Self confidence and alternate outcomes.

Alternate History scenarios often require the people of the cultures ‘alternated’ to act or respond in ways their prototypes would have found strange and unacceptable. A simple example being La Grande Armee cheerfully climbing into those horribly unseaworthy landing craft to cross the English Channel and arrive in a fit state to conduct the military campaign Napoleon envisaged. A large number of the invasion forces in much more sophisticated landing craft in 1944 arrived in too poor a condition to carry out their tasks. In AH propositions these factors and the state of mind of the people involved often have to be completely discounted to get the alternate schemes to work.

It’s widely recognized that training people from technically unsophisticated societies entails a psychological resistance in the trainees that’s very hard to overcome. I found that in the North African oilfields in the 60s whenever local personnel were faced with new and unfamiliar jobs to do. The trainees might absorb and understand 25 - 50% of the information they were initially given, but any attempt to make up the rest would be repulsed by impatience, anger, and “I know” even though they didn’t.

Recently talking with a military staff college officer who has been involved with instructing young African Union officers, I see the problem still occurs there with those who have been selected to lead their fellows in new technologies. A few excel, but a larger number find it impossible to immerse themselves in the challenge of the new system. It’s a complicated mix of lack of confidence and the fear of appearing inadequate. To learn one must first admit to not knowing anything about the material to be learned. People from undeveloped societies, likely with a history of colonialism, seem to have an innate inability to open themselves to the possibility of failure that learning something new entails.

As a writer of alternate world fiction that involves introducing anachronistic technologies into an earlier world than ours I have to wonder if I should allow for the effect here as well. In this fictional situation the people to be taught have never been beaten down by colonialism, and have their self confidence undiminished because they’ve never been compared unfavorably to other contemporary cultures. But would individuals also exhibit the tendency to defend their egos against the possibility of failure? Would they have the same huge obstacles to overcome before they could become successful trainees? Is there an advantage to being the first trainees ever exposed to new technology – a feeling that whatever they achieve will constitute a record?

What do others think?
 
This is fascinating question!
I'm sure there are historical parallels!
How new societies deal with rifles or big guns or artillery they can now afford!
Probably ingrained officer corps hold out against newcomers while new technical corps gets special treatment from the ruler?

Cat
:)
 
Alternate History scenarios often require the people of the cultures ‘alternated’ to act or respond in ways their prototypes would have found strange and unacceptable. A simple example being La Grande Armee cheerfully climbing into those horribly unseaworthy landing craft to cross the English Channel and arrive in a fit state to conduct the military campaign Napoleon envisaged. A large number of the invasion forces in much more sophisticated landing craft in 1944 arrived in too poor a condition to carry out their tasks. In AH propositions these factors and the state of mind of the people involved often have to be completely discounted to get the alternate schemes to work.

It’s widely recognized that training people from technically unsophisticated societies entails a psychological resistance in the trainees that’s very hard to overcome. I found that in the North African oilfields in the 60s whenever local personnel were faced with new and unfamiliar jobs to do. The trainees might absorb and understand 25 - 50% of the information they were initially given, but any attempt to make up the rest would be repulsed by impatience, anger, and “I know” even though they didn’t.

Recently talking with a military staff college officer who has been involved with instructing young African Union officers, I see the problem still occurs there with those who have been selected to lead their fellows in new technologies. A few excel, but a larger number find it impossible to immerse themselves in the challenge of the new system. It’s a complicated mix of lack of confidence and the fear of appearing inadequate. To learn one must first admit to not knowing anything about the material to be learned. People from undeveloped societies, likely with a history of colonialism, seem to have an innate inability to open themselves to the possibility of failure that learning something new entails.

As a writer of alternate world fiction that involves introducing anachronistic technologies into an earlier world than ours I have to wonder if I should allow for the effect here as well. In this fictional situation the people to be taught have never been beaten down by colonialism, and have their self confidence undiminished because they’ve never been compared unfavorably to other contemporary cultures. But would individuals also exhibit the tendency to defend their egos against the possibility of failure? Would they have the same huge obstacles to overcome before they could become successful trainees? Is there an advantage to being the first trainees ever exposed to new technology – a feeling that whatever they achieve will constitute a record?

What do others think?

The problem is that colonists also have had self confidence problems. It is a human problem not a societal one.
 

Rockingham

Banned
Alternate History scenarios often require the people of the cultures ‘alternated’ to act or respond in ways their prototypes would have found strange and unacceptable. A simple example being La Grande Armee cheerfully climbing into those horribly unseaworthy landing craft to cross the English Channel and arrive in a fit state to conduct the military campaign Napoleon envisaged. A large number of the invasion forces in much more sophisticated landing craft in 1944 arrived in too poor a condition to carry out their tasks. In AH propositions these factors and the state of mind of the people involved often have to be completely discounted to get the alternate schemes to work.

It’s widely recognized that training people from technically unsophisticated societies entails a psychological resistance in the trainees that’s very hard to overcome. I found that in the North African oilfields in the 60s whenever local personnel were faced with new and unfamiliar jobs to do. The trainees might absorb and understand 25 - 50% of the information they were initially given, but any attempt to make up the rest would be repulsed by impatience, anger, and “I know” even though they didn’t.

Recently talking with a military staff college officer who has been involved with instructing young African Union officers, I see the problem still occurs there with those who have been selected to lead their fellows in new technologies. A few excel, but a larger number find it impossible to immerse themselves in the challenge of the new system. It’s a complicated mix of lack of confidence and the fear of appearing inadequate. To learn one must first admit to not knowing anything about the material to be learned. People from undeveloped societies, likely with a history of colonialism, seem to have an innate inability to open themselves to the possibility of failure that learning something new entails.

As a writer of alternate world fiction that involves introducing anachronistic technologies into an earlier world than ours I have to wonder if I should allow for the effect here as well. In this fictional situation the people to be taught have never been beaten down by colonialism, and have their self confidence undiminished because they’ve never been compared unfavorably to other contemporary cultures. But would individuals also exhibit the tendency to defend their egos against the possibility of failure? Would they have the same huge obstacles to overcome before they could become successful trainees? Is there an advantage to being the first trainees ever exposed to new technology – a feeling that whatever they achieve will constitute a record?

What do others think?

That didn't happen OTL in Japan(although it wasn't colonialy(sic) humiliated.

The same gap has been repared in several Asian countries(Singapore, S. Korea), and is being repared in China and India..... though they aren't as far behind from the start as Africa.

That pattern seems to have manifested itself in the ME, where Turkey and Persia seem fully functional....although, oddly Saudi Arabia doesn't "function" and has not been humiliated as the other Arab nations have. Which can perhaps be put down to the regime or oil.

So it is questionable....are their any OTL examples?
 
I was think of Africa examples - Tukolor, Sokoto, Zulu &c
I do remember reading Tukolor/Mandinka did incorporate Euro weapons and customs but still got slaughtered by French artillery
But China stands as a nation where new stuff was sidelined by existing philosophy of old religion/thought who saw new stuff as being intrinsic bad

Cat
:)
 
Old ideas, new tricks.

Okay . . . Here's a what if.

A small group of people with Martini-Henry's arrives in Marlborough's army camp on the Meuse and tells him they're going to train an infantry battalion to use these weapons as light infantry. (Think Kipling's "Man who would be King".) This is before the Brit Army learned how to use cover in the Indian Wars, instead of standing in ranks out in the open. Is Marlborough going to say, "What a good idea." I don't think so. What about the men -- are they going to have the confidence to go into battle with these tactics?

Would these strangers be run out of town on a rail?
 
As a writer of alternate world fiction that involves introducing anachronistic technologies into an earlier world than ours I have to wonder if I should allow for the effect here as well.
I think Turtledove touched on this, during the chapters, where the Africaneers were teaching how to use the AK 47.
But you are right most of us here gloss over the problem,
Adding a bit in showing the problem, may add a touch of realism to the story. but unless it impacts the events, no need to dreal on it.
 
Anyway power in this thread? I've been thinking of alternate paths for technological development a lot, and the initial posts in this thread seem to be aimed that way, with a philosophical undertone

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Alternate Paths

Anyway power in this thread? I've been thinking of alternate paths for technological development a lot, and the initial posts in this thread seem to be aimed that way, with a philosophical undertone

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

Although I now have three novels in the series published and long fixed the path I use, I'm always interested in other ideas.

I decided that my advanced tech people would choose a very low tech approach to introduce advances into a 17th century world. How could you teach a blacksmith semiconductors? But you could teach a blacksmith to use a mechanical power hammer. As a student I saw an old one that used rotation, cables, clutches, and falling weights between guide pillars and "Old George" the striker who normally swung a sledgehammer could gently crack an egg with it.

The route I have my people choose was to start with a steelworks -- a smallish blast furnace instead of charcoal pyres and iron ore in the forest -- then a puddling hearth or a Bessemer converter instead of forge and hammers working for days to pound out the impurities.

Once their steel became cheap and abundant they would introduce steam engines in order to train a new generation of workers from the ground up. Just simple double acting reciprocating machines at first -- leave the steam turbines for a time when they've the machine tools and operators who can handle precision.

This might sound like a safe but pedestrian route to development, but what ideas do you have?
 
I think distrust of new technology is a fairly widespread and very human trait, as is distrust of those deemed "the Other". The Other could be foreign colonial rulers, members of another social class within one's own society or simply foreigners one nonetheless considers peers.

Learning to use a new technology involves trust. Trust toward the teacher that failure to immediately master the new procedures in their entirety won't be held up, either publicly or privately as evidence of the student or student's social group's inferiority. Trust that the technology will work well and not be dangerous to the student, if a misstep is made. And trust that the student won't lose status as a member of his own group by adopting the technology.

Each of these trusts has been breached at various times in the past.

It was not uncommon for 19th and early 20th century American academics to stereotype certain groups as more or less capable of mechanical learning. My own mother wanted to take a mechanical drawing class in high school (c. 1960), out of a love of and desire to pursue architecture, but was refused the right to do so, because it was a boy's class. Even some girls couldn't understand why she would want to do something so manly. Had she taken the class and performed in any less than a truly stellar manner, those who opposed it would use her as an example of why girls can't learn engineering; conversely, had she excelled, some people (students, teachers and parents) in the school would likely have gossiped about her supposed manliness, or at least lack of adherence to social norms and resultant isolation from her peers. Either way, by extending her learning beyond what was considered the norm for her in-group she was risking alienation from that group. (To bring this more into the topic at hand, if a 19th century colonial were teaching tribesmen to use a steam engine and they failed to do so, would the colonial question himself for poor pedagogy, or question, if only to himself or among other colonials, the innate inability of brown skinned people to comprehend pressure differentials and gear ratios?)

Foreign technology has been introduced into cultures only to have the technology be discovered to be dangerous to the user or society. Is sub-Saharan Africa better off for being flooded with European weaponry and techniques of modern warfare during the Cold War? Does the African-American community have reason to distrust white medical practitioners after the Tuskeegee experiments? On the whole, was the building of the railroads positive or negative for Native Americans? Do Tuvalans have reason to distrust the burning of greenhouse gas producing fuels? How has the western petrochemical industry impacted local water supplies, air quality and health in developing nations? Modernity seems to have brought global warming, AIDS, weapons of war and disruption of traditional patterns of land use leading to famine and war. When someone from a developing country is handed a piece of foreign tech, he has every reason to be leery, consciously or not.

(Note that these countries aren't even given the respect of being assumed to be on their own path... we refer to them as Developing Nations as if patting them on the head and saying, "Don't worry, Kimbuta, if you work hard, study diligently, and leave your native culture at the door, then Kinshasa will be just like New Orleans, Warsaw or Belgrade in a few decades. Won't that be great?" Maybe they want to develop in another direction, but when was the last time we asked them?)

The trust that a student won't lose membership in his own group by adopting new technology is quite foolish. In large portions of the world those who live in modern, westernised cities, like Dubai, Shanghai, Nairobi or Mumbai live a western lifestyle, with cars, shopping malls, high rise apartment blocks, western dress, western gender roles and exposure to foreign ideas through mass media. They are treated as (and may feel like) foreigners in their own culture. What happens when an engineer, physician or professor of mathematics goes to visit their grandparents and finds them living as Arab fundamentalist nomads in the Empty Quarter, peasant rice farmers being displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, herders of cattle from the wrong tribe being massacred with Soviet made weapons, or low caste laborers doing handbeading in sweat shops? And what happens when they travel to the "First World" and are put on terrorist watch lists, discouraged from marrying Europeans, denied equal immigration rights, or, maybe worse, treated as an exotic import to be alternately quaint or vaguely forbidden. I cannot imagine their wrenching, existential isolation, caught between cultures, but never fully a member of either. Others in the society, considering modernisation, look on with neither envy for the squalor of traditional life made impossible by a modern world nor envy for the half-life caught between western ideals and the entrenched poverty of "developing nations". They rightly hesitate to adopt the outsiders' ways.
 
An Example

When someone from a developing country is handed a piece of foreign tech, he has every reason to be leery, consciously or not.

(Note that these countries aren't even given the respect of being assumed to be on their own path... we refer to them as Developing Nations as if patting them on the head and saying, "Don't worry, Kimbuta, if you work hard, study diligently, and leave your native culture at the door, then Kinshasa will be just like New Orleans, Warsaw or Belgrade in a few decades. Won't that be great?" Maybe they want to develop in another direction, but when was the last time we asked them?)

They rightly hesitate to adopt the outsiders' ways.

I accept a great deal of your insights. There is a good example of the reaction to outsiders' meddling today in Pakistan. See http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KA10Df01.html for the expression of natural resistance to US meddling that goes against Pakistan's own interests.
 
It is easy to make fun of corporate training "off site" exercises, but sometime they are valuable. Your question made me remember a particularly good ropes course I was sent on. Ropes courses were popular in the 1990's and they can be geared for particular purposes: team building, individual self confidence, etcetera. The one I have in mind was geared to help develop problem solving skills by overcoming the fear of failure.

The group was presented with a series of physical puzzles (how to get a single member of the group across a shallow pit using available ropes and boards, for example). The solutions to these puzzles was often not obvious. The full nature of the puzzles could often only be discovered by experimentation. That meant that you had to try, and fail, the puzzle at least once before you knew enough to accomplish the task. It also meant that a single "leader" could not solve all the puzzles but had to accept input from other members of the team. By the end of the course the legacy hierarchy of my group had been abandoned and we openly brainstormed while trying to work through the tasks. We also adopted the strategy of trying things early and closely watching how first attempts failed in order to learn more. The stigma of failure had been removed and failure had become a tool for us to use.

You can argue whether ropes courses do much good, but I think that a time traveling society with experience of training other cultures could have developed some techniques to alter cultural norms that inhibit the adoption of new technology.
 
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