Astral Codex Ten

Incas

4 min read

Incas

Article

Incas is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 07, 2022 and August 25, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “the Incas did some very neat things with rope bridges and knots”; “It could have been the Chinese or even the Incas”. It most often appears alongside 5G, Acemoglu and Robinson, ACX comments.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: October 07, 2022
  • Last seen: August 25, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

A Columbian Exchange
October 07, 2022 · Original source
Beroe: I’m sorry, you may be right about the history, but Indigenous Peoples’ Day is just not a very good holiday. Indigenous Peoples are just too vague and diverse to have any real attachment to them. What are we even supposed to be celebrating? It’s not that Indigenous Peoples didn’t have any good qualities - maybe some of them lived in harmony with nature or something, and some had surprisingly egalitarian societies. I hear the Aztecs had amazing urban planning, and the Incas did some very neat things with rope bridges and knots. But there was no good quality that all of them had as a group. And even if there was, we wouldn’t be allowed to celebrate it, because that would be a stereotype. I can imagine a world in which Benjamin Harrison had declared Indigenous Peoples’ Day back in 1892, and people celebrated by wearing feathered headdresses and attending pow-wows and eating cornbread, and that might have eventually evolved into a good holiday. But absent a 180 degree shift in the culture, we obviously aren’t going to get that now. In the real world, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed by feeling vaguely guilty, making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day, and making sure not to do anything fun or cultural related to Indigenous Peoples in any way, lest it offend someone.
Your Book Review: Why Nations Fail
August 25, 2023 · Original source
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is treated with similar inconsistency: while initially admitting it is "a powerful approach to the puzzle on which he focuses" (why the Old World colonised the New instead of vice versa), AR eventually claim … it is not even historically or geographically or culturally predetermined that Europeans should have been the ones colonizing the world. It could have been the Chinese or even the Incas. The Chinese perhaps, but Diamond's thesis is completely inconsistent with the Incas. Soviet growth apparently "did not feature technological change". As an economist I assume they mean that statistical measures of total factor productivity did not grow. But by any ordinary meaning of "technological change" this statement is patently ridiculous: horses were replaced with tractors, employment shifted from agriculture to industry, the production of steel, electricity and machine tools grew exponentially, and city dwellers moved into highrise apartments with radio, TV and refrigerators. (I once travelled a bit in Central Asia and the newly ex-Soviet 'stans felt like developed countries that had fallen on hard times. Nepal didn’t.)
Inline links: total factor productivity