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> self-built building by somebody who's neither engineer nor architect

That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.



I'm not saying that our ancestors were wrong. Hell, I live in a house that was originally built under similar conditions.

That being said, buildings collapse a lot less frequently these days. House fires happen at a lower rate. Insulation was either nonexistent or present in much lower quantities.

I guess the point I'm making is that the lesson here shouldn't be "we used to make our houses, why don't we go back to that?" It also shouldn't be "we should leave every task to a specialist."

Know how to maintain and fix the things around your house that are broken. You don't need a plumber to replace the flush valve on your toilet. But maybe don't try to replace a load-bearing joist in your house unless you know what you're doing? The people building their own homes weren't engineers, but they had a lot more carpentry experience than (I assume) you and I.


>Law § 229 of Hammurabi's Code

>If a house builder built a house for a man but did not secure/fortify his work so that the house he built collapsed and caused the death of the house owner, that house builder will be executed.

If even professionals did get it wrong so often that there had to be law for it... Yeah, maybe it is not that simple.


In a village most houses were built by their owners. I am not talking here about nicely decorated brick buildings in a city: they were obviously designed and built by professionals.


> That is exactly how our ancestors built houses. Also a traditional wooden house doesn't look complicated.

The only homes built by our ancestors that you see are those that didn't collapsed and killed whoever was inside, burned down, were too unstable to live in, were too much of a burden to maintain and keep around, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias


And what happened to them, I wonder?


Well, they reproduced so we could exist now. Definition of ancestors.


That’s…not what I asked. Y’all need to recognize that Darwinism was intended as an explanatory theory, not as an ethos. And it’s not how we judge building practices.




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