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Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. Are you summarizing the thread or is that based on evidence and research? I don't see the explanatory power of those theories.

> Oral transmission via an apprentice system

Oral transmission has probably existed everywhere (apprenticeship is a matter of definition, but I get the idea), but very few have achieved anything like the Incas.

> Quipus as a form of proto-writing

Quipus are just numbers, as far as I know. They are great, but don't explain how the enormous amount of other necessary information is transmitted and updated across such a vast geography.

With due respect, what we need is actual research based on actual evidence, not Internet comments (I'm not offering any theories myself!).

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> With due respect, what we need is actual research based on actual evidence

I recommend “Tinkuqchaka: A Suspension Bridge over the Upper Pampas River, Ayacucho, Peru” from Lidio M. Valdez, and Cirilo Vivanco. Published in the Journal of Anthropological Research, 2021.

It has its limitations of course. It describes present day rope bridge building practices and there is no guarantee that those practices are the same as in days of old. But given that the bridges themselves rot away and the ancients are not around to interview this is likely the best description you will ever get.

Thank you. I am not wondering how to build rope bridges; lots of cultures figure out some interesting local technologies.

It's the Inca's scale that is what sets them apart - doing these things, at a very high level and with great success, over enormous distances and populations.

A few civilizations achieve these things, the great majority don't; what is the difference?

It is a common question asked by scholars for generations about all sorts of places - for example, see the popular book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

> I am not wondering how to build rope bridges

You were just a few comments ago. You were specifically asking how bridge construction and maintenance is communicated over great distances and time. Let me quote your very own words to you: “how do you communicate, for example, rope bridge construction and maintenance information over great distances and time”

This is the only thing i have answered because your wider “how do the inca do?” question is not specific enough to be answerable.

And the answer to that specific question is that no maintenance information needs to be transmitted and the construction information is spread as folk tradition. Bridges are usefull enough that local villages want them to be built, and they are perfectly manageable as a local effort. And then the next village sees that a bridge was built, they also want one and find someone who knows how to build one and they do. You repeat that a bunch of times and you have a bunch of rope bridges all around. There is no mystery there.

This idea was so alien and unbelievable to you that you accused me of promulgating some sort of conspiracy of playing down the importance of literacy. Not cool.

> very few have achieved anything like the Incas.

Can you be more specific?

I understand they were a vibrant, far reaching empire, but I'm not sure I understand how they were so exponentially further advanced than many other past civilizations, that have each has their share of remarkable 'how the hell did they do that's.'

Taken in sum, I find them all remarkable in their own ways -- but it also proves the earlier point, that human ingenuity has found ways to express itself innumerably across the eras.

Two ways they are extraordinary:

First, the great majority of 'civilizations' [1] do not achieve anything like what the Incas did. Perhaps your perspective is distorted by survivorship bias - you know about the biggest successes, not the 99.999% that you've never heard of, like someone who thinks FAANG are typical of computer businesses. There are (or were until recently) societies in the Amazon, for example, no larger than a village and living in neolithic conditions. That is how far they made it. So there is the common question - why do some 'succeed' on such a large scale and some don't? Jared Diamond's famous book, for example, looks at this issue.

Second, the Inca did it with unique limitations: "Remarkably, the Inca managed to forge this vast society without the wheel, the arch, money, iron or steel tools, draft animals capable of ploughing fields or even a written language." That's from the OP.

It's mysterious to me that the OP spells out this question, but nobody in the discussion seems to understand it.

[1] I'm not sure that's the right word, but I'm not going to define it to precisely

> Perhaps your perspective is distorted by survivorship bias

Have you considered that perhaps it is your viewpoint who is suffering from survivorship bias? For a civilisation to be considered “great” many many things has to go just right. A wide variety of things can and do go wrong to curtail human societies. Prolonged bad weather can ruin the harvest, and the resulting unrest break up the “civilisation”. Random sparks of religuous fervour can catch and destabilise the region. The ruling class can be wrecked by succession wars. Outside threats can conquer all of them. Their civilisation can fail due to economic or demographic changes.

Is it possible that when you are asking how they succeed on such a large scale while others did not you are just observing that they were lucky in many aspects until one day they were no longer lucky? And then wondering what their secret of success was is indeed just survivorship bias.

Obviously it is still an interesting question to study how did they operate, how did they live and so on and so on. But searching for their “secret sauce” might be a fools errand. Because they very possibly didn’t had one.

Perhaps you have something profound to communicate here, but you're not doing a great job of getting it across.

As an example, in response to "very few have achieved anything like the Incas," I asked for something specific to establish a frame of reference, and you replied with something that can be summarized more or less as "very few have achieved something like the Incas."

As to your second point, this is remarkable. Nobody has disagreed. But it's not extraordinary. Not every culture has to be agrarian. Not every culture has to be written. Draft animals, arches, wheels. These are one way to solve specific projects problems. They aren't the only solution. The Incas, through remarkable ingenuity and effort, solved those problems differently. Again, remarkable but but extraordinary.

It feels to me like you've asked and been answered, and for myself at least, it sounds like you've sort of dug in and want to be found on this hill of Incan exceptionalism. I personally find their exceptionalism exceptional, as exceptional as the many other exceptions that have been discussed in the thread so far.

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