[Mobleysoft]

What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills, creates the conditions for the iterative improvement of those practices, and enforces a detachment from the results of the practice of building in favor of an attachment to the practice itself, the latter of which seems like a much more valuable asset to possess, considering the life-expectancy of these buildings. What does fire do on a symbolic level? It hardens, cleanses, purifies, and refines. Perhaps they did this every time the leadership changed, so the success or failure of the tribe or settlement under the new leader/chieftain could not be blamed on nor attributed to the previous one. A clean slate for each administration, so to speak.

On another note, if these structures are essentially what the guy from the neolithic technology youtube channel gets up to, then maybe they just did it for fun. Guy looks like he's having the time of his life playing in the mud.

[leto_ii]

> What does burning down your buildings every so often achieve? It ensures the skills of building are passed down from generation to generation, that the people remain well practiced in those skills

This is unconvincing. In most cultures, most of the time, people manage to pass down building skills without destroying everything they've built before.

[LunaSea]

In Japan there was a tradition of rebuilding every 20 years for the exact reason of transmitting building methods to the next generation.

[mutatio]

Do you have a source for that? Everything I can find on Japanese 20-year re-building cadence is due to religion.

I'm struggling to see any sense in the 20-year cadence cliff-edge for typical knowledge transfer.

[animal_spirits]

Another comment here referenced the Ise Grand Shrine [0], so that is what I bet the OP is referring to. I pose this, religion isn't only about spiritual beliefs, it encompasses rituals, culture, and history. Knowledge transfer is a major part of continuing a religious culture, whether it be through studying of scripts or preaching. So, just because it is religious based doesn't exclude it from also being about transferring of knowledge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Grand_Shrine

[mutatio]

The link provided shows that it is due to the religious belief of rebirth, the tradesmen themselves practice their skills continually, so the theory still doesn't map for me. Moreso if we apply Occam's razor: there's no evidence the Japanese practice is for skill transfer yet it's being used to promote that premise for something else.

[beaconstudios]

Religion is just a specific way of encoding useful lessons into oral/written tradition. So it could well be that keeping the trade alive was the original reason but it became a religious doctrine so as not to be violated.

[leto_ii]

This is a seemingly compelling explanation, but I see no reason why it would actually be true.

It seems to me like it treats people as lacking the degree of intelligence and foresight needed to figure out that it's a good idea to pass building techniques along. As if back in the day people were only capable of understanding things if they were framed in a religious or supernatural way.

I just don't think people a couple of thousand years ago were so cognitively different from us. Not to mention that there's still overwhelming evidence of knowledge being passed down for non-religious purposes throughout history.

[beaconstudios]

> It seems to me like it treats people as lacking the degree of intelligence and foresight needed to figure out that it's a good idea to pass building techniques along. As if back in the day people were only capable of understanding things if they were framed in a religious or supernatural way.

I think this speaks to your own prejudice against religion based on how Christianity is treated in the US. Religion isn't predominantly about supernaturality, it's about what works. Supernatural explanations of why it works almost don't matter, if it works.

Let me give an example. Christian morality seems to be to largely be about stabilising society. "Turn the other cheek" prevents cycles of revenge, for example. Does it matter if that's the case because you understand cycles of revenge and how they lead to more harm than the original offence, or because your priest told you that's the right thing to do? It would be ideal if everyone just understood these precepts from logic, but I don't see any structures for disseminating logical behaviour to the broad masses today either.

People thousands of years ago are the same people as us. I see plenty of truth in religion and I see plenty of falsehood in modern, supposedly "rational" modalities. I don't think the balance of how clear-thinking we are has changed at all.

[mutatio]

I could see the opposite of that possibly arising, e.g. doing something irrational like creating a training event every 2 decades, due to belief - but the inverse makes no sense to me, what's the advantage to a society to renewing skills at 20 year cliff-edges vs. continual development? Makes less sense still in the context of Japanese kingdoms, the kingdom choosing to continually propagate skills would win.

[beaconstudios]

Because skills aren't always generalisable. For the Ido shine, for example, there's a specific building skillset they use for building temples. New temples aren't built often enough to keep those skills sharp.

> training

Training doesn't impart skills unless the theoretical knowledge is actually used. What better way to use it than to build a temple?

[refurb]

Wouldn’t natural population growth and decay of current structures be enough demand to ensure building skills remain sharp?

[neogodless]

I believe that in the modern world, specialization is more common, where ancient skills might have been more generalized.

So comparing to the modern world, I know of one relative in the industry of building homes, but even that person has never "built" their own home, and none of my relatives have bought a newly built home. In other words, in our family the skill of building home is very barely there. We'd likely have to hire out. If, instead, when my parents bought the house I grew up in from my great grandparents, they'd torn it down and built a new one, then the skill would have only skipped one generation, but continue to be exercised within our family.

[bcaa7f3a8bbc]

Imagine if computer engineers have a religion of burning down and rebuilding the entire computer architecture every 20 years, hardware and software, from scratch. Everything will be cleaner, and the problem raised by Jonathan Blow [0] can be addressed too (it's basically: modern system has low understandably & maintainability, everything is extremely complex, and only a few people in the world can understand systems at each low-level component, it only takes a moderate social disruption for the entire digital civilization to collapse").

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

[Mobleysoft]

There is an interesting discussion going on in the recent Microsoft Exchange hack thread about firm's periodically rebuilding their IT infrastructures to protect against malware that shows some convergent thinking that might interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367534

I like your idea. What do you think would be the first step to getting there?

I have a client in the controls systems space, a systems integrator that helps municipalities update the systems that keep the water running, and one concern that occurred to me while investigating their business requirements is how the systems they work on are becoming less and less able to recover from certain attacks as the components that make them work become purely digital and electronically controlled. Perhaps we should begin engraving the contents of wikipedia on clay tablets, just in case.