Trying to arrest people's attention by making them recognize how strange are the ways that we humans manage to get things done—when, that is, we actually manage to do things, as opposed to fail to...
Sounds to me like the Athenians were as looney as Americans were when they created all the defenses against Soviet bombers that never existed, back in the 1950s. Consider: the second-most expensive governmental research/industrial program after the Manhattan Project was the creation of supersonic flight and the industrial base needed to support such ($180 billion in 1950s dollars); the production of over 8,000 supersonic interceptor fighters ($100 billion in 1950s dollars); creation of the DEW Line across northern Canada ($18 billion in 1950s dollars).
The cost to design and produce the B-47 and B-52 bombers - and their support systems - to deliver the nukes in the USSR was around $80 billion in 1950s dollars.
And in 1955 and 1956, the U-2 missions flown to photograph the bases where the USAF was convinced the vast Soviet bomber fleet was "hidden" at, found NOTHING. Francis Gary Powers' unfortunate encounter with the new high-altitude SA-2 missile designed to shoot down U-2s was flown in a last desperate attempt by the Air Force to prove the existence of the "bomber gap." (After that, they moved on to the non-existent "missile gap"). This was why Eisenhower - thoroughly disgusted with the Air Force and the CIA and their industrial supporters - gave his "Beware the military-industrial complex" speech as his final speech to the country before leaving office.
Actually, we have learned a fair bit about the sources of tin in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. There has been a lot of work analyzing trace impurities in ancient metal samples which provide clues to the metal's origins. There were two main sources of tin in that area during the Bronze Age, what is now Cornwall and what is now Afghanistan. (There's a theory that Britain may have gotten its name from the Phoenician word for tin and Ireland from the word for iron. h/t Caitlin Green.) Now, if we could only figure out what name Achilles used when he was at that girls' school.
So if unskilled non slave labor in ancient Greece was the equivalent of $120 a day, that's equal to $15 an hour for an eight hour day in modern America. Or about twice the federal minimun wage. Of course ancient Greeks who were not slaves might have worked more than eight hours a day, but they had no deductions from their pay.
Cybernetics was the coming thing back in the 1950s. There was a lot of work done on simulating neural architectures and brains (e.g. Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby). I even have Beer's "The Heart of Enterprise" in my library, although it is a difficult book to read. But something changed. Cybernetics became sidelined into a niche. All those ideas of using it to design electronic brains, and in Beer's case, corporations, seemed to evaporate. Perhaps it was replaced with the newer term "systems theory" to explain how systems are homeostatic and can handle perturbations.
My personal feeling is that Beer's netested architecture would prove to be too rigid in practice to manage a firm. It seems better for established industrial corporations that are not subject to significant change. Such corporations would strongly resist changes such as Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma".
Having said that, cybernetics did seem very promising and I still see the value in the approach that the early researchers demonstrated. I have often through that Rodney Brook's subsumption architecture to control robots with distributed "brains" was teh last gasp of cybernetic ideas, even if it was described as such. What I do know is that Brook's approach collapsed under its own complexity and was abandoned. I sometimes wonder if it might have worked better had he used Beer's nested 5 component architecture instead.
Your own source says that we simply do not know the provenance of specific tin artifacts in antiquity and while it is now dated, I can find no reason to doubt Muhly. The Athenians might just as easily have sourced their tin from Iberia, Erzgebirge, or Brittany as Cornwall. I think it is unsound for you to attribute this tin specifically let alone solely to Cornwall.
In reflecting on this while standing on one leg, the words that come to mind are authority (permission to make decisions), fairness, corruption, networks, and feedback.
Sounds to me like the Athenians were as looney as Americans were when they created all the defenses against Soviet bombers that never existed, back in the 1950s. Consider: the second-most expensive governmental research/industrial program after the Manhattan Project was the creation of supersonic flight and the industrial base needed to support such ($180 billion in 1950s dollars); the production of over 8,000 supersonic interceptor fighters ($100 billion in 1950s dollars); creation of the DEW Line across northern Canada ($18 billion in 1950s dollars).
The cost to design and produce the B-47 and B-52 bombers - and their support systems - to deliver the nukes in the USSR was around $80 billion in 1950s dollars.
And in 1955 and 1956, the U-2 missions flown to photograph the bases where the USAF was convinced the vast Soviet bomber fleet was "hidden" at, found NOTHING. Francis Gary Powers' unfortunate encounter with the new high-altitude SA-2 missile designed to shoot down U-2s was flown in a last desperate attempt by the Air Force to prove the existence of the "bomber gap." (After that, they moved on to the non-existent "missile gap"). This was why Eisenhower - thoroughly disgusted with the Air Force and the CIA and their industrial supporters - gave his "Beware the military-industrial complex" speech as his final speech to the country before leaving office.
Actually, we have learned a fair bit about the sources of tin in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. There has been a lot of work analyzing trace impurities in ancient metal samples which provide clues to the metal's origins. There were two main sources of tin in that area during the Bronze Age, what is now Cornwall and what is now Afghanistan. (There's a theory that Britain may have gotten its name from the Phoenician word for tin and Ireland from the word for iron. h/t Caitlin Green.) Now, if we could only figure out what name Achilles used when he was at that girls' school.
So if unskilled non slave labor in ancient Greece was the equivalent of $120 a day, that's equal to $15 an hour for an eight hour day in modern America. Or about twice the federal minimun wage. Of course ancient Greeks who were not slaves might have worked more than eight hours a day, but they had no deductions from their pay.
Cybernetics was the coming thing back in the 1950s. There was a lot of work done on simulating neural architectures and brains (e.g. Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby). I even have Beer's "The Heart of Enterprise" in my library, although it is a difficult book to read. But something changed. Cybernetics became sidelined into a niche. All those ideas of using it to design electronic brains, and in Beer's case, corporations, seemed to evaporate. Perhaps it was replaced with the newer term "systems theory" to explain how systems are homeostatic and can handle perturbations.
My personal feeling is that Beer's netested architecture would prove to be too rigid in practice to manage a firm. It seems better for established industrial corporations that are not subject to significant change. Such corporations would strongly resist changes such as Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma".
Having said that, cybernetics did seem very promising and I still see the value in the approach that the early researchers demonstrated. I have often through that Rodney Brook's subsumption architecture to control robots with distributed "brains" was teh last gasp of cybernetic ideas, even if it was described as such. What I do know is that Brook's approach collapsed under its own complexity and was abandoned. I sometimes wonder if it might have worked better had he used Beer's nested 5 component architecture instead.
Your own source says that we simply do not know the provenance of specific tin artifacts in antiquity and while it is now dated, I can find no reason to doubt Muhly. The Athenians might just as easily have sourced their tin from Iberia, Erzgebirge, or Brittany as Cornwall. I think it is unsound for you to attribute this tin specifically let alone solely to Cornwall.
In reflecting on this while standing on one leg, the words that come to mind are authority (permission to make decisions), fairness, corruption, networks, and feedback.