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Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

The article seems to revolve around defining an archetypal average peasant, which reminded me of [1]. While the article is well-written, I feel like I walk away with very little, given the story's focus on generalities.

[1]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

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There is a discussion of the statistical model he’s considering and why it is relevant even if it is imperfect in the first post of the series: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

The point of this series is to address the subset of his readers/commenters/his followers on twitter who have various flavors of delusions of the past being some utopia of multi-generational housing/family units and that wasn't just the reflection of harsh economic realities. He's already written blogs addressing the extreme on the other end where people assume too much economic freedom and upward mobility like is typical in video games.

He's done other blog series in the past that are more specific about specific things. His best work is on ancient military tactics and strategy. Every now and then he does these "baseline knowledge/understanding" series when he gets fed up with a particular group of idiots in his comments. It's like a teacher getting a class and being like "oh, you really are this dumb, I guess I gotta teach prerequisites before we dive in" even if they're not the best person to teach those prerequisites.

Thanks for the useful clarification. I guess I'm not the target audience, then. I was a bit surprised by the article, given other works from that blog were much more to my taste.

As a former history student I thought the ancient era was the most difficult because of the lack of good sources. It's easy to see why people fall victim to the tin-foils who propagate theories about alien pyramids etc. Pedagogues like Bret are a countermeasure but there's unfortunately not enough of them.

Always amazes me what we can piece together or at least put upper and lower bounds on from proxy sources.

What specifically did you think was missing? It seems to me to be a summary of existing work, and for specific details you'd go read the cited works?

infamous the air force average strikes again.

Yet, I don't know if that pertains to peasantry as they didn't have much of a choice depending where they lived. The article talks about Europe as if it was somewhat homogeneous (and mostly divided west & east)

I think there are too many words an too many jumps for it to be well written.

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