[HN Gopher] Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move
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Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move
Author : Tomte
Score : 141 points
Date : 2022-08-12 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| loufe wrote:
| This has been one of my favourite of his series. I've been
| thinking about making a game with some of my friends to model the
| complexity of moving an army around.
| h2odragon wrote:
| units pushed too hard take a few days of, or go ravage the
| countryside, or decide to assisnate the general... like
| Rimworld but the units you're trying to control hate you a lot
| more and are willing to do something about it.
|
| Let the user decimate units for indiscipline and stuff too. or
| hang cheating officers to win troop loyalty. Could be a real
| favorite of sadists _and_ masochist.
| shakezula wrote:
| the first two parts of this blog post series absolutely blew my
| mind and changed how I think about an army in the real world.
|
| Can't wait to read this post.
| jalino23 wrote:
| this is such a good find! I've been playing age of empires 4 and
| got really interested in the military before gunpowder
| antonymy wrote:
| Have enjoyed this series a lot. His whole blog is great and you
| can easily spend hours reading through his lengthy, well-
| researched posts if you have an interest in premodern military
| history or topics that brush up against it (i.e. strategy video
| games, fantasy literature, etc).
| ju-st wrote:
| Absolutely, I was so proud of my Google skills for finding this
| blog three weeks ago, and now it's on top of Hackernews. The
| series about the decline of the Roman empire is amazing.
| ttr2021 wrote:
| Mind blown. So many variables to consider, so many options.
| Excellent read.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| I'd love to read something similar about how taxation and the
| management and securement of (moving or fixed) gold/money
| reserves worked back then in practice.
| shakezula wrote:
| Agreed. The author makes a few comments in the second part of
| the series about how ships of gold were the main way to ferry
| money around and how if that went wrong it had sweeping
| consequences, too. Would be a really interesting series fro
| this author.
| cwillu wrote:
| I believe his fall of rome series has more on this;
| specifically about how there are multiple stable attractors
| in the economic capacity space.
|
| There's also the series on the defense of cities, the series
| on bread and the one on clothing.
|
| Oh, and the series on steel production.
|
| You know what? Just read everything he's written.
| danielheath wrote:
| Recommend Scott's "Against The Grain" for that! Chapter four
| specifically.
| 78124781 wrote:
| Amazing work from Bret as usual, but very sad that this kind of
| popular/actually useful history is completely unrewarded in
| academia. This is far more valuable than whatever top university
| press book most historians write.
| wjnc wrote:
| It's entertainment. Academia shouldn't be entertainment, at
| least that is my opinion. I've seen more than a few erstwhile
| respected professors turn into talking heads without much
| substance by sudden media fame. One of the better stories was
| the one that started bringing in his own newspaper clippings to
| the universities media department in order to rank higher on
| the yearly media ranking. After that he rented an apartment
| near Harvard and bought Harvard professors lunch to publish the
| photos.
|
| I think Bret rightfully treats it as a secondary career and
| that his patrons are very right to support him.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| This is much more than entertainment. These posts have
| citations and the same academic rigor as a typical academic
| publication. They're just packaged in a more approachable and
| accessible format.
|
| However, these posts are not doing original research which
| does distinguish them from the main activity of academics.
| They're essentially brief survey papers (works that summarize
| the existing publications on a given topic). This is not a
| knock against ACoUP. These posts are excellent and I enjoy
| them immensely. They're just not setting out to accomplish
| the objectives that most academics are trying to achieve.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Academia has a serious problem with snobbery. Few other
| workplaces in the world have denser concentrations of people
| who think really highly of themselves, even though they
| wouldn't admit it openly and their preferred way of war is
| tons and tons of plausibly deniable passive aggression.
|
| This snobbery problem opens a bigger chasm between the
| academics and the general public that would otherwise be
| necessary, and the political consequences down the line might
| be serious; if academics are perceived as out of touch, aloof
| and intentionally incomprehensible, the backlash won't be
| just anti-snobbish, but anti-intellectual, with possible dire
| consequences for the viability and vibrancy of Western
| civilization.
|
| But the fact that popularizers like Bret Devereaux reap so
| much open disdain indicates that few activities are so
| unpopular among the gatekeepeers than building bridges across
| said chasm. _A True Intellectual Must Be Dour At All Costs._
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'd say it's education.
|
| Academia ostensibly has a dual focus, on both research and
| education. But the really is usually different from that
| messaging.
| trebbble wrote:
| > It's entertainment.
|
| Complete disagreement here. Informative writing may serve as
| entertainment, but if it's done well, that's not _all_ it is.
| It helps people understand the world, which can provide all
| kinds of benefits beyond keeping them from being bored for a
| few minutes.
|
| In fact, this type of work is _precisely_ how people learn
| almost everything, right up to grad school, which means it 's
| the way the _overwhelming majority_ of education is
| conducted. Most people going through that aren 't doing it
| for _entertainment_. Hell, Spivak 's _Calculus_ is more on
| this level--presenting findings to non-experts--than it is an
| _academic_ endeavor, and no one dismisses that as just being
| _entertainment_.
|
| It may not be valuable to people who are _already_ experts in
| a field, so may not be properly "academic", but this
| categorization of acoup (and anything like this work) as
| simply entertainment is going way too far.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Bret actually has an entire thread on this in Twitter (https:
| //twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1513255197597966341),
| responding to someone calling him "the orc logistics guy".
|
| The tl;dr is basically that part of an academic's job is to
| educate not just the professionals but also the lay public.
| By using fantasy and other pop culture works, he's
| introducing pretty important military history and theory
| concepts to those who wouldn't otherwise attempt to wade into
| it--and if they enjoy it, they might come back for some more
| pressing and serious can't-sugarcoat-this topics such as the
| implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
|
| In general, I would say that academics all too commonly
| forget the need to engage with people outside of their narrow
| disciplines, and in doing so, you can cede the field to
| engaging writers who are way out of their depths and horribly
| wrong about what they are writing (e.g., Jared Diamond).
| leto_ii wrote:
| > writers who are way out of their depths and horribly
| wrong about what they are writing (e.g., Jared Diamond).
|
| Could you elaborate a bit?
|
| Myself I found his books quite compelling. I'm of course
| not an anthropologist, historian etc. so I may be missing
| something big.
| _delirium wrote:
| > In general, I would say that academics all too commonly
| forget the need to engage with people outside of their
| narrow disciplines, and in doing so, you can cede the field
| to engaging writers who are way out of their depths and
| horribly wrong about what they are writing (e.g., Jared
| Diamond).
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding the Diamond example here, but I
| think of him as precisely a cautionary tale for academics,
| of what can go wrong when they try to go too far in the
| pop-science, big-picture, broad-audience direction. Diamond
| is solidly an academic, not some kind of outsider... he's
| held a professorship at UCLA for 50+ years. But later in
| his career decided he wanted to write "big history"
| interdisciplinary synthesis for a popular audience.
|
| I suppose one could try to write for a popular audience
| without going that far outside your own
| discipline/expertise though.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I believe you've misunderstood the parent comment.
|
| Also - generally speaking, I think being able to speak
| (or write) in a manner that's compelling for audiences
| across broad backgrounds, rather than just their niche
| community is a skillset to be admired.
|
| Science does nothing if people do not believe in it, or
| do not engage with it.
|
| I definitely agree that this does not give academics
| license to veer entirely outside of their expertise and
| use their credentials in the field to hide this (eg:
| Diamond). But I think not trying at all is worse. Far
| worse.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Diamond is pretty well regarded even in among academic
| historians. I strongly suspect believe that
| /r/anthropology is responsible for this perspective that
| Diamond is poorly regarded among historians. Almost any
| serious historian agrees with his thesis: larger arable
| land coupled with crops and animals more suitable for
| domestication led to greater population levels and social
| development in Eurasia than in the Americas, which is the
| main reason why the Columbian exchange was so one-sided.
| Diamonds ideas laid the foundations of many serious and
| well regarded historians, like Ian Morris.
|
| I'm also seriously baffled by people who try to portray
| his views as racist of eurocentric. His preface
| explicitly spells out that Europe was a backwater until
| the early modern period. In fact, a large part of the
| motivation behind _Guns, Germs, and steel_ was to debunk
| the idea of wester cultural or racial superiority, and
| provide a compelling counter narrative to those
| explanations of Eurasian-American divergence.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I think as categories, popular education material and more
| scholarly work are equally important (just look at Bret's
| citations...).
|
| I think it is fair to say that the marginal value of one extra
| ACOUP sized blogpost of high quality popular education material
| is probably higher than one extra book, but that comes down to
| the relatively lack of high quality popular education material.
| [deleted]
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