> but I'd be really careful about dismissing survivorship bias.
I completely agree, we can't dismiss survivorship bias.
But let's imagine we are in a speculative historical sci-fi novel.
An ancient civilization makes contact with an alien one and they gain access to a new powerful way of building that had no precedent in history.
Fast forward 50 years, aliens are gone for good, there's no easy way for the layman people to access documentation let alone understand it, people will obviously don't understand what's going on, but they would see older buildings collapse after a mild earthquake or be destroyed by a wild fire, while some of them would survive, mutliple times.
They would most probably think of them as safer structures and give them more value and try to preserve them because of their "magical" ability to survive catastrophic events.
They would probably think of those buildings as gods gifts or sth like that.
Imagine that instead of 50 years it went on for almost a millennium.
And then the knowledge on how they were built got lost.
We shouldn't also dismiss more practical reasons, why build a new church if you can reuse one of the abandoned Roman temples? Why build a fortress to protect yourself from your enemies if you can just patch up some holes and install a gate to the Coliseum (or just convert some emperor mausoleum to one)? Even if people were fully aware (and at least the more educated ones were) that there was nothing magical about Roman construction they simply had no need to build anything similar themselves when they could just reuse the already present structures (either directly or as building material).
I completely agree, we can't dismiss survivorship bias.
But let's imagine we are in a speculative historical sci-fi novel.
An ancient civilization makes contact with an alien one and they gain access to a new powerful way of building that had no precedent in history.
Fast forward 50 years, aliens are gone for good, there's no easy way for the layman people to access documentation let alone understand it, people will obviously don't understand what's going on, but they would see older buildings collapse after a mild earthquake or be destroyed by a wild fire, while some of them would survive, mutliple times.
They would most probably think of them as safer structures and give them more value and try to preserve them because of their "magical" ability to survive catastrophic events.
They would probably think of those buildings as gods gifts or sth like that.
Imagine that instead of 50 years it went on for almost a millennium.
And then the knowledge on how they were built got lost.