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Strife and innovation - why Discord might be what Scadrial needs


radren

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1 hour ago, Frustration said:

Any military technology has civilian applications. 

Sort of, depending on how you interpret it, but while there's a war going on people aren't going to be investigating these applications. It's only after the war that people start looking into civilian applications.

There's also the question of how funding would actually work, because if you're in a war, or assuming a war is coming, you probably don't want to spend large amounts of money on possible dead-end projects, unless you have massive amounts of resources available. And large-scale construction will slow down too. UK battleship production is a good example. In the build-up to WWII there was quite a lot of building planned and going on, but as soon as the war started most plans for battleship construction vanished, and the production schedule changed to one with less building, rather than more. Since Battleships take a lot of time and money to build, and that was instead better spent on smaller construction, which was more flexible and immediately useable.

There are also other cases where military reality meant funding for science actually got smaller, instead of larger, or diverted away from long-term goals into short-term ones.

Innovation comes from there being a (perceived) need for it. Simply tossing a war at a country won't suddenly get it to start rapidly innovating in all fields. And said innovation will likely build on already existing technological development and theoretical science, not going around finding new fields of science in the hopes of developing a new wonder weapon.

P.S.
Before anyone brings up the Manhattan project, keep in mind the theoretical physics was already established before the war started, and even then it took massive amounts of research, and multiple countries pooling their researchers and resources. Technically even Germany, since a lot of German physicists, especially Jewish ones, fled to the USA. Even solving the enigma code relied on work by multiple countries (quite a bit of research came from Polish researchers, who had already made breakthroughs in the code before the war started).

Edit: As an aside, it's also important to consider what too much war does for technology. Technology and research requires infrastructure, as well as education programs to transfer knowledge. Warfare on too grand a scale, with too much economic damage or civilian deaths (or death of conscripted civilians) could actually harm technological progress. A good example is the collapses of bronze age civilizations, and how it actually caused writing to die out in multiple of the collapsed nations, as well as complex society in general, simply because they lacked the systems to produce enough goods to have the food to sustain an intellectual class.

While the bronze age collapse wasn't purely down to war, it does show that if anything, whether natural or man-made disaster, does enough damage to the complex systems behind society, it can easily set back development.

Edited by kenod
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4 minutes ago, Ookla the Headmuncher said:

I’d tend to agree, but I feel that there are limited applications for nuclear warheads in a civilian atmosphere.

To be fair, that's actually one of the technologies with more direct links to civilian applications, in the form of nuclear reactors. Reactors actually predate the bomb, though they were for researching nuclear reactions and producing plutonium, not generating power.

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5 minutes ago, kenod said:

To be fair, that's actually one of the technologies with more direct links to civilian applications, in the form of nuclear reactors. Reactors actually predate the bomb, though they were for researching nuclear reactions and producing plutonium, not generating power.

Well, I suppose, but the workings of nuclear reactors and nuclear warheads are different enough that, though they are field by some form of uranium, I would not consider them to be quite adjacent enough to call nuclear reactors domesticated warheads.

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25 minutes ago, Ookla the Headmuncher said:

Well, I suppose, but the workings of nuclear reactors and nuclear warheads are different enough that, though they are field by some form of uranium, I would not consider them to be quite adjacent enough to call nuclear reactors domesticated warheads.

They're not domesticated warheads, but reactor technology was a necessary stepping stone to develop these warheads, and these initial reactors could then be refined into functional generating reactors relatively easily.

Of course, fusion shows quite well that this isn't always the case. We didn't need fusion reactors to design fusion bombs, and the technology hasn't really led to an easy break-through in fusion reactor technology.

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While I was listening to TLM I thought this exactly.

On 11/20/2022 at 5:16 PM, Kitch said:

I was fully expecting the bomb to go off at the end of TLM, or some kind of twist that Sazed was pushing for a disaster to jump start the basin. Either Sazed fully aware of it coming, or Ruin pushing through to act more.

Prior to the reveal of Trell's identity I'd decided that it was Harmony and Discord acting in dual nature in order to break the problems introduced very early on.

I have concern's that Harmony is just too impotent and not a long term viable combination of the two Shards.

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On 20.11.2022 at 6:44 AM, ConfusedCow said:

Does strife produce innovation?  Aren't peace, plenty and partnership as likely to produce advancement as hatred, hardship and horror?  I'd be interested if anybody with a history of science background could chime in as to what the historical record tells us. 

This is a pretty contentious issue - and it has already provided a good debate and nice examples here. I'd like to share some more thoughts (history major, though I studied history to teach in schools, which is a bit different in terms of the curriculum where I live):

I tend to agree with the view that war does not necessarily produce innovation. At least not more or quicker innovation than would have been created without any given war. Innovations in warfare until Industrialization were mostly about the tactial level and about the ability to field more soldiers. In terms of raw fighting strength most historians I know basically agree, that a Greek hoplite or a Roman legion could have engaged any given army up to Napoleonic times and be considered on equal terms or even superior. It is not before the Industrialization of warfare that this changes drastically.

As has been convincingly argued, 'strife' is a wholly different matter - but one that heavily depends on the interpretation of the concept. There is little or even no scientific advancement without the questioning of existing concepts and even 'proven' things - something you could call strife. To me, however, 'strife' sounds a bit more belligerent in nature. I'd rather say that competition, a thirst for knowledge, an inherent drive to better one's lot and wanting to understand the world - all of which are crucial (but also relatively recent) concepts of Modernity - are the driving factors of progress in the way we understand it today.

One additional aspect - which might be interesting in the context of the Cosmere - is the secularization of knowledge. It makes no sense to systematically question nature, divine forces, circumstances, etc... when you inherently believe that a divine being (or many divine beings) are there to rig/fix the world in which you live anyway. Once you take that away science as we know it today can begin to flourish.

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On 11/17/2022 at 3:05 PM, radren said:

Maybe it's presumptuous to assume that the industrial revolution on Scadrial was directly caused by Autonomy's intervention. But both Autonomy and Kelsier talk about how struggle creates the right environment for innovation to flourish. Electricity was brand new in Alloy of Law and by The Lost Metal, it was everywhere. Radios and photographs were common. The Set even had colored motion pictures. That's a lot of advancement in 7 years or so. I think Harmony knows that by allowing Preservation to be the dominant force, he has made things too easy. There has been a lot of talk here about Discord. Harmony tells Kelsier that he will take his suggestions into consideration. I wonder if Harmony makes the conscious decision to become Discord knowing that the chaos it causes will provide the tension needed to continue the pace at which Scadrial had advanced technologically during Autonomy's intervention.

I'm included to agree with you. I think that strife and conflict could definitely produce massive growth for Scadrial. Especially since there is already this mindset of forward movement. It seems like, at their core, Scadrians are innovators. Almost like they're continually working to throw off the shackles of repression that TLR kept on them for 1000 years!

I think the amount of time between Era 2 & 3 will be shorter than 1 & 2!

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I find it interesting, that Scadrial is always singled out in terms of innovation potential in the Cosmere. The only other planet where we have had multiple long books over an extended timeline is Roshar - and we see quite a lot of fancy new tech there as well. Which leads me to the question: Is Scadrial even such an outlier or are we simply not seeing enough of other places for long enough periods of time to witness their tech-jumps?

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55 minutes ago, thorongil said:

I find it interesting, that Scadrial is always singled out in terms of innovation potential in the Cosmere. The only other planet where we have had multiple long books over an extended timeline is Roshar - and we see quite a lot of fancy new tech there as well. Which leads me to the question: Is Scadrial even such an outlier or are we simply not seeing enough of other places for long enough periods of time to witness their tech-jumps?

I've had the same thought, especially because one of the other Shards is literally named Invention....with Ingenuity having been tossed around as a possible alternative name for it in the past, I believe...and Innovation being a synonym as well. So I'm very curious to see any world(s) Invention might be Invested in or a kind of patron of, because I would expect them to have pretty interesting curves when it comes to the development of magic, tech and magi-tech.

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On 11/30/2022 at 3:34 AM, BinarySecond said:

It has occurred to me that we have a good Cosmere example of what TOO MUCH strife can do to a societies progression.

Roshar was effectively in ceaseless war for centuries and they lost technical knowledge and ability.

One needs a reason to strive for improvements but also a level of space in which to do it.

It seems to me the sweet spot is that there should be competition and pressure to improve (such as a long-term foreign threat), but not active war.

An actual ongoing war is too destructive - can't study if your laboratories get bombed, if your scientists are drafted and given rifles. A short-term threat is also not the right kind of pressure - it incentivises cannibalizing your future production for the short term.

But long-term competition - "Some Other Guys" that will get ahead of "Us" if "We" don't invest in research... that's just the ticket.

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  • 11 months later...

If a country broke its word or did something that put another force in a pinch, the offended party may use soft power. All would hope that things would cool down and not escalate to something else. All they need is to make sure that they can put the blame on someone before going to war.

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