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I'm interested in how one would prove that one way or another.

It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it.

But I have no proof of that.

Fortunately, there are millions of buildings that remain standing as evidence of what was done in the past. So at least there's that!

Massive selection bias - only the good quality ones remain standing, the low quality ones are not.

You have to get a representative sample, that's the tricky part.

So there's that!

Buildings don't get taken down because 'they were built poorly', it's cheaper to rebuild than refurbish.

And we can accommodate for 'selection bias'.

We have all of the historical evidence we could ever want for 'how things were built', basically 'infinity examples'.

I think some things were more robust, particularly some of the old framing, like in Europe, with non load-bearing walls etc. Those will stand for 1K years, but arguably unnecessary.

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