
Great Stirrup Controversy - IFR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stirrup_Controversy
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motohagiography
So strange to see this here as the societal role of horsemanship is an area
I'm studying as a side interest.

Whether the resolution of this question lets us extrapolate a general
principle of technological determinism, whereby an invention topples a global
order in place for centuries, it's an interesting anecdote, but I don't think
it's a strong foundation for a heuristic we could apply to say, a text editor,
cell phone, or a lambda function for that matter. We could use any of these
things as the beginning of a post-hoc narrative explanation for a perceived
historical change, but causality is weak.

However, if you are really interested in how cavalry works and would like to
reason about this question, I recommend former games developer James Kingsley
who has some great videos on it. He can actually ride, so his videos are a
more serious investigation instead of just the speculation of a talking head
on a lark.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEdnpoTDGX7IcHAPCjTs5...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEdnpoTDGX7IcHAPCjTs5Vp-
dz3LmZQG3)

Short article about him:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39851253](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39851253)

~~~
tlb
A strong claim for causality requires a counterfactual scenario: if the
stirrup hasn’t been invented, then ___.

I always find these hard to imagine when the cause is a basic technological
development. Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given
ridable horses.

It’s easier to try to imagine a world with no horses, or where they were
unsuitable for riding.

~~~
blotter_paper
>Surely, someone would have eventually invented the stirrup, given ridable
horses.

This isn't obvious to me. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm not convinced
that it's right either. Henry Turtledove's short stories The Road Not Taken
and Herbig-Haro explore a future where aliens invade Earth with FTL drives,
but only basic weaponry. It turns out that FTL drives are a relatively simple
technology, but one we missed. Not expanding outward in space forced us to
pursue more competitive development of other technologies on Earth, and when
the aliens invade we quickly kill them and take their FTL drives, suddenly
becoming the dominant species in our part of the universe. It's just fiction,
of course, but I think us having missed some basic tech is an interesting
possibility. It's only theoretically possible to show that we missed something
in the past, not the present, since the discovery of something which should
have been obvious in the past makes it no longer valid as evidence of our
failure to have discovered obvious things in the present -- it's been
discovered now. That being said, can we think of such examples? Things that
don't have any obvious barriers, but which we still failed to invent for long
stretches of time? The screw as a fastener seems like a potential candidate to
me; the Archimedes' screw was used to move water and grain in ~300 BC, and
nails have been around since prehistory, but screws as fasteners don't show up
until the 1400s AD. You could argue that the widespread adoption of screws in
the 1800s AD required certain machine tools for mass manufacture of screws
with threading at regular increments, but this doesn't explain the 1700 year
gap between invention of the screw and any use of hand-crafted screws as
fasteners. There could also be gaps in our understanding of this history, of
course, but that would be true to varying degrees for any proposed example.

~~~
riffraff
The lack of wheels as a mean of transportation in pre-columbian civilizations
is a classic example.

Steam machines might be another, basic ones were already in use in ancient
Greece but their development stalled for millennia.

