this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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I didn't say he explained why this is the case in this video. I believe he may have talked about it elsewhere, but long-story short, European nation-states didn't want unified railroad systems because they were afraid their opponents will use them to invade them during war.
That does clarify the point, but I also don’t think that it’s true. It may well be that a major reason proposals for unified European rail never got off the ground before recently was that European countries rejected such proposals on grounds that it would make it easier for them to be invaded. But the rail systems in different European countries nonetheless developed independently, using different technology and standards, mostly (arguably) in the 19th century.
This complex process doesn’t reduce to 20th century FUBAR, even insofar as diplomatic and security considerations were involved in its evolution (and yet of course beginning in the 19th, not the 20th, century).
I gotta be honest with you, at this point I don't even know what you're arguing for 😅
Sorry, but the history of technology is one of my things, and I think that there’s a misrepresentation going on here about how technology develops. Not only is it rarely mono-causal, it’s extremely rare that one cause even predominates in the evolution of a technology (such as a railway system). I don’t think it’s the case that 20th century conflicts have remotely a large enough impact on the development of the European railway systems to properly explain why it is that they aren’t more integrated.