The narrow/wide bucket analogy is neat; it is a good thinking tool. That said, I am by no means a historian, and do not know how good of a model it actually is. Some scattered thoughts:
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The metaphorical bucket overflowing means unavoidable innovation, not system collapse per se. It seems to me like the narrow bucket can overflow many times, and each time it does it gets wider. That completely changes the model: no longer does it explain this ‘shift towards the north’.
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As for Rome, it had long exhausted the surrounding lands before it collapsed. Its bucket overflowed many many times. One of the innovations they made is to cultivate grain in distant lands and ship it to Rome in huge quantities (Im sure they weren’t the first to do this but the scale is massive). Your bucket-theory is tightly coupled to people exploiting their surroundings only, and this breaks the model completely in my opinion.
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A good source for reading in this vein is this blog, in case you haven’t seen it yet. This specific article is about land exploitation from a city point-of-view, but I think it’s very much related.
Hey LessWrong, I found you years ago but made an account only now. After reading the HPMOR series I bought the Feynman Lectures on Physics, but never made much headway. I am giving it a proper go again though, and feel like I am making more steady progress than the last time I tried.
One thing I am running into time and again is that while Feynman is amazing at guiding the reader through discovering the physical laws on their own, it is still a static textbook. Being a huge fan of everything Bret Victor, I wondered: has anyone attempted to make these lectures interactive in some way? What would the lectures look like in an age where simple simulations can visualise how parameters in physical laws are related? In an age where readers can use their 3d printers to print an experiment setup at home and follow along? Would love to discuss with people currently going through the lectures themselves what tools they are creating to help their own learning process.
I am currently just taking notes while reading, but at some point am planning to at least create some interactive simulations of the experiments described. I find that even if those do not add any value, the process of making them helps understanding the concept immensely.