Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmooss | Hacker News Reader

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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 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.

> 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.

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