phrase whose apparent redundancy is best resolved by noting that "science" now means not merely knowledge but the systematic approach of observing, deducing, testing, and validating hypotheses, something Socrates did not practice, and Harper has.

Which isn't to say that the shallow interpretation of Harper's narrative might not also be false. But for a third time, that's not my point, the co-evolution of systems and pathologies is, and I'd hope that at least some of my readers here have managed to grasp that concept despite my own bungled attempts to express it.

I find it fascinating that most plague outbreaks seem to have taken down double digit percents of the populations. That's just wild. If 50% of humanity got wiped out suddenly by a pandemic I can't begin to imagine what the consequences would be.

This would obviously be terrible, but are there any long term consequences from this that wouldn't be positive?

Housing prices would come down.

And workers become more scarce, leading to increased salaries.

The plague is one of the reasons behind the economic growth of Florence (and many other places) in the middle ages.

And apparently led to the end of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.

Think about how many highly specialized jobs are needed to run modern-day society. Think about how much of the required knowledge and skill to do those jobs would be lost, not to mention available person-hours. We could be set back a century or more, but without the cheap and plentiful natural resources that got us to where we are today.

Also I’d expect lots of countries to collapse into anarchy, no particular reason to believe that whatever rises from the ashes will be any better.

When the black death hit Norway in 1349, 2/3 of the population was wiped out. The whole structure of society broke down. Most of the state and church was just gone. It took 300 years to get everything back in operation because most people that could read and write had died.

I don't know how you define "long term", but for several generations society didn't work, there were no justice and people really suffered.

Plagues and famines both.

Prior to the 20th century, and even in through the first half of same, famine's population reductions frequently ranged from 10% to 90% over fairly wide areas. It's useful to keep this in mind as contrasted to several major famines of the past roughly 50--60 years, including Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, and the like, which dire as they've been, pale by comparison.

As Communist China's Great Leap Forward and ensuing Great Famine are often mentioned in this context, it's worth noting that a roughly comparable famine had occurred only about 20 years earlier, under the Republic of China, not to mention several similarly-scoped famines in the 19th century. The incidence of famine seems somewhat independent of political structure, and has arguably stopped under Communist Chinese rule. (I draw no causal inference here, just note the fact.)

Ireland saw its population fall by half during the Great Potato Famine of ~1840--1850, through a combination of direct deaths and migration, and only matched its pre-famine population within the past decade. (I've had to consciously note that this fact has changed recently, the fact that the population hadn't recovered was so profound.)

As to impacts: past civilisations were often far less complex and hence less dependent on highly specialised technical skills. We live in a world in which a relatively modest pandemic resulted in global disruptions of trade, commerce, finance, and governance. The global "bus factor" seems to be quite low. In a world in which 90%+ of the population tended farms or herds, and interdependence between towns and villages, let alone nation-states, tended to be fairly low, gave for somewhat greater redundancy. Ironically, the combined impacts of reducing populations (and hence pulling back from the famine frontier itself), as well as increased labour bargaining power and the liberation of property ownership often meant a comparative flourishing of civilisations following a major famine or plague. This is much discussed in the context of Europe's Black Death (25%--50% population reduction over roughly a decade).

Both the Great Famine and the 1942-1943 famines were politically caused, the first by communism and the latter by Japanese invasion.

> a relatively modest pandemic resulted in global disruptions of trade, commerce, finance, and governance

The pandemic didn't result in that directly. It was the political response to it that caused that. Some places just skipped many of the most damaging responses but had identical outcomes. Africa hardly did much and you can't see it in their population figures for example. Also it seems like resilience is remarkably high. Governments went crazy and used enormous force to create as much havoc as possible, yet the core supply chains (food, water, electricity) held up very well especially after people realized how robust it was and the panic buying stopped.

> Both the Great Famine and the 1942-1943 famines were politically caused, the first by communism and the latter by Japanese invasion.

The Great Famine wasn't caused "by communism", it was caused by incompetence. Mao rejected both Western science and the expertise of Chinese farmers which agreed to it, much like the Nazis rejected "Jew science" (which luckily hampered their war effort and prevented them from developing nuclear weapons). He also established a culture of fear that led to bureaucrats lying about their numbers instead of risking admitting failure.

I guess you could say the cause of the Great Famine therefore was bureaucracy, or maybe dogmatism. Neither of which is necessary, nor sufficient, for communism[0].

[0]: ... even without getting into the distinction between what governments have justified with the excuse that they want to achieve communism and what communism itself would look like. No so-called communist government I'm aware of has ever claimed to have achieved communism. Even Soviet-era Eastern Europe at best claimed to have achieved "real socialism" when they pretty much admitted giving up on communism by calling anyone expecting more of them "utopianist".

I'm unsure about the time scale in question, but something of this magnitude occurred to the indigenous populations of North and Central Americas, with the introduction of urban diseases (smallpox, influenza, chicken pox, bubonic plague, etc.) from Western Europe that they had no prior exposure to.

If you narrow the geographic scope and widen the temporal scope, the tolls were much higher than 50%.

The consequences are difficult to de-correlate from the other effects of colonization, but no it wasn't pretty.

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