amielleon: The three heroes of Tellius. (Default)
Ammie ([personal profile] amielleon) wrote in [personal profile] queenlua 2017-08-23 11:26 pm (UTC)

lol well usually isn't "pfft your list is full of modern western events, forget those" kind of taken as bashy? I don't mean it as an attack or anything but I'm led to believe it sounds haughty and pretentious.

It's true that there's a serious question of how broad a swath of events you can claim, and how many implicated events contribute to the value of your pick. Like, the Renaissance is a long-ass period of time covering all of Europe, and is certainly a high value pick if you can lay claim to every innovation to come of it. Honestly, given how everything leads a little bit into everything else, you might say that a lot of what this exercise tells you is how people conceptualize cause and effect/discreteness/etc.

For example, I think I went for paradigm shifts: this event reshaped how people lived, this event reshaped power, etc., whereas Krad was like "this one emblematic thing happened and a zillion people died/lived." Well, I guess she did openly declare that she interpreted it as a window-of-effect thing.

I think there's also something to be said for having an eye on wide vs local impact. For example, Yorktown is a big deal to an American, but a farmgirl in Mongolia probably gives no fucks about that particular development and feels very little downstream effect. How do you rate a local event with profound consequences for that area and some shockwaves (eg. Shiite/Sunni split, India/Pakistan split) vs something with a wider effect that doesn't feel as big (eg. ... I don't really know actually; I think most things that affect the whole world tend to do something big to the human race).

... Or I guess it's somewhat mathematician of me to go "woah just 10 events? we must be talking about fire and the wheel then" and promptly zoom to that level ignoring everything else in the way.


Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting